How to GET 1 MILLION YouTube Subscribers - Evan vs. Valuetainment vs. Oprah

What's up, Believe Nation? It's Evan. I am back for another episode of How to Get to 1 Million Subscribers on YouTube. In this series, I document my journey on how I'm getting to 1 million subscribers and giving you my advice, my tips, answering your questions along the path. I'm almost there. We are getting close. And so this series is going to end pretty soon, but I'm excited to be here at least while we have it going. Today I'm going to talk about something really important. I'm talking about thumbnails and I'm talking about titles, how to get people to click through on them and how important they are to making your YouTube channel take off. In previous episodes, I've talked about the importance of uploading frequently and I've hopefully hit that, I've pounded that into your head enough. I think it's the single most important thing that you can do as a YouTuber right now if you want to get your videos ranked, produce content daily. Get to daily, or at least make it your goal to go daily. If you need to be convinced as to why, go back and watch all the other episodes in their series and you'll find out. Today though, I want to talk about thumbnails, I want to talk about titles, I'm going to look at my channel as an example, some of the things that I'm using that's really helped me. I'm going to compare my channel to Valuetainment, a friend of mine, Patrick Bet-David, and Oprah's channel, and I'm also going to give you a tool that I use consistently that has really helped optimize the performance of my titles and tags. So let's do it. So first of all, I want to do a quick update as to where I was as of the last video. I actually don't know where I was as of the last video. We can flash a big number on the screen of how many subscribers I had as of the last video. But it's been a great month for us. This is my channel on Social Blade. And last month we had, what, last 30 days, 53, 54,000 subscribers. We're at 9, almost 919 right now according to my Social Blade. And, uh, you could see down here it was our best month ever for views, 8.8 million. Our best month ever for subs, 62, 63,000 almost. So it was a really, really good month and we're closing in on that million gap. The last videos I compared myself to Gary Vee and Tai Lopez. I predicted I'd get to a million before Gary Vee. If you look at his channel now, uh, you could see he's at, he's at 865 with 1,600 a day. I'm at 919 with $1,700, $1,800 a day. So I thought Gary was gonna pass me. Let me show you his graph. See, look, Gary was taking off and I thought he was going to pass me around here, but then he started tanking and he took August off and he left it to his team and they kind of dropped the ball, to be honest. And now he's back and starting to do well again, but I don't think he's going to catch it. So a little disappointing. And Tai Lopez, you never know what Tai's gonna do. If you look at his updates, he's almost at a million, $996,000. He's getting close, but his his sub numbers are really low. You could see here, you know, he had— he's had these spikes and then he goes massively down, you know. And in this month here, he only had 402 subscribers, and then 292 subscribers, and then 6.27 thousand. So he really focuses on advertising. When he advertises, he gets more subs and growth, and when he doesn't advertise, he loses subscribers. So we'll see. I don't know if I'll beat him to a million, but we'll see what happens. So today's topic: thumbnails and titles, why they are important. Let's just quickly look at this. This is my stats for the past 30 days. So past 30 days, 69, 68 million minutes of watch time, 8.3 million views. Look at this. This is what I've been talking about this whole series. You know, 5,678 videos that we've put on the channel. Not all of them are live, but that's a lot of work. Daily consistent content. I guarantee you it's going to help. This is where I think a lot of people make a mistake. So look at where my traffic is coming from, and I encourage you to go look at yours and you'll find that it's probably something really, really similar. Most of my traffic, this purple chunk here, comes from suggested videos. This red one is browse features, and then third is YouTube search. So this green is YouTube search. Too many people optimize for YouTube search. You're thinking of this as Google, right? In Google, when you have a website, you're trying to rank it, You're thinking SEO, you're thinking keywords, you're thinking, how do I get my video ranked? Which is a very SEO kind of website way to think about things. It's not how YouTube works. If you are trying to optimize for search as your primary indicator, you are going to lose. Search does not drive a ton of traffic, right? 9.5% of my watch time, where 77% come from these two. So the purple one, suggested videos. That's the videos along the side. So if you look at a typical video, that's this. This is where most of your views will come. It's going to come from the suggested related videos after somebody watches a video. So either at the end of this video where those— if I go to an end of this video, for example, uh, I'm mute. So I go to the end, suggested videos are going to be These right, right here at the end and these down the side, that suggested video, that's where most of your traffic is going to come from. And then this red one here is browse features. That's going to come from the YouTube homepage. So here, if I go to youtube.com, whatever people see here on the homepage and from the subscription feed. So if you click on subscriptions here, you lead to here, these are people that subscribe to. And you can see it here. And so this is where most of your traffic will come from. So the key is how do I stand out? How do you stand out along this side, right? You need to have titles and you need to have a thumbnail that really, really grabs their attention. Now I'm fortunate that a lot of these are going to be my own on my own videos, but why would somebody click on your video with your thumbnail instead of somebody else's? What's going to help make you stand out? And I'm going to share my strategy to help do that. And the same thing applies here. Like of all these things, these recommended, you know, the other places that I subscribe to, the subscription feed, like why would I pick this video to watch instead of this video, right? A lot of it, it could be the greatest content in the world, but if you don't have a great thumbnail and you don't have a great title, it's going to be really hard to get the views that you need. And so that's what I really, really, really, really, really want to focus on with today's video. For those of you who are focused on SEO and worried about keywords and tags and descriptions and all that stuff, it helps. It's definitely important, but not as important as you think. Where much, much, much more important is this 77%. Stop playing this 9.5% game. And again, go check your channel, like, prove me wrong. Go check the stats on your channel and see if you're getting the number one source of traffic is YouTube search, then keep doing what you're doing. Great, go for it, go for SEO. But if these two are the ones that are coming up, then the way to win here is you need to have better titles and better thumbnails. So let's go through some examples. I'm going to look at my friend Patrick Bet-David from Valuetainment. He's got a great channel around entrepreneurship growing pretty quickly, almost 400,000 subs. Congrats, Patrick. Some of the things that I want to talk about for what to look for in a thumbnail and a title. First, you want to make sure it's attention grabbing. Second, you want to make sure it looks good when it's small. And third, you want to make sure that it's recognizable and that it's yours so people can immediately tell that it is yours. So let's look at Patrick's channel as an example. Attention grabbing. I think Patrick does actually a really good job, way better than most people on YouTube in terms of attention grabbing thumbnails. You look at it, he has fun pictures, he has serious pictures, he has famous people like Andy Roddick on here. He's got, you know, Cartoons that stand out, globes. He has things that kind of draw you in. Some things I would think about, making sure that people are really recognizable. So for example, Andy Roddick, you know, you see it in the title, but if you look at that face, you may not know that that's Andy Roddick because he has that visor on. Now that's an actual clip from the interview I think that he did with him, but I would look at maybe doing a different face so that you know instantly that that's Andy Roddick. Same thing down here with Wayne Gretzky. It's not the most recognizable picture of Wayne Gretzky, so you might pick something that's a little more easy to recognize that it's him. But for the most part, they're pretty attention-grabbing, right? It's easy to see, they stand out. So that's a big win for Patrick. Some of them, like this one, I don't know how attention-grabbing that one is, but on the whole, it's pretty attention-grabbing. Like, he's got— he's here with a sword and a shield. It's like, if I saw this, in a sea of this, right, it would stand out. And a good test is what do you pay attention to yourself? Like, go to your own subscription feed and see which thumbnail do you pay most attention to. What would you click on? What's relevant? What looks good? And which ones are you ignoring? And from your own test, you can see, okay, you know what, I totally ignored this thing. Mongoose uses snake as a swing. I don't know why that's in my subscriptions, but, uh, anyway, like, what— I don't even know what that is. My eyes go right past that and I'm looking at the faces of these other people. And so use your own example to see what your eyes are drawn to, and then you can model some of that for your own channel. So Patrick does a really good job on the attention grabbing. Next is what looks good small. So this is one size, but it's going to get even smaller when you get to your actual videos. If I go back here and I compare