20-year-old YouTuber Nate O'Brien shares how he grew to 39,000 subscribers while in college. Spend under $1,000 on gear (camera around $600-700, microphone $100) to move past phone videos. Keep thumbnails to three or four words with your face, and aim for 50-60% average watch-time by structuring videos as numbered lists so viewers stay through the end.
Okay, everyone. Today we have Nate O'Brien, and Nate came over from Penn State, graced us with his presence. And so Nate is only 20 years old, still going to college right now. He's got a YouTube channel with 39,000 YouTube subscribers. How big is your Instagram?
It's only a couple thousand.
Still bigger than mine.
I gotta work on that.
You know, it's all good. Look, 20 years old had infinitely more than I did at 20 years old. I had nothing at 20 years old. But anyway, my point is this: Nate is here. And, you know, in this video I wanna talk about how you can grow your YouTube subscribers, or actually grow your YouTube channel using certain tactics that Nate employed. So Nate, what do you think led to your success with YouTube so far, up to 39,000 subscribers?
Alright, so the first thing I wanna say is we're almost in 2019 right now, so I think something that people kind of overlook is you need to have somewhat decent quality content. You know, I think if you just make that little investment of Less than $1,000, you can get a camera. My first camera was like $600 or $700. Get, you know, a $100 microphone setup, and automatically you're gonna be able to rank your videos much better off just from that jump from filming with your phone to actually making that little investment into getting a camera. Most YouTubers today are much more professional. If you wanna compete with them, I think it's pretty important to, you know, make that little investment to get that camera.
Great, okay. So camera's number one, 'cause the quality's a lot higher, right?
Yeah, definitely.
So what do you think is number 2?
I think you wanna have a decent thumbnail, and that sounds kind of obvious, but I really think people start to overthink their thumbnails these days, and they start to cram in like 2 sentences into the thumbnail and then flashing colors. And what I try to do is I try to keep it pretty simple, maybe 3 or 4 words in it so that it catches people's attention. And then something else that I like to do is I like to put myself in the thumbnail every time so that people know when they see it on the sidebar or in the suggestion, they know that it's my video. And some people do it differently, they'll put maybe their logo in the thumbnail in like the corner for that, but I think that's pretty important to kind of get that recurring viewer.
Cool. So let's go with 3 tips for this video. So we got number 1 is the quality of the picture, so you can take care of that using the higher quality camera. And then the second one is the thumbnail, right?
Yeah.
Now what is the third tip?
Okay, so by far I think the third one is gonna be watch time, and more specifically watch time percentage. So, you know, back in the day YouTube really kinda ranked videos based off of views, but today they really care a lot about watch time percentage. So for my videos, I try to get, you know, at least 50%. Usually the ones that do better are gonna get 55% or even closer to 60% average views on that video. There's a few strategies that you can implement in order to get longer watch time. Sometimes YouTubers will kind of drag out the video for the first like 4 minutes, they won't even give you the answer, and at the end they give you the answer. I don't really like that necessarily because it kind of pisses people off sometimes if you're kind of beating around the bush a little too much. So something that I like to do is I'll actually kind of make the video so you give them like a list or like a preview of what you're going to talk about. And so you say, you know what, in this video we're going to cover 3 different things or 5 different topics.
Mm-hmm.
Or 7 strategies. So you kind of give them a list, and what'll happen with this is people just psychologically need to know, like, what's number 1, what's number 2. So they're not gonna click away at number 4 if there's 3 more left and you're counting down from that. So I found that some of my best videos, I think that they do well because people want to know what all of those points are, and they're not gonna click off after just a couple.
Got it. Okay, that's great. So Nate, how do people find your channel?
Well, you can just look me up. My name is Nate O'Brien. It's, uh, Nato Bryan.
Oh, there you go. Nato Bryan. Go to Nato Bryan, check him out, and don't forget to subscribe, comment, let us know what you're gonna do to grow your YouTube channel, and we'll see you in the next one.
