Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you today?
Me?
I'm doing spectacularly because this is an important day in our vlog, in our 21st episode
now on Growing Your YouTube Channel to 100,000 Subscribers.
We crossed a pretty important milestone yesterday.
We passed the 25,000 subscriber mark, which I am thrilled with, but when I stop to think
about it, our goal is to reach 100,000 subscribers in the year 2014.
We're five months in.
It's looking kind of bleak as far as reaching 100,000 subscribers but I'm not discouraged
in any way, shape or form because this journey was about discovering if a content creator
can make a living and what we have to do to make a living using YouTube as a base for
creating content.
As far as that goes, I think we're on the road to some pretty good success.
So I thought this would be an ideal time to kind of recap and take a look at what we've
learned, some of the changes in direction that we've made since we began.
Now it wasn't that long ago, 21 episodes ago, that I posted my first video and this vlog.
I'm looking and the posting date here was March 4 do it's only two and a half months
ago or so that I posted the first one.
If I look there, you probably can see but I had just under 12,000 subscribers at that
point so we've more than doubled the number of subscribers in the last two months that
we had which is a great ratio.
We had some really great ramping up, some really good traction.
We've had lots of success.
We've had a few things that had been not quite as successful and we changed direction at
least one major way in those two months.
I've really gained one different level of appreciation since that all began.
I think I understood when we began this journey that YouTube was a social network but I didn't
realize how much of a social network YouTube was.
When I started to engage and started this vlog, I had a fairly decent level of engagement
with the audience through Google Plus chat or the Comments area in YouTube but that has
increased dramatically over the last little while.
I've started to engage more in the Google Plus community even in a short frame of time
and started to recognize how that is becoming a real key in how we grow our channel and
how we engage with our audience because I guess as you decide how you're going to grow
your own channel, you have to decide whether you're going to grow with real relationships
or you're just going to grow by massively reaching out.
Now the people who have huge viral success, whether their videos take off overnight and
they suddenly have hundreds or thousands of subscribers, it's very difficult for them
to have an opportunity to engage one-on-one and actually have a lot of conversations with
their subscribers and their followers just because there are so many of them and their
bandwidth is limited.
When you grow strategically the way that our channel is growing, we have an opportunity
to actually forge relationships with the individuals that are following us and they become champions
as well.
So I can see the effect of having conversations and the people who have conversations with
when they share videos with others, when they comment, when they plus the posts, especially
in the Google Plus space as it reaches out across those into other people's networks
and we are suddenly exposed to other people.
I'm really recognizing how valuable that engagement is and the cool thing about engaging and growing
strategically on YouTube that I don't think that the viral growth people get advantage
of—I don't mean that they understand it; I mean that they don't build the advantage
of it—is the loyalty that is generated as a result of you growing with your audience
and there's no place that I recognize that more profoundly that in our Patreon campaign.
As we, a month ago, changed track or added a revenue channel saying that I was not going
to go for corporate sponsorship, which was always an option, as I looked at growing the
channel out and my first goal was to get a critical mass where I was relevant in YouTube,
where people would notice me and where I would walk in and talk to somebody and I wouldn't
have to say, "I've got 300 subscribers but they're really good."
I didn't know what the number was coming out of my mouth that would make me feel like the
channel was an entity that was worth considering but I knew it wasn't 1,000 and it wasn't 10,000.
I knew it had to be larger and I'm starting to feel that.
When I hear the word 25,000 coming out of my mouth, it has a little more weight.
It carries a little more weight.
This isn't to belittle any channel that are beneath or glorify any channels that have
more as far as the engagement.
This is my personal market that I'm growing and what it's going to require with the sort
of followers I have in order to make a living.
A very successful YouTube channel can be three of four hundred subscribers depending on what
your goals are depending on what your goals are, which we've talked about in the past.
So this is in no means meant to overly glorify what we've done nor to diminish any efforts
that are being made out there.
But having said that, I knew that I was reaching the point where I could go and I can start
to speak to sponsors about coming onboard the channel and I can start bringing in additional
revenue.
To be honest, I was not looking forward to that point because that's what I did for 15
years when I did network television.