it to here, this is a little bit bigger than the ones that are shown here. Not much, but a little bit bigger, and it makes a difference. And so if somebody's watching this video and they're going to see down the side what's coming up, is this enough to understand on a really small scale what it's all about and make me want to click? And so one of the things that I'm talking to my editor a lot about is I need— we need to make the font bigger. We need to make the font bigger because we need to be able to see it small. They won't see this giant thumbnail that has all this detail. They're going to see it this size, so it has to be visible. Build your confidence, keep going, productive habits, they're easy to read. If I look at Patrick's, a lot of them are pretty good, you know, 3 toxic habits to avoid in life. Something like this, though, might be a little bit hard to read when it's smaller. Something like this where you can't really read, like the red on the black can be hard to read. It's hard to see that, that's how Amazon destroyed a $6 billion retail giant. Smaller, that might be even hard to read. You don't want to make it hard for people to understand what you're all about. But for the most part, he does a pretty good job, right? Join the military or go to college. Also, one thing quickly, guys, to make sure— there's always going to be a little timestamp on top of the video. So you want to make sure that the timestamp does not cover your title. See, like this one, how to take your business global. You can still read that that's global, but it's going to be hard to see because it's covered up. So try not to have text or anything that people need to read in the bottom right-hand corner of any of your thumbnails because it's going to limit ability to read it and then you won't get click-throughs. But for the most part, you can read some of this stuff. I just look at some of them like this. This one has a lot of text, case studies with the biz docs. So like hard to read that, you know, how 3 startups raised millions and lost it. You can't read the all because it's covered and even that's a little tight on the font, but in general it's pretty good. Like something like this, great, stop making excuses. Good. It's getting late, every entrepreneur's best friend. So in general, I just want to make sure that it's easy to be able to read. And then recognizable. There's 5 things that I look at for recognizable. So we started off with, is it attention-grabbing? Does it look good small? And then is it recognizable? Recognizable, I look at colors, logo, format, personality, and the title. So the goal here is if I've just finished watching a Valuetainment video or Evan Carmichael video or on your channel, I just finished watching your video, I want to easily know that this this next video about the watch is also from the same creator. If the thumbnails are totally different and the titles are totally different and there's no consistency, then it's hard for me to know, like maybe I love that video that Evan put up, but I didn't know that the next one is by him. And so I'm not going to click through and watch. And so if I look at Patrick's as an example, the first thing I look at is the colors. So Patrick is using yellow and red. Mostly yellow, red, and white. So there's some consistency in the theme. Even more consistency would make it easier for people to understand that this is his channel. The logo you see on pretty much all the videos— who's got this little logo here? Some of them they're on, some of them they're not. You know, let's see. Well, this one doesn't have it on, but for the most part they have it on. What I would do is try to put it in a consistent spot, so like this is perfect. Top right, top right, like get this out of here, move it top right, top right, top right, top right, so that I know every time it's top right, I see that icon, it's a Patrick B. David Valuetainment video. I want to watch that thing. Uh, when it's in the middle or on the side or not on it at all, then people don't know that it's your video. Again, watch out, do not put it in the bottom right-hand corner. It's going to get covered up and you won't see it. So Patrick does a pretty good job of that. It's either bottom left or top right, but But I love this positioning, whether it's white or red or yellow, I would keep it to probably 2 variations, but still having it be at the top in every single video so it's easy to see. And I know that's a value-tainment video. I love the one I just watched. I'm gonna watch the next one as well. Next one is format. And this is where we start looking at fonts and colors and where we're putting the text and how we're putting the pictures. So Patrick uses probably about the same font each time. Some of them he might customize like military, that's fine in college. So you're using like a military font and a college kind of font. It's pretty good. So it's almost always caps, right? The numbers might stand out whether he's doing 333. So that's pretty good. If you're using different fonts each time and you see this on a lot of YouTube channels, every font is totally different, every thumbnail is totally different, So then if I just finished watching your video and it's really great, I can't tell that the next video is yours, so I'm not going to click through. Again, we want people to click here, right? Or after they watch a video, where's my video? Here, right? I want to be able to click through and know that this video that's coming up is also yours. So we talked about colors, we talked about logo, we talked about format. Next is personality. This works really well when you have a business and a YouTube channel around yourself. So Patrick has it around himself. The more that he's in the thumbnails, the easier it's going to be for people to click on it. Now Patrick is in almost every thumbnail, which is awesome, unless he has, I guess, this Biz Dog guy doing a series. Patrick's in pretty much every single thumbnail here. Maybe this one's a little bit different, but even the Biz Dog is here, and the Biz Dog is here, and the Biz Dog is here. So now he's building up a brand around the Biz Dog as well. But looking at this video, if I watched you know, you're only 5 necks away from being a millionaire. Great. I see Patrick here. I see Patrick here. I'm going to click on that. I see Patrick here. I'm going to click on that, right? So if you're a personality-driven channel, putting your face on the thumbnails each time makes it easy for people to know that it's your video. If you're not a personality-driven channel, then having similar formats, right? Go back to the other points that we're talking about. And then the last thing you can do is in the title. You could, you could look at putting the series name in the title, put in the channel. In the title, putting something, putting a hashtag in the title, something in the title that makes people know that this is your video so that they click from one, they go to the next, they know that that's yours. So that's how it breaks down on Patrick's channel. Let's go to— so here's an example of Patrick's video. So I finished watching this video. Great, Patrick, awesome. 3 toxic habits, that's amazing. I learned the 3 toxic habits. Hopefully I'm not going to do it. Here's what shows up. And again, use your own tests. Like, look at these thumbnails. Where are you going to click on next? Are you going to click on this? So can you— you can read that title. That's pretty good. But at the top, you can't. Like, what does that say? So Daily Habits of Successful People. What is that logo and what does it say above it? It looks like Weekly Motivation Presents. I don't know. And I'm a fan of Brian, although this isn't his channel. This is JJP Motivation. But that thumbnail could be better. This one, Dave Asprey, Train Your Brain. Like, that could be— it's hard to read the white on a light background. That could be better with Lewis. And Lewis is another friend. Like, where's the branding? I want to see the School of Greatness branding on here. I want to make it— I want to know that this is Lewis's video. Talks at Google, you know, it's just a picture of Tim Ferriss, which is great, but I don't know who made it. Now let's see, let's go down to more Valuetainment. So Valuetainment shows up here. Great thumbnail. Showing money on a thumbnail is always good. What's missing here is where's the branding, right? Where's the logo? How do I know that that's Valuetainment, it's great to see Patrick on it. That's what helps sells it. Look at that money pouring down. That's amazing. Scrolling down, here's some more from Patrick. Look at how easy it is to read this. 12 Mistakes I Made My First Year as an Entrepreneur. Perfect logo at the top. Great, easy to know that that's Patrick. Here's another one, just missing a logo, but it has Patrick on it, has the text on it. This is where the more it's consistent, like if I watch this video as an example, this is where the pattern of your users becomes really, really, really important. If this shows up in my subscription feed, right, and I really like this video, then I'm going to start looking for other videos that look like this. And so even though this video is on the same channel, I may not associate it with Patrick because Patrick's not in this, but he is in this. The logo's here, but it's not here. There's a big number and then huge text, and there's big text but no number. So like, if I finish watching this, I may not know that this is also Patrick's video, and so I may not click on it. Now this down here is an example, right? 