- This is Grant Thompson from
The King of Random. - The King of Random.
Hey, we said that together.
- What's up guys?
- We've got some pro tips for you guys
as creators coming up.
(upbeat digital music)
Grant has done a lot on YouTube.
Nine million subs you just passed.
- That's right.
Yes, woo!
- And 15 some million views a month.
Just got a team.
You've figured out a lot of things on YouTube.
What's your best pro tips and advice
for YouTube creators who wanna be where you are.
- Yeah, I get a lot of people asking how do I do YouTube.
And I feel like I've been blessed
with a unique perspective because we are at the top
of YouTube now, where we've talked to YouTube,
we consult with partner managers,
we get invited out to headquarters,
they fly up and meet with us.
And not to mention all the experiments
we've done with the platform itself.
Little tweaks here, tests there.
And we've been doing this a long time,
we've made a lot of videos.
Some of the most important things that you can do is
first of all, really define clearly what your purpose is.
Like why do you wanna do YouTube?
What is it about you or your passion or your message
that's gonna make you wanna share this
for the next five to ten years?
You gotta have something that's gonna drive you.
Because if you just wanna do YouTube
'cause you think it's easy,
and you're gonna make lots of money
doing something that's very easy,
you're actually gonna get weeded out.
There's a weeding out process.
The comments are gonna destroy you.
Nobody's gonna watch your videos.
You're gonna get discouraged and
you're just gonna stop making videos.
So what is your purpose?
What is your passion that you wanna share?
What do you have for the world
that nobody else can do as well as you?
Number two, you wanna concentrate all of your efforts.
So once you define where it is you wanna go,
and what you wanna be doing, throw everything into it.
I almost imagine drilling a hole through a concrete wall.
You need to have the right tools.
You have the right drill bit,
you need to pick the right spot, right?
And then you need to just be consistent and persist,
and you wanna put everything you've got into that one spot.
And it make take three hours to drill through this wall,
but eventually it's gonna happen.
So be persistent, be consistent,
have a definite purpose.
And then once you've got that,
you really have to get exposure.
YouTube's not gonna promote you.
When you start putting up videos,
you're competing against so much content
that's being uploaded constantly,
there's nothing gonna be making you stand out.
There are two things that you can do
that are gonna help a lot.
One, just keep making your videos,
'cause you wanna build up a backlog
of content on your channel.
So when people do find you, they're gonna see
that you're serious, you're legitimate,
and you've got a lot, like you've got a good work ethic,
and if they subscribe to you,
they can expect more good things to come.
Secondly, you can promote yourself off the platform.
One thing that I did was write articles for other websites,
and I would embed the links to my videos.
And quite often the articles would be featured
on the front page of those websites,
or get blasted out to their email list.
So they'd be promoting me to 50,000
of their email list subscribers because
I'm writing content for them.
But it's secretly directing traffic
back to my YouTube videos,
and I was getting subscribers through that.
One huge thing that helped me jump
from 50,000 to 100,000 subscribers in two weeks.
- Wow.
- Was running a contest.
I just asked my subscribers to share
any one of my videos, anywhere they wanted,
send me a screenshot of how many likes it got,
and whoever had the most likes
I would give them some things that I'd made.
And my subscribers jumped all over that.
One thing got shared to Reddit,
it went viral, it got picked up by NPR,
they wrote an article about it,
then Good Morning America was interviewing me live
and it just blew up, and ever since then,
my channel's gained a lot of traction.
So with this in mind, you've got to do
a lot of self promotion,
but when people discover you,
you have to have a lot of great quality content
so when they dig in, they check you out, they're like,
"Wow, you're legit.
"Where did you come from?
"You're an overnight success."
But in the meantime, you've spent an entire year
like building this content up.
You don't want to build your YouTube channel
relying on Adsense.
Adsense is great, you can make a lot of money doing it,
but you have to have millions of views on your channel
to make it sustainable, and it can be turned off anytime.
So it's not very reliable.
So I'd say the biggest thing you wanna
think about in your strategy is
as you're attracting an audience,
as you're making YouTube videos,
how are you actually making money?
Do you have a product you're gonna sell?
Do you have a service that you're offering?
These people are following you for a reason.
You have something that they need
or something that they want.
So what kind of way can you package that
and give it to people in a way
that you can benefit and it will support what you're doing
so you can do more of it without adsense?
Adsense would just be like the cherry on top.
- Absolutely.
You guys who've been around the channel for a long time know
that's exactly what we talk about here.
Because you can get a few dollars
per thousand views on YouTube.
But whenever I pitch my ebook,
30 Days to a Better YouTube Channel,
like I'll do it right now just to show you guys what I do,
every day's gonna give you something you need to know,
a task you need to do, and links to further resources
to really build a highly subscribable channel in 30 days.
So the link to it down below.
Whenever I do that pitch,
typically one percent of you guys will convert into a sale,
and so that's $300 per thousand people.
Because 10 of you will convert,
so that's $300 per thousand, instead of like a few dollars.
So that works great.
- Let's put this in perspective here, guys.
So if you wanted to use Adsense to make money,
you would need to get
roughly a thousand views on your video to make one dollar.
If you sell something and you make $30 dollars on it,
that's equivalent to about 30,000 views on your video.
So you don't have to have
massive subscribers or massive views
to make that same kind of money.
You just find a couple people, sell one product of your own,
and you're right there making the same amount of money.
And I have one thing I'd like to mention as well.
The last thing I feel like would be really important
is doing collaborations with other YouTubers.
Mainly, not so much to get subscribers, not to get views,
but what it does is creates validations.
When you work with another creator,
you're basically validating each other.
And it will help raise you up in the ranks.
You can have great content and be awesome,
but if nobody really knows
who you are or where you came from,
there's no stamp of approval to say I accept you.
But once you see them in another video
with somebody else that you like,
it validates you as a person.
So collaborate as much as you can.
There's no harm in doing it.
And give credit where credit's due.
- Go check out the King of Random,
YouTube.com/TheKingOfRandom, link below.
Interactive card around here too.
And we'll hear what your pro tips are
down in the comments below.
Subscribe, we got new videos,
just to help you guys grow your YouTube audience,
not just for the sake of views and subscribers,
but ultimately for the sake of being able to reach people,
and change their lives with the message
that you're spreading.
So thank you for letting us be a small part of that.
Subscribe, and we'll see you guys again on
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and all the other times
we post videos here.
See you then.
Bye.
- Probably after about two years of grinding away
seven days a week, 18 hours a day,
you know, I was getting bags under my eyes,
my eyes were bloodshot.
But I just had to keep going, keep going,
to keep the momentum up.
- What kinda kept you going through this?
- Success.
Success is what kept me going.