"How to Make Your Channel Boom | 53 Minutes of Growth Hacks"

What's up, Believe Nation? It's time for another update on the path to 1 million subscriber challenge that I'm on. Basically, I'm highlighting my journey to get to 1 million subscribers and giving you some tips, advice, and feedback along the way to help you achieve whatever your YouTube goals are. So last month when I did the video, I had— let me see— I had 639,000 subscribers. I'm sitting now at 690 8, so 30,000 swing— no, 60,000 swing. 60,000 swing in a positive direction. It's awesome. Getting closer to hitting my million goal. The past couple videos, I've talked about the importance of upload frequency. I've talked about looking at people like Eric Thomas and Gary Vaynerchuk, people who are considered to have immense talent, people whose channels I love, and they just produce some amazing content. And Eric wasn't producing enough content to hit massive YouTube goals. Gary now started to increase his frequency and is gonna pass me soon. And so again, this may not be the only thing. YouTube is not the only thing. I understand these people have other businesses, and it's great. I do too. This series is focused only on how to get subscribers for your channel. And so we've talked a lot about upload frequency. It's really important for YouTube. It's part of their algorithm. They want you to upload regularly. Once a day is the new minimum. I'm at 3 per day using my team. There's a big growth that you'll get from going once per week to once per day. Another big jump from once per day to 2 per day in terms of how much YouTube will promote your stuff. Between 2 and 3, not as big a gap, so may not be worth going to that extreme, but I'm testing it out and playing around with it. And so I encourage you, increase your upload frequency, maintain quality, and you'll see a dramatic rise YouTube channel. It doesn't mean that you can't have success uploading fewer videos, but, uh, why drive on the side roads when you can go on the highway, right? I'm playing the YouTube algorithm, and if you do it as well, you'll be able to beat people who have more skill, who have more money, who have more of a background in it, because you understand your algorithm better. Today I want to focus on understanding which series are working and which aren't, and I'm going to model and compare another YouTuber that we've had some fun with. Grant Cardone, friend of the channel. He's been on my channel talking about his book. We've done some videos on him. A great guy to look at if you're looking for anything about entrepreneurship, sales, motivation. He's a good YouTuber to check out. And so I'm going to compare my channel to his and give him some recommendations to increase his YouTube goals as well. So let's pull up the data quickly. So you can see here I'm at 697,000 subs, Grant's at 248,000. What's interesting is we scroll down, you see that Grant's subs have been pretty much consistent around the 200 range per day until recently where it really shot up and he's actually coming close to me and beating me on some days here. Good job, Grant. And one of the things I want to look at dissecting his channel is, are all the videos that he's doing adding to the channel, helping him out with his growth? And before jumping in on his, I want to show you an example from mine. The two things that I really pay attention to when I'm evaluating a new series is watch time, because watch time is the single most important variable that YouTube looks at. If you are giving YouTube watch time for their videos, they will reward your videos and rank you higher. So every new series that I launch, I look at the watch time, and then I look at, is it leading to subscriber growth or not for me? If my goal is to get to a million subscribers— that's the name of this series, that's the next goal on my list— then I need to make sure that every series that I launch leads to subscriber growth. And so I'll usually give a series 3 to 4 chances to see if it's helping me with my subscriber growth, then I keep it. If it's not, I'll kill it unless it serves another purpose. If I'm making a sales video, if I'm showing my life, if there's a strategic reason behind the video besides subscriber growth, then I keep it. But if there isn't, if I'm hoping to use this video to help me grow my channel and it doesn't lead to subscriber growth, that's when we kill it. So let's take a quick look at 2 of the videos that I did and then we'll jump into Grant's channel. This is the first video that I did on this series, how to get 1 million YouTube subscribers. This video had 10 days watch time, which isn't that great, and only led to 8 subscriptions. So that's not a fantastic start for what a video would get on my channel, but it's worth an extra shot, an extra test. The second one I did was me and Gary Vaynerchuk. That was the last one in the series. This one had 40 days watch time and it drove 62 new subscribers, which is better. And so this is version 3 right now in the series. This one right here is version 3, and we'll see how well it does. And this will help tell me, am I going to keep this series or not? And so I highly encourage you to look at— for every video series that you launch, whatever new ideas that you have, give it 3 or 4 tests to get some good data on. And does it lead to watch time? And does it lead to subscribers for your channel? If it does, keep it. If it doesn't, kill it. And so let's jump in on Grant's channel and I can show you what he's doing. So this is Grant's channel, and Grant is doing an amazing job at the content. It's really rare to find people who are keeping up with me on the content. I think actually recently he's ahead of me. This is 2 hours ago, 17 hours, 18 hours, 18 hours, 19 hours, 22 hours. One thing I would say, if you're going to post this much, spread it out a little bit more. So if you're going to post 5, 6 videos in a day, spread them out over a couple hours each time so they're not back to back, because it gives a little bit of more room for the videos to to breathe. So here, 22, 19, 18, 18, 17, these are all going to be lumped together and all of these videos could have had more views if we spaced them out like this one that was 2 hours ago, 1 day, 2 days, and so on. So it's great to see Grant uploading tons of content and I consider Grant to be an amazing speaker and has lots of great wisdom and advice to share. So what's the deal? He's uploading tons of content but is stuck at 250,000 subs. Let's break down some of the series so we can look at where he's doing right and what he's doing wrong. So this is a typical Grant video, the new ones coming out at least. 46 days watch time, that's awesome. 18 subscriptions driven. Here's another one, 150 days watch time, 13 subscriptions driven. 