In january of 2020, I embarked on a mission to take my small youtube channel
and make it into something much bigger than it already was
Within six months i went from driving about 800 new subscribers
and 50 000 views every single week all the way up to 5 000 subscribers and over a quarter million
views in that same week it looked like the sky was the limit and then disaster
Let me start from the beginning my name is Daniel Batal and i'm a youtube content creator
since 2018 i had a dream to build a channel that talked about how to make videos put them onto
youtube and grow an audience around that content i had a full-time job and i was making videos after
work in my spare time and in my fuzzy head it made all the sense in the world to build something
that would connect with people who might be trying to do the exact same thing like any small creator
with every week that passed i was slowly getting better at making videos i've been testing out
different types of content on my channel and that was something that youtube actually encouraged
new creators to do i even had some really great youtubers come onto my channel and talk about
the kinds of things that people like me needed to know in order to become successful youtube
content creators now in order to make these videos i was using a very simple video editing software
it was called filmora i started noticing that every time i talked about filmora and showed
other creators how to use it to make their own content those videos started doing really well
on my channel so doing what i had heard creators should do when they have a successful video
i made another and another and another and another i can't sleep
i can't sleep i can't sleep
i can't sleep i was doing things with filmora that filmora didn't know the
software could do each one of these videos started doing better than the previous one
and people started getting really excited to talk to me about how to edit their videos i started
watching my daily subscriber and view count double and then it tripled and then it quadrupled
and then it i don't know the word for five or six times but it did that too i even had other video
editing software companies reach out to me and start paying me to make videos showing creators
how to use their software the same way i had done with filmora this was right about the time
where the pandemic hit so people started finding themselves stuck at home across the entire planet
movies and television series really weren't being made because their productions were getting shut
down so a lot of people started turning to youtube to find something to watch having that captive
audience right there was not only helpful to me but it was helpful to pretty much any youtuber
who was making content at that time that was when i finally looked at my girlfriend and said i'm
quitting my job and i went all in as a full-time content creator that was it this was the big time
this was the dream that every kid wishes for across america to be a full-time professional
youtuber the best part is i was actually teaching other youtubers how to do the exact same thing
or so i thought i did notice that i was spending a lot of time talking about the video editing
and the other part was kind of getting neglected the part about actually putting those videos onto
youtube and learning how to grow an audience around it how to become a successful youtuber
so i made a decision and i published a video letting the community know that i was going to
slightly shift that focus back towards the stuff that they really wanted to know not just how to
do some simple trick in a video editing software by the way the video where i announced that was
a massive success just look at the data thousands of views an hour a click-through rate that would
make most youtubers head spin and all kinds of questions and comments coming in from people
asking me what i was going to talk about next i had my sights set on a very bright youtube future
what i didn't realize is all along i had been building a ticking time bomb right underneath my
own feet let me explain there's a piece of advice that content creators on youtube will hear very
often and it's called niching down niching down refers to making sure that you're making content
for a very specific group of people consistently week after week those people are called your
target audience i thought i was niche down i thought i was making content for people
who wanted to learn how to make videos put them onto youtube and grow a youtube channel turns out
i wasn't i had become so entrenched in making videos about one very specific video editing
software that people actually started calling me dr filmora now some of you might be thinking well
what's wrong with that you were making really successful videos that they were paying you
to make keep making those videos you giant whiny insufferable ungrateful listen i was very grateful
and i loved every single person who would come to my channel week after week for that reason but
here's the problem they didn't care about youtube they cared about filmora and it never occurred to
me that lots of people were using filmora and had no intention of ever building a youtube channel
for a lot of people who were clicking on new videos expecting me to talk about filmora and
i was talking about how to grow a youtube channel that was like walking into a doctor's office and
instead of him deciding to talk to you about your health today he's gonna talk to you about
tennis nothing against tennis and worse the type of viewer that i really did want to reach
wasn't the type of viewer that i had spent years helping youtube learn was the target audience
for my content they were connecting my content with filmore users not youtubers now i know some
of you might be thinking well duh daniel just start making some more of those filmora videos
and mix them in with the youtube videos and put them onto your channel so you'll have the best of
both worlds and to be perfectly fair for a while there i did exactly that i started mixing the two
but all that ended up doing was fragmenting my audience worse i was effectively making videos
for two completely different people with every upload i was a red-hot creator mess i started
publishing even more inconsistently worried that every new video was just going to make things
worse and eventually everything just kind of dried up for me i had to figure out how to start making
content that targeted my true audience people who wanted to make videos upload them onto youtube
and then grow their own youtube channel and to be perfectly honest getting that dopamine hit from
thousands of views when i would publish a filmora video was really hard to let go of but i had to
get my head back in the game even as every new video i published started losing subscribers the
minute it went live that was brutal there was no avoiding it i still get comments from people
asking me to please make more filmora tutorials but the amazing thing is as i slowly started
putting out that new content focused on the actual audience i was trying to reach
that content started to slowly connect and really start gaining some momentum now it's certainly not
back to where it was but all of the data trends looked extremely positive what i learned from this
is that we as youtubers really need to be very clear about who we're making content for and why
those people come back to watch our videos week after week once a channel really starts taking off
it's like a cruise ship and it's a lot harder to turn a cruise ship than it is a robo if i'd only
done this back when my channel was much smaller it would have been so much easier to pivot there
are some other hard lessons i've learned along this journey and i've shared some of them in the
video that's on screen now i'm hoping that one will be useful to you too keep creating. Peace.