(metronome clicking)
- Ugh. (mouse clicking)
I think I need a break.
So here I am, wide awake,
but also exhausted at three o'clock in the morning
reflecting on this whole YouTuber journey.
It's a story being retold
by millions of budding YouTube creators
across the globe as I speak.
It's a highs and lows and a trials and triumphs
that we all share.
A collective journey that's long, sometimes tough,
but always rewarding because it's within these stories
that we find insights and we uncover strategies,
and most importantly, we all grow together.
So you know what?
Just after 3:00 AM in the morning,
I've got a new video idea.
So I guess my YouTube journey started back in 2008.
That's 15 years ago.
Anyway, my first video upload was a classic example
of how not to start a YouTube channel
because the video doesn't exist anymore.
There were two very popular football pundits
in the UK at the time, and they got in trouble
for some somewhat controversial opinions.
Now, I thought it'd be really funny to get a compilation
of all of our blunders and upload them to YouTube
not thinking that none of that content was mine.
And so that was my first and very obvious mistake.
Don't use copyrighted content.
It's often gonna get claimed, no money for you,
or you're gonna get some strikes,
no channel for you.
Bit of a terminal lesson, that one.
But anyway, there it was, my first video on YouTube.
And what did I do next?
Absolutely nothing for months.
But then, something really weird happened,
or at least it felt really weird at the time:
I got noticed.
Typically, when you set up a YouTube channel
you just leave all of the notifications on.
Yes, I want an email when I get a new subscriber.
Yes, I want an email when I get a new comment.
And more of them kept coming in every single day.
Doing something and have people engage with it
on the internet was very new to me.
And you know what that feels like, don't you?
Real engagement is a sweet-sweet dopamine hit,
and I wanted more.
So I started creating stuff, and I do mean random stuff.
If you go back to the origins
of my personal YouTube channel,
you will see I was all over the place and very sporadic.
And guess what?
I completely failed to replicate
the success of that first video,
and so those notifications soon dried up.
And so it wasn't until four years later
that I decided to take some real intentional action.
2012 was the year I got a brand new piece of shiny tech:
the Asus Transformer Prime.
If anybody remembers that tablet,
holler if you hear me in the comments below.
When I went on to YouTube to try and find out
how to use this shiny new piece of tech,
I couldn't find anything because nobody was covering
this particular tablet.
And that is when I had my first
(snaps) true YouTube lightbulb moment.
Why don't I help people how to use it?
I knew there wouldn't be a huge audience
for this niche piece of tech,
but I knew there was an audience and I was gonna help them.
And as soon as I became laser-focused
on a certain thing for a very specific audience,
I learned a very valuable lesson.
The more I focused on just one thing,
the better I got as a creator and I did it a lot faster.
So I put in the reps and I did them intensely.
Through doing this, I found out that I was really good
at a critical YouTube skill:
taking an idea to a published video.
I could come up with a new idea to talk about this tablet.
And within 30 seconds to a minute,
I'd already made the decision whether or not
I was gonna turn it into a video.
I very quickly got into a routine:
idea in one minute,
complete a video within two or three hours
every single day for months.
And this brings us to a classic conversation
all content creators have at some point
in their YouTube journey:
quantity versus quality.
From my personal experience on that question,
here's what I recommend.
Focus more on making lots of videos
rather than perfect videos.
This way you practice the whole process
of making content over and over again.
And through doing that, you'll build up
your YouTube muscles very, very quickly.
And you'll also find out very, very quickly
whether or not you enjoy making videos
which is quite important for YouTube.
Imagine you've made 50 videos
and you're not getting loads of views.
That is not uncommon.
Building up a YouTube audience does take time.
But after making those 50 videos,
you'll go back to your first one and say to yourself,
"Yeesh, that's rough."
The winning trick on YouTube is one of the most obvious:
consistency.
Keep showing up and keep creating.
It's one of the fundamentals here at vidIQ.
I can count on a single hand
the number of times we've missed a deadline
or not gone live with our weekly stream.
You have come to rely on us
and I like to think that we don't let you down.
And here's the funny thing about YouTube
that every single creator learns at some point or another.
You will spend hours, days, sometimes even weeks,
crafting that perfect video
and it'll fizzle out and do nothing.
And then on another occasion,
you'll whip up a video in 10 minutes
and it'll turn out to be your best-performing one
for the entire year.
That's YouTube for you.
But regardless of video performance,
the simple truth is this:
the more you create, the more you learn,
and the more you learn,
the more you understand how YouTube works.
Now, once the video's out there.
- It's showtime.
- No, I don't look like him.
And what makes YouTube completely unique
to anything that came before it
and addictive and probably terrible for your mental health
is real-time data.
Unlike writing a piece in a magazine
or appearing in a theater play,
you get immediate feedback
to every little thing that you do.
And seeing all of that feedback can send you
into an immediate action mode.
And I will confess to all who are watching and listening,
I am an analytics junkie.
I'm feeding the data directly into my veins.
I remember a time when I would've been overjoyed
to get 100 views in a single day.
Then, it became 1000, 10,000.
These days, I'm gunning for 100,000 views per day.
It's ridiculous, isn't it?
