- Hey, everybody, this is Roberto Blake of RobertoBlake.com,
helping you create something awesome today.
In today's video, I'm going to talk about some things
and my advice for younger YouTubers.
Even if you don't consider yourself a younger YouTuber,
you may want to stay tuned because it's possible
you might be making some of these same mistakes
or assumptions about how YouTube works,
and this might be helpful for you.
One of the things that I see a lot from young YouTubers
that I think needs to be addressed is
the idea of what a YouTuber is and the idea of
being a big Youtuber.
Now, a lot of people start out with Youtube
for completely altruistic reasons.
They want to put out really good content,
they want to do something that's interesting
and just share it.
Then there are other people who want to become
internet famous and I think that
this is a part of the culture of young people today
in the same way that other people would have wanted
to be a movie star or a celebrity, for them,
being a bigger YouTuber is that aspirational goal
of being famous in what their culture is.
I get it, but the thing is
it's an unreasonable goal to have in many cases,
because one, most people are not going to be
successful at it because partly,
if that's your goal and your mentality,
then you're not putting out content
that other people are going to value,
that other people are going to be interested in,
that other people are going to care about.
You're really just not going to grow a big audience.
If you're not doing something that's interesting,
or entertaining, or inspiring,
or that's educating other people and doing it constantly,
consistently, and with high production values,
reality is you're not going to grow a lot of subscribers,
regardless of how much much effort you put in,
you're just not going to get that traction.
That's why there are some people on YouTube
who have been on YouTube for years and years and years,
and it didn't really go anywhere for them
or they didn't get a large number of subscribers
or they didn't get any subscribers
or views to their channel, is because they had
purely self-motivated, selfish reasons for
doing their content.
I'm not saying that you can't do content
that you're interested in or that you can't vlog
and talk about yourself and your life,
I'm saying that you have to do it in a way
that is going to create some kind of value for other people.
If you don't get that, it's going to be very hard
for you to be successful in the YouTube space,
and you're going to take a lot of criticism
or you're just not going to grow your channel.
That's just the way it is.
If you look at the successful YouTubers,
whether they're big or whether they're doing it
for a living, or whether they're doing it full-time,
if you look at all of them, you will see
a consistent pattern of high production values,
interesting personalities, interesting content,
consistent quality content.
You'll see that that is the trend for those
larger, successful YouTubers.
The other thing is, a lot of young YouTubers
get discouraged and they give up
because they don't see their numbers growing.
They might be producing great content,
but they may not being doing some other technical
or marketing things well,
and they're giving up very early
instead of just putting out quality content, quality content
and then learning and growing from that experience.
They get discouraged and they give up in
3 months, 4 months, 6 months, a year,
instead of sticking it out and learning
and going deeper and growing and asking for advice.
They just give up.
I've produced a ton of videos that gives practical,
actionable advice that I use to help me grow the 30,000 plus
subscribers that I have at the making of this video,
and also build YouTube into part of my business.
I do not make a living off of YouTube.
I make a living as a graphic designer and a consultant.
I make a living doing a lot of different things,
but YouTube is part of my marketing strategy
for those things, and also a great creative outlet
and lets me engage with peoplel in my audience,
convert some of them to clients and customers.
YouTube has a lot of value for me in that way,
but, make no mistake,
it's very hard to make a living off of YouTube,
and if that's your goal, I have a video that talks about
at least six or seven other things you need to do
outside of Youtube to make money if you want to actually
accomplish the goal of making a living on it.
The other thing that I see young YouTubers doing wrong,
and even some older YouTubers, too,
is there's two really big things that they're
absolutely doing wrong that is really hurting their channel,
and hurting their credibility in the YouTube space,
and that is the sub-for-sub culture
and that is also asking for shoutouts with people
you don't have a relationship with.
I did a whole video on why sub-for-sub is bad,
but the technical reasons behind it
that young YouTubers don't get,
because they might not be super techy yet,
is that YouTube is a search engine,
sub-for-sub is something they know and consider cheating,
and it's hurting your channel
and they're ranking you down for it.
