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  • I'm going to tell you how I got from 50 subscribers to 25,000 subscribers in two months.

  • I'm gonna break this now into three sections.

  • The first section is what happened?

  • I'm going to tell you exactly what videos I posted and how many subscribers I got.

  • And then a second section.

  • How did it happen?

  • I'll go more into details into explaining where on YouTube and which videos actually brought me two views which eventually led to subscribers.

  • And then, finally, the most important part.

  • Why it happened, which I'll explain my thought process in each video I made and also the strategy die executed and how it paid off.

  • Now, before I start this video, I just want to say that my growth is not 100% merit.

  • I use a lot of unfair advantages.

  • But on the last section, which is why it happened, I talked about a lot of fundamental concepts that you should understand if you want to grow your YouTube channel.

  • All right.

  • Are you ready?

  • I'm gonna go pretty fast on December 1st.

  • I start with 50 subscribers.

  • I haven't touched my account for months.

  • I was gaining about maybe one or two subscribers a week.

  • I only had two videos uploaded, but that was because I was waiting for one thing that happen, and that thing to happen was a collaboration with another youtuber.

  • On December 7th, when you Go published our collaboration, she posted a video that was about how to get an internship, and I posted a video that was an interview with her.

  • At that time, she had 60,000 subscribers.

  • So the moment she posted that collaboration, I got 178 subscribers on that day and the next day 102 subscribers.

  • So basically, within two days, I went from 50 subscribers to 345 subscribers.

  • And then for the rest of the month I was gaining, on average, 30 subscribers a day, which is a hugely from I Want to subscribers a week Also posted video called How I Got an Internship that set It Out on December 23rd.

  • So with the momentum gained by me Yukos Cola and decided to split into two shows, one to start up Siri's, which is a mockumentary about a fake startup I'm creating, and to the tech show, which is to teach people how to get into Silicon Valley and get a successful career that this piece is kind of important to remember when I go through the Y section of this video.

  • On January 1st, I hit 1000 subscribers on their released My Fifth Video, which is the second video of my startup, Siri's Right after I released that I gained 100 subscribers that day.

  • And then for the next few days I was averaging a brown 100 subscribers also.

  • But later on on the house section of the video, you quickly realize that it's not because of that video was actually because of something else, even though the timing seems right.

  • It's not because of my start Siris.

  • On January 8th, I celebrate my 1000 subscribe, marked by making a video about airport giveaway, and that did not help at all, but gave me Instagram and Twitter followers.

  • And then, three days later, I made a video called How I Got Into Ship at Lincoln, And then on January 18th many things happened.

  • I posted a video called Engineers Answer your CS questions, and I also started live streaming regularly, and I made this core channel in the following week.

  • I live stream seven times, five days.

  • Between January 1st and January 23rd I averaged about 110 subscribers a day, which got me to 3400 subscribers at the end.

  • But that was right before the most successful video of ever posted.

  • On January 24 I posted a day in the life of a Facebook engineer, and that video skyrocketed my growth.

  • The day I posted, I gained 180 subscribers and then five days later, because of that video, I was gaining about 2300 subscribers a day.

  • So within five days, I already reach 10,000 subscribers.

  • And during that time, I kept live streaming a lot.

  • On February 1st, I posted my third startup episode.

  • That actually didn't do much at all because most of my subscribers still came from that day in the Life video.

  • But my growth was slowing down, and I was gaining about 1000 subscribers a week.

  • As a growth was slowing down, I published a second day in the life video, so that bump me back up to around 1000 such drivers a day.

  • So from February 1st, I had about 14 subscribers, and now I only took 10 days to get 25 thousands drivers because I was averaging about 1006 drivers a day.

  • And there you have it, 25 thousands of drivers in two months.

  • Now it's all good to know what happened, and usually it would be pretty obvious to see which video actually caused the increases subscribers.

  • But let's dissect the growth a little bit more, all right.

  • So one fundamental concept that's pretty obvious but you still have to keep in mind is that to grow your subscriber account, you have to have non subscriber views, meaning you have to reach new audiences.