27 days watch time, 12 subscriptions driven. So he's driving between 10 to 20 subscribers per new video that he puts out. That's about Grant. So this is all kind of Grant just talking, ranting into his phone. It doesn't have to be a setup. He's just, he's just going off the cuff. And Grant is, Grant is one of the best at doing this, going off the cuff, being live, sharing his opinions and rolling with the punches. And so a typical Grant video where he's just doing that leads to 10 to 20 subs, which is great. So next time I'll look at some of his series. So this is a series that he has called Ask the Pro. Grant is not actually in these videos here. And look at the difference on the video. So 5 days watch time, zero subscriptions driven. So the other really important thing to understand about the YouTube algorithm, and this is worth a pause on this point here. If you have a video that underperforms your average, if you have a video that does really poorly on your channel, it actually hurts your future videos. This was an important lesson I learned. So I was just putting out tons of content, content after content, figured let YouTube pick what's going to work. It's adding value to the audience. I don't care if a video only gets 1,000 views or 3,000 views. Doesn't really make a difference, it's just still high-quality content. If a video does not do well, especially considering what your average video will do, then that video hurts the future videos that come out on your channel. The flip side is if a video does really well, if it takes off, then that video will help your future videos on your channel. So you always want to be producing content that is better than the average. It keeps raising the bar on watch time for for the channel. But this is really important because if you have a series that is at zero subscribers growth and is underperforming compared to your average, then the whatever future video Grant puts out that may be him ranting, even though those typically overperform, YouTube will not rank it as well because this Ask the Pro video underperforms. So that's where it's really, really, really important to pay attention to the series that are working and not, and the ones that aren't, kill them because they hurt all your future videos. So let's jump back in and look at this stream again. So this is Ask the Pro, and maybe it's because Grant's not in this show that it doesn't do as well. This often happens with personality-driven channels when it's under somebody's name and then somebody comes on and Grant's not there, the video won't do as well. So this video had zero subscribers growth. Here's another one, Ask the Pro, same guy has another guest coming on. 11 days watched, -1 subscriptions driven. So he actually lost. Subscribers because of this video. He lost subscribers. Instead of it growing, he's losing base because of this. And so maybe there are other Acid Pro videos. I haven't gone too far back in the series. Maybe, you know, I just happened to pick two that underperformed. But in general, if a video series is leading to negative growth and is not doing well compared to your usual videos on time watched, then it's time to kill that series, move on to something else unless it serves a strategic purpose to help in your business, your main business, how you make money, how you add value, grow. Next, I want to jump in on some of Grant's shorter clips. So what he'll often do here is he'll have a main big video like this. So this is one of Grant's videos, Cardone Zone, talking about saving for retirement, 72 days watched, 7 subscriptions driven. It's okay. It's actually, it's interesting how his set pieces like this underperform his live stuff because this takes a lot of time, right? There's setup time, there's crew time, there's questions. You know, there's a lot of effort that goes into making one of these videos. For it to only have 7 subscriptions driven compared to something like this. It's 18, this is 13. Like, this took Grant 10 minutes. He's sitting there on his phone, he gets 157 days watch time and 13 subs driven compared to this where there's a lot more team and effort involved. So finding ways for Grant to be more, uh, off the cuff, live, exciting, doing crazy things, I think would really help this channel. But what I really wanted to get into here was he has this clip that comes out on May 21st and he has this clip which comes out also on May 21st, which is just a short version of something that he says in the original video. So this video is 38 minutes long. This video is 1 minute long. Look at this. Look at the difference. 72 days watched, 2 days watched, 7 subs driven, 2 subs driven. And so this video again is underperforming what's on his channel. YouTube doesn't like this video. They're going to downrank it. They're not going to send it out. It's not going to get a lot of attention, attraction, awareness. It's not going to show up a lot on the recommended down here on the side. And now the future video that Grant puts out right after this is going to take a hit. If you produce a video that is below your average, your next video takes a hit. And so it's super important to understand. He does it again here. Here he's doing affiliate marketing and Grant Cardone coaching. Awesome. 52 days watch time, amazing. 23 subscriptions driven, great. So it's leading to, you know, new subs finding him. He puts out a 1-minute version of it. Again, let's check the dates. May 21st. Again, May 21st. Same thing. Now, spacing it out may help a little bit because if people just saw this, they're not going to want to watch this again and they're not going to be moved by it because they just heard the same points. So spacing it out can really help. But still, I'd be inclined to kill this series. Look at this, 46 hours of watch time, 52 days of watch time compared to 46 hours of watch time. YouTube hates this video. YouTube will not promote it, will not give it more exposure. And then again, whatever video Grant puts out next is going to take a hit because he put this video up. But the 4 subs, so it's okay. But this is the one to pay attention to. And this 1-minute series should— I would test it putting it later on. So instead of putting the same day, put it next week where people who may not have seen the original video can see this short bit or just test to see if it's working because maybe that short 1-minute clip should only be on Instagram or only on Facebook and not on YouTube because I don't want you taking a hit. Here's another quick example, 36 hours of watch time and 1 subscription driven for a 1-minute 32-second video. This is something that his team should be paying attention to and saying, stop making these videos, save them for social, the other channels, and put up the better stuff on YouTube. So the next thing we want to do is go series by series and pay attention to what he's putting up. And you do this on your channel, look at every series that you have. It's harder when you're looking at it from an outsider's perspective. If I had access to Grant's analytics, I could provide a much more in-depth report 'cause you can create groups a lot more easily, but go series by series. So here's one, Confessions of an Entrepreneur with Grant Cardone. He's having a guest come on, 67 days watch time, great, drove 11 subs. That's about average with his Grant Rant series with his phone. So again, like, is it worth this spending the time to book this person to do all the work, to drive with them? Maybe he gets a lot of, you know, pride with it. Maybe he loves it. Maybe that's where he gets his mojo from. And so, that may be a series worth continuing. But again, compared to something like this or something like this where he's just sitting there with his phone, it gets way better results. So just something to think about when you're comparing how much time it takes to make a video. Here's