11 skills looks the same as this. So there's probably a high click-through rate from this to this. And then I'm going to be looking for other videos that look like this. So it's important to have some variety on your thumbnails, but also make sure that people don't get confused between one thumbnail and another thumbnail. So the more you can have consistent elements, the easier you keep people on your channel flowing from one video to the next. Let's go to look at Oprah as an example here now. So this is Oprah's channel. Oprah has 1.4 million subscribers and obviously leverages her brand a lot. Let's go through the 3 things: attention-grabbing, looks good small, and recognizable. So attention-grabbing, I don't know. Okay, like, are those thumbnails emotional? If you saw that, you know, if you saw this, is that attention-grabbing? If you saw this, is this attention-grabbing? You know, this is Iyanla Vanzant. She's recognizable, you may know her, so that might be more attention-grabbing. Vera Wang, like, is that the best picture of her? Is that attention-grabbing? You know, just use your own test. I don't know that any of these really pass the attention-grabbing test, at least for me, and so this wouldn't be one that I want to model. Maybe this, like, what's happening here? She looks like she's shoving him into the wall. I don't know what's happening there. That's a little different. But again, does it pass your own test for attention-grabbing? Second, looks good small. So remember, it's gonna be smaller than this. So something that has a lot of detail isn't gonna look really good small. Something like this, where it's hard to know what's happening, so she's sitting there talking to somebody, is that a famous person, do I need to know who that is? Like, this is about a yanla, it's in here, but I don't know that that's a yanla by looking at her in the side profile, and it's gonna be even smaller, so all those little details will be lost when it's really small. So I don't know how many of these really look good small. And then is it recognizable? You know, if you saw any of these, would you know that it's Oprah's channel? So they do a great job in the branding of Iyanla Fix My Life as an example. So if I see this, I'm looking for that for future ones. So I know that this is all part of the same series because it says Iyanla Fix My Life. And same thing for the released, released, released, right? Easy to see that that's hers. The OWN, that's more symbolic with Oprah Winfrey's channel, so I'm thinking that's for sure an Oprah Winfrey video. This logo is a little bit hard to see. You can see the Oprah Winfrey, the logo, I mean, the signature, you can't really, you know, if you just saw that, you may not recognize it. It could be, it could stand out a lot more. This little white shading here could be different so that this logo pops a lot stronger. This, I can't even see what it is. Loving. Something wrong, loving, you see, I don't know, right? Like that's not good. And so I would recommend having something because Oprah has such a big name. You may not understand what released means. You may not recognize that with her, but if I had a little own at the top, right? Like, oh, that's an Oprah video. Like how much this video only had 343 views, right? She's got 1.5 million subscribers and this video had 343 views. If that video up here had this own logo that really popped out, I guarantee you this video would get more views just because of the power of branding. People see this showing up again, they see this showing up on the side and they don't know that it's hers. And so they don't click on it. Nobody watches it. Same thing, this entire series. And you can look at it by series too, like this series, you know, 401 views. It's not getting a lot. It's not doing well. And part of it is the exposure. Like maybe the video itself isn't very good. I don't know. I haven't watched it. But if I can't tell that that's an Oprah Winfrey video, then I'm not going to watch it. And so she's going to really lose traction momentum on that. If you look at what I do, a lot of my videos follow a similar format where we have somebody's picture on the right and then bold text, all caps on the left. And then we have our logo on every video and the series logo. So You know, Patrick has his logo almost on every video. We talked about that right in the top right. Oprah only has the series logo but not the channel logo. I recommend trying to find a place to do both. So some of these we don't have a series logo for, like my book sample video. I don't have a series logo. This is a new one we're looking at, so we don't have a logo yet. But for the fleshed-out series that have an ongoing theme— our espresso, our top 10, the ant vibes— You know, you look at each one, you see the plane, that's Evan Carmichael, and then you see the logo, you know what the series is. So having similar fonts, right, it's always white, it's always orange, the text is always on the left side for the most part, and it's just easier to know that this is my channel. And so you watch one video, you're more likely to watch the next video because you saw this stuff, right? You see this, it looks a lot like this, and it looks a lot like this, and it looks a lot like this, and this, and this, and even this. It's not that big a difference. And so people get used to, you know, if you watch Louis CK and that's the first video you've seen on my channel and you like it and you see something like this that looks like it, same format, you know this is my channel because it looks similar. And so you're much more likely to click through on this, enjoy that, and then click on the next one and then eventually subscribe to the channel. And so you really, really, really want to make sure that people can tell that it's yours. So the colors are fine, the logos you can tell, the formatting is pretty simple. Personality is something for me. I'm not in every video, right? So Patrick B. David is on more of his videos than I am. Oprah's not on any of these videos, but maybe she's not inside them. You know, I'm like, if Oprah was interviewing Meryl Streep, Oprah should be here. Oprah is interviewing this person. I don't know who this person is, but you know who Oprah is, so they would— they should definitely show her face. I'm not in a lot of the videos. I'm doing the introduction, but it's mostly about Louis C.K. or T.D. Jakes. And so I show their face, and their face also brings some awareness of, you know, what's in this video, and people know who these people are. So it's a way to get more people in. And then the title, at the end of the series, we'll always put a hashtag with the name of the series. So this is an Enspresso. This is an Enspresso. This is a One Rule. You know, this will say top 10 at the end of it. And so it helps people understand, okay, Enspresso, Enspresso. Top 10, one rule. It's not the biggest factor, the thumbnail is more important, but having that in the thumbnail can, can play a role. Again, looking back at all these things, what we want to pay attention to: attention-grabbing thumbnail and title, it looks good small, and it's recognizable that it's yours so that if I watch one of yours, I know which future ones are yours when they show up in my feed. Those three things are really, really, really critical. And if we're recognizable, we're looking at colors, logo, format, personality, and title. You can watch that video back again if you want the breakdown again. And finally, always use yourself as the asset test. You know, if you saw your thumbnail, would you click on it? If you're looking at my channel, looking at this page, these are all my thumbnails. You look at this page, what stands out to you? What would you click on? Would you click on Tony Robbins because he's smiling? Would you click on The Rock because he's serious? Would you click on me because I'm pointing at stuff? Or if you look at Patrick's channel, would you click on this because he's in You know, this armor, he's got, he's got his sword and shield. Would you click on this because of the blue background? Would you click on this because you recognize Wayne Gretzky or this because you see the jet plane in the background? Like, think about your own patterns, what you love clicking on, and then think, how can I model that for my own channel? Again, looking back at the analytics, it's the most important thing. Suggested videos and browse features. Stop paying so much attention to search. It's okay, but it's only 10%, at least of my traffic. Pay attention to your thumbnails and your titles. Spend more time on your thumbnails and your titles. Now I want to end off before getting to questions by showing you a tool that I use that helps me with my thumbnails and my titles. It's from TubeBuddy. This is part of their paid tool. I forget how much. I'm on their most expensive platform. I forget what it is. I think it's $50 or something. Uh, I'm not being sponsored by this. I just love using this tool and I've given them feedback. I want to see this tool get more fleshed out. There's a problem with YouTube in that they don't allow you to split test. It's so weird. It's such a data-driven company, but they don't allow you to split test your results. And so there's no easy way to test one title against another title, to test one thumbnail against another thumbnail and see which one does better. So the closest thing I found to it is through TubeBuddy, and they have a tool that allows you to test the thumbnail, the title, the tags, and the description. I don't care so much about the tags and description. We just test thumbnail and title because that's really what's going to help drive those two metrics for the analytics. So here's an example. This is our original Mark Cuban top 10 rules. We thought, okay, what if we put Cuban yelling? We could get a more emotional Mark Cuban picture instead of a smiling, happy Cuban. What if we had him looking at the text instead of looking at the audience and see which one does better? And what TubeBuddy does is it'll show one thumbnail for one day. So February 5th, it showed the original or the variation, and then the next day it shows the original. And so it shows one version one day, one version the next day, one version one day, one version the next day for 14 days until you get some results. Now it's really important as you're doing these tests to make sure you're picking an older video because if you pick a brand new video and you're doing split tests, it's going to be inaccurate data because the first day of your launch, you should get way more views than the next day and then they'll continue to, to trail down. And so try to