(upbeat music)
- Hey, everybody, this is Roberto Blake of robertoblake.com
helping you create something awesome today.
So today, we're gonna do a topic that
I'm not personally the biggest fan of,
but it is relevant.
How to grow your YouTube channel fast.
Here's the thing, I'm planning to do a video
on how to grow your YouTube channel slow
because I believe in that a lot more,
but there are some of you,
especially the young people
who are super impatient and you want it
now, now, now, now, now.
I don't believe in that because I believe you should build
a brand with YouTube.
I think you should take your time.
I think you should build a community
and there are people who have done that fast,
but I think that doing it the slow way
you learn a lot more,
and I think there's a lot more value in that.
But for those of you who want it now,
I have some tips and advice
and this stuff does work.
Yep, I do know what I'm talking about.
So one of the things you can do
to grow your YouTube channel fast
that I don't think enough people bring up
is you can pick very popular,
very trendy content that has a huge user base.
Here's a primary example.
Right now, it's Summer of 2016.
Pokemon Go is huge.
We've seen channels in like the one to two
weeks that this has been out go
from zero to a quarter of a million subscribers
because the timing was there and was right,
and they were consistent
and they were putting out quality content
around something that's very popular,
that there's only so much information about.
So there are people who have built these great communities
that were Pokemon fans
and it is tremendous, it is amazing.
Another one that is a great example
is when Star Wars: Episode VII
finally came out, there were a ton
of people who have done
Star Wars fan films
and Star Wars fan theory channels
that blew up overnight
riding the coattails of that film release.
So, if you take advantage of something that's going on
and is popular in the moment,
that has a huge fan base,
then there's a really good chance
that you can grow your YouTube channel
very quickly, maybe not a hundred thousand
in a week, but some people
have been known to do it.
Another popular trend that follows
the same vein that I'm not a fan of
is the YouTube drama genre.
There are some people who have been very successful
with that; they pivoted.
I know there are channels that were like gaming
or were review channels that pivoted
and started covering YouTube news,
YouTube drama, and celebrity gossip
and they blew up and went from like,
you know, 50,000 subscribers,
to like 2,000,000 subscribers.
So, that is another way to grow a channel fast.
Again, I don't believe in that.
Now here's something really practical and tactical
that you can do the right way
to grow a YouTube channel fast.
If you have a lot of, ah, friends,
not even a ton of them,
but if you have enough friends.
You have to remember,
big YouTubers have superfans.
These are people that are sharing
their, ah, videos all the time
in Facebook and Twitter and other social media
and are talking them up to people.
If you know a group of people,
or have a group of friends
that also are creators,
you guys could get together and collectively
you could network and you could arrange
to share each other's content
and promote each other all the time.
These promotion networks are not like
a Multi-channel network, a MCN, any of that stuff.
This just friends getting together promoting each other.
Musicians know about this
because a lot of indie artists
and bands they get together
and they have, ah, small groups that do this
and they are each other's street team,
so if you do this with your YouTube channel,
then you're getting a broader audience,
you're getting more distribution
and then it's not just you promoting it,
it's other people talking about you.
This is a fast way to grow your channel
If the people that you're working with have
a similar-sized audience
or people with similar interests
or a big enough audience of their own.
A popular trend among YouTubers
is to want to do collaborations and shout-outs
with bigger YouTubers and to try
and siphon from their audience.
This can work; this could be hit or miss.
The reason I don't like this is
if you go from, like, having 500 subscribers
to a big YouTuber
with a million subscribers or something
shouting you out, and then
all of a sudden you have 50,000,
a hundred thousand, a quarter of a million,
that person can kind of take credit
for your career and your successes
in the long-term no matter
how hard you work or how much you build on top of that.
You are basically letting this person
own your success and I'm not a huge fan of it.
I think that if tomorrow
I got a million subscribers because of somebody else
that I would actually be genuinely upset
that they can take credit for that
and it wasn't me on my own.
Now, there are people that get shout-outs
that do amazing work
and have always done amazing work
and just nobody was aware of them
and they keep their audience
and they continue to grow because
they were that good all along
and it was just gonna take a while
for them to get noticed.
So, I don't really have an issue
with it if it's on merit,
but if it's just that some
big person shouted you out
and they can now take credit for your entire career,
I would hope that you have a problem with that, too.
It's actually part of the reason why, one,
I mostly collab with people smaller than me
because I want to give
them more reach and more exposure
if I love what they're doing
and I think they need more awareness
or that they are worthy of it,
then I like doing those collaborations.
I do it a lot
and mostly with people who are personal friends
or colleagues of mine
and I think that's a cool way
to help each other grow.
I think that most of you,
if you want to do collabs,
you should be working with people that are
at the same level as you,
that are crazy, stupid, excited
about the same things as you.
One of my final tips for growing
a YouTube channel fast is make daily content.
Something Casey Neistat said on his channel
and also at the VidCon panel that
he was at this summer,
which I have that full panel linked up here, um,
and it should be on the YouTube channel.
It's like a 45-minute video,
but it's 45 minutes of Casey Neistat
and a bunch of other YouTubers,
big and small, sharing, like,
very important advice that you will never hear,
like anywhere else if you couldn't afford
to spend hundreds of dollars
to fly out to VidCon,
so I put that up for free.
You're welcome, sit through it.
I know you guys love five-minute videos,
ah, Casey Neistat is preaching to you
and telling you how to actually do this.
I would listen, but something
that he says that stuck out to me is
just make more videos.
I a lot of people get into this idea
of quality over quantity
and try to make the best looking video possible,
and that's fine, I love great quality content,
but at the end of the day,
you learn so much by putting something out there,
seeing what works, what doesn't,
and just doing it.
It's like daily exercise.
If you wanted to work out
and you wanted to get as healthy as possible,
you have to be consistent
and do it everyday.
It's the same thing with growing an audience
and building a community.
If you show up everyday,
you have more opportunities.
More videos means more views.
More views means more subscribers.
It's a really simple formula.
(finger snapping)
Remind me, I need to do a video
about the formula for getting more
subscribers because I can actually
do visual diagrams and that could be a thing.
I need to do that.
My last tip for growing a YouTube channel fast
is launch your channel
with like a lot of good content to start with
so that it's worth subscribing to
to catch up on stuff and binge.
Like, House of Cards does really well on Netflix
because that's your whole weekend.
It's released all at once
and it's time to binge.
When they released the new Voltron update for 2016,
there it is, the whose season.
Time to binge watch,
clear your weekend, clear your calendar.
So, those kind of things, um,
are attracted to people.
It's worked, it's been proven to work,
so, I would look into that.
So, that's my tips for growing
a YouTube channel fast.
Uh, if you don't wanna do it like me,
the slow and hard way,
three years of grinding
to a hundred thousand subscribers, then,
you know, that's on the table for you.
I would just point out that, like,
most of the people that are big on YouTube,
it took them a long time to gain traction,
but once they did and they kept putting in the work,
it took off for them.
Ah, it was a year between
Marques Brownlee doing a hundred thousand subscribers
and doing his first million subscribers,
and in that year, he produced
the best content that he ever created.
So, I think that that matters.
Patience, hard work, and really
loving what you do
are the best ways to grow your channel.
Anyway, I hope that helped you guys out.
If you have questions, ah,
leave those in the comments section.
Links to all of my YouTube gear and setup
are in the description,
so make sure you're hitting up those Amazon links
that helps me and the channel out.
Like this video if you like it.
Don't forget to subscribe.
Check out the other awesome content on the channel.
As always you guys,
thanks so very much for watching and don't forget,
create something awesome today.
Who knows, you do it enough,
you might end up with one of these.