I got this in the mail today....
100K subscribers!
Yay!
And I wanted to say a massive thank you
to all of you guys for supporting me over the past four
and a bit years on YouTube.
I originally started my channel,
making silly tiny planet tutorials,
because I was getting so many messages in my Instagram inbox
that it was just easier to make a video,
and send that video to all the people on Instagram.
And then it just slowly snowballed
into this couple of years later.
So yeah, 100K that's cool.
I'm done celebrating.
So I thought that I could take this opportunity
to share with you guys 10 things I learned
over the past few years on my journey
to 100K subscribers.
There are certain things I wish I'd known early on,
that would have helped me navigate the waters
through to 100K, a bit faster and smoother.
Number one, is it's not about the numbers.
Who cares?
Honestly, I'm at 100K, but so what?
I honestly don't care.
It feels exactly the same as it did when I was at 10K,
and even when I got to my first 1,000 subscribers,
they all feel equally as good.
And just aspiring to get to big numbers
for no reason in particular,
isn't a very satisfying destination when you get there.
I know having big followings is glamoriseed like,
Ooh!
But yeah, what if you had 100,000 followers
and they all hated you?
Something I find much more important
than the quantity of the audience is the quality.
I would honestly rather have 1,000 quality audience members,
than 100,000 random people
who followed my channel just because I asked them to,
or I bought followers or something like that.
The numbers don't mean anything unless they're real people.
And your message is actually connecting with them,
because that is the point
of building social media profiles online.
It's not to get the following and the numbers.
It's about the impact you make.
It's about the people you help.
And it's much better to find 1,000 true fans,
than 100,000 random people.
Two, choose a niche you love and stick to it.
So if you're just starting out
and you wanna get noticed online,
you need to become known for something.
You can't just be posting on random topics.
One day it's photography,
the next day you're talking about your love life.
The next day after that, it's politics.
No, no, no, no, people aren't looking for
all of those random things from some random person,
you need to stick to one topic and one alone.
Especially in the early stages,
once you become better known,
then people care more about your opinions on other things.
But when you're just getting going,
you need to stick to one topic
and explore that topic in as much depth as you possibly can.
That's how you build a reputation
as an expert in that particular field.
And your channel actually has a theme.
Think of it like it's an encyclopedia.
You need to fill up those pages of the encyclopedia,
as much as you can and make that encyclopedia
as big and in-depth as possible.
Don't make it an encyclopedia about everything,
because no one's gonna read that.
And here's something embarrassing.
The channel I have right now,
isn't my first YouTube channel.
I actually technically started on YouTube,
probably 10 years ago.
And I went through four or five different themes,
before I got to the one I'm at now.
The first channel I ever made was doing movie reviews.
My first review was of my favourite film,
"2001: A Space Odyssey".
And, I was young and I didn't know
how to put sentences together good.
And I was like, "Hello, there. Today, um,
I'm going to be reviewing, uh 2001,
a space,
uh, what's that.
Odyssey.
And as you can imagine,
I got a couple of comments on that video.
And one of them compared the dude in the video
to a chicken McNugget.
I retired from YouTube that day.
But nevertheless, I came back about two years later,
and started a new channel with a new theme.
I thought I would start doing stop motion,
where I bought these two action figures.
One was R2D2 and one was Donald Trump.
And I decided to put them together into these comedy
situations that I filmed around my house.
And I made them move through stop motion,
and me just holding the dolls and shaking them.
And it was actually a pretty good show.
I think I got to about five episodes.
Although it seemed that that didn't really hit the mark,
because even to this day, 10 years later,
it has about 100 views per episode.
My third channel was doing
curb your enthusiasm impersonations.
I used to love the character Marty Funkhouser,
just loved the raspy sound of his voice.
Don't ever touch my Yarmulke!
Do you understand?
SO,I did a couple of Marty Funkhouser impersonations,
and yeah, I got probably a few hundred views
on those, but yeah, didn't last.
And while all of these channels were utter failures,
something they did have in common,
is they all had a strong theme about them.
And if I had kept going to this day,
10 years later,
those channels would probably have
like a million subscribers.
So deep down, I regret abandoning them.
But at the same time,
they weren't exactly what I wanted to do.
And the response wasn't really there.
So yeah, I kind of gave up.
The third thing I learned on the way to 100K,
is be honest.
People will find out if you're full of it.