You always want graphs that are going up and to the right
and those green numbers.
It is a thrill, isn't it,
right up until the point the numbers start to slump.
It's like you're always stuck in this endless cycle
of chasing better and better numbers.
YouTube have done a really good job
of gamifying analytics, haven't they?
And then the inevitable blame game begins.
Is it me? Is it YouTube?
Yeah, probably.
What is going wrong?
In the moment absolutely you're gonna have
unbelievable highs and depressing lows.
It's stressful, and half the time you think
everything is beyond your control.
But what I ultimately found out
is that if I continue to be consistent
to turn up and stuck to a long-term game plan,
the channel does this in an unstoppable fashion.
And by 2016, after four years of hard work,
I felt as if I'd hit my YouTube stride,
25,000 subscribers,
a couple of million views on the channel.
I felt as if by then I knew a little bit about YouTube
and I wanted to give my knowledge back to the community.
So I started to share my YouTube journey
in the sense that if I could do it,
then you probably could too.
And yeah, I'll be the first to admit
it wasn't the perfect pivot from tech to YouTube education.
Oh well.
Now at the same time, YouTube education was becoming
an industry in itself.
Obviously since you're here, you've heard of vidIQ,
but at the same time, there was a competitor,
that we'll call.
- Brand X.
- Controversial opinion: Jack's joker, the best one.
Now at the time, I had a very neutral opinion.
I just wanted the best tools to help me grow my channel,
so I tried both of them.
But it just so happened that vidIQ
at the time had a superior tool:
copy tags.
Yeah, you don't need to do that anymore.
So I decided to make an incredibly simple video
about how to copy tags with vidIQ,
and that turned out to be the biggest decisive decision
of my professional life.
The performance of that video was very modest indeed.
Today, it has four and a half thousand views in 7 years.
But here's where the magic happened.
Every video, even with just a handful of views,
has unimaginable potential,
and this was one of them.
With that video, I reached out to vidIQ on Twitter.
"Elon, what have you done?"
- Brand X.
- I told them I'd made a video about their tools.
It was a collaboration they never asked for
and they got it for free.
Call it luck. Call it timing.
The next 24 hours, whoo!
The CEO of vidIQ at the time,
who's still the same CEO and a very busy person,
found the tweet and got in touch with me immediately.
Now, up until this point, the only YouTube income
I dabbled with was ad revenue.
Yes, I'm the first to admit I'm a terrible business person.
But the CEO right there and then
offered me some paid freelance work.
I could not believe it.
And get this for a crazy little story:
I had no idea how much I was worth to vidIQ.
The CEO asked me, "How much are you gonna charge
for your freelance work?"
And I just plucked a figure out of the air: $25 an hour.
But this was a moment that really solidified
my relationship with vidIQ.
The CEO insisted I was worth more than that
and volunteered to pay $45 an hour.
Having someone recognize my value
and not take advantage of it was truly empowering.
And so the rest is history, right?
Not quite.
I started making one vidIQ video a week for $45 an hour,
a nice top up to my ad revenue,
but not quite quit your day job money just yet.
But then, after about six months of good work vibes,
the CEO of vidIQ threw me a humongous curve ball:
he asked me if I'd be interested
in working with vidIQ full-time.
I ain't got any more hands to do anything.
I was flawed.
This was a life-changing opportunity.
Hell yeah, I was interested.
But life is rarely a simple straight puff, isn't it?
Canada, where I was living at the time,
has some rather complicated Visa employment laws.
And because I wasn't a Canadian at the time,
I would have to jump through many legal hoops
to even make this opportunity a reality.
It would take almost a year to do that.
And here's the incredible thing: vidIQ waited.
18 months after I sent that tweet, I became a full-time
YouTuber, content creator, digital marketer.
I like to call myself YouTuber-in-residence.
It's a made up name. It's quirky.
There's only one of these in the entire world, I think,
which brings us to vidIQ.
And the rest is kind of history
chartered in the 1400 videos
we've already made on the channel.
You should definitely check them out.
For 99.9% of creators on YouTube,
success does not come easily or quickly.
I joined vidIQ when we had 1500 subscribers
and it took us 18 months to get to 100,000 subscribers
and over five years to reach that
golden magical 1 million subscriber milestone.
And what inevitably comes with success,
a hunger for more.
And it took me far longer than I realized it should
that I need help on this channel.
For several years, I did absolutely everything
on the channel by myself, and then Dan joined,
and what a lovely man he is with a beautiful voice.
But we still worked independently of each other
putting all of the burden on our shoulders
for every aspect of a creative process.
I am not the world's best script writer,
video editor, or thumbnail designer,
so we finally got some help.
In the last 12 months, we've gone from a team of two
to a team of six,
and the results speak for themselves.
But I will admit it was a lesson that took
far too long to learn
because I always want control of everything.
Most of the time, it is your job
to earn the trust of your audience,
but when the time comes,
be ready to trust others to help you
on your YouTube journey.
And you know what? (yawns)
Telling you that story has made me quite tired.
And goodness, it's 3:15 in the morning now.
So why don't you share your YouTube stories
in the comments below,
and I'll check 'em out in the morning.
I'm done.
I forgot to turn the lights off.