"DON'T Spend MONEY On EQUIPMENT, Get STARTED With WHAT You HAVE!" - #MakingIt

I think it's— this is where most people fail right away.

With a YouTube channel, you can go super niche and be all about jelly beans, or you could be day-in-the-life vlog.

If you want to succeed here, you've got to show up for work every single day.

What's up, Believe Nation?

It's Evan.

My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I want to see that amazing thing that you've got inside here get poured out into the universe to have a positive impact for yourself, for the friends, for your community, and the people around you. And I hope that these videos are helping play a small part along your journey. So I started the Making It series to try to learn from people in a specific industry, to try to learn from them, to apply some of their lessons to help us get to where we wanna go. And so today we're gonna learn how to make it as a YouTuber. Tip number 1 is start with what you have with PewDiePie.

I wanted to start on the equipment because I think it's— this is where most people fail right away. I see so many people get really angry about this one because they bought all this expensive equipment and they, they come to me like, "Where are the subscribers? Where are all the views? I've got— I spent all this money on all this equipment." I always say, don't spend money on equipment. It doesn't have to be expensive at all. And I think a lot of people wait with starting videos because they don't have all the equipment. I think it takes practice to make videos, and I think it doesn't hurt to get started with what you have. I didn't have a webcam when I started. I had a fucking— I legit used this microphone, which I actually accidentally broke. That's my first microphone on the Razer headphones, and it was fine. It really was. It definitely doesn't hurt to have nice quality, don't get me wrong, but it's not automatically going to make you get subscribers.

Tip number 2 is commit fully with Gary Vaynerchuk.

With a YouTube channel, you can go super niche and be all about jelly beans, or you could be day-in-the-life vlog. I think at the end of the day, both work. I think you just need to know yourself. If you have something that you're super hardcore expertise in, that you have super hardcore expertise in, or super hardcore passion, well then that's something that you'd want to talk about for the next 5, 10 years, then I'm comfortable with niche. But I think people are always trying to find which one's better, and the truth is, Ari, is that it's better based on the person. There's no general answer. It's more predicated on you, right? What feels right to you? How long have you been doing it? Good, you know what I'm gonna say. 4 months is just not enough time to decide if this is right or not right. Keep trying different things, and really, if you wanna win as a vlogger, You know, it's funny, every 15-year-old and now every 30-year-old in the world wants to be an influencer or, you know, or a YouTube celebrity, right? And the reality is, is if that's true, the reason everybody wants to do that is 'cause it's a fucking awesome life, right? And so if that's true, if that's what one wants, I don't understand how people are not committed to doing it every day for 18 to 24 months before they even begin to doubt, should I jump off this? Like the thought of like jumping off early on something that is so amazing, right? I think it's It's more about you interacting with them when you have a small following, so you should message and direct message every single person. Every single person watching my vlog right now, if they have 300 or less people following them on Instagram, tonight they should DM every single person and say, "Thank you for following me. What are you following me for, and is there anything I can do for you?" That's the quickest way to go from 300 to 800. Putting out content is the cost of entry for major upside in the game, in my opinion. And then you just gotta hope it's interesting, entertaining, makes people escape, and educates them, motivates them. You know, I think the reason I work is I think I educate people, I think I definitely motivate people, and I think I entertain people, and I think that's, you know, when you think about the 3 pillars, if you've actually got, I'm sure I probably over-index in motivation and maybe a little less in entertainment and really, really great in education, and so, you know, but there's a lot of people that don't do any of those 3 things, and that's why nobody fucks with them. Watches them.

Tip number 3 is post more frequently with myself and Casey Neistat.

I saw a huge jump in my subscribers, in my views, in my revenue when I went from making 1 video a week to a video a day. A massive jump. YouTube seems to really, really, really care about upload frequency, especially right now. I saw another massive jump going from 1 video a day to 2 videos a day, and I'm at 3 videos a day most days. and there was a little bit of a jump. Between 2 and 3 is a little bit of a jump, so I would say if you're 1 video a day or 2 videos a day, you're getting the maximum leverage out of it, and then it starts to fall off. Now that may not be possible for you right now. You may be looking at that and say, this is crazy, like making a video a month is hard enough for me. That's okay to be where you are right now. I would look at how do I start to increase my frequency with the goal of getting to 1 video a day, at least. 1 video a day should be the new bare minimum. If you want to have success in 2017 as a YouTube creator. If you look at my channel, if you look at Gary Vee's channel, if you look at Grant Cardone's channel, if you look at a lot of different YouTube creators, they saw their growth just explode when they went to making daily content. It's just something that YouTube cares about right now. It may not be the same case in a year or 2 years from now, but right now, if you are making daily content, even if it's worse content than your competitors, you will win because it's what YouTube favors at the moment.