If you're making stuff up, if you're biased,
it's always going to come out eventually,
especially as your following grows.
So in every video you make,
your reputation is always on the line.
And because of that, you have to be extremely honest.
You can't be saying, something's good if it's not,
and you can't be saying something's bad, if it's not.
You need to do your best to be 100% honest,
with everything you put out because people respect honesty.
And it's what grows your bond with your audience.
And some situations mightn't require honesty.
Like if you're talking about cameras or whatever.
But something I make a habit of doing
is vocalising things, that I think deep down are the truth.
Even though other people aren't talking about them,
if I feel like something's not quite right, I'll say it.
I won't keep it bottled up.
I always try my best to call things for what they are,
because your reputation is your calling card.
And it's very easy to lose your reputation
and your trustworthiness.
The fourth thing I learned is don't be perfect.
This is something that so many people
try to be deep down unconsciously and consciously.
It's like they have to say the perfect thing,
the perfect words, in the perfect order
and the perfect sentences in the perfect order, in order to.
See that last sentence, wasn't perfect,
I had to cut myself off.
In order to come across
like they know what they're talking about,
but in reality, it's imperfection that is more relatable.
If you're not perfect, you're like everyone else.
Congratulations, yay!
But if you're perfect and everything you'd have to say
is perfect, perfectly spoken.
You have every last statistic and number 100% accurate.
I mean, yeah, you're accurate, that's great,
but you're perfect and nobody's perfect,
and you are, so you're not really like anyone else.
I actually like making mistakes and saying wrong stuff.
I mean, sometimes it can be embarrassing,
but I'm only human, right.
And so are you.
So don't feel like you've got to be perfect,
because often it's the pursuit of being perfect,
that stops you from making content to begin with.
Well, I'm here to say, you're never gonna be perfect.
So forget about it and just make content.
And this also applies to your production value as well.
Your shots are never going to be 100% perfect
unless you're a channel like MKBHD,
love his videos, but his production level
is like next level.
But in reality, most of us only have a camera
and a room that we're filming in,
and we can't create perfect production value every time.
And that's okay.
Again, imperfection is authentic as long as it's usable.
And what you're saying makes a bit of sense,
then it's okay, go for it, publish it.
Number five is, it's not a competition.
This is something that is probably more in your head
than in reality.
Yes, there are heaps and heaps of people on YouTube,
but we're not really competitors.
I'm not competing against you,
and you aren't competing against the next person,
because the thing is, I'm the only Ben Claremont.
The next person, is the only next person.
And you, are the only you.
I can't compete with you being you,
and you can't compete with me being me.
And if the way I say and do things resonates with people,
it means I've just won the battle of Mr. Ben with Mr. Ben.
And that people are following me because I'm me.
So it's not like there's only one channel,
on the whole of YouTube that can be followed.
No, people follow and subscribe to hundreds of channels.
So even though there may be other competing channels
in your niche, don't worry about it.
It's okay.
It's not a competition.
All you need to do is focus on giving value
and making your channel as good as it possibly can be.
Don't be discouraged if you have a small channel,
and you feel like there's too much competition
in your niche.
It can totally be de-motivating when you see channels
with millions of subscribers,
and you feel like it's such a big journey,
and it's so impossible.
And yeah, it just demotivates you from even starting.
Also on your pursuit of growing your channel,
there's no need to bring anyone else down.
You don't need to say bad stuff about other channels
and you don't need to say how great you are.
People will get it naturally.
They're not dumb.
They can figure out if you know your stuff or not.
You don't need to knock down everyone else's castle,
for your castle to be the tallest.
Stole that from Gary V.
It's okay, we're all friends and we're all on the same team.
Number six is, don't take it personally.
When you start getting negative comments.
Now, if your channel starts gaining any momentum at all,
let's say you go beyond your first 100 subscribers.
You're going to start getting comments on your videos.
And, eventually as your momentum growth
and your subscribers come in,
you're going to get positive comments
and you're going to get negative comments.
And this is just a part of the game.
I know on my channel personally,
I get overwhelmingly good comment.
It's like 99 in a 100 comments is a positive comment.
And yeah, it makes me feel great.
But then, there's one comment
that says the most nasty, vile thing imaginable,
Mr. Ben, you're a big ugly loser,
and he don't know what you're talking about.
And then I go to my room and start crying.
How could they say that?
And then I stop and think,
hey, this person is potentially right.