another series. So 91 days watch time on Young Hustlers, 8 subs driven, decent watch time. Mm, okay for subs. Again, I don't know how much Grant is in here. He is, so he joins later on. This is another one I would look at like, hmm, okay, watch time is decent on this one, subs are, below average, what Grant should be getting, I'd go back and look at every Young Hustlers episode and do an analysis of is this series worth keeping, what topics really hit, what topics didn't, so that you make the Young Hustlers series even better. Here's another one, Cardone Mastermind Event live at 2 o'clock. This is a half an hour mastermind call with somebody, not Grant, you know, so it's half an hour of this guy answering questions. In 10 days watch time, not that great. Negative 2 subs. So he lost subscribers because of this video. And again, the next video Grant puts up is going to take a hit because this video underperformed. Next, I want to talk about some of his more high-profile guests, and this is where Grant has really started to excel recently. If I go back to his Social Blade account, you can see that he's recently really taken off. A lot of that is because of the guests that he's had on board. So this is a video where he brought on Gary Vaynerchuk is relatively new, 476 days of watch time and 180 subscriptions driven. This is still a new video. It's still going to do well. It's still going to continue to drive traffic and awareness for him. So, you know, they mentioned this video that he spent a lot of time trying to get Gary Vee to come on board and recruiting him and back and forth. And so it was worth it. And Grant does a really good job in interviews. He's really good. In the live setting here. The next one he did here, Tai Lopez. This one, this is one of my favorite Tai Lopez interviews of all time. And Grant did a really good job. I really appreciated the hustle and the drive and the questions here. Look at this, 2 years of watch time. One of his best videos of recent memory, at least 2, 2 years of watch time and 233 subscriptions driven. So this series, Power Players, is working. When he brings on high-profile guests and you allow Grant to be Grant and share his wisdom, ask the questions, be real raw, and the things that Grant does, it works. It helps generate a lot of traffic, attention, awareness. This video goes up, YouTube is going to love whatever next video he puts up and give him extra awareness. So I would definitely go hard on the Power Player series and bring on more guests to let Grant be Grant, interview, and involve the audience. Next, let's jump to the G&E Show. So I'm just basically doing this for all the series that I I could find just quickly looking at his channel and the video uploads. So, How to Give Back, The Gene E Show, 39 days watched, okay, 2 subscriptions driven. Not great on the subscriptions driven. There's another example here, The Gene E Show, The Business of Marriage, 39 days watched, -2 subscriptions driven. So he's losing subscribers because of the show, and again, it's going to hurt him for the future videos. Where this helps is it's long, so he gets the watch time because it's a 48, uh, minute episode compared to the other stuff, which is shorter. So it's going to help with the watch time but hurt him on the subs. So again, I would go back and look at every G&E show, just like the Young Hustlers, and say, hmm, I'm getting decent watch time on it, but I'm not getting the subs that I should be getting compared to my other videos. What's wrong? Do we cancel the show? Do we find what episodes are pulling really well and go more in on that? And again, maybe some of these shows have a strategic purpose so that it's outside of just generating subs for his channel. Maybe he really loves working with his wife. Maybe he really loves working with his associate on the Young Hustlers Show. You know, maybe there's other reasons beyond just subscriber growth, but paying attention to it is important. The next thing I want to highlight are the sales videos, and this is something that will often come up. You know, we want to use our YouTube channel as an opportunity to sell stuff, to grow, to promote stuff. And so Grant was promoting the 10x Grow Con and had all these people kind of talking about how great it was. And again, only 4 hours watch. This might be one of them, the worst videos of recent memory on Grant's channel. He lost a subscriber because of it, only had 4 hours watch time, and he had a bunch of these. So if you go to his channel around the time of this conference, there's maybe 15 of these different videos of people just talking about how great the 10X Growth Con was, and that hurt his channel. But there's a reason for it, right? He's trying to promote his conference, the 10X Growth Con, and it's okay to use your channel to promote something that helps your business objectives. And so yes, he's, he's knowingly taking a hit on his YouTube growth, losing a subscriber because of this one, hurting his future videos because of the poor watch time, but it's helping him generate sales and awareness and attention for his growth conference. So it's okay to have some videos that hurt the channel if it leads to another strategically important decision for your company. So here's another quick one. Again, Negative 1, he lost a subscriber because of it. Only 10 hours watch time. This whole series of videos is going to hurt the channel. Now, if you put out some great quality content afterwards, you'll start to raise the average, start to get more promotion awareness as well. But I love getting that momentum of positive video growth. The last thing I want to talk about is Grant's live stuff. So this is a recent one that Grant did, uh, Grant interviews a job candidate, live footage. So 141 days watch time, 32 subs driven. This is a good video. And it's just Grant sitting there talking to a guy who's doing a job interview. The camera is shaky. It's handheld. There's not a lot of production quality kind of thinking that went into it. Just Grant doing his thing, which Grant is amazing at. If we go back to another video on his channel, this is a recent one also from May, 86,000 views, 511 days of watch time. and 221 subs driven. So again, this is just this guy on a tripod or just holding a camera, seeing Grant do his thing live, right? If I go back, this is from May 21st. Let's find some other May 21st videos. So this one, which, which did well, this is Grant ranting with just him and a camera, right? May 21st also, but only 13 subscriptions driven. May 21st, this one was May 21st, zero subs, only 5 days. Right, May 21st, minus 1 subs, 11 days. Fast forward, May 21st, 39 days, 2 subs for the G&E Show. May 19th, 4 hours, minus 1 subs, the GrowthCon we looked at. And then here, 32 subs driven, 141 days of watch time on May 21st, just following Grant around. 