  • So let's look at which video start reaching new audiences and how.

  • Let's start with the medical video.

  • So why was my interview from a yuko getting so many views?

  • The first thing is that she had a huge audience.

  • She had 6000 subscribers.

  • You know it's bound to happen that some of our viewers will be curious enough about me because I'm in their video to search me up and to look at my videos.

  • But additionally, Miyako added an end card and that was vital to my growth.

  • So that end card linked to my video, the interview with her.

  • So if you look at the analytics, as you can see for the first few days, I got my views mostly from end screens and channel pages.

  • But then, as you see as time goes by, if I look at the week later, I was getting more views from suggested videos and even recommended videos from the home page.

  • That's what they call home.

  • Browse features the reasons because people watching the Yukos video like our coal lap started watching my video right afterwards because of the end card.

  • But then, later on, you two figured out that a high percentage of people watching her video went to my video right after.

  • So then, because of that, they boosts in my video up next category of her video.

  • So then I didn't need to depend on the end cards anymore because I became the up next video that also started happening with all her other videos.

  • So that is how I was growing at 30 subscribers a day, and then on January 1st, if you remember, I was suddenly growing at 100 subscribers a day now you might think, Oh, maybe it's because of the start of Episode two, but let's see what really happened.

  • So if we break down two videos with Number one video, getting the most views and growing fastest is still by my Yukos interview.

  • So how did it suddenly spike up?

  • Well, if you look at the traffic source of that video, you see that the initial spike came from suggested videos.

  • And if we dig into that, if you click suggested videos, you see that Miyako just released her get ready for 2018 video, and then my interview happened to be the up next video.

  • And then after that, that's when YouTube start promoting that video to People's Home Page.

  • So that's what the brows features are.

  • Now let's talk about the one video that skyrocketed My Child, The Day in the Life video that video was posted on December 20 for So how did you get so many views?

  • All right, let's look at the first bump from December 24 to December 26.

  • For the 1st 2 days, it did really well with my subscribers and started promoting it on people's home page.

  • In addition, I was able to get up to the up next video of another daylight video at that time already considered as a successful video because in three days I accumulated 4.8000 views.

  • However, after that and blew up even more because, you know, you two decide to shove my video, Thio everyone not even subscribe to me under recommended videos.

  • In addition to that, my videos were getting suggested on other people.

  • Similar video.

  • And then that's how I got to 25,000 subscribers because that one video Oh, and by the way, this video format, I just took it from me.

  • You go.

  • So once again, Thanks, man.

  • You go now on to the next section.

  • This section is actually the most important because I actually go through the concepts and how you to think about Hello.

  • Now, if you are subscriber, you probably just see me as a engineer who had too much time on his hands and decided to make some fun videos for the Internet.

  • But what really happened was an execution of a plan that I started back in August 2017.

  • Even before I made my first video.

  • So let's get into it.

  • I was still in New York at that time, and I saw a video on my recommended videos and that was me Yukos Day in the Life video.

  • Now I didn't watch it, but after a week I saw that the views increased by maybe 10 times, and it was still in my recommended videos.

  • I looked at her channel and she had nothing else, so I knew I had to contact her.

  • It was the perfect opportunity.

  • She was still new, such that my email wouldn't get buried.

  • But she's also growing such that it's gonna give mass results.

  • So while I was waiting for her to contact me back in parallel, I knew that had to make a whole new channel dedicated to tech because that's where she was in reason.

  • Number one.

  • I want him a yuko to agree to collaborate me Reason Number two when the viewers air coming from her channel the likelihood that the subscribe is higher if it's a tec channel because it's relevant.

  • I looked at all my skills and my competitive advantage, and I realized that two of the best skills I have was one.

  • I had a ridiculous amount of internship experience, and two, I had filmmaking skills.

  • Those were my two most valuable assets as a creator.

  • So I found my niche, and I thought about two distinct Siri's one detection and one to start up Siris on entertainment show.

