- As the famous speaker John Maxwell once said,
"Everything worthwhile is uphill."
Today I'm going to share with you how I grew
from zero to 300,000 subscribers.
The short answer is I did it the hard way,
the long road that goes uphill, as I'll explain.
And yes, there are some channels out there that explode
and grow and become overnight successes, and good for them,
but that's only true
for a very small percentage of channels.
And in my case, and in the vast majority of cases,
it takes years and years to grow to 100,000,
200, 300,000 subscribers.
I'll show you the timeline of how long it took me
to reach those different milestones
and how many videos it took me to get there.
And whether you have your own channel
or another type of big goal in your life,
the basic principles that I followed for my channel
can be applied to virtually any big vision
you have for your life.
In fact, feel free to share the vision
that you have for your life in the comment section below.
I look forward to reading that.
I'll talk about this in terms of five key principles
that help me get from zero to 300,000.
First, I had a really clear picture,
a vision for what I wanted.
I'm a big believer in having a clear vision for my life.
But mine was not really that unique.
Like a lot of channels,
I wanted to reach 100,000 subscribers.
I saw online recently, though,
that fewer than 1% of YouTube channels
ever across 100,000 subscribers.
So I knew this was a big goal,
and a big goal requires a big commitment.
I told myself when I posted my first videos
that even if I didn't reach that goal,
I was willing to make videos for five years straight,
even if the whole thing ended up being a big flop.
I figured that it was going to take me five years
to learn how to do this and do it well.
And then anything between zero and five years
was all just learning and experience.
And I never once second-guessed that five-year window.
So here's that journey.
Everybody starts at zero subscribers on YouTube, everybody.
So I posted my first video on May 31st, 2016.
I made a big announcement on Facebook,
and 24 of my personal Facebook friends
subscribed on that first day.
And I was so excited, I literally got out my calculator
and I said well, if I add 24 subscribers every day,
then in a year I'll have 8,000 subscribers.
I was in for a big surprise and a shock.
As you can see, there was almost no growth after that.
This line shows how many new subscribers
were added each day.
Many days I got just one or two subscribers.
And a lot of days I got zero subscribers
for multiple days in a row.
But by the end of my first month, I had only 51 subscribers.
And it took a total of five months to reach 100 subscribers.
Of course, I immediately started to question
whether or not I would ever get to a 100,000,
even in a million years.
But things started to pick up.
11 months later, the channel crossed 1,000 subscribers,
and a year after that 10,000,
another 18 months reach 50,000,
and in another year reach a 100,000.
So in total, it took me four years, nine months and 14 days
to reach 100,000 subscribers.
I was totally blown away and beyond grateful.
On most days, I feel like my wildest dreams have come true.
Then it took me about one more year
to go from 100,000 to 300,000 subscribers.
So as of this recording, I've had my channel
for a little under six years,
and two-thirds of that growth
has come in the last 12 months.
It took me over five years on YouTube
and over 20 years teaching college and consulting
to become an overnight success.
And I'm glad I committed
to doing this for five years no matter what.
If had let my early results discourage me,
I would've quit a long time ago.
Second, I was consistent.
My grandfather used to repeat this expression
that my mother also says quite often.
"You can move a mountain a shovelful at a time."
So I had this big mountain,
this vision to create a successful channel.
And each video is one shovel.
It was my goal to post one video per week,
and except for two vacations per year,
summer and around the holidays that I take every year,
I came pretty close to one per week.
It took me 202 videos to reach 100,000 subscribers
and about 240 to reach 300,000 subscribers.
It took me five and a half years of posting videos
to have what you might call my first viral video.
I made a video reacting to Bill Gates in an interview,
and that ended up getting several million views
in just about a month.
The success of that video was a big surprise, by the way.
I collaborated on another video
with another channel called Accurate English.
And that one went viral and got 8 million views.
And a lot of those people came and found my channel.
So that was a really big help, too.
But none of those videos came easy to me.
It didn't really feel like my progress was moving that fast
for most of those six years.
It felt more like I was being pulled back in a rubber band,
and all those repetitions
and finally flung the channel forward.