511 days, 221 subs driven, same day, May 21st, just following Grant around. Like, Grant should— if, if his only goal was, I want to get watch time, I want to get views, I want to drive my YouTube channel to the moon, then he should just do a vlog and have people follow him around and watch him do his stuff live, because that would— that's what he is amazing at. If we go to his channel and look at all the videos that he has, the most popular video of all time that he has is this, doing an actual live sales call, sales training, 4 years ago, 1.4 million views. Let's check out the stats on this video. Look at this. It drove 8,339 subscribers to his channel. This is the kind of stuff that Grant needs to do more of. So if I was in charge of Grant's channel, if I was in charge of advising him on his YouTube strategy, that's what I would focus on. I'd say less set pieces. I'd say less short 1-minute clips immediately after a full-length clip. I'd say go in harder on the videos where you can bring on guests. And have a great time with them and do more live stuff of following you around. Not the setup, not the official camera crew. You live, people following you around doing something that Grant Cardone does. I think that's where you're going to get the highest leverage from your channel. So that's my quick take on Grant Cardone's channel. I'm a big fan of the hustle and the upload frequency. He's doing a great job on that and is set for his channel to explode if he makes a couple minor tweaks that will really help him. Let me get into some questions that you guys had from last month's video and see what you have that I can maybe help you out with. All right, first up, Dude What 212. There is no guarantee that YouTube will exist 60 years from now, let alone forever. Who cares about 60 years from now? I— how old am I? I just turned 37. I'm gonna be 97 in 60 years. Who cares what's happening in 60 years? I don't care about what's happening right now. That's what it's all about. I'm not addicted to YouTube. I want to help a billion entrepreneurs. And wherever the entrepreneurs are, that's where I want to be. I never wanted to be YouTube famous, and my initial goal starting this wasn't to have a million subscribers, it's to help a billion entrepreneurs, however that happens. And so if YouTube in 2 years isn't as popular anymore and everybody's moving to Instagram or Snapchat or whatever the newest thing is that everybody's on, then that's where I'm going to be, and that's where you should be too. Don't hold on to the platforms like MySpace and all the other ones that go under. You could have made a serious amount of money, had a serious amount of impact on MySpace in the day, but if you stick there, then you're not going to be successful. So you have to be where the attention is. If your customers are there, where your audience is, you need to be. That's marketing 101. Be where your customers are. So right now, that's YouTube. This video will help people who are trying to get whatever their YouTube goal is, your subscription goals are. Pay attention to the series, upload frequently, Do the data to understand that this series is working and this one isn't, and you'll have success. Next, Starlight. Create 1 million Google accounts, subscribe your desired channel, and ta-da. That is a way to get YouTube subscribers to get to 1 million. You can also buy them if you want. This is talking about legit ways, though, to get to 1 million subscribers. I don't buy my subs. Next, Ryan. Watch out for Valuetainment. He has quality content. I'm a fan. I'm a fan of Patrick Bet-David. He's got some great content for entrepreneurs. Maybe I'll do a breakdown of his channel at some point. Patrick's been on my channel, I've been on his. It's a great collaboration, and I'm supporting anybody who wants to help entrepreneurs. I don't think there's enough quality people who are trying to help entrepreneurs on YouTube. So it's been amazing to see the work that Patrick's put out, and I would love for him to hit a million subs as well. It means that entrepreneurs are being helped. Next, RC Spark Studio. YouTube is going to pummel you guys because your views are small. You're taking lots of YouTube real estate, producing no views. Subs mean nothing to YouTube if they're not watching your films. Watch time, bro, watch time. Yes, I agree, dude. That's why we're talking about watch time. It's not just about subs, but it's definitely not about views. Don't pay attention to views at all. You're looking at the wrong metric, dude. I generate 42 million minutes in watch time per month, which for a channel of my size sub-wise, that's really good. I'm hitting above my belt. Views don't matter. Watch time does. So in this entire series of how do we break down what a good series looks like, right, it's watch time and subs driven. That's how I analyze if a series is good or not, and that's how you should too. 1% Better: I suspect Valuetainment will be catching you guys soon. It's a lot of love for Patrick in the series. I'm a fan and I look forward to doing a breakdown. Utopia: I don't agree with your strategy, Evan. There are tens of channels with 1 million subs and almost none of them have 3,800 videos as you have. 'Evan PewDiePie, the king of YouTube, has less videos than you but almost 55 million subs.' So what? It's not my strategy, it's what YouTube wants. You can win. So first of all, PewDiePie started at an earlier time where what they cared about most was views, so it was a different algorithm. But PewDiePie could win even harder if he produced more content, right? Look at PewDiePie's channel recently and look at how many times he's complained about the YouTube algorithm. He's complaining instead of adjusting. And so while he still may be number one and he still produces content that his channel and his audience enjoys, he's fighting the YouTube algorithm instead of going with it. And what I'm saying is you could do that, you could still have success, it's just not efficient. If you can produce quality content and play to the algorithm that you're dealing with, you're just going to win harder. PewDiePie could be winning much harder instead of complaining about the algorithm you'd be having a lot more success. So sure, you don't need to have 3,800 videos. There's a lot of people can get there a lot faster than me. But if you're producing quality content and you're producing it more regularly, you will win harder, period. Next up, VCG Construction. As a new creator, do you think going live could help us get viewers to our channel? Live is a strange thing. Live has its own algorithm. I used to go live all the time. I used to have 5 to 8 live things a week. Usually all on a Thursday, kind of condensed back to back. This is where I had to cut a lot of the live stuff out of my channel because it was a video series that attracted a lot of attention immediately, right? So if you're online and you do live, people will come and flood to your channel, but it was causing negative subscriber growth. So a lot of people had on for the live interviews, they didn't pull as well. People didn't know who they were, maybe they didn't like their advice. And so because of that, I lost subscribers. Not significant, not like losing hundreds of subs each time, but I don't want to put the effort into making a video and having guests on and booking them and then it leading to my channel getting smaller, right? That's a problem. Unless again, that person serves a strategic reason, right? We have a relationship, it's leading to something else outside of business. I just want to do good by them. Whatever it is, there's a reason that I know I'm going to hurt my channel for. And so if you do live videos and they don't do extremely well, then it's going to hurt your channel. And so a lot of people aren't great