I spent about 60% of my time dealing with my sponsors, being concerned, following their
businesses closely and being very sensitive to every little up and down in their business
cycle and worrying how it would affect me.
I spent a tremendous amount of time and energy just getting the money to keep the doors open
on the TV show.
While it was necessary, there wasn't a lot of joy in that.
I enjoyed the relationships but I didn't enjoy that work .
So I was kind of looking at that next phase in our growth with some trepidation.
I knew that AdSense revenue would at some point be relevant and be enough to help keep
the doors open and we are trending in a good direction.
We are now making well over thousand dollars each and every month based on 25,000 subscribers
with AdSense revenue which is good.
When we hit 100,000 subscribers, it will be a nice chuck of change flowing in so that's
going to be great but it's not enough to kind of keep the doors open and it certainly is
not enough to retire on at this point.
So we were going to find some additional sources of revenue and corporate sponsorship is the
most likely candidate.
Then a friend of mine, John Biller [phonetic 00:06:34], who is actually quite solid in
the maker community, told me about Patreon.
I looked at Patreon for a good month and a half.
I followed it and I looked at the success that different individuals had had and decided
that I was going to try for Camelot.
I was going to say I'm not going to go for any corporate sponsorship.
I'm going to trust my community, which I feel this engagement with and I am going to see
if they will indeed support us.
I'm thrilled.
When we launched the campaign, we had about 80 people or 85 people sign up in the first
couple of days.
We are now three or four weeks into the campaign and we're up to $400 dollars a month, a little
bit north of $400 a month, which again I'm not going to be able to retire on it but it's
growing steadily.
Each and every week, we get more people coming on and we don't push it too hard although
it might sound like I'm pushing it hard now because I'm talking about it so much.
But the reason that I'm talking about it here is so that you can understand that your community
can become the resource for you if you communicate to them an appropriate message.
Patreon might not be for every YouTube channel.
It certainly isn't for every YouTube channel but my community, I believe, recognized that
I could spend 40%, 50%, 60% of my time out raising money for the channel that I can now
spend creating content for the channel, which means that I create more content which gives
them more information that trust me to provide.
So that's the relationship that I believe now is being built through Patreon and I couldn't
be happier.
Patreon is the biggest surprise for me in the last two and a half months since we started
this vlog.
I didn't expect that crowd funding would be a source of revenue that I would really embrace
personally.
I've never been good at asking for money.
That's one of the reasons why I don't do a great job on selling courses and stuff.
So putting together a pitch, putting together this page that you see here asking for support
on Patreon, that was a lot of work for me.
That was a big challenge but, as I said, I couldn't be happier with how it's coming together
and it's something that we'll return to and visit as we try different things and as I
start to learn from my audience where I'm making wins, where I'm doing a good job and
where I'm making mistakes.
The nice thing about it is that it's a fairly small community.
You know they're all supporting you so yours better be big ears when they're talking to
you so I have my email flagged so as soon as the message comes in from the Patreon page
it pops to the very top of my list of priorities and I respond to it immediately as well.
Some of the other changes that have happened since we began is I used to do a radio program,
a weekly radio program here in the lower mainland area and then it was podcast.
Many of you could be subscribers to that as well.
It was just a general interest technology show and I kept it going to be in mainstream
media but we stopped doing it two weeks ago.
It came to the end of its last contract.
The sponsors weren't sure that they were quite getting the same value in the radio space
as they get from some of their online ventures and that sort of stuff and so it just seemed
the natural time to put it out of its misery—it wasn't miserable; I shouldn't say put it out
of its misery—to send it out to pasture.
But I wasn't willing to let go of having a weekly live show that I could talk to fascinating
and interesting people about a wide variety of topics.
So as I saw it winding down, I was really thinking about what I can do with the next
generation of my radio show.
For me, this is a huge thing because for over 20 years I've had a mainstream media product
that I've worked on: a TV series , we were on television for 17 years total; a newspaper
columnist, I wrote in newspaper columns for I think 10 or 12 years; and I've had radio
shows all through that period as well.