pick a, a video where you're going to get enough views, right? Like, we're getting almost 500 views a day average on this video, so it's enough to start testing. If you only have 3 views a day, it's going to be hard to get good data on, and also not something that's so brand new that the initial spike is really high. So this lets us test the thumbnail. So our theory was a more emotional thumbnail would allow people to want to click on it more. We were wrong. Right? The original version of this video outperformed the variation. This one is better than this one, and it's only by 15%. It's not by 2,000%. It's not a massive difference. But if you can increase— like, if I extrapolate that across my channel, if I can increase my views by 15% by just doing this, it makes a big difference. And so you can test. You can test colors, you can test pictures, you can test your logos, you can test different variations. To see which one is doing better. So this is one test we did, right? Emotional picture versus smiling happy picture. The smiling happy picture did better. Maybe I just have a happier audience, you know, maybe somebody else's audience, they're yelling, they're mean, they're emotional, they're going on rants, and this one would perform better. But for my audience, this one does better. And I'm kind of happy about that, to be honest. Here's another test that we did. Let's try to make our thumbnail even better. Let's try a different version of it. Let's make, a zoomed-in picture of Cuban. Let's put the text on the thumbnail instead of putting it just Cuban's 10 rules to the lesson from inside. Well, it didn't work, right? The original version outperformed the variation by 16.5%. So this is no, let's not do that ever again, right? That is not the way to do it. This is still our winner. And so I'm happy when tests fail, right? Most of the tests will fail, but if you find one that starts to work, then you can apply it across the entire channel. —so we moved the, you know, the Top 10 logo inside instead of putting it there, and just this one didn't work out as well. It's fine. Another test we ran was now testing the title. So those were thumbnail examples. Now let's test the title. Okay, so we know that having the Top 10 Rules on the video thumbnail itself, that works the best. Let's test the title. So we have Kevin O'Leary's Top 10 Rules of Success as a title versus I'm Never Working for Someone Again as our title. Well, the variation won this time, right? If you look at all of our new videos now, you'll notice the top 10s, we don't have this anymore in the, in the title. It's not, it's never the person's name, top 10 rules of success. It always leads with a quote because the quote, we find something that's attention grabbing from the video itself and we put it in and more people click on it. This is a very SEO-friendly search title. This one is not. But this one is more attention-grabbing. And on our newer ones, we usually capitalize almost every first letter, and then we find one word to do all caps. So like, "I'm never," never all caps, "working for someone else again," again all caps, exclamation point after it. That is more attention-grabbing than "Kevin O'Leary's Top 10 Rules of Success." And so that's what we do. Another quick example is Mark Cuban. So the original one, Mark Cuban, this is perfect. This is a great example of of what not to do, right? Mark Cuban interview is a search term, right? If you type in, and the way to do this, right, you go to the top, you go Mark Cuban, look, Mark Cuban interview, right? First suggested result. That means a lot of people are searching for that. So hey, let's put that in our title, right? People are searching for it. Let's go and look at that in our title. So here we put it in, and then Mark Cuban's Top 10 Rules of Success. Compared to I'm working 24 hours a day to kick your ass. This version, I'm working 24 hours a day to kick your ass with the same thumbnail outperformed by 17%. The relevancy and the attention grabbing this is more important than the SEO value, than stuffing keywords in here. It's more important to have such an attention grabbing. Now again, we modified this to, this would be capital W, 24 hours a day to kick your ass. Like this whole thing might be in caps, exclamation point at the end. Through the other tests that we've run, we found that that works. Now, make sure, one, you're only testing one thing at a time. Don't test your thumbnail and your title at the same time because you won't be able to know what you're getting good results for, right? You don't know if it's the thumbnail or the title that's making the difference. But continue to test, right? Keep testing until you find the best format that works for you and you're always trying to beat your best, right? It's like if you can increase all your videos by 17%, as soon as we saw this, right, it worked for O'Leary, It worked for Cuban. Now we're applying across all of our videos as we do this test, right? Look at the jump. How do you make this jump? How do you make that jump in subscribers and views, right? How do you make that jump? Well, you got to make better thumbnails and better, better titles, right? It's this testing allows me to do it. And so again, this is from TubeBuddy. It's the only tool that I know that allows you to do it. I'm not being paid by them. I think this version costs $50 a month. It's totally worth it. I mean, I guess if you're brand new, just starting off, this wouldn't be super helpful because you don't even have enough data to be able to really tell if a result is working or not. But once you get some traction on your channel, it's worth it. It's a no-brainer decision as long as you're using it and always running tests. So I always have my team testing this stuff out to see how we can do the best job possible, how we can get the most results out of our thumbnails, our titles, because you put so much work into creating the content that you want to make sure that it's getting the most exposure possible. So those are some hacks that you can use to help you with your thumbnails and your titles. How was that? Some good knowledge for you? Now I want to get to the questions, okay? Make sure you're paying attention to your thumbnails, to your titles. Make them attention-grabbing. Use yourself as a proxy always to see, would you click on that? And if you would, you're on the right track. And then split test, split test, split test. Using TubeBuddy, or maybe you found another tool that works for you. If you do, let me know. I, I'll be interested in testing it out too. Let's get to your questions. Some of the questions that came in from last episode. Let's see what we got. So these are the questions from the Gary Vee, Tai Lopez episode that I made. Practical Psychology, I've said it before, I love this series and will watch every single one. Let's race to a million, happy face. Thank you for the love, man. It's been a lot of fun putting the series together. It's a ton of work doing too. Um, so once we hit a million, that's the end. We'll probably have one video left, two videos left depending. And I'm excited to have provided this value at least for you guys, and it's great to hear that you're enjoying. Next up, Mr. Gaming Genius: How come your videos never pass 10,000 views and you have nearly 900,000 subscribers? That is not true. Lots of videos pass 10,000 views, just not all the videos pass 10,000 views. And that's what happens when you start creating tons of consistent content. You got to see which videos are performing the best for you, keep that series and start dumping the rest. This is really important. This is super, super, super, super, super, super important. Stop getting attached to how many views any individual video gets. If you produce one video a week, that single video will get more views than if you're producing a video a day. But combined, all those videos that you're producing a day will give you way more views than that single video. And what your goal is, is to have an impact, right? Your goal is to reach people. Your goal is to get your message out there. Your goal is to get exposure. Your goal is to get subscribers. Your goal is to get lots of views for your channel. Don't make a single video channel views your goal because you're going to lose. Make the channel growth the goal. And if you look at the size of my channel, Compare the size of my channel to almost anybody else who's at my same level. So almost a million subscribers now, whatever I said we're at, 8, 8, I don't remember, closing in, no, 9, 9 something. Look at other channels that have 900,000 subscribers and look at how many views they have on their videos. Mine will destroy them. And that means I'm reaching more people. And so don't get too attached. It's the wrong metric. Don't get too attached. To how many people watch a single video, because you're going to lose the big game. You're going to lose the bigger picture game of being able to reach a big audience. And then that leads to being able to sell your products, getting brand deals, all that other stuff that goes with building a YouTube channel. It's the biggest mistake that I see for YouTubers. I can't tell you how many YouTubers I've met that, that at one point were bigger than me who complained about it and didn't want to increase their frequency because their views per video were dropping. And by paying attention to that wrong metric, other people are blowing past them. Don't let that be you. Pay attention to the right things, Mr. Gaming Genius. Next, Alexandra Carmichael, my sister. Great tips. Thanks, Evan. I appreciate the love. Thank you, Alexandra. Next up, what do we got? Jens Larsen. This is a great series. I can't manage to do one video per day, but that of course doesn't mean that I can't find it interesting to see what you do, what your research tells you, both with working with a team and understanding YouTube. This is great info. Thank you for the love. And again, for those of you who can't do a video a day, that's okay. But you want to make that your goal. And again, think about if I'm making a video a day, what is, what does my