at going live, and so I'd really think about it. Um, I would try it and see, but again, if after 3 to 4 episodes you're finding that it's not leading to subscriber growth and it's hurting your channel, then I would cut it or work on getting better, right? There's a lot of series on my channel that I could cut, but I want to work on getting better. It's part of my growth, and so I'm okay holding back the growth of my channel on some series for my own personal development. So there's a strategic reason for doing it. That's all. Alexander, I personally get more value from your channel, Evan. Gary's channel has become much more fancy, like an action movie. It looks like a TV series about an entrepreneur. Yours has less drive and motion, but in terms of practical info and value, much better. I know the thumbnail has like me against Gary or me against Grant. It's not meant to say that my channel is any better or worse, right? You'll get different things from Gary, you'll get different things from Grant, get different things from me. It's awesome. We all serve our own niche. I'm a fan of what Gary does. I watch pretty much all of his episodes. I love the support. The idea here isn't to bash Gary or bash Grant. It's to look at what they're doing on YouTube, compare it to what I'm doing for me to learn and also for me to give you guys lessons for you to help you in your growth for YouTube. But I don't want to get into like whose channel is better. There's a lot of love for Patrick Bet-David too in the chat. I love it. But I don't want to get into whose channel is better and why. It's not the point of this. I want to help you build your channel and build your business. Next up is Explore List. Just stumbled across your channel and watching this video with interest. You're obviously focused your energy on building a large number of subscribers, but should it not be on the number of views you're getting? I'm not a Gary Vee fanboy, but his video views appear to be considerably higher, and I was wondering why you were focusing on number of subscribers compared with getting more views on your videos. So we've talked about this a little bit, and again, me versus Gary is not something I really want to get into, but our strategies, our tactics, super interested because maybe I can learn something as well. Looking at Gary's stuff, it's— he saw his big growth when he went from 1 video a day to 2 a day, even from like 1 or 2 a week to once a day to 2 a day. That's where he starts seeing the massive growth. That's why he's catching up and going to pass me on YouTube for subscribers. Uh, if I'm looking at, um, the metrics though, I don't care about views. We've talked about this already. When I'm looking at how to evaluate a series, you look at watch time and you look at subscriptions driven. The difference between my content and Gary's content, a lot of Gary's stuff hits with fire immediately and then fades. Most of his daily vlog content, whether you're a fan— like, some people don't like the action motion, some people love it and they get inspired and that's what motivates them to want to do more work— whether you like it or not, if you're following somebody's vlog, typically it's a rabid fan base who watch every episode, but they don't go back. GaryVee episode, you know, 30, whatever his vlog was, most people aren't going to be watching that. So you'll see huge spikes, you get lots of views, and then it crashes. Where a lot of my videos are geared for long-term consumption, and so the initial views don't necessarily take off. My videos are also a lot longer typically than what Gary's putting out, and so my watch time versus Gary's— I would put us, I would put us up against each other. I'd love to see what Gary's watch time is. I would say that I get more watch time than Gary. I think I get more views than Gary. Let's check it out. You know what, let's check it out right now. Let's go to Social Blade Live. So this is a cool tool here. You have the option to compare modeling the master. That's me, Gary Vaynerchuk. Let's compare. So subs, I'm still ahead, but he's closing the gap. He's getting there. I'm, I'm red, right? He's getting there. He's what, 20,000 subs behind at the moment? He's getting there. Let's see what our— let's see what our— so subs per day, look at that, he's had one crazy day where he grew. We're still kind of close, but net he's beating me a little bit. It's close. Views, I don't know what happened there. So we have averages, so I get 189,000 daily views, he gets 145,000 daily views. 1,100 daily subs. So I'm, so I'm ahead of Gary on daily views. So it's not surprising. So you're looking at views as a metric, but you're only looking at short-term immediate views when a video launches, where a lot of my stuff takes time to build up. I build evergreen content I think is relevant and valuable forever, and a lot of Gary's stuff is super timely. So it's not right or wrong, everybody has their approach. And Gary, as I said, has passed me on subscribers, but I'm ahead of him on views. Wesley, love this series, can't wait for the next month's episode. Thank you for the love, Wesley. Hey, if there's somebody you want me to compare my channel to— and, and not again, it's the comparison is not to say who's better than who, it's to look at what that other person is doing, give some recommendations and advice, and through that process you guys can learn as well to help build your channel. So there's something you want me to do next, the breakdown comparison, let me know in the comments and I might just do it. Next up, Black Conservative Media. Thank you for this video. Does an intro help with your YouTube page? Also, what inspired you to start your page? Thanks. This goes against what most people say, the YouTube experts. An intro video does very little for your channel. Uh, I'm not a fan of having intro videos. I think the best thing that you can do, and you can test it, test it one day against another. A lot of people put a lot of effort into making an intro video. First off, most people don't go to your homepage and watch a video there, but even the ones that do, what I wanna hit them with is the video that will lead to the most subscriber growth. And so I think, and I've tested, having a video at the front, so you can go in your analytics and look at all the videos that you have, look at what video leads to the most subscriber growth. So for me, it's one of my top 10s, it's between Steve Jobs and Tony Robbins or one of the top 10s. I'll put that video as the one that I want to put because it leads to the most subscriber growth. The whole idea of you need to tell the person, tell the audience how many videos you're going to put and what your schedule is like and all this stuff— people don't care. I could tell you what my schedule is. Most people don't care. Most people don't remember. Most people don't plan their schedule according to one YouTuber's schedule. There may be one that you just really absolutely love and you're a hardcore diehard fan of, But for the most part, people don't care what your schedule is, so don't tell them. Just make awesome stuff as often as you can. And the intro video on your channel should not be a welcome video. It should be the video that converts the highest. If your goal is YouTube subscribers, the video that is on the homepage of