  • Now this is another important concept I want you guys to understand.

  • For a channel, there's three main purposes for a video.

  • One reaching new audience to converting viewers to subscribers and three to engage your current subscribers to increase their affinity with you.

  • Now the 3rd 1 didn't really matter to me because I didn't have any subscribers to begin with.

  • So the techs show was meant to give tips and tricks for people who want to work at Silicon Valley.

  • As you can see, this is obviously for purpose.

  • Number one reaching a new audience because when you're new, you're not going to reach any audience.

  • The only way you can get a new audience is being searchable and being relatable from under kind of videos.

  • So what are people searching for it?

  • You're searching for how to get internships, and I have the knowledge for that.

  • So for my star up Siri's.

  • These were to convert viewers into subscribers because there were a lot higher quality videos and they were entertaining.

  • So basically, in some ways I reeled them in with knowledge, and I keep them with entertainment.

  • So one month later, make you go, finally contacted me and she agreed to meet.

  • At this point, I didn't have any videos, but I soldier on a dream on creating a new wave.

  • Are YouTubers in tech fast forward a month?

  • That's when I made my two first videos and then just waited for the collapse to come up.

  • And the reason for these two videos is that it increases the ratio of viewers to subscribers.

  • And the reason why is if you had a empty channel and you just had that collaboration, they don't know if you're gonna keep posting videos, so there's no reason for them to subscribe.

  • But if you already have two videos, they know that you're serious, and they know what value add to them, so that will increase the likelihood for them to subscribe.

  • All right, now, let's talk about why I decided to choose to make an interview as a collaboration with my Yuko.

  • But before that, there's a second concept I want you to understand.

  • And this is how do I get my videos to the up next?

  • So a rule of thumb on howto crack these algorithms thes YouTube algorithms is to put yourself in YouTube shoes.

  • Imagine if you run you to what would you like users to do or to behave on your platform?

  • I mean, I have Percy.

  • If I own YouTube, I want people to spend as much time as they can on YouTube, and one of the features is up next.

  • So I asked myself, What kind of videos do I want to put their videos that a relevant?

  • So maybe they have the same tags are kind of similar titles, but I think we can do better than that.

  • So once I get enough people watching this video, I want to know which videos are most likely to be raw.

  • Watched right after this video, and that is how I will choose what videos to put on the up next section.

  • So back to them a Yuko interview.

  • Why did I choose that video?

  • Because one thing I saw is that people who watch me Yukos video loved my yuko.

  • People are very interested in her personally, and she did not fill that void in her videos.

  • So I made this video.

  • I completed the void.

  • I made this interview such that it was personal and the reason why I did that.

  • Because I know that right after the watch a video bomber yuko they want more.

  • And then if my video can provide out, they will click that video right after.

  • And that is how I got into the suggested videos for all of her videos.

  • So as you can see, I was very dependent on the up next category.

  • But when I grew to 2000 subscribers, it was time to change plans, and that is to get on the home page on the recommended videos.

  • So here we go.

  • This is the next concept I wanna talk about.

  • How do you make you to promote your videos onto the home page for your nonsubscribers?

  • Once again, let's pretend we're due to begin, and what do we want?

  • We want to increase time spent on our website, which we put Should we put the most popular videos or the videos from her subscriber's list.

  • I mean, those are good bye thing we can do better.

  • And to talk about this, I'm going to use a concept that product managers use often called the user fun.

  • Oh, so this is what, The YouTube seducer of fun?

  • Oh, it looks like So what does this user funnel have to do with getting onto the home page?

  • Well, as a YouTube product manager, I want as many users to reach the end of the funnel, which is to, you know, watch as many videos as possible, or like binge watch videos.

  • So how'd I optimize that?

  • What?

  • Every user has to start from the top, and that is to click a video.

  • And to see how successful of video is is to look at the C t.

  • R a k a click through rate, which means how likely are they gonna click that video?

  • So no matter how good your video is, if nobody clicks her video, you're not gonna watch it.

  • They're not going to see it, so it doesn't even matter.