You guys might think that your sub-for-sub community,
and your sub-for-sub culture is you guys
helping each other out,
but what you're really doing is telling YouTube
to ignore you because programmers are super smart.
They're onto that game and they're going to punish you.
You need to stop doing that if that's what you're doing now,
and I do a whole other video about it.
As for the requesting shoutouts things,
there's not a technical thing about that.
That's a politeness thing.
That's you approaching strangers that you 've
never had a conversation with,
and then asking them to do something for you
without you having done something first,
built a relationship, comment with them,
talk to them, go deep with them in social media.
If you're not building a relationship,
you're not doing for these things,
then you're asking people to tell their audience about you
and their audience may not like your content at all,
so, if they did it and then their audience
is a different audience than yours, they go to your stuff,
and they don't like it and they hate it,
you're opening yourself up to all that scrutiny
and all of that negativity, and all those bad comments
and all of those dislikes, and it's going to
hurt your feelings,
and it's because you didn't take the time to figure out
whether this person's audience matches your audience,
whether this person's audience would like your content,
whether your content creates value for them.
Some of you might think that's harsh.
You're saying, oh, well you're saying
my content has no value?
For those people, if someone is watching videos
about YouTube marketing and you're doing videos
about gaming, there's a good chance that they may not like
those videos or may not care about those videos.
So, no, you're not creating value for them.
If you're a YouTuber who's doing television show reviews,
and you ask someone for a shoutout
and you're doing beauty blogging,
they may not be interested in that.
If it's not a television show
that has a large female audience,
there's a chance they won't be interested in that.
If you're asking people from this Sci-Fi movie reviewer guy
to go to your beauty blogging channel,
then that shoutout may not work
the way that you think it will.
Again, you're opening yourself up to negativity
and to haters when you could have just
thought about it like a human being
and thought about, gee, if I'm going to ask someone else
to shout me out, maybe I need to start commenting
on their videos and maybe it needs to be
somebody who does similar videos to me,
and maybe that would be helpful.
These are the things that I see a lot of young YouTubers
making mistakes with.
They are too impatient to put in the time and the work
to really grow their audience and build their channel.
They are getting into messed up things
like sub-for-sub culture and asking the wrong people
in the wrong way for shoutouts on videos.
Not making enough content,
not realizing it takes time to build an audience
and giving up too soon.
All of these things are things that I think
are really hurting young YouTubers in this space
and are making them either get discouraged
or look bad or draw the wrong kind of attention
or negativity, and I think that if you
pay attention to what other people are doing successfully
and maybe if you watch some of the stuff in my playlist
as far as how to grow your YouTube channel the right way,
or if you don't want to watch my stuff,
maybe you watch something like Steve Dotto's information
or maybe you watch Derral Eves information.
Any number of people, or the YouTube creator academy,
any number of people who've put out great content
to help you understand how to grow your YouTube channel
the right way.
I don't feel that just because you're young
means that you have to go about it the wrong way
and make all of these mistakes and just say,
"Oh well, I'll figure it out later."
I know a lot of young people in YouTube
that are doing most of this right.
I would say that, and give a shoutout to,
someone who I think is doing it right is Joshua Choppy.
His channel is growing incrementally, little by little,
but he's also doing the right things with his channel,
and I have a lot of respect for him as somebody who's
a 9th grader, that I feel for his age,
is crushing it in YouTube.
He may not have a huge following,
but he has a loyal following,
and I feel like he's doing the right things,
putting out quality content for what he's capable of
and reaching an audience that cares about his content.
Anyway, I hope this information helped you guys out.
I hope some of you don't feel overwhelmingly discouraged
or have hurt feelings over it.
I'm trying to help you understand
what you might be doing wrong,
and what's keeping you from having the success
that you actually want.
Anyway, like this video if you like it.
Don't forget to subscribe.
Check our the other awesome content on the channel.
As always, you guys, thanks so much for watching,
and don't forget, create something awesome today.