your channel should be the one that converts the highest. And you know what that is by just looking at your analytics. I think it's the best way to go. Next up, Sohail. Hi Evan, I thought— I don't think it's a YouTube algorithm that has anything to do With number of subscribers, algorithm can directly help your video to be ranked higher in search, but only indirectly can help with number of subscribers just by making more people to watch your videos and therefore get interested in at least one and then subscribe. That is mostly true, and that's what I'm talking about too. The whole point of the algorithm is to get your video showing up, to get your video being recommended to people, your subscribers and non-subscribers, so that you get watch time, so that you get attention, you get views, you get comments, you get engagement. If your video shows up, you're going to get more subscribers. That's the YouTube algorithm that we're talking about. Now, the part that you're missing that I haven't really talked about either on this series is there's a thing called view velocity. And so when you first put out a video on your channel, that's not a live video, you just launch a video. How quickly that video gets watch time is really, really, really important. If the video starts getting watch time really quickly, YouTube will promote it more. If it's not getting watch time very quickly, then it's going to promote it less. And so that's where your subscribers can really help you because if you have a big subscriber base and they watch a new video that you put up really quickly, it'll help the view velocity, which helps get ranked in the algorithm, which will help new people find your videos as well. So there you go. Next up is Nick. Great video. I'm taking this message to heart. I recently launched my YouTube channel for therapy and I'm uploading approximately 5 videos a week. I love that. "My goal is to post daily as a brand new channel. My question is, how do you deal with not getting views? Should I not even look at the numbers and just keep posting on a consistent basis? I want to make sure I'm not missing anything. Thank you in advance, Nick." So Nick, when you're first starting up, you can't get super attached to it. You also don't have enough data to really make important decisions. When I'm breaking down Grant's videos, there's enough data to work with. He has 200-something thousand subscribers. He's making consistent content. He's done a lot of videos in a series, so we can see, okay, here's how much an average Grant video will do, here's how much this series is doing. You can see, is it better or worse? Is it worth continuing this series or not? If a video has Grant in it, it does better. If a video doesn't have Grant in it, it doesn't do as well. If Grant is allowed to be live and crazy and do his thing, it does better. If it's staged and performed and structured, it doesn't do as well, right? So you can start to outline trends and has enough data to make a decision. When you're first getting started, you don't have enough data to make a decision. And so all I would focus on right now is just getting better. Listen, at the start of a YouTube channel, you're going to suck anyway. Your videos aren't going to be great. You may be a great therapist, you may know your craft inside out. That doesn't mean you're great on camera. It doesn't mean you're great at making videos. Doesn't mean your editing is amazing. You know, I'm sure there's a lot of repetition. I'm sure there's some nervousness still coming out. There's a lot that could be better. And so I would focus in the early days more on just making better videos. I'm a firm believer that the quantity leads to the quality, and now is the time to experiment, to try to hone your skills, to improve, and not get so attached to how many views one video gets or how many comments one video gets. At the start of my thing, my channel wasn't getting any comments, zero. So the fact that you have one or two comments coming in on a video, if that happens, that's, that's amazing. But one video may spike for the wrong reason, right? Maybe you put some keyword in there and that takes off and you think you did a great job, but you didn't. You know, really, right now I would not pay attention to the numbers. If you're only doing this to get numbers, then you're in it for the wrong reasons. Focus on building your skills, honing your craft, and get better. Otherwise the numbers are going to keep pulling you down, man. You look at that every day, you're gonna you're going to want to— you're going to be depressed. Next up is Sue. I love that you say we have to get better. We, not the camera, not the lighting. I could, okay, I will be honest, I've spent hours researching lights and so on when I realized that this is just a very nasty way of resisting moving forward because I'm just scared. Sue, that's some amazing self-awareness. Listen, we all want shortcuts. We all want shortcuts. So the last question, you know, about Nick, like, He wants to grow his channel too. We want shortcuts. And so if you think it's easy to go out and buy lights, right? It's easy to spend whatever it is, $10, $30, couple hundred dollars on some lights. It's easy to think if I get a better camera, then things will be better. But at the end of the day, if you're making this kind of video, a talking head video, you're an expert. You know, Sue, I don't know what you're doing. You're negotiation angels. So, you know, if you're a negotiator and you're making expert quality content, Look at Grant's stuff. Grant has budget, Grant has a team, right? There's people behind those professional cameras. There's sets, right, that he's invested into building up a set. There's structure, he's paying people to do this with him. And his best stuff is Grant on a phone going on a rant or showing something, or somebody following Grant around with the jerky camera while he's explaining something or doing something in a job interview or in a sales call, right? That's his best stuff because Grant has talent, Grant has skills. And so if you have the skills at what you do, then you can rise to go to the top. And so it's really important that you focus on that. It's hard work. You have to make a lot of videos. You got to practice like anything else. You know, if you're a negotiator, you didn't just come out of the womb as a great negotiator, right? You had to practice, you had to improve, you had to learn, you had to train. Apply that same approach. It's slow, it's frustrating, it's painful, it sucks. I'd love to say buy this $100 lights and you're set and your videos will all be amazing forever, but that's not the shortcut. And if you understand that, if you work on your craft and get better at it daily and you keep working on it, your videos will get better. Udoka, please comment on how someone who works another job or is running a business can fit a decent YouTube following into the schedule. It's It takes me half a day to record a short video and another 3 hours to edit it. Even with the simplest edits, I don't have time to produce videos to post multiple times a week and edit them down and all that. Is there any hope? Should I even bother until I'm able to spend more time on this? You just practice. When I made my first videos, it took me more than a day to make, of just me