YouTube channel look like? Who do I have to have on my team? How am I going to be able to grow this thing out so that I can make a video a day? It's okay if you can't get there yet, but have that part as your goal. Say, how do I get there? And that's part of where I want to get to, whether it's this year, next year, whatever it is, you need to get there. You have to have a plan to get there because it's something that YouTube heavily, heavily, heavily prioritizes right now. And if you can even just double your volume for now, and then like if you're doing one a week to go to two a week, it'll still make a big difference. And then three a week, like make it a realistic plan. Don't come from the place that says I can never get to a video a day. You lose. If that's your mentality, you lose. It's like saying I'll never make a million dollars. I'll never hit my big goal. I'll never buy my dream house. I'll never create the business I want. Like, don't operate from a place of scarcity. Instead of saying I can never go out and do that, I'm not saying that this is you, Jens Larsen, I'm not saying that that's you, but instead of operating from a place of scarcity, say I can never do that, start asking yourself the how questions. How can I go do that? When you figure that out, when you start asking your brain that question, you start getting better answers. When you just tell your brain, I can never do that, then you're right, you never will do that. You never will get there. So start asking how and make a plan to get there, whether that's a 3-month plan, a 6-month plan, a 2-year plan, whatever it is, that's your goal. You want to get there and it's possible for every channel. Stop coming up with limiting excuses that are holding you back. It's possible. You can do it too. I started by myself. I'm not a video editor. I have crappy video editing skills and I was able to do it by building up a team slowly. Right? I didn't just jump to 3 videos a day. You can get there even faster because you realize the importance. I didn't know how important it was. So you can get there faster than I did. You can get there faster than others who aren't paying attention to this. You can get there faster, you can grow a faster channel than people who are more skilled than you, better on camera, create better content than you. You can pass by them because you are hacking the algorithm better than they are. So put it on your plan. Let's see it happen. Congratulations, Evan. Do you know how the algorithm of YouTube interprets scheduled uploads? Like if you upload 7 videos on one day but schedule them throughout the week and make one video a day public, keep the rest private? I think that's okay. I don't— I mean, I don't have all the data on that, but it's what we do. You know, we won't schedule usually a week in advance. Usually we're scheduling a couple days in advance, but I haven't seen any difference when we've scheduled 4 days in advance versus putting it up live and on the one day. I think it's much more about when the video goes public than when it's created or when it's uploaded and put private or scheduled. So I just focus on getting the videos when they go public, making that happen. So if you publish, you know, a month in advance and you schedule them all out, I think you're okay. Esteban Lopez: Hi, when you say you killed the series, do you mean you delete them? Regards and thanks for teaching your knowledge. Esteban, no, I don't, I don't delete videos ever. It doesn't really help. Like, if you had a bad video and you delete it, it doesn't change the metrics on your channel from everything that I've seen. And so you might as well just keep it up. When I say I killed the series, it just means I'm not making any more of that series. That's the end. I keep whatever is up as up. When I showed you my screenshot, we had 5,000-something videos. A lot of those are from series that we canceled as well, and they stay up, and some people still see them, and it still helps drive some traffic and awareness for your channel, but it just means I'm not gonna make more of them in the future. I don't recommend deleting a video Unless it's something that, you know, you got a takedown notice on or you're just not proud of it anymore or you've changed and you don't feel passionate about that video anymore, you don't like it. You know, a lot of my earlier videos, I think I suck in the earlier videos, like my first videos, but people still watch them and it's good to see the progress in my opinion, like to see me nervous and shy and awkward and trying to make good videos at the beginning. I think it's part of the journey, so I wouldn't delete videos really, if I'm— because the first ones would be embarrassing. Just maybe you said something that you're not proud of, maybe something you don't want your kids to see, you know, your future kids, your future grandkids. And so, uh, that's why I would delete it. But from, from an algorithm perspective, once it's up, doesn't really make a difference. Next up, Simland. Evan has been the underdog this entire time, waiting in the background and now pouncing for the kill. Gary Vee, beware. And the me versus Gary Vee thing has been a fun thing. It's a little disappointing now, a little sad because it's basically over. I'm hoping Gary comes back on really strong and crushes it so that it's a race to a million again. When I passed him the first time, it was a good, hey, look, we're ahead of GaryVee, and then it was who's gonna get to 1 million first, and I thought he was gonna beat me, and so like, yes, good competition, I love it. Competition makes you go harder, right? Makes you faster. And then August came and he was gonna go away and his team was gonna take over the account and it was gonna go downhill. So I don't know, we'll see. I hope he comes back on strong. There's also nobody next. Like, this is a challenge for me in that the next milestone is 10 million, I guess 2 million or 5 million, but 10 million is the next real milestone. And it's, it's, it's not happening next year. Maybe that's the limiting belief of mine, right? Like, how do I get to 10 million next year? I gotta adjust my own mindset. But, uh, with our current numbers, it's not happening anytime soon. and there's nobody above me that I really care about. Like, it's great that Oprah's at 1.5 or whatever she was at, but I don't know, it doesn't— she's not in the entrepreneur space. There's nobody really ahead of me that it's like, okay, next person that we're kind of going up against, even in a fun way. The good news is though, I just love the work, right? Like, it's fun to have a goal to shoot for, and it's fun to have people to kind of go up against and push you. But if that was the only reason why, like, if you're only doing your business to chase this goal down, you're going to ultimately fail because once you reach a goal, you know, it's like you don't know what to do next. I guess you set another goal, but you need to have it meaningful. Like if you're only kind of jumping between milestones, you're never going to have success where you have to actually enjoy the work. Like really, those goals are great, but I like the work. Like I like the day-to-day. I like making videos for you guys. I like being in the comments. I love the work itself. So I don't need to have that external thing pushing me. I would just want to make better videos. Next up, Beautifully Different 86. I've been on YouTube for almost a year now. Congratulations. I struggle with just one video a week. I do makeup videos and haul videos. I also talk about life with disability and other health problems. That's great. Just keep putting out content. Everybody struggles with making videos. Like, if it's important to you and you put in time to make it good, there's a struggle. Like, nothing great ever comes without a great struggle. If it's super easy to do stuff, you get bored and you don't want to do it anymore. You could put out a crappy video every day if you wanted to. Hey, here's what I bought. 5 minutes, put it up. But you have standards and you want to make it good, right? And so the struggle makes you better. And so it will be a struggle. Like, expect anything good in your life, anything good in business to come with a struggle. I think it's part of the process. I struggle every day on my YouTube channel to make things even better. And I love the struggle, right? Like you thrive in the struggle. The struggle makes you stronger. The struggle helps build your foundation. And so don't just look for the easy way out, right? Like there's hacks, right? Like this video might give you some hacks to make things go a little bit easier, which is fine, but there's still a lot of real work that goes behind it, right? Like the hacks are the extra 20%, but the 80% comes from still What did I say at the beginning of the video? These are great strategies to help you, but the number one most important thing is still make daily content. And with that is gonna be a struggle. So I feel you, like I'm empathetic. The struggle is real. The struggle is real for me every day, even though I have my team, right? Like we're struggling to get it going. The quality of every video has to go up. The testing of new series has to go up. It's a struggle. Don't get beaten down by the struggle. The struggle makes us stronger. You gotta enjoy the struggle if you're gonna have success as an entrepreneur. Next up, Eclectic Alou. Hi Evan, thank you for answering my comment. I really appreciate it. Glad you enjoyed. I've been talking about uploading once a day ever since you mentioned it. I think it's helpful advice. I like that you're talking about it. Now what are you going to do? You got to do it. Stop talking about it. I guess that's the first step. Now start doing it or at least increase your production. Definitely my goal now. Also, you just talking are my favorite videos because you add a lot of value. Love this series. Thank you for the love. I, I mix it up. Uh, it's a combination of what I love doing with what the audience loves too. So this series, you know, is doing well. It's leading to— every video series that I put