YOU Can Beat Gary Vee! | Easiest Path to 1 MILLION Subscribers

I have revised my prediction. I'm going to beat Gary Vaynerchuk to 1 million subscribers and maybe even Tai Lopez too. What's up, Believe Nation? It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in people more than they believe in themselves. And my sincere hope is that if you see in you what I see in you, you'll be able to change the planet. Now, I'm a little bit sick today, just recovering from a really bad stretch of constant fever, so I'm excited to be back. And I started this series about how to get to 1 million subscribers to document my journey along the way. I think I started this series when I had about 550,000 subscribers. Uh, last video I had 775 subscribers, and now we're well over 800. And the goal was really to kind of show you what I'm doing to build my channel, how to get 40,000 to 50,000 subscribers a month and grow and try to build a million subscriber channel. and you guys could hopefully learn through that process as well if your goal is to build a successful YouTube channel. So today I'm going to compare my channel again to Gary Vaynerchuk and now also to Tai Lopez. A little bit of background: Gary's a friend of the channel, he's interviewed on the channel, I've collaborated with him for a number of years way back before I even had a YouTube channel. I'm sure Gary doesn't really care about who hits 1 million subscribers first, it's just a fun little competition and it's nice having somebody to go head-to-head with. Tai, I don't really know. We did a top 10 on him. I'm not super familiar with his channel, but I'm going to dive into some of the details today and we'll see what we can uncover. Okay, so back in April, I made a video saying that Gary Vaynerchuk was going to pass me on YouTube and I'd have to make a video in a few months to say, "Gary V passed me." And now he's going to pass me. You look at the curve, he's catching up and he's on the path to beat me. And so I'm gonna be making a video in a couple months saying Gary's ahead of me and I'm now not the number one channel for entrepreneurs out there in the world. And I got up my game, it's great. Well, fast forward to August, he hasn't passed me yet and I don't think it's gonna happen anytime soon. Let me show you why. Okay, so here's a comparison of my channel versus Gary Vaynerchuk on Social Blade. And if we go down to look at the head-by-head comparison, as you can see at the very start, so I'm the red line, he's the blue line. If this goes even before, Gary had a bigger audience than I did, and then I passed by him, and then there's this huge gap that started to open up, right? Huge gap of what, about 100,000 or so? What do we add here? Let's look at this. I was 424, he's 334. So, you know, 90,000 subscribers, huge gap, big gap, big gap. And then he starts to post 2 videos a day, 3 videos a day, and he starts catching up. He starts closing that gap, closing that gap, closing that gap, to the point here, which is what, June? So I said in April that in a couple months that he would pass me. It's pretty close. In June, he's 6,000 behind, 5,000 behind, 6,000 behind. He's really narrowing that gap. 5,000 behind. He got within 5,000, and now look what's happening. The gap is getting bigger again to the point where now, as of recording this video, he's at 791,000. I'm at 817,000. So that's what, 26,000 gap and getting bigger. More important is like he's kind of leveling off and I'm going up. So there's two main reasons why this is happening and a short-term thing that's negatively impacting Gary's channel that I want to talk to you about. So the first thing I want to look at is the frequency of upload on Gary's channel. One of the main reasons why he was able to catch up to me was because he was making 2 to 3 videos a day and he slowed down. He slowed down. And this is what YouTube wants. YouTube wants people who are making consistent content. Now he slowed down to 1 a day, which isn't that bad, but it's not 2 a day. And there's a big gap between going a couple times a week to once a day, but there's still a gap between 1 and 2 a day and Gary is falling down right now. Now maybe it's a summer thing, maybe there's another reason for doing it, maybe there's people on his team that are shuffling around, but if we look at how many videos are a week old, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. 7 videos last week. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. 7 videos the week before. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. 7, 8 videos the week before. He's down to a video a day, and that's still really, really good with YouTube's algorithm, but it's not 2 a day, and so it's going to slow his growth compared to someone who's making more consistent content. Reason number 2 is what I said back in April about me needing to up my game. It's really, really important to look at your YouTube channel and every individual series and if they are performing for you or not. So as an example, if I pull up Gary's channel, he's got a lot of different series, right? He's got his #AskGaryVee call-in show or however he's doing it. Episode 259, Episode 261, Episode 260. He's got his Daily Vs that happen on a consistent basis. There's a daily vlog show. So I know it was 5 times a week typically. He has his fireside chats. He's got random interviews that happen. And so he's got this mishmash of different series, and what's