talking head, like me with a camera. That's it. Because I made mistakes, because I was nervous, because I was scared, because I sucked and I wanted to do it again, and I was trying to memorize the script and I forgot. I started to take take and take and take and take, right? So hundreds of times to do one video. And now when I get to the studio, we'll record 60 videos, 70 videos in a day. The more you practice something, the better you're going to get. So depending on what it is that you're doing, it won't take you half a day as you get better at it to film the video. It may not take you 3 hours to edit something as you get better at it. So practice, practice, so you can get that half a day video down to 30 minutes. Get better. And as you build up, you can start to look at, okay, if I don't want to, you know, if my best talents are in front of the camera, I need to get an editor. That's what helped me move from a video a week to a video a day is I got an editor. You can get part-time people, full-time people. You don't need to go full-time at the start though. I love Upwork. It's a website to find people around the world who are talented, who have a passion for what you're doing, who want to work from home. And I have 2.5 full-time editors on Upwork and I send the files by Dropbox and that's how I do it. So if this is your dream, don't give up. And it's frustrating and it's slow because you know what a good video looks like and you know that your quantity needs to be better, but like anything else, at the start of anything else, expect to suck at the beginning. If you're gonna learn taekwondo, you can look at Taekwondo Masters and say, "These guys are great." Just because they're great doesn't mean that you need to quit. Just practice, get better. You'll pick up the moves faster. And then as you grow, you can surround yourself with a team to help you pick up the pace even more. Piercy111, yeah, but Gary has someone else film and edit all his videos. This is why he can post 4 or more a day. Also, some of his videos are only 1 or 2 minutes long, which are just cuts from some of the longer videos. Sure, Gary has an advantage. I have an advantage. I have, I have people on my team. We've got 8 people on my YouTube team. That allows me to post 3 times a day. So you can't get the 3 times a day or even once a day right away, but plan for it. That's where you need to get to. That's the standard right now. That's where you want to be if you want to win with the YouTube algorithm. So you're not there yet, just like anything else, right? If you want to get that car, you want to have those savings, and you want to have this level of customer growth, you want to develop this website, create this product, whatever it is, you have a goal. Work towards it. You start where you are with what you have. That's every successful person's story. If all you look at is someone who— like Gary or me— who has 700,000 subscribers and think that you can compete at that level right now, you're going to be depressed. You can't compare your start to somebody else's middle. Look at how we started and you'll see, you'll see the growth. And that's what you need to do for yourself. The 1 or 2-minute clips, they don't always work. Look at Grant's channel, right? We did a breakdown. The 1 or 2-minute clips from his channel are hurting his channel. He's getting some subscriber growth from it, but it's getting not great watch time. And if he keeps doing it, it's going to hurt his future videos that are coming out. So it's not that it's a great strategy to do. Next up, Professor Nez. I like your points, Evan, but I actually felt Gary was overkill when he exaggerated his uploads. I actually unsubscribed to him. It was overbearing. Shouldn't there be some kind of balance? Don't you think quality affects the quality and that your audience will be fatigued by upload overload? Thank you. Professor Nez, I hear you, man. Some people will unsubscribe, but he's, he's winning. The data shows otherwise. For every you who's saying I don't like that, I don't, I don't— listen, I'm not a huge fan of the DailyVee series. I much prefer his AskGaryVee Show. I learned a lot more from that. I don't need to see Gary hustling for me to want to hustle harder. I don't get as much education from the DailyVee stuff. I'm not, I'm not as big a fan of that as I am of the show. I didn't unsubscribe to him and you did, but he's winning. People love that stuff. For every one of you, there's 10 people who want more of the stuff. So you have to pay attention to the series. This entire video that I broke down Grant's stuff, It's the same thing. He's posting a lot of content, and if he pays attention to the series and what's doing well and what's not and cut, cut out the weak ones and replace them with better ones, he's gonna win even harder. And so I hear you, but there's always room for quality, and I think you should cannibalize yourself first. Don't let somebody else take your audience away. Cannibalize yourself. So if you can produce quality stuff Go and do it. And some people you will lose, some people will complain. I'm sure some people complain on Gary's channel that he was producing too much. People have unsubscribed from me for producing too much content and the stuff I was making wasn't hitting them enough. It wasn't good enough. I didn't provide them enough value for them to want to stick around. Maybe they came for one series and now that's only a third of the videos that I put out. They don't like my other stuff. And so it makes sense. They're going to unsubscribe, but net I'm winning, I'm getting more. So just pay attention to your data. Gary's data shows that he's winning. So it's sad to lose someone like you, but it's worth it. Carl Simmons, I'm not sure if you mentioned this before, and I'm watching a YouTube series at some point, but how large is your team? So I have 8 people on my team, mix of editing, researching. I've got a guy comes in and films me. It doesn't really matter though, like how big my team is now, what gear I use now, like it doesn't matter. Start with what you have. You can have, think about what you're great at. If you're looking at building a team, what are you amazing at? What's the best thing that you want to focus most of your time at? And then bring people on who can help support that. The first hire for me was a part-time editor. It allowed me to go from one video a week to one a day, but from a part-time editor, cuz it took me so long editing and I didn't want to be an editor. I had no ambition to get better at it. I didn't want to learn the skills to improve myself at it. I wanted to be in front of the camera. And so hiring an editor helped me improve. And that was— that let me do one video a day. It was me and an editor. It's great context, I guess, to understand where the people are at. But if you're just comparing yourself, it's a challenge, right? Like I said before, if you compare your beginning to somebody else's middle, you're going to lose. Next up is Nick. Great stuff, Evan. Value, value, value. In response to Andy's comment, if animations are amazing, and also add massive amounts of value. There are channels like Kurzgesagt— In a Nutshell that upload once a month. They only have 59 videos but have over 3 million subs. So content like that would be a great fit for him if he