  • So that's why we call it the top of the funnel.

  • Next bucket of the funnel is if they watch your video so If your video is good, you're generally get a good watch time on your video.

  • So how does you to measure toe?

  • They measure it by your average video, watch time and then, lastly, the last bucket.

  • The thing that we care most about is that they start binge watching videos.

  • So basically they want to answer a question.

  • Does your YouTube video increase the time span of the user on this website and that could be measured by session time?

  • We can't really see this, but it means right when they click on your video, how long do they stay on YouTube?

  • The hired outnumber the better it is because it means that your video was the catalyst of this binge washing session.

  • So what YouTube does is they will first take the people who are most likely going to watch your videos and show it to them.

  • So most likely your subscribers, and then once it performs well for them, it will show to people who are less likely going to watch it, and then they're going to see how performs with them.

  • And then they're gonna keep doing this until they realize your video has no more marginal benefit for them.

  • So how do you make these videos that are promoted by YouTube?

  • So looking back at the funnel, you have the last part.

  • And then how do you increase that last part voters Through your race, there's one.

  • You increase the CT are your video, which means that click through rate so that means thumb now and title.

  • And then you want to have a good video that they finish watching, which means you want to make sure that you increase your audience retention and also your watch time artists.

  • Retention is kind of tricky because it depends on how long the video is.

  • So just focus on having, ah, average, watch time that is high and that you can do just do by having better videos are more engaging videos and the 3rd 1 increasing session time.

  • That is a little bit harder because you're not really in control of what they're gonna wash next.

  • But if you have a lot of good videos and to recommend it on your own videos, then they could start binge watching your video so you could single handedly increased session time.

  • Alright, finally, let's wrap it up so How do you turn those views into subscribers now?

  • And the reason why subscribers are important because they're the ones that are going to see your videos first and they're going to be the judge of them, and you two are going to take signals from them to this side if they should promote your video more or not.

  • All right for the things I'm going to talk about.

  • Next, I'm going to use another user funnel.

  • But this time it's not YouTube's user funnel.

  • It's my user funnel my channels user funnel.

  • So as you can see, the end of the funnel is not subscribers.

  • The end of funnel is actually engaged users.

  • We usually talk about getting more and more subscribers, but I don't believe that numbers represent everything because I see a lot of people with 100,000 subscribers, but only getting maybe 1000 views for each video, and I also see good accounts that have 100,000 subscribers.

  • But they're getting 50,000 views per video, so there's a big difference there.

  • So this is why I think the bottom to funnel should be engaged users.

  • But there are a lot of different proxies to kind of measure that one way I measure it is I look at when I post a new video.

  • How many views again?

  • The 1st 24 hours that air from my subscribers.

  • So those are the most engaged users that have.

  • There are other proxies, like how many people are in your life streams or how many people start falling on instagram those air.

  • You're engaged users.

  • All right, so now I'm going to talk about my channel strategy and how I use the user funnel Thio decide on what videos I make.

  • So obviously it's best to increase the top of the user funnel because if you increased 10% of top of the funnel, then it's the biggest pie.

  • So at the end, you're gonna increase 10% of engaged users.

  • So top of the funnel, we gotta increase CTR.

  • Now, how do you do that?

  • We want to get good thumbnails and good titles and for people to have reasons to wash your video.

  • So this is why I make videos like High Ghana Internship Day in the life videos and all of those click baby videos.

  • My startup, Siri's, the ones I put the most effort, and they actually don't do that.

  • Raylan CTR, because they have no context toe what it's about.

  • But this Siri's serve another purpose, which I'll explain later.

  • So the problem of increasing the top of your funnel is that YouTube does not give you see t ar metrics, so that's a little bit hard to see if you're doing well or not.

  • But there are things that can give you indication.

  • For example, my video a day in the life of a Facebook engineer.

  • Obviously, I put Facebook.

  • Therefore Clickbait.

  • I was getting a lot more views on the first day compared to my other videos.

  • So I would guess that people are clicking more often because want to publish a video.