up has to lead to watch time for the channel and subscriber growth. And if it doesn't, then I kill it, unless I'm just— unless there's another reason for it. This series, I like doing it. Takes up a ton of time, more time than my other series, but I like doing it and it's leading to watch time and subscriber growth, so I keep doing it. So it's great to hear and I'll continue to experiment with other series in the future. Next up, Michael. Evan, for someone first starting out on YouTube, are Social Blade and vidIQ priceless value-wise? Do you recommend looking at the data even early on and what memberships are worth paying for? Thanks. So Michael, I have the vidIQ plugin installed somehow on my Chrome and it just shows up with every video. I don't know that I really use it that much. I don't really pay attention to the data. Social Blade, I'm on almost once a day. I think it's part of the daily tabs that I look at. It's good just to know how the channel is doing, um, you know, how the growth is happening. It's easy for videos like this to show, you know, the growth and compare it to other channels as well. I think it's, it's helpful. Um, Social Blade is also great when you're doing live streams to hit a milestone, like you've hit your first 100 subscribers, your 4,000 subscribers. You can show it on screen what your milestones are and just generally get to know kind of where you're standing. And historically, you have Google— your YouTube Analytics, sorry, which are okay, I just, I like being able to see the live data since the YouTube stuff is like, I don't know why YouTube is days old, right? Like it's multiple days old before you can get access for the most part. There's some live stuff, but it's really weak. Um, so that allows companies like Social Blade to stand up. I'm not a part of a paid program with either of those two. I don't know if they even have it. I'm, I guess they do. Uh, the only one that I pay for is the one that I showed you, TubeBuddy. And I started off on their free program and they have a lot of free stuff that you can get. And I went to the paid program because of the split testing. It's like, what? TubeBuddy does split testing on thumbnails? If you look at any industry, any online marketing, you'll see split testing, any marketing, not even online, they split testing. Like you test one against another and you see what works. It's standard in everything. You look at Facebook ads or Google ads or flyers, in-store promotions, you're always split testing. And YouTube does not provide you the tools to split test. And so it's a great feature from TubeBuddy. Again, I think it's about $50 a month and it just gives you an edge. Like if you find the thing that then pushes your titles or your thumbnails up by 15, 20% and you apply that across your whole channel, that's, that's right. Like that's not just for that one month, that's every month that starts to compound. Those new people that came to your channel now are watching your other videos and then that leads to other growth and it just makes total sense. I'm sure at some point YouTube's going to come up with some tool. And, and split testing day by day the way TubeBuddy does it is not the best scientific way, but it's the only option really right now that's available. So, uh, yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't spend— listen, I wouldn't spend any money on anything if I'm first getting started. Spend $0. Put your time in, your energy, your hustle. Use your phone to film you. Like, don't spend any money until you start getting some progress and making money. But, uh, all three— VidIQ, you can see if you like it. Social Blade, I like, um, TubeBuddy, I like. They have free versions, use those to get you started. And as you start making some money, you can see where you want to invest it. Another one from Michael: Gary's on vacation this entire month. He mentioned this a while back and said that his content will be pre-recorded. This month's content is kind of scrambled, and you can definitely tell in the comment section, but the man has worked hard and he's enjoying his time with his family. Gotta respect that. Yeah, it's just priorities. Like, listen, Gary's running a huge company, he's got lots of things on his plate, he's got many social media channels. YouTube is not his number one priority. You know when it's somebody's priority by where they're spending their time. And Gary does a lot of great work, and I'm a fan, and I consume a lot of his content, and he's been a guest on the, on the channel. I went on vacation. I went on vacation. I was away for over 2 weeks. We still had videos up every day on the channel. It wasn't just my team rehashing stuff. We had content. You can make a plan. You can make it work. Right? It just wasn't a big enough priority. And I don't blame Gary. It's not like Gary's a bad guy or Gary had a wrong strategy or it was a wrong move or he shouldn't be spending time with his family. It's all great. Just when his team takes over, his channel starts to go down. And it could be getting a better team, having a better strategy, putting more focused effort into it, even, even preparing and like in the lead-ups to it, having better prerecorded content, like knowing you're going to go away, like his AskGaryVee Show, Why not film 8 of them in advance while he's away, or 30 of them, one a day in advance while he's away? Why not film that? It's just timing, right? He didn't make the time. He, he has a business to run, he's got other things going on. He didn't make the time to do it. You know, I filmed for my channel the day before I left on my vacation, and then I filmed a couple videos while I was on vacation. It's just different priorities, you know, like I had a great time with my wife on vacation. I vlogged a lot of it. You guys have seen the videos coming out now on the channel. And I also care deeply about you guys. A day with no videos on the channel or a day of just like rehashing old stuff, I'm not at that level. Like, I don't, my standards haven't dropped to that point. I'm uncomfortable with knowing that if I leave and if my team's gonna take over the way Gary's team took over and it crushes the channel, I'm not happy with that. I care, I care about you guys. I care about the content that goes up. And so it's not that anybody's right or wrong, it's just the difference of values, the difference of priorities. Secretly, I was hoping Gary wouldn't do that because I wanted the race, but, uh, Gary is an awesome guy, has great content. I'm a fan of the channel and looking forward to seeing him be the number 2 guy to hit 1 million subscribers. Alexandra, next up. Ah, so much value in this one. Thank you, Evan. I'm posting a video a day. After watching the video, the previous videos from the series. Good job, Alexandra. And now it's time to step up the game to make longer quality videos. Thank you for the inspiration and for so many practical devices. One who is willing to listen to have the chance to learn a lot from this video. Thank you again. Yeah, length. I've talked a little bit about in previous videos too. You want to be looking at 10 minutes plus. It just makes a huge difference if your videos are 10 minutes plus. It skyrockets for whatever reason. YouTube's algorithm, they care about watch time, right? So you can have a ton of people watch a 1-minute-long video but on almost every channel, and I've shown you guys in previous episodes, go to the Grant Cardone episode, you'll see the videos that were really short, 1 minute long, 2 minutes long, they don't get the views, they don't get the watch time. YouTube downgrades them. They don't want short content. Now you can have, like, you'll say, Evan, hey, look at the trending tab, there'll be some video that is super short and 30 seconds long. You can have 1 or 2 exceptions, right? There's always 1 or 2 that break through that are outside the norm. But what I'm giving you is the advice that works consistently. Like, you want to bet on making an amazing 1-minute-long video and just hope that it takes off, you're going to fail a ton. Where if you're making consistent 10-minute-plus videos, it's just what YouTube wants. Like, it's just making it easier for you. Yes, it's harder to make quality content at 10 minutes plus, but it's making it easier for you to get known. Like, I want people to see your message. I want people to subscribe to your channel. I want people to buy your products. I want people to be attached to the stuff you're creating. And it just is so much easier when you're playing to YouTube's algorithm. You could pass the people, again, who have more talent than you because you just, you understand the game more because you're watching this video or you're consuming other YouTube content where you're getting education. 