So I've never been without a mainstream traditional media avenue, a way to communicate, a way
to share through mainstream media.
And now I don't.
For the first time, I'm completely an online guy so that's a big change for me.
What I decided to do with our show is I decided to really test out the Google Hangouts space
and to move it into Google Hangouts and to take advantage of Google hangouts on air and
see if I could create a fully interactive show, allowing my audience to really participate
and to reach out to a lot of different guests and to create some nice energy that's just
beyond what we're doing with our radio podcast just with interviews and that sort of stuff,
which is all fine and dandy.
It's great but I wanted to do a little bit more.
I wanted to push the boundaries a little bit.
So I'd recently licensed a product called Webinar Jam, which is a piece of software
which kind of puts a shell over the top of Google Hangouts and it's designed for webinars.
It's really designed for the internet marketing side of webinars where you're trying to sell
something out of the backend because they've got all these great little calls to action
and things that you can out in and you can insert in the chat area of the webinar and
make offers to people with live links right within the webinar itself, which I think is
a great concept.
I thought I could take those communication tools and migrate them into the world of an
online radio show or webcast and take advantage of those tools.
So we're in the midst of testing that out.
We just ran our first test last night.
It was fairly successful.
The biggest issue that I really have with the whole Google Hangout thing is that video
quality just doesn't quite cut it, does it?
Plus the fact they've got those stupid little hats and things that sometimes guests play
with but I digress.
The video quality, I've got to work on trying to figure out how to make that a little bit
better.
It's great for an audio podcast.
It's great for recording an audio podcast.
The audio quality is not great but I've been reading and I think I can improve the quality
by going into something called Studio Mode which I'll learn something more about over
in the next little while.
I can also do that.
I can also increase the audio quality by having everybody locally record then combining those
files at the end and marrying them all together.
So there are ways around improving the audio quality.
I'm not sure we're going to be able to improve the video quality enough to make it get where
I want it to be.
That doesn't mean that it won't be a viable product.
But that now fills out my different playlist mix that's on the channel.
I don't think I'll be adding anything new after this.
So we're going to be bringing that show into a playlist into the DottoTech channel, which
again should help drive my YouTube subscriber base because I'm going to be pointing everybody
that used to be pointed towards podcasts, I'm going to as much as possible trying to
get them to view them as webcasts on YouTube.
It's a little bit rambling today as far as the content goes but I did want to talk to
you about the biggest things that I'd learned over the last couple of months since we started
posting this vlog and since we hit a milestone, it seemed like a good time to have that conversation.
So the biggest things that I learned are looking for new revenue opportunities, Patreon coming
up.
Don't ignore the fact that crowd funding might be the answer.
Second thing is really pay attention to what's happening with your social network side of
YouTube, how much conversation, how much dialogue, how much engagement you can create with your
audience.
If you are a channel of similar size to mine, in the tens of thousands, you can certainly
have a great relationship with a large percentage of your subscribers, empowering them, making
them feel validated, learning from them and using them as champions to go out grow your
network.
The people that they bring and they themselves become staunch supporters.
They aren't just watching for a little while and going away.
You're going to see the results in immediate traffic, immediate traction for all of your
videos, getting viewed and getting grabbed and getting taken up and having comments on
them right away as soon as you post them, which is incredibly gratifying as a content
creator.
With that, I'm going to wrap things up for today.
As I mentioned, we have a Patreon campaign.
If you're interested in supporting us and seeing that we continue, the best way you
can do that is by becoming a patron of DottoTech.
So check out our Patreon page and see exactly how we position it.
Even if you're not interested in supporting us, take a look at how we've positioned it
and you might learn something from that for your own channel so I encourage you to take
a look at that as well.
Of course, I would love you to subscribe to this channel and also you can sign up for
our newsletter which includes a digest of all of the videos we produced but also notifications
of any webinars and special events that we have coming up.
We are producing at least one webinar on different productivity or technology-related topics
per month which are doing quite well.
We're really having a lot of fun with our webinars as well.
So with that, thank you very much for spending time with me today.
I appreciate you spending some of that valuable time with me.
I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!