- There's one secret to growing on YouTube
that I think would massively have an impact for
most of you if you're a content creator,
and it's a secret that I and nobody else
in the community ever talks about.
I don't think anyone's ever shared it.
I don't think most people realize that this is happening.
So I'm just gonna give it to you.
Let's get into the video.
Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake
helping you create something awesome today.
Welcome back to the channel.
Today we're going to have another YouTube tips video.
For those of you who have no idea who I am,
my name's Roberto Blake.
I'm a creative entrepreneur.
I'm a public speaker.
On this YouTube channel we talk about how to build
your brand online and how to grow an online business.
So if you're into that thing,
you'll wanna like and subscribe.
Some of you might be familiar with
my content for growing on social media,
whether it's YouTube, LinkedIn, or Instagram.
Today when we're talking about YouTube,
I want you to understand that you could probably
apply this same logic to almost any social media platform,
and definitely to most online businesses.
A phrase that you hear in YouTube,
especially on these YouTube growth videos,
all the time is, make content for your audience,
make content for your audience.
What if you don't have an audience?
Here's another one.
Make videos for people like you.
Okay, not bad advice.
Let me ask you something.
If you're a smaller YouTube channel,
do you think you're going to grow by making content
for the audience you already have
or making content for the audience that you desire?
Think about that.
When it comes to anything in your life,
doing what you're doing right now
probably can only get you so far.
You would have to raise your standards
and change things dramatically if you want
a dramatic impact or change in your life.
Here is what I'm going to tell you you should do.
Make your content with the assumption
that nobody knows who you are.
Make content that is accessible for people
who don't know you, don't care about you,
and have never heard your name before.
That would probably help considerably.
See, what a lot of you are doing is
you're playing the YouTube meta game.
You are trying to do things that
fit within the YouTube culture,
things that you see a lot of people
in the YouTube community doing,
things that you see your favorite
content creators are doing.
That won't work for you because
those people are already established,
and their place in the community is already secure.
Now, this isn't gonna be a video where I say
the secret to success is being yourself.
That's true on some level,
but it's true for a very specific reason.
Let's say that the core YouTube community
is the 100 million people or so subscribed to PewDiePie,
the biggest YouTuber.
Okay, if the community is 100 million people,
the community is outnumbered by the average consumer,
the casual viewer because while there are
100 million people strong in the YouTube community
among those core watchers and even
the content creators themselves,
they're outnumbered by the two billion people that
are logged in every month that are casual viewers.
Making your content easier to understand for
a casual viewer that's not part of the internet culture
and not part of the YouTube culture is key.
The other thing is you would need to identify
who is the desired audience for this.
Some of you are making content with
no idea who you're making content for.
You haven't really focused on who your core audience is.
You have no identifier for them.
You can't make something for everybody.
You have to find, out of those two billion people,
who is your tribe, who is your community?
Where do you fit in?
What lunch table at school are you going to sit at?
You cannot please everybody.
You can't make everyone happy,
and the best thing you could do is not to even try.
That's where people get frustrated, where people burn out,
and why people don't feel they can be themselves.
Even some of the largest content creators
are struggling because, in many ways,
they are still making videos for the audience they have,
and they might have outgrown that audience because,
frankly, they've grown up.
It's also possible that your audience could
outgrow you if you don't evolve and reinvent yourself.
PewDiePie evolved and reinvented himself and also
decided to shift where his interest and personality
was taking him instead of staying locked into something
that he built his reputation on in the past,
which was primarily gaming, okay?
The same can be true for Shane Dawson.
Shane Dawson was known for an era as an OG YouTuber
of like cringe-style humor videos,
and then, he started to shift his content,
and now, he's a documentarian.
Like, that is a huge pivot from where he was.
Even when he became the conspiracy theories guy
after doing the cringe-humor stuff, and then,
some other things, he's evolved and reinvented
and recast himself many times just
based on where life has taken him.
And so, I think that there's an important
lesson in that that we can all learn
when it comes to growing an audience.
And I know what a lot of you desire is an active audience.
You want your subscribers to watch your videos.
You may have noticed something.
YouTube does not deliver your videos
specifically to your subscribers.
It's identifying people for your videos based
wholly on what those people are interested in.
And I'll give you a hint.
If you're not a famous YouTuber,
it's probably not you specifically,
it's the thing that you made, and that's fair, that's valid.
Now, there will be a portion of your audience
that did come for you and will watch
and support anything that you want to do.
It won't be the majority, in most cases, though.
That's just the truth.
That is the truth for the majority of people
on this platform that aren't famous, okay?
So you can't always do what you see other people doing
in YouTube just 'cause they're big and they're famous
and you think that that's what it takes to be successful.
You need to figure out what staying
in your own lane looks like.
You need to carve out your own path to success,
and you have to remember that it's
going to be based on what you do.
It's gonna be based on what you make people interested in.
It's gonna be based in what you become known for.
So if you wanna grow on YouTube,
the secret to growing on YouTube that no one talks about
is that you need to make videos that would be
interesting and would be accessible
to people who don't know you,
people who've never watched a video from you before.
I want you go into your YouTube analytics,
I want you to do me a favor.
In the comments, in the comments of this video,
if you are a YouTube content creator watching this,
go into your data, look at the last 30 days,
or even the last 90 days,
and tell me what percentage of your views,
what percentage that YouTube say your views
came from people subscribed to your channel
versus not subscribed to your channel
because I will guarantee that the far majority
of people are getting a good portion,
more than half of their views,
from people who are not subscribed to them.
The good news about that is that it's an opportunity.
People who are not subscribed to you have an opportunity
to become a loyal subscriber or to buy your merchandise
or to click your affiliate links, or again,
to support you by watching the videos so that
you can get those brand deals that you want.
So again, reaching people beyond your
subscriber base is going to be the norm.
I'm sorry, active subs is something that is not going to
really be a reality of the current way that
YouTube works and delivers videos to us.
YouTube delivers videos to us not based
on what we are subscribed to,
but based on what we watch, how long we watch it,
and how often we watch it, and not just that video,
but that topic.
YouTube's topics and classifiers are really
what drives the algorithm right now,
and it's based all on your behavior.
If you look at yourself as a viewer,
you know that this is the truth
when you look at the YouTube homepage.
It is based on the last 100 things that you watched,
whether you are subscribed or not.
I constantly am getting videos from channels
that I just haven't hit the Subscribe button on,
but I watched two or three of their videos
in a row or I watched a 20-minute video from them.
Happens all the time.
I know this is probably what you didn't wanna hear.
I know you probably wanted some secret to going viral.
It doesn't happen for the far majority of people,
and you know, viral success can be fleeting.
Slow and steady isn't sexy, but it works.
There are a lot of things about this channel
that on the surface don't look sexy, but they work.
Not getting a lot of views, this looks bad,
until you realize that there are views that
are worth $2 versus views that are worth $20.
Hmm...I'd rather have the views that are worth $20
even if there's less of them, that probably works out.
Anyway, that's what I've got for you today.
Make videos that people who have no idea
who you are could actually watch
and enjoy and share and would engage with.
Question of the day.
What do you struggle with most on YouTube?
And you're not allowed to say views or subscribers.
Let me know in the comment section.
Like this video if you like it.
Don't forget to subscribe.
Check out the other awesome stuff here on the channel.
As always, you guys, thanks so very much for watching,
and don't forget, go out there
and create something awesome today.
Take care.
(upbeat synthesizer music)