- Getting your first subscriber on YouTube
is one of the easiest things you can do,
(mouse click)
but it's also one of the hardest to get right.
If you are brand new to YouTube,
welcome to one of the most incredible, creative
and accessible opportunities on the face of this planet.
You can start creating right now
and potentially reach an audience of 2 billion people
for free, instantly.
If you're watching this video, it is clear
you have a passion and a message,
and it's time to start sharing that with the world,
just like we did, and now we have a million subscribers.
On the other hand,
it's very likely that most of you
probably already have at least one subscriber.
So let me ask you this.
How did you get your first subscriber on YouTube?
Let us know in the comments below.
Now, my guess is that your answer
probably falls into one of three buckets.
You either subscribe to that channel from another account.
You asked somebody in the real world
to subscribe to your channel,
or you earned that subscriber in the YouTube world.
Now I could be proved wrong and I want to be,
but the cynical side of me suggests that most of us
manufactured our first subscribers.
If you stick around to the end,
you'll find out the answer to that.
Oh and as a quick side note,
if anyone noticed how these balloons
make that look like a Golden Play Button,
it's not, not yet anyway.
(bell chime)
Now don't worry folks.
If you did beg, borrow or steal your first subscriber,
I am not here to dub you into YouTube.
I'm not here to cast judgment
on the way you cheated to get your first subscriber.
I'm just here to tell you that that subscriber
is nothing more than a number.
It won't help you with the algorithm.
It won't help you build a community.
It won't help you grow as a creator,
unless of course, your friends and family not only love you,
but they also love your content
and watch every single video that you publish,
and that's the a difference.
99.9% of your viewers
will care about the value of your content first,
before they care about you.
And when you earn that subscriber
naturally and organically through your videos,
it will feel all the more sweeter
and that subscriber is more likely to become
a return viewer.
But let's not complicate things with return viewers,
that's a topic for later on in this series.
Now some may argue and reasonably so
that getting subscribers early on
is simply a means to an end,
for example, 1000 subscribers for monetization.
All right, fair enough,
but are those subscribers gonna help you
when you get there?
For example, YouTube have just massively reduced
the subscriber requirements
to go live on the YouTube mobile app
from 1000 subscribers to 50 subscribers
and it's not unrealistic to think
that you could get to 50 subscribers
without making any content.
You just ask as many people as you can in the real world
to subscribe to your channel.
Boom, you can start live streaming on mobile,
but when it comes to that live stream,
are any of those 50 subscribers gonna watch it?
No, you're just gonna be talking to an enter room,
which is ironically what doing right now.
Let's be honest about this.
A subscriber by itself
tells you literally nothing about your channel.
It doesn't tell you how long
people are watching your videos for?
It doesn't tell you whether people are satisfied
by our videos,
and it doesn't tell you whether people were engaged enough
to post a comment on your videos.
A subscriber literally tells you this,
(mouse click)
and that's it.
Now, yes, I will agree
that I am being a little flippant here.
The more subscribers you earn through hard work
and good content,
the more valuable the data you get from them will be,
but you need a good sample size of good subscribers
to get good data.
But on the other hand,
if they all just press that red button
and don't do anything else, they ain't much use to you.
Here's what I'm trying to say.
Your first subscriber represents your first opportunity
to demonstrate your dedication to your YouTube journey.
There's an easy way to do this that's very quick to do,
but it's not gonna help you out in the long run,
not in the slightest.
And then there's the hard way, but the right way,
to start making content and continue to make content
until it's good enough to persuade somebody,
a complete stranger to commit to your channel,
and that is the birth of your YouTube community.
That is the start of your YouTube journey.
And what a shocker, I was right.
Most of us didn't earn our first subscriber through content.
We took the easy way out
and with a hindsight of experience,
we all admit it was a wrong way to start.
This is it, the creative opportunity of a lifetime.
Decide on what audience you want to reach on YouTube
and start talking to them
and I guarantee you the subscribers
will take care of themselves,
but of course, this is just the beginning.
Your first subscriber.
If you wanna learn how to get at least one subscriber
every single day,
then you might wanna check out this video over here.