Before I started vlogging, I had a YouTube channel for 5 years. And in those 5 years, I had a whole bunch of huge viral hits. Movies that got like 15, 16 million views. But my subscriber growth was anemic. The channel growth was anemic. Flat like that. 5 years, 500,000 subscribers. Then I started uploading daily, and in 5 months, I had 500,000 more subscribers. That's 1 million subscribers. 5 years for the first 500,000, 5 months for the second 500,000. So I kept uploading, and 2 months later, I had another half a million subscribers. Now here I am, 1 year after doing daily uploads, and I've got 2.5 million subscribers. YouTube isn't Hollywood. I'm not Stanley Kubrick. You can't succeed here if you're uploading once a month. If you wanna succeed here, you've gotta show up for work every single day.

Tip number 4 is promote appropriately with Roberto Blake.

The way that you grow a YouTube channel from zero is gonna come down to getting people to watch your videos and be interested, and this is what I mean promoting. Don't go into other people's YouTube comments and promote and tell them to sub to your channel. That's rude, it's disrespectful, and people are just gonna delete your comment and block you. At least I know I am. And if you're lucky, I will ban you forever. So, that matters. What you can do and what you should do is individually, one by one, find people who would care about the thing that you're talking about build a relationship with them, and then ask them to check out your video and to tell them, uh, tell you how they feel about it. That could be a great way to do it. You could also build a Facebook group or community, and you can share your videos there. You can go to existing Facebook communities, ask the admin if it's okay to share a video on occasion. Do not be spammy about it. Do not be tempted to try to get as many views and subscribers as you can as early on. Understand you have to earn it, and you have to build it, and Just remember, Marques Brownlee, MKBHD, biggest tech YouTuber of all time, like almost 4 million subscribers. He did 100 videos to get 78 subscribers. So don't be soft and whine about you did 15 videos, 20 videos, 30 videos. You worked hard. 100 videos to get 78 subscribers. That's work. That's what it takes. Bottom line. So again, promote appropriately. Use other social media platforms. You're going to have to build those relationships one by one. It's the virtual equivalent of knocking door to door. I mean, That's just how it works. That's something that you have to really take seriously and you have to be committed to. Obviously, you can also encourage the people who are watching your content and commenting, encourage them to share it with other people that they think would enjoy it.

Tip number 5 is be prepared to work hard with Lilly Singh.

When YouTubers aren't working, they work some more. A lot of people fail to realize that when YouTubers make YouTube their career, YouTube is their life. And the reason is because YouTubers are self-made. There is no president or CEO giving us directions on what to do. We are that CEO. So when we're not uploading videos, we're on conference calls, we're taking meetings, doing whatever we can to grow and be better. And for a lot of YouTubers, this results in our friends and families getting really frustrated because we're so busy. But we have to put our all into our career, or else it will go nowhere.

Tip number 6 is do some research, with Derral Eves.

Don't just slap up videos to your channel. Take some needed time and do some research. Ask these questions: What is your channel really about? Who is your target audience? Where is your target audience actually congregating outside of YouTube? Why would your target audience be interested in your video content and also your channel? And how can you get the viewer or potential viewer to subscribe and share the video? Find out what blogs, forums, Facebook groups, Google+ communities, websites, people that are really interested in your content. Now recon is really, really important. Over 75% of my video views come from outside of YouTube. Now think about that for a moment. It's really important to do recon.

And tip number 7 is evaluate and repeat with Tim Schmoyer.

And then number 7, and this is so important, guys, is to evaluate the progress you've made, The things that you're learning from your audience and the content and the process, everything. Just learn, evaluate, and then fix things. Like, what's working poorly that I need to fix? What's working great that I need to learn from and keep doing? And then go back and rinse and repeat that, and implementing those updates and those changes that you're making to your content all the time. Especially if this is your first channel you've ever done, there's a lot of lessons to learn, a lot of experiments to be had, a lot of mistakes to be made. And so make them, but learn from them, and then keep going.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. I'd love to know what did you think of this video? Which lesson are you going to immediately apply somehow to your YouTube business? Leave it down in the comments below. Also, is there an 8, 9, 10 that you want to add to the list? Or is there a different making it video, a new part of the series that you want to add? Making it as a what? What do you guys want to see? Leave it down in the comments below. I'm really excited to see what you have to say. Thank you guys so much for watching. I believe believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is.

Much love.

I'll see you soon.

So let me give you the one word secret to happiness. One word. This is all you need to be happy. The most important word ever.

If you had to think of one word that's most important to you, or that sums you up, or that would be kind of like a little beacon.

Hey, Believe Nation, if you want to know what the most important one word is for Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah Winfrey, will.i.am, and Howard Schultz, I have a very special secret video for you. Check the description for details.