really important to look at— are these series performing for you or not? I want to show you something I've never shown people before. This is how I run my YouTube channel. This is real data with the names of the series removed. And so what's really important here is looking for us at two key metrics: watch time and subscribers. Every series that we put out is measured according to watch time and subscribers. Watch time because that's what YouTube really cares about. If you are generating a lot of watch time on your videos, you're going to get more attention from YouTube. And subscribers because I want my, my series to benefit the channel. Not that my channel has lots of watch time, but I want subscribers to be coming to it. So this is one series. This is another series. This is another series. This is another series. This is another series. And every month we look at the data to see how it's going. And I only look at the data for that month because a video that did well really long time ago, our Steve Jobs top 10 rules of success, 4 million views, I don't want that corrupting kind of my new data. I want to know that my top 10 series is still performing well, that if I put out a new top 10, it's still performing well, and that we're not just relying on the old stuff. And so as an example, this is a series that we're looking at today here. This is it. This is the, the path to 1 million. So, Mark, in our first video against Eric Thomas, it generated 13,000 minutes of watch time and 8 subscribers in the month. Now, since that month, it's probably generated a little bit more for us, but again, in that one month. The second one was Gary Vee. That one did better, 55,000 watch time, 59 new subscribers. The next one was Grant Cardone, 27,000 watch time, 13 new subscribers. And then the most recent one that we did before this, we don't have full data on yet, so it's not in here, but that's how well the series does. So I know if I'm putting out a video, okay, it's going to generate, you know, between 13 and 55,000 minutes of watch time. It's going to give me between 8 and 59 new subscribers. And you know, I want to think, okay, if that's going to be a daily series, if I was doing this more than once a month, I'd have to optimize that because that— these numbers are not good compared to some of these other numbers, right? If a series here is generating 285 minutes of watch time and this one only is 27,000, I'm thinking I don't want to keep this anymore, or I need to make this better. And so the things that's really helped my channel recently is one, looking at underperforming series and canceling them. So, you know, you see blank spots here because those are canceled series that we destroyed. All of these blank spots were canceled series that we destroyed. So we have lots of data for all these ones 'cause we kept them. And this one was a relatively new one and all these other ones have been canceled. So if it's underperforming, it goes. Some of these are new tests. So these are bubble series. When, when I say on the video that, I'm not sure if we're gonna keep this series or not. It's legit, it's true, we may not keep it or not. You know, right now, whatever series this is, to generate 37,000 minutes of watch time and only 2 new subscribers, that's not cutting it for us. So in our test series, we'll do 3, I'll do 3 versions of something. We'll see if we get enough data on it, see if we can move that number up, and if we can, we keep it, and if we don't, we kill it. So why has my channel grown recently? Is attributable to the new spike. Let me show you on this side here. So one was killing off the bad series. Two, this, when it's purple like that, that represents the best series for subscriber growth in the month. So you can see the dates here. So from, you know, June to July as an example, this series, this series, and these three series all led to the highest subscriber growth. Look at this series here. This series had a history of underperforming. 8,000, 12,000, 9,000, 9,000. Highest 22, not bad. Boom. 77,000 minutes of watch time subscribers. You know, 23-221-36 subscribers. This is per video. So 36 new subscribers for every video in this series that I'm doing. Now, if this is a once a month series, that's not that big a deal. If that's a once a day series, that's a much bigger deal. You know, like our top 10 series comes out 5 times a week. If I could do 5 times 36, that's a good number, right? So this series did really well. And so what we were doing is looking at this series, okay, how do we tweak it? How do we make it better? How do we improve it? Because we're looking at watch time and subscriber growth. We made a few changes, bam, big growth. Same thing with this series here, 55,000 minutes of watch time. That's a decent series, you know, 9 subscribers per video in the first month, decent series. But look what happened. We made some tweaks and changes from 55 to 448. From 9 subscribers to 378 per video that we put up in that series. This one also had a big jump, 95,000 to 190,000, average doubling the watch minutes per video and, and more than doubling the subscribers. So it might be kind of a confusing graph to look at, and I don't blame you. And YouTube doesn't really give you those tools built in. We have to kind of make custom reports and sift through the data, but that's what my team and I look at every single month. We want to make sure that every single series is