10 minutes plus. A video a day, 10 minutes plus. You can do it. Plan for it. You may not be ready now. Plan for it. Put it in. You could do it. Devon, I love these videos. I would have never checked my analytics if it wasn't for this series. I'm glad it helps. And I'm not the most data-driven analytics nerd guy out there. Channels where every little thing is nitpicked and analyzed and people who are better at it than me. But to never look at your analytics, you're missing opportunities because a lot of the— a lot like everything else, a lot of the analytics is 80/20, right? A lot of— even just looking at what I showed you in this video about where is your traffic coming from, if it's the related videos as opposed to search, just knowing that, then that allows you to make better thumbnails and titles. Even if that's all you looked at and you never went back to it, that's already massive value that you can add to your channel. So there's a lot of little tweaks like that that you can see significant improvements with. And then if you want to get into the nitty-gritty and go for that final 20%, it's a choice. Next up, Sharif. My only question in terms of Evan's mission is whether there are a billion entrepreneurs out there right now. It's possible there isn't, but there will be in the not too distant future. It's not super related to this video topic, but the point of that big goal, the point of me wanting to help a billion entrepreneurs is just to have a big goal, to have a lifelong mission. Like, I don't care about tracking the goal. I'm not tracking YouTube views or subscribers. Like, if we're already at how many, how many, we're at 200 million views, something like that. Like, if I use that as a metric, I'm almost there, right? That's, that's, that sucks. I don't want to hit my lifetime goal. I want, I need to, I need to get there a little slower, right? Like, I need to have a bigger impact, I guess. It's just more to have something that shapes my decisions. So going to YouTube as an example allows me to impact a lot of people. Writing my first book and now my second book allows me to reach a lot of people and have an impact. It's why I'm not a one-on-one business coach because yes, I can have a deep impact with the people that I help, but it doesn't really help my mission of being able to help a billion entrepreneurs. And so it just shapes my decisions as to, am I playing a big enough game? Like how do I play a bigger game? How do I reach more people? How do I have a bigger impact? Whether or not I ever hit a billion entrepreneurs doesn't really matter. So I don't really track And if there's no metric, I don't even care if there's a billion entrepreneurs out there, right? None of those things matter. It's about me doing work that can reach the widest possible audience in a really impactful way. Next, passion project. I like this video even before seeing this video. I appreciate the love. That's what you want to get to with your audience too, right? I mean, I know there's a core hardcore group of people who love my videos and will just automatically watch them and automatically like them and comment, and I always appreciate that. I feel like I want to earn every view that comes in, but you want that for your channel too, right? Like, will people automatically like the video before they even watch what's in it because you've just developed this history and reputation? And it goes back to having a thumbnail that's recognizable. If you have a thumbnail and a title that's totally different, people may not even know that that's your video, and so they never watch it, and you're losing out on that audience to help spread the message for you. Sharif Saroor: LOL to Evan's shutdown on those comments. That's awesome. I don't remember what my shutdown was, but, uh, I'm glad you liked it. I try not to, uh, slam people, but if we can make a point, I guess that helps. Hopefully, like, it's all, it's all with love, trying to help you guys. And sometimes we have to crush some limiting beliefs, but it's never personal. It's not like those are bad people, and my goal is never to come on and shut people down. It's why I love the Mark Cuban. Like, I'm so glad that the happy Mark Cuban thumbnail did better than the yelling Mark Cuban video. I just want to be able to spread more positivity, more belief. I want to spread more belief. Than, uh, than anger and yelling and, and attack and hatred. So, uh, anyway, I'm glad that that helped. Next, Alix Fishing TV. Evan, if I make all my videos 10 minutes plus, I could only post 3 to 4 days a week. If I include 3 to 4 minutes videos, I can post daily. What to do? That is a tough question. If it were me— so you're basically valuing how long, like, length of a video versus upload frequency. If I had to pick between doing 3 to 4 10-minute long videos that were quality or weekly 3 to 4 minute videos, like once a week, I would go with the 3 to 4 10-minute videos. I think 3 to 4 is enough of a frequency to get triggered by the algorithm and the 10-minute versus the 3 to 4 minute will make a big difference. It's, it's hard. It's hard to get a 3-minute video ranked. And get people clicking on it. It just doesn't generate enough watch time, so YouTube really downgrades it. And it's a great point because maybe I haven't talked enough about video length in this series. Maybe next week I'll do it, but I mean, I did it— or next month I did it with Grant Cardone, so you can check that one out. But I mean, ideally you want both, right? So if you're making 3 to 4 videos that are 10 minutes long, 3 videos a week that are 10 minutes long, we want to, we want to work our way up. Like, hopefully you start making some money, you start monetizing, you start, you know, selling some some deals, then you can expand your, your team and get to 7 days a week or 14 days a week, right? 2 a day. But if I had to pick one over the other, I would say if you were dropping below once a week, then you're really going to get hit, I think, hard by the algorithm. But a 3 to 4 minute video is also really rough to get ranked. So that would be my advice. I don't know that I have good tests to be able to show you, but every time I've seen a video go up with that, or says 3 to 4 minutes long, it just, it just massively underperforms if you compare it to a 10-minute long plus video. So that's my advice. But really, end game, end game, bro, we're going both, okay? 10-minute long plus, 7 days a week. Subconscious Sketches: Wait a second, Evan, did you say you were sick? Stop doing your Wim Hof breathing or what? Glorious content, by the way, really "Really dig the data and comparison to Gary and Tai. I'm rooting for you." Thank you for the love. Yeah, I need to be a little more consistent on the Wim Hof. It's easy when you're feeling really great. So I've been sick once really badly since I started. I had a 1-day fever when I was at Tony Robbins' event, and then I got sick for a couple days, I guess last month when I made the video. That's still pretty good for my track record considering like we're in October and I've only been sick once all year when I'd be getting sick like every 2 weeks before. That's pretty good. But, uh, yeah, I need to be more consistent. Uh, it's easy when things are going well to just leave it, and then if you leave it for too long, then those old things come back. So, uh, I've been pretty good though since I've been— since I got that like reminder, since I got punched in the face on that one. I've been pretty good and still haven't been sick yet. So fingers crossed for a good winter. Thank you for the love. Next up, Lisa I Am. Hey Evan, you should feel really good about your channel and what you're doing to inspire, motivate new, young, and old entrepreneurs such as myself. Myself. After watching many of your videos, I decided today is the day. No more excuses. I've been making unique products and unique picture frames for 15 years, and I've told numerous times to get started. Thank you for having these videos to keep me motivated. Sometimes videos will do more for me than the actual people around me. LOL. Well, thank you for the love, Lisa. Congratulations on starting your business. That's really cool. I love seeing people take that first step, and the first step is the scariest and it's the hardest. And you take that first step, then you take the next one and the next one. As long as you continue that positive momentum, you'll do, you'll do great. I'm excited to see where you take this. Uh, I agree that a lot of people in our lives are not super supportive, you know, they don't know how to push us, they don't know how to motivate us. They may— they, if you're lucky, they may be empathetic and just try to help understand you. And if you're unlucky, you got people telling you you're never going to make it and how much you suck and you should just go get a job. So I'm glad that the videos— like, your environment really matters. And if my videos are part of that environment that helps you daily, it means just a ton to me. Um, I do feel really good about my channel. I, I feel really good about my channel, and I think it needs a ton of work. You know, it's like both sides. I love my channel, I think it's the best thing on the internet, and it needs to get way, way, way, way, way, way better to get to where I want to go. Like, if I want to hit 10 million subscribers next year, that's not going to happen doing what I'm doing right now. And it's easy to coast and say like, listen, look, we're crushing, we're first one in the million, this is great. Doing so much good, but I know I could do better and I need to find the path to get better. And maybe you guys will give me some suggestions on how to do that too. Next up, Liliana: Who cares about subscribers? I care about the practical content that the YouTube provides. I love Tai Lopez because of that. Why are you so worried about what others are all doing? So I'm not worried. I think a couple of things off of this. First, why you care about YouTube subscribers is if you're an entrepreneur, you need to have an audience. Right? You're trying to get people to sell, to buy your product, to buy your service, to believe in your message, to buy your book, whatever it is. If it's just a hobby and you don't care if anybody watches it, like you want to feel like the work you're doing is meaningful. And so subscribers are somebody's vote to say, hey, your content is meaningful. It means a lot to me. Like if you love practical stuff, then you're going to subscribe to the channels where you're getting practical information. And then that person knows, hey, Liliana likes this stuff. People are liking my practical information. I'm going to create more of it. Right? Like, my subscribers have allowed me to create more content. It's allowed me to build out a team. It's allowed me to build a business around YouTube. And so getting a subscriber itself is meaningless as a number, right? Like, if you're just buying subscribers, that doesn't help you. But if those subscribers are real people who then vote with their attention, that then you can use that to build a business around, that helps everybody build and grow. Helps my business grow, helps me make more content. Hopefully you guys watching it, you're now building and growing your businesses, and so it helps all boats rise. In terms of comparing to other people, one, I think you can look to other people to get ideas, to get inspiration, to get some, some creative new things you