I was trying to make
what a lot of people call 1% improvements every single time.
I felt like I was climbing up this long,
steep hill every week.
My skills are still not where I want them to be,
but I feel like I'm moving
in the right direction very slowly.
And really there's no way around that process.
Sean Cannell from the channel Think Media has an expression.
"Your first videos are your worst videos."
It's unavoidable, and the only way to get better
is by getting lots of reps and posting consistently,
one shovelful at a time.
Third, I sought out advice from experts and online mentors.
I've done lots of public speaking
and consulting and teaching, but I didn't know anything
about how to run a YouTube channel.
There's a lot to it.
There are hundreds of small little aspects
to running a channel that collectively amounted
to a huge body of knowledge I had no idea about,
I didn't know how to approach,
I didn't even know where to start.
But thankfully, there are a bunch of channels
out there on YouTube that actually teach you
how to have a good YouTube channel.
So I started looking at channels like Video Creators.
The host of that is Tim Schmoyer,
Think Media, I mentioned Sean Cannell a moment ago,
Roberto Blake's channel,
Justin Brown's Primal Video channel.
They teach you everything you need to know
about your camera, your audio, your branding.
And I had to learn those skills through mentors.
There's no way I could have figured that out
through trial and error on my own.
I have always felt like a old dog learning new tricks
running this channel.
I can tell you honestly, none of this comes easy for me.
You see the final version,
but I'm not a natural video production editor
and social media kinda guy.
Still, if there's anything I have
that we could call a superpower,
I would say that my superpower
is seeking out good advice and putting it into practice.
Fourth, I learned to love the process.
Some videos are successful when I put them out.
Other videos, completely flop and nobody watches them.
But I really love almost every minute of scripting,
my talking points recording, editing,
posting, answering comments.
I love the process.
Having YouTube channel is one of the greatest blessings
in my professional life.
So even though I had a goal
and a vision to reach 100,000 subscribers
and then of course 300,000, I really enjoy
almost every single step along the way, every day.
Even when the channel very small,
I enjoyed the day to day process of running a channel,
learning, adapting.
It's really challenging,
and I love virtually everything about it.
Fifth, I had to learn
how to ignore the critics, the naysayers.
I had to remind myself
that I was not making videos for the critics.
I had to learn that negative comments on videos,
negative comments even from people in my personal life,
had nothing to do with what I was trying to accomplish
on my channel.
Negative criticism does not slow down the success
of YouTube channels,
and you cannot avoid criticism
if you put yourself out there.
I use the metaphor of a dumbbell.
On one side of the dumbbell is success
in putting yourself out there more and more
so people can watch you.
But then the critics rise right along with the supporters.
I think it's about a 10 to one ratio.
For every 10 positive or regular comments,
I get one nasty comment.
So if I have only 10 comments,
then I'm only gonna read one nasty comment.
But if there are 1,000 comments,
then you read about 100 of those negative comments
from what we call naysayers.
That's just part of the job description.
I had to learn how to ignore them
and not let them bring me down
because I could tell the momentum of my channel was gaining
and that the critics had nothing to do with the success
or failure of my channel.
I can say I've gotten much better at this.
And I can read some of the worst insulting,
horrible comments about myself,
and they really don't bother me that much anymore.
I'm not 100% there yet,
but I'm trying to do like they say
and let it roll off my back like water off a duck.
From a big picture view, those are the five principles
or themes that I see on the long, hard road
I took from zero to 300,000 subscribers.
And the truth is most channels out there took the long road.
I saw some channels recently
that have about the same number of subscribers as me,
but it took them five or even 10 times the number of videos
that I've posted to get there.
The big lesson is this is like almost anything in life.
Most people get there the hard way.
They take the long road.
And again, as John Maxwell once said,
"Everything worthwhile is uphill."
So my question for you is what big vision
do you have for your life?
What special thing do you wanna accomplish with your work?
If you're feeling courageous, please share that
in the comments below.
I would love to hear the vision you have for your life.
God bless, and I will see you soon.