performing, and if it's not, then there's a reason, right? And I've talked about this on previous series before. If there's a reason to have a video that is going to underperform, that's okay, but you know that there's a reason for it, right? So an example, if you're going to make a sales pitch, if I'm going to come on and sell my book, right? Buy this book, it's the greatest book ever, right? Some of you guys will love that, but it won't be the highest video on my channel and may even lead to negative subscriber growth. That's okay because it's serving a different purpose, right? I'm serving a business purpose. So whenever you do a sales pitch kind of video, you can expect your numbers to tank and for you to even lose some subscribers. That's okay because you're generating some revenue from it, right? But it's the, the other ones that are the killer. It's the ones that you think are helping you grow your channel, but that are actually hurting you, that if you can find ways to either adjust or tweak that series or kill them off, your channel will really start to take off. Now the third thing that's going to hurt Gary in this race that he doesn't know about is that he's going away. He is away right now. He is not making videos and well-deserved family vacation. You know, needs the time off and I applaud that. It becomes a challenge especially for for any of you guys who are vloggers, unless you're vlogging your vacation, and then it might actually be some amazing content, some new content out of your city, but in general it's hard to get time off because the content is so dependent on you and showing your life. The other stuff he could have done in advance, like he could have lined up AskGaryVee 5 shows, filmed them all in one day, and then released them. Over time. What happened last year and what's probably gonna happen this year was just his team did a mishmash of some old stuff, couple-minute clips, put them together that weren't very good. And, uh, as a fan of the channel, fan of Gary's channel, I was like, okay, when's Gary coming back? I want some new stuff. I want the real deal. And maybe his team is much better this year, who knows. He's put a lot more time into building his team, and so we'll see what happens. Actually, let's take a look on his channel 'cause he just recently ran away. Let's see. So this is Gary's channel. So here it is, signing off for a month. Then they showed some ad tech conference he did, great, a keynote, perfect. And then see, this is the stuff that will kill your channel. This 2-minute, 2-minute, at least he's posting consistently, at least it's still going on. But YouTube right now, from an algorithm perspective, does not want to see these short videos. This will kill the channel. These will get some decent views, but will have terrible watch time and will start to drag down the channel. And it's going to make it harder for Gary when he does come back to make it awesome. Now, a lot of people say, so what? August is a slow time. People go away. You know, it's okay for your channel to drop down. August doesn't have to be a slow month. August has been a great month for me so far and was last year too. Let's look at the data. So this is the Social Blade for my account. If I go down to see August, you know, August last year was better than my July and better than my June and was the same as my September and the same as my October almost. Fast forward to August now. Oh, we can't see because it's not done yet, but look, like July, July was my best month ever. July was my best month ever with growth, with, with subscriber growth, with views. And August, I'm recording this August 15th. Look at the August numbers already, last 30 days. So 46,000 subscribers last, last 30 days, and July was 44. So it's already— it's a record month. It's a record month already in August, and, and June was a record month. So it doesn't have to be a slowdown. Remember what happened in July. July was a record month for me despite almost all the videos having terrible sound. You guys killed me for the sound on the videos and Good morning, Believe Nation. My name is Evan Carmichael. My one word is believe, and I believe that entrepreneurs will solve all of the world's major problems. You killed me on the sound, and rightfully so. I have standards. I want to produce good quality stuff for you. That's not acceptable to have really bad sound. But despite having really poor sound, right, which you think would make a worse video, By consistently keeping to what the YouTube algorithm wants and making the 3 videos a day, we had our best month ever. We had the worst sound ever and we had our best month ever. Now we fixed the sound and we're on track for an even better month ever, and it's August. And so it's, it's a tip not just for YouTube, but in business. While your competition is away on vacation and sleeping and taking time off and it's a slow time, That's the time when you hustle. That's the time when you can get to work and do amazing things. I used to hate August and December in general in my business because people wouldn't return phone calls, you couldn't get business done. And I realized this is my time to plan, this is my time to really hustle and grind so that when September does come around, I'm going to be firing on all cylinders. I'm going to be way ahead of everybody else. Now, luckily with YouTube, you can still have an amazing August and and not have to wait for anything. So whenever you see your competition going to sleep, that's your chance to attack and get ahead. So that's what's happened with me versus Gary Vee. Our graphs are starting to go apart. It's gonna get even bigger considering that he's gonna be away for the next little bit. Gary's gonna have to come back and just absolutely destroy and get back to really making 2 videos a day, Gary, if you wanna win. You wanna get to that million first. 