might be able to do for your channel. And two, it's a good kind of benchmark to see, right? Ty is a special case, as I mentioned. You know, he builds his business mostly through advertising. I don't, I don't play the advertising game, so I don't— there's definitely a model there. He's built a great business around it. It's not about trashing Tai or trashing Gary Vee or trashing Oprah or any of the people that I profile on the channel. It's just to help show what people are doing, their models, how they're having success, how I think people might be able to improve based off my history. And hopefully you use that. You like practical information. Hopefully there's practical information in the video that then you can use to help build your channel. And so if you interpret this just as a who's better than who and slugfest to win, that's not the intention. And I've only said positive things about the people who, uh, who are profiled and give them some suggestions. Um, so hopefully you can see that for what it is and use the information to help you build your business. Next up, Eddie. I'm so excited for Evan reaching his million subscriber goal. A win for Evan is a win for me and a win for entrepreneurship. Thank you for the love, Eddie. A million's coming soon. I don't know what I'm gonna do. A bunch of people have asked me for a live stream, so I'm probably gonna try to do a live stream when we hit a million. I'm open to ideas what we should do on the live stream. Again, it just depends, like if I'm in the country, if I have a meeting, you know, you never know when you're gonna cross a certain milestone. So I've done it for some and not done it for others. Most of them I haven't done. And again, celebrating is not really part of what I normally do, so, uh, this is a good reminder that we gotta take a break and celebrate, and hopefully we'll have, uh a chance to be able to do it, hitting a million. And again, your feedback, I'd love it in the comments on how to, uh, what we should do to celebrate. Next up, Eric Draws: I don't think Gary is actually on YouTube to have the most followers because his revenue comes from deals with big businesses, but I think he wants subscribers nonetheless. That being said, I admire your hustle and I hope you get the numbers you want. And I agree with August being productive because I haven't hustled as much as I have this month, and this video gives me the motivation to kick August in the face. I love that. And take my success by working as hard as I ever have. I'm just taking a meal break to leave this comment to let you know you're a big influence on me. Yeah, awesome. Listen, guys, I want to make this clear for everybody watching. YouTube is not the primary business, I don't think, for, for most of the people that I'm covering, right? Like, it's not my primary business, it's not Gary's primary business, not Grant's primary business. YouTube itself is just a path to get an audience. And when I profiled guys like Eric Thomas before I think he was the first one or the second one that I did. ET has a great business and it started on YouTube and has expanded beyond it. I'm not showing you how to build a business around YouTube. That's not the point of this series, right? Maybe that's a continuation of the series. This is how to get subscribers because from subscribers you can build a business, right? From subscribers, a lot of things can happen for you. And so what if I'm looking at Eric's channel or Gary's channel or Tai's channel, or Patrick's channel. It's just looking at what people are doing, what you can learn from them, my advice that I'll give to them, and just sharing the strategy that I've learned to help me get to almost a million and documenting the journey to get to a million. Hopefully you guys find value from that, but it's not to say that this is the best model, and, and absolutely everybody has other, other businesses, other projects that they're working on. But the point of the series, like it's called How to get to 1 million subscribers. I'm just trying to help you guys get there fast. Next up, Charles. Kind of weird seeing Tai's subs flattened out. I for one unsubscribed because the content decreased and sales pitches tripled. Feel Gary is going to sling in September, November. It'll be close between you two. Yeah, again, like, Tai's got a really interesting business model. If you like studying business models, it's worth checking out how he did it because he's a really unique YouTuber. Everybody knows Tai, whether, whether you love him or hate him. Everybody's seen those car commercials, you know, here in my garage. Everybody knows that. Whether people love it or are making fun of him, you know who he is and he built a business on the back of it. So there's something to learn from it. Not many people have followed up in his footsteps. Like, I can't say anybody that I know that I've seen that much advertising come out of. And so maybe that was a moment in time. Maybe that model's disappeared. Like, he's not continuing with it now. So maybe he, you know, he can't find a way to continue that stream or maybe he's, you know, got all the business he wants and doesn't want to continue growing. Maybe he's focused somewhere else. Who knows, maybe he's all about Instagram and not about YouTube anymore. I don't know, but it's an interesting case to be able to see him grow. But when you build a business, any business, you build a business off of advertising and then you stop advertising, your business is going to start to go down. And so that's the case with Tai. He's got content, whether you think it's sales pitchy or not. I don't really watch his stuff, so I couldn't tell you, but, um, it's still a really cool— like, if you ever want to try to grow something through advertising, you need to look at Tai's history and see how he did it, because that's great lessons for your business. For Gary, slinging September to November. I hope so, man. I'm really hoping like Gary comes out and crushes and has some insane plan for October, and, and it's getting close. It's just, it's going to be really hard. It's going to be really hard. Short of doing a big ad campaign or getting some major thing happen, it's going to be hard to do it. But I, I'm rooting for him. I want it to be a close race, and I wouldn't mind losing Like, I love the back-to-back. I, I don't mind being number 2. I don't mind losing that race, uh, because it's fun to see the climb. Next up, Chart Your Trade. Thanks for answering my question about video length, and thanks for the shout out. Here's another question. Do you know what would happen if you upload the same video natively to both YouTube and Facebook? Would it have the same effect as posting the same blog post to multiple sites would on your SEO? Doing this with blog posts will quickly kill the number of people Google sends to your blog. Thanks, Evan. P.S., started posting videos more frequently. It's already paying off on my channel. I can only do 2 or 3 a week so far, but even that is already helping my subs go up. Thanks for the helpful advice. I'm a big fan of marketing within the platform that you're working on. I think you just have a lot more results. I think if your goal is to drive traffic to your website, I wouldn't be worried too much about building up Facebook or YouTube as a platform. I would be looking at how do I build more content on my website and try to win that game through SEO and through leveraging other people's networks. So if you're looking at influencers or you're looking at advertising to drive traffic to your website, I think if you're looking at a YouTube strategy or a Facebook strategy, you're trying to win in that game. So the point of having a YouTube channel is to build up an audience within YouTube and then convert and market to the people on YouTube, not trying to get them to come visit your website. And hopefully be a subscriber there, but to convert within the YouTube platform. Same thing for Facebook. Like, I don't, I don't think it works as well to try to get a Facebook strategy to then try to build a YouTube audience or to try to build a website audience. If I was building Facebook strong, I'd be looking at Facebook and try to convert within Facebook. And so if, if my goal was SEO for my website, I think there's a lot better ways you can use that time, money, and energy than YouTube. I don't think YouTube is your winning strategy. I think if you want to win at YouTube, you have to care about building a subscriber base, building a loyal audience there, and then converting those people into its own funnel. It's not about converting website sales, it's converting now that YouTube sales. I think if you look at it like that, you'll have a lot more success. If you look at it as just trying to build your SEO, I think it's, uh, I think there's other things you can do. I think it's a losing strategy. All right, we're gonna end it there. It's been a lot of fun. It's been tons of questions. My voice starting to get dry. I'm gonna have some water. Thank you guys for all the love and support along this journey. It's been an awesome ride. Uh, it's great. Like, the challenge for me is I love answering your questions so much I could be here all day, but then I don't get my other work done making other videos for you guys. So it's a nice mix to have. Yeah, let me know what you think. Share your thoughts, your feedback, suggestions. We're gonna have one or two more videos in this series, and then that's the end of it. Uh, if there's a topic you'd like me to cover in another episode, let me know in the comments. If you have suggestions for what you want to see on the million live stream, hopefully we can get that to happen. Again, leave that in the comments. I really appreciate the love and support. I hope you go out and use this knowledge to help build your YouTube audiences so you can spread your message, have a big impact. It's why I do what I do, and I hope you leverage that to expand your business as well. Thank you guys again for the love. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. I'm on my trampoline. Much love, guys. I'll see you soon.