  • YouTube does not know who's interested in it, so they would probably send it to the same amount of people as previously.

  • All right, so let's say once they click the video, probably 75% of them actually watches more than 12th of it.

  • You can look at this using audience retention on your videos.

  • All right, so another concept I need to bring in is about benchmarking, and that's just a fancy word to say, comparing yourselves to other people and see how you fall.

  • So I would like to do is I look at my other videos and also my friends videos to see what kind of metrics to get.

  • And then, depending on the metrics that they have, it gives me an indication to think about.

  • Oh, is this even possible to move like this metric?

  • So back to the 75%?

  • I think that's pretty hard to improve because I've looked at every other channel, and not a lot of them got more than 75%.

  • So I'd say once they've reached a 10 seconds of the video, maybe 60% of them are 50% of them actually finish your video, depending on how long your video is.

  • Of course, I wouldn't worry too much about how many people finish your video, but I would worry about your average watch time on your video.

  • That's important because YouTube would probably be using that as a signal to see how high quality or video is and will boost it accordingly.

  • So to increase that, that's just about content quality.

  • So I can't really help you out there All right, So next part of the funnel is having your viewers watch more videos or visit your channel.

  • So this is just, you know, if you have good videos, they will watch more of it.

  • And a way to measure that is by looking at your ship.

  • Just videos on your analytics to see if you get a lot of traffic coming from your own videos.

  • If you do, it means a lot of people are coming from your videos, and then they wanna watch more and airbender washing your videos now, finally getting them to subscribe.

  • So my current strategy is surreal them in with knowledge like how to get internships and stuff like that and make them stay for the entertainment, which is my start, Siri's even if you have one viral video.

  • If your channel is not high quality and hasn't or has nothing to do with the viral video, people will not subscribe.

  • Make sure people have a good idea on what they're subscribing to arm what your channel is about.

  • So how do you know if you're doing well and converting them to subscribers, you have to look at your ratio of new subscribers divide it by number of unconnected views.

  • Unconnected meeting nonsubscribers.

  • That ratio tells you what is the percentage of people watching your video had this side to subscribe.

  • Once again, you should benchmark look at other YouTubers account and see what their percentages.

  • This is not going to be a perfect approximation because where you're looking at is their daily subscribers defied by daily amount of views.

  • So you can't really get their non subscribe reviews.

  • So how do you do?

  • This is You go on social, Blake, your type and account that you want to compare yourselves to usually compare yourself with someone with a similar subscriber count and also similar topic.

  • And then what you do is you look at how many views they have and you look at how many subscribers they have on a daily average.

  • And then you divide those two and you see the percent.

  • Usually, I think 5% is a really good one.

  • Now it's not over yet.

  • I want to make sure that my subscribers don't get bored of me, and that is where consistency comes in.

  • And I care about engaged users, not just subscribers some people subscribe to over 50 plus channels, and they don't actively watch all of them.

  • They might watch.

  • Maybe, you know, at max 10 of them actively.

  • So you have to work really hard to be their favorite youtuber.

  • The way you do that is by being consistent and you upload often.

  • That way you don't become irrelevant, and I live stream a lot because I can't post every day.

  • But I can live stream pretty much almost every day.

  • And then that's how I keep my subscribers engaged.

  • All right, so that was super long, and I hope that was useful and that some of these concepts will stick to you.

  • And I think those were good for a march to think about how to make videos and howto grow your channel.

  • But if there's only one thing I want you guys to leave with is remember that if you have an opportunity or if there's enough protein that rises, you better take it.

  • And then once you take it, you should double down on it, so this can be in a form of a collaboration or of a viral video.

  • Make sure you just do that thing again, so I hope you enjoyed this data science approach to growing a YOUTUBE channel actually have a lot of other tips and tricks.

  • But this video is already way too long, so I'm gonna keep that for maybe another time.

  • All right?

  • Good luck.

  • And thanks for watching piece.

I'm going to tell you how I got from 50 subscribers to 25,000 subscribers in two months.

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