has the ability and time to compete. For the rest of us, we definitely need to upload more. No, this guy needs to upload more. Once a month is not enough. More. You can do it. Find a way. Create more. Okay, let's compare. Let's see. Let's find I'm going to share my screen. I've never heard of it. Kurt Segatz in a nutshell. Here we go, let's compare. So this guy has 4 million subscribers. I have 698, so he's crushing me on the subscribers. He started later than I did as well. I'm half his daily subs almost and more than half his daily views. Look at that, I've got 189,000 daily views. He's at 329. And he's got 4 million subscribers to my 700,000. This is what happens when you don't promote enough content. He's winning, but he could win harder if he produced more content. He's losing the YouTube algorithm game, and that may not be what he wants to do, but he's going on the slow streets. He's riding, uh, horse and buggy. That's what he's doing. Or I want him to ride a Ferrari by doing more. He's fighting against the YouTube algorithm and he's winning because his content is so good. I haven't checked it out, but to get 4 million subscribers, you're doing something right. But he could be winning harder if he had better strategies. So do more, do more. Come on, Kurtz, Kurtz, gesagt, you got to do more. You can. And part of that is, for me, I believe if you have the ability to change the world, if you have the ability to help, then you have the responsibility to do as well. A lot of the people with— I just came back from ClamourCon— a lot of these people with bigger channels, they're doing okay, but they could be doing more. They could be having a bigger impact. They could be making a bigger reach. They're not working as hard as they could, and their stuff means something to people. So if you have the ability to change the world, you have the ability to have an impact on people's lives, and you have the responsibility to do more. And so he's gonna— this guy's gonna get crushed by somebody who understands the YouTube algorithm better and produces inferior quality content. That upsets me. Next up is Leo. Cheers, Evan. I learned a good lesson, but I must add, neither Gary can be you nor you can be him, and the game is to beat yourself at this game. 100%. 100%. Your goal is to be the best version of you, but you can learn from other people to help become the best version of you, and especially learn from their strategies. The fastest way to get somewhere is to look at who's already gone there and learn from them. So if you want to have YouTube success, go look at the people who've had YouTube success and model them to help you get there faster. And that's the point of the series. I'm trying to share with you guys the strategies that I've used to help me, as well as learning from other people and giving advice on what I would do differently or why they're winning so much. Nikolai, Master Evan, I think one of the reasons why the live streams don't get as much as the replays are the topics to be covered, notifications, alerts, reminders when the live stream starts, and probably timing on YouTube's heavy viewership traffic. It's a different algorithm. The reasons why live streams don't do as well is it's a different algorithm. What YouTube does is they promote a live stream really heavily when it first comes out. It'll show up on the right-hand side for the for the suggested videos, related videos. It'll, it'll send notifications to people who've signed up to be a subscriber on your channel. You can— there's options in the back end to have it featured when you go live across all your videos, and that will help drive a lot of people immediately to your video. But once it's done, once it's finished, YouTube doesn't promote it as well as the other videos. They just don't. It's a different algorithm. That's why. It sucks because I love doing live stuff, but, uh, unless you have really, really good guests, it's going to hurt your channel. Relaxing Sleep Station, what do you think about reducing your quantity to focus more on the quality of the videos? Both. Do both. Quantity plus quality. The quantity leads to the quality. Doing more quantity improves your skills to get better for the quality. At the end of the day, it's quality. That's what's going to matter. If you produce 100 videos a day and they're all crap, nobody's going to watch or subscribe or comment or share. You get zero watch time. You need good stuff, but more good stuff. And I want you to win the YouTube algorithm and produce more high-quality stuff. Do both, get better, move faster, practice, practice, practice. Young Caesar, Evan, you're winning. You approach us calmly and firm instead of too hyper. And I came across Gary too hyper. You're calm and welcoming. Keep it up. There's lots of people who, who love the hyper and would much rather watch Gary than me. It's okay. You got to go all in on you. Again, our styles are not what's in question. I'm looking at the tactics that he's used on his channel to pull out things that you could learn from, and maybe me too. Next up, Sukhum. Hey Evan, my first time ever commenting on your channel and I'm loving the message and value you bring. That's awesome, man. Welcome aboard. I actually started vlogging a week ago and put out content once a day to a challenge. The last 3 days I posted 2 videos a day and I'm seeing more people are checking out my channel and more engagement. Thanks for the tips and keep up the great work. First of all, I love it. Why I'm shaking my head is the amount of people who will look at and who are commenting that this strategy doesn't work, but then actually don't go out and try it. Like, just try it. Here's a guy who's vlogging and he goes 2 a day and he's getting more results. It's not a strategy. It just works. It's what YouTube wants right now. It's their algorithm. It works. So do it. Or if you can't do it, you know that you're not playing to the algorithm and you made that strategic decision for whatever reason. But it's not, this is my opinion. The people who are commenting that this is, you know, your opinion and it doesn't work, just try it before saying that something doesn't work. You have to try it and actually see. So Sukum, first of all, congrats on the new vlog. It's awesome. And it's great that you tried it and it's great that you're getting results. All right. There's a lot more comments, but I think I'm going to end it there. That was a lot of Q&A, more than I expected. Expected, but I had fun doing it. So guys, thank you so much for watching. Let me know what questions you have to help you build your YouTube channel. You have a question for me, leave it down in the comments below. I'll try to answer it next time. I did a lot of Q&A this time, so hopefully we'll get to more next time. Remember, you need lots of videos. The quantity leads to the quality, but you need lots of quality videos to win YouTube's algorithm game now. And pay attention to the series. Pay attention to which videos are doing well. Pay attention to the watch time. Pay attention to the subscribers gained and lost. And kill the series that are not doing well. Replace them with new ones. Test, try, and see what works. That's going to help you really build your channel up. Until next month, remember, I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.