Maybe they've got a point that's valid.
Maybe I said something wrong,
or maybe I'm coming at my video
from the wrong place, or whatever.
I'm definitely gonna do some self reflection on that.
But, I get enough satisfaction knowing
that these negative people online
normally will get what's coming to them.
If they're saying nasty things to random people,
on random websites on the internet, no doubt,
it's gonna come back to bite them somewhere, in some place.
I don't know when I don't know where. But it will.
And that one negative comment
is the price to pay for getting 99 positive comments.
Now look at the same time,
if you're getting 99 negative comments
or one positive comment,
that's a sign that you should probably re-evaluate
what you're doing or what you're saying.
Cause you're probably saying something offensive.
So always have self-awareness.
But at the same time, don't take it personally,
if people are going to be mean.
The next thing I learned over the past four and a half years
is that growth is exponential.
It takes forever to get to your first 100 subscribers.
Then it takes forever
to get to your first 1,000 subscribers.
Then it takes forever to get to your first 10,000.
And then, it doesn't take that long
to get to 100,000.
This trajectory happens for many reasons.
One of which I think the most important,
is you start getting better at doing
and explaining stuff in video format,
but also the YouTube algorithm stuff,
is picking you up as a serious channel,
once you've posted enough videos.
And then you've also got the momentum
of having posted enough videos, had enough comments,
likes, to feel motivated to keep posting week after week.
And that in turn ticks the needle up and up.
I would honestly say it took a similar amount of time.
It took to get from zero to 10,000
as it did from 10,000 to 100,000.
And that's because of all the things I talked about,
I think the most important one,
is I just got good at doing what I'm doing.
After making enough videos,
I know how to make them to a decent standard now.
I know how to cut to the interesting bits,
cut out the boring bits, as well as choosing topics
that people are actually interested in.
And that's gonna be also one of the most important things,
is your topic selection.
As you get better at selecting topics,
that will really help speed the growth trajectory up and up.
Number eight is, make content you love.
If you're going to be posting online for a long time,
for years and years,
it needs to be stuff that is sustainable for you.
The types of videos you're making,
they have to be interesting to you,
the subjects, whatever you're making and putting online,
it has to be satisfying.
And I think it's probably a common thing,
to get pigeonholed in one thing that you thought
originally was your topic,
but then you realise later on, it wasn't.
So maybe you're really good at one thing,
and you get known for that,
but then suddenly you wanna do 180,
to talk about something else.
Well, that's gonna be a bit hard to do later,
because the more you establish yourself in one topic,
the harder it is to pivot to another.
So it's something you really need to think about early on,
what is your number one topic going to be
for the next few years?
Or what is the general area of interest and do that.
And, it's also important as you progress
through your journey to reevaluate.
If you're enjoying making the content you're making,
is it still satisfying?
Or does your heart pull you in other directions?
Take me, for example,
I'm known right now as "the 360 dude,"
and yeah, I really enjoy 360 cameras.
They're awesome.
I think they're the coolest thing potentially ever invented.
At the same time though,
is it something I wanna be talking about forever?
Probably to some extent,
but I do really wanna talk about other topics
outside of 360 as well.
For me, something that I feel very passionate about
is business and helping people create businesses
from scratch.
Like how do you start a business with no money and no skills
and start and scale a business
so that it becomes your full-time thing?
And yes, that does include photography
and video and virtual tours in 360.
But as a teacher, I just get more satisfaction
in teaching that than say doing a comparison
between two cameras.
And look, I know I am pretty good by now at reviewing
and comparing cameras.
So I probably will keep doing that for a little bit longer,
but I don't know if it's gonna be super satisfying
for me to do it forever.
Just cause I'm good at it,
doesn't mean I wanna keep doing it.
So yeah, I guess time will tell on that,
but I guess you guys should also expect
a little bit of a pivot in the kind of content I make.
I wanna make more evergreen content.
Stuff that will really help you guys,
and give you practical skills,
so you can go out into the real world,
as opposed to this fake world I'm in right now.
And take your skills and go and make money,
and start a business with them.
How cool would that be?
Number nine, is monetise.
You need to think about your monetisation strategies,
as you get further and further into the game.
If you want to create content,
with the majority of your time,
if that's something you're actually interested in,
maybe you're not.
And that's okay.
But if you are planning on being a content creator,
with the majority of your time,
you will need to think about how you'd be bringing in money,
because without money, how are you gonna eat?