2 videos of amazing GaryVee content every single day. When I come back in September, we're gonna come with some real fire on YouTube. So YouTube, get ready. I'm gonna spend this time, me and the team are gonna spend this time to really come back with the 4.0 version of what we're doing here. Alright, let's get to Tai Lopez now. People have been asking about Tai. They wanted my thoughts on his channel, any breakdown, any advice I could offer. So let's look at Tai's channel. Now at the top of the show, I said I might beat Tai Lopez to 1 million subscribers. You go to the Social Blade and you see that he's at 989,000 subscribers. You think, well, how are you going to beat Tai to 1 million when he's already at 989? Tai runs his YouTube channel a lot differently than most people. And so this is why. Let's look down. You look at his Social Blade. He is not really growing. Right, the past week it's been all negative except for today where he's had a little bit of growth. And if you look at the growth history here, this is his views and this is his subs. Tai doesn't get his subscribers from his content. Tai gets his subscribers from his advertising. And so when Tai decides to just produce content, he actually loses subscribers. When Tai decides to advertise a lot, He gains subscribers. And so he obviously has a way to be able to make money from his channel, right? It funnels to his various courses and programs. And I don't know anything about those programs, so I can't recommend them or not, but it's working. You know, he's making money from it, it's working, so he's going to continue doing it. So let's look at the history of his channel. So he's floating around here, he's got 1 million views a month, 1 million views a month, and then boom. What month is this? September 2015, 95.73 million views. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Here in My Garage campaign, right? If you look at the Here in My Garage ad, this is when it was launched. And so he went from, you know, 1 to 95 million views that he bought. So he basically bought 95 million views. Now, if we go down to his subscribers, you see that it led to a nice chunk of new subscribers, right? He's at 59,000, 64,000 subscribers. So he bought a chunk of subscribers, but he wasn't getting that many more subscribers from that video compared to what he had before, you know, to go from 59, 64 down to 20,000. So he, you know, he spent how much money to, to buy 95 million views to get an extra 35,000, 40,000 subscribers. But I guess it worked out for him, right? Everybody has seen that commercial and he was able to funnel them into different advertising courses for himself. What's really interesting is as we fast forward down to here, you look at January 2017, he had this huge surge in subscribers. He jumps to 115,000 new subscribers with almost no huge growth here on his views. He wasn't spending the money on his views up here anymore. So he spent it in different ways. Either it's off-platform spending on Instagram or Facebook ads, or he's looking at pre-roll ads that don't count towards the view count of a video. So it's not really leading to a lot of new views on his channel, but it's leading to a lot of new subscribers for him. And so You can see that once he shuts off his advertising, it just falls back down. So it's really hard to predict what's going to happen. How do you go from a channel that had 115,000 new subscribers in January down to having 400 new subscribers, you know, 6 months later? How do you have a channel that is losing subscribers on most days just from organic video? It's really up to Tai. When Tai wants to spend money on advertising, his channel's going to explode. And when he doesn't, then the channel's going to start to sink. And so it's just a different model than what most YouTubers do. We typically grow through the content that we create, and Tai has found his own unique place to stand that through advertising can build his own little empire off of it. So those are my quick thoughts. Me versus Gary Vee versus Tai Lopez. We'll see who hits 1 million first between the 3 of us. I'm excited. It's all fun anyway. There's no real stakes on the line, but it's nice to see, have a little bit of competition. As we all grow together to try to help the entrepreneur community. Now let me hit up some questions. Let's see what you got from last episode. The most liked comment from last month's video from CMD Ameed Sohail: You don't have million subscribes!!! That's a fantastic point. I'm glad that that's what you took out of the last video. It's really interesting to see what people take away from content. Like, are you the kind of person who finds the truth in things or just finds one little kind of detail to pick out and just be a naysayer all the time? I acknowledge in every series that this is about the path to get into a million subscribers. And also, even, you know, at the point of that last video, How's that 775,000 subscribers? What are you at, CMD Amin