How are you gonna pay rent?
This is essential.
So you need to think about your monetisation strategies.
And if you're going to do this through video content,
or even through YouTube,
you're going to have to consider
a couple of different revenue streams.
Here are my top four revenue streams out of YouTube.
One is YouTube ads.
You upload a video,
you enable ads and that's it, you get paid a little bit,
not much, barely anything.
But once you have a following of over 10,000,
that's when it starts to turn into like
a couple of cups of coffee a day.
Two, is sell other people's stuff,
aka affiliate marketing.
So this is something that's completely free.
And there's hundreds of affiliate programs.
The most popular one is Amazon and it's free to join.
If you mention any kind of product in your videos
or you use products to achieve your videos,
you can create a customisable link,
that you put in the description of your video.
When people click it,
you get a very small, tiny little cut of each sale.
And there are heaps of other affiliate programs elsewhere.
So there's selling other people's stuff
through affiliate marketing,
then there's selling your own stuff.
And there's so many things you could potentially sell
of your own.
You could sell t-shirts.
You could sell autographed headshots.
You could sell downloads.
You could sell videos.
There are so many assets you could sell online.
And this is a really good one,
because it means you can more or less
keep 100% of the profits.
Whereas with affiliate marketing,
you're only getting like 2 or 3% a lot of the time.
The fourth monetisation path is through sponsorships.
So once you get big enough,
and companies can see that you've got an audience,
then they'll approach you to do some paid work, potentially.
But again, this is when you probably need
to get to 10K followers first,
before companies start approaching you.
Okay, now for number ten.
This is a really important one, that I've learned lately.
And, it's the reason for my absence on YouTube
for a lot of this year.
And that is you've got to enjoy life inside
and outside of YouTube.
I see so many people on YouTube
posting as many videos as they humanly can,
with extremely high production value,
that clearly put a lot of time and effort
into all of their videos.
And it makes me think like,
do they have any time to themselves at all?
Do they do anything they enjoy doing,
aside from making videos?
I mean, videos is definitely fun.
I enjoy making videos for YouTube,
but there are so many other things in life,
that are really satisfying.
And I've just found personally
for me over the past few months,
there are other things that have taken priority.
And especially during such a crazy time in history,
where our amount of variety is just so little,
you really need to expand your bubble
and do as many different things as you can.
So what are some things that make me happy?
Well, just walking around and taking 360 photos in fun
and cool and picturesque locations, yeah.
I really enjoy that.
Also enjoy playing a bit of Pokemon Go.
I like working out.
I like listening to audio books and learning new stuff.
And I would say probably the thing I liked the most
outside of making videos is growing my business.
I'm an entrepreneur at heart
and I can't help but work on my next project,
work on my business and scaling up my business.
Cause I find that to be really fun and really satisfying.
And for me, it's really important
to have all of those things progressing equally,
not just working on my content.
I wanna work on all of those things,
which is why I'm level 40 at Pokemon Go by the way.
So yeah, balance is key and happiness is the goal,
and it is easy to forget that.
And yeah, that's it.
That's my list of my top 10 things I learned
on the way to 100K.
I did actually make another video about YouTube.
I'll link it down below, or here, or there,
that also shares other strategies
for growing a YouTube channel,
particularly when it comes to the technical bits.
Okay, so what's next for Mr. Ben?
Well, I am gonna still aim to release one video a week
to YouTube.
So if I don't do that,
then you can definitely comment and let me know.
I've also been super busy
updating my Virtual Tour Pro Course.
If you're into 360 photography and virtual tours,
this is a course I've been working on over the past year.
It started at just eight hours long
and now it's like 15 hours,
and I've been treating it very much
like I treat my YouTube channel,
adding regular content almost every single week.
So that's something that I'm gonna keep doing
for the foreseeable future.
I'll put a link down there if you're interested in that.
And yeah, that's it.
Again, I wanna say a big, massive, giant thank you
to all of you, all of your support
over the past four and a bit years.
it's been a pleasure.
I've loved every second of it,
except probably a couple of seconds, I didn't enjoy,
but for most of it, I enjoyed every second.
So yeah, hope this video was helpful and I hope that you,
if you don't already, get the chance one day,
to do what you absolutely love doing as your main job.
And I can say with certainty that I get to do that,
and I have each and every one of you guys to thank for that.
So thank you and I'll see you the next one.