Sohail? Zero. Zero subscribers. So someone who is 77.5% along the way to hitting a pretty big goal, maybe there's still something you can learn from them and not just shut down. Next, Z Ghost Blood underscore. Not being a hater, but Grant Cardone say don't get advice from someone who never get it yet. It's the same thing. I think it's the same comment, right? Well, first of all, go watch the Grant Cardone video because Grant Cardone said that everybody should listen to this advice. Grant Cardone said, thanks Evan, great job and great content. Let's do a podcast on this. This is how you add value, folks. Watch what Evan is doing here. All caps, SMART. So Z Ghost Blood underscore, up to you, man. You could focus on the fact that I'm not at a million subscribers yet, or you can actually listen to Grant Cardone because Grant gets it that there's good advice in the videos because it's way ahead of where you're at if this is your goal or not. All right, moving on. Soul Love Lee. "Thank you for not putting any background music on this video." You're welcome. Mihaville: "My prediction for Evan's channel: 1 million subscribers on the 25th of October, 2017." Bam! That's fast. That's fast. Social Blade has me— let me see. So if you go to future projections here, it'll show you when they think you're going to hit it. You go subscriber milestones. Social Blade thinks I'm going to hit a million In 118 days. December 12th, December 11th, December 11th would be an early Christmas present for me, but I would love to be October 25th, Midheville. Let's make that happen. That'd be great. Next up, Practical Psychology. Hey Evan, something I've been thinking about. Instead of 2 to 3 videos a week, or even one video a week. I've been thinking about stockpiling some videos and posting them all in November, December for 50 to 60 videos in a row. Your thoughts? The algorithm could change by then, and I also wouldn't get instant feedback, but daily videos for 60 days on an animation channel with high viewer retention would be some amazing data. I like it. I would only say, like, don't stop doing what you're doing right now. And don't stop it in December. Build the machine. Just think about what do I need to do to make an animation video every single day. You know, I can't make a video myself. When I was doing everything myself, I could do one a week. It's just the editing took way too long and the research took way too long. Get in front of the camera and talking, I could do this kind of video. Every day, but the videos that I wanted to make, I couldn't do every day. So I built a team. So if you're making animation videos, I'll be thinking, what's your key role in it? Are you animating? Are you doing the story behind you? Are you doing the researching? Are you doing the titling? Maybe right now you're doing everything. And start to think, what is the most time-consuming thing that is involved in your channel that you don't want to do, and then find someone to help you do that. As soon as I found an editor for my channel, I was able to go to one video a day. That made the world of difference. So that's what you need to find. Next up, Simarchy. Can uploading daily or even twice daily actually hurt you? Sometimes I wonder if I'm pumping out too much content that my subscribers can't keep up. I currently post one time a day and livestream 1 to 3 times a week. For the record, I'm a gaming channel centered around one franchise, The Sims. I'm debating whether I should take it down or not. From your advice, you're saying I should just— I should double it. Just curious if I can hurt some channels or if it's always better to post more. So it's always better to post more if it's good. That's the tough part. You know, anybody can just throw up 2 videos a day or 3 videos a day. Even when I was posting the videos with poor sound back in July, They were still good, but when I showed you my series, right, in that Excel chart or Google Docs, we kill series all the time. The ones that aren't performing well, we kill. And so be paying really close attention to, is this series that I'm putting out working or not? Other things to keep in mind, don't expect your audience to keep up. Stop worrying about your audience watching every single video. It's not going to happen. I don't care if you guys watch every video on my channel. I don't need you to watch every video on my channel. I don't want you to watch every video on my channel. I want you to watch a video, watch the ones that mean something to you, and then go do something about it. And so it'd be looking at, okay, it does not matter to me if my subscribers watch every video that I have, as long as every video is leading to growth and is successful. The other thing, live stream is its own algorithm. Live stream is a whole different beast. And so what really happens in the live stream is you get a lot of live attention right away, but the replay value is really low. You'll find that the live videos are not watched much after the fact unless you're really promoting them somehow. They don't, they don't live for very long. And so if you're doing one post a day and live streaming 1 to 3 times a week, I wouldn't count the live streams really as, uh, as posts, as videos. I'd be looking at making sure that you're posting one quality video a day, and if you have a live stream, that's a great extra piece of content. I'd make sure the live streams aren't hurting you because the live streams were hurting my channel. If I have a big name that came on my channel, then it would help the channel, but if I had someone who's never been on camera before I had somebody that, you know, people had no idea who they were, it would actually lead to negative subscribers. And so that's why I actually started a second channel, Evan Carmichael Live, for any of the live stuff that isn't with a, a well-known personality. So I would just, again, look at your data, look at your analytics, use the same metrics that I gave you. Watch time per series, subscriber growth per series. If you can look at those videos a day, Are they all the— is it the exact same video each time, or are they— can you have different themes? And then within each theme, which theme is performing well with watch time and subscriber growth, and which themes aren't? Kill off the ones that aren't doing well. And then the live streams too, is it leading to watch time for your channel? Is it leading subscriber growth? So the two most important metrics I'd be looking at— more content that is quality. I would make 5 videos a day. If I could. I just can't. I can't make it quality. I could throw up 5 videos a day. I would lose a bunch of people because the 3 videos I'm making are really good, but the 4th wouldn't be as good and the 5th wouldn't be as good. So that's the challenge. But if I could find a way to make 5 really good videos a day, I would do it. J. Her, I found out about your channel because of Charisma on Command. Subscribe because your videos are inspiring for my mind towards increasing my clientele. I really like your attitude around business. Thank you for that, J. Her. Charlie's awesome from Charisma on Command, and I'm, I'm glad you're here. Welcome to Believe Nation. Chart Your Trade: In one of your videos, you debunked that no video should be greater than 6 minutes long. My question is, what do you think the minimum length of a video should be right now? If you want to do well with YouTube's algorithm, you want to be looking at 10 to 12 minutes long video at least. That's what they want. That's why I want to go to Gary's channel and see what he's doing for his strategy when he's away and they're posting these 2, 3 minute videos. It's going to hurt his channel. Even if it's good stuff, like it has to be, it's not that no 2 minute video can do well. You can go to the trending tab and see one really short video, but it used to be filled. Like YouTube trending used to always be these short little bloopers, little fails, cute cat videos, 30-second recording, 59-second recording. You're trying to get it under 1 minute as much as possible because people had short attention spans. It's just changed. It's not what YouTube wants to promote. They want to promote watch time. And so if a video, even my, my, my 6-minute video that was too long now I would wanna make it 10 minutes. The video that's done, you know, 2 million views plus for me now did well in an environment where shorter videos were rewarded more. Now you wanna be in the 10 to 12 minute range per video, ideally. You can win again if it's shorter, but you're just playing against the algorithm. It has to be so insanely overwhelmingly good that it busts through the algorithm. You could still win a race barefoot, but why not wear running shoes, right? So I'd be looking at 10 to 12 minutes. Next up, Christ-Centered Ironworks. Hey Evan, I've been watching your videos for a while now, ever since hearing about you from Roberto Blake. Awesome, welcome aboard. Between the two of you, your advice has helped me grow my channel from 2,500 subs to 4,600 subs in the last 2 months by applying your teachings. Specifically, we started posting 2 times a day. Hmm, imagine that. So he almost doubled his channel in 2 months by posting twice a day. And my views went from 2,500 a day to 6,500 a day. At first glance, this might not seem like huge growth to some channels, but I am an artist blacksmith. I have a very small niche channel, so it is huge to me. Thank you for all you're doing on YouTube. Hope this finds you well. God bless. And this, so this is the difference, guys. So many of you are not even trying it. There's a chunk of you who just say, oh, this guy hasn't hit a million subscribers, so I'm just going to discount everything that he's saying. Perfect. There's a whole other chunk who'll find out some other reason to discount everything I'm saying. Great. Then there's going to be a chunk of you who will say, well, I can't do that. Find out all the reasons why this strategy is stupid, is not going to work, it's not for me, I can't do it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Excuses, excuses, reasons, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, great. Then you're going to have the small few, and these are the guys I'm actually making this video for, the small few to say, huh, that's interesting, how about I give it a shot? And you get this guy who doubles his channel, almost triples the views in 2 months just by trying it, just by going to 2 a day. So many people are so quick to discount an idea without even trying it. I'm telling you, this is something that will work for you even if you are less talented than the people above you. My channel continued to grow despite all those sound issues. We had our best month ever because we're playing to YouTube's algorithm. This is what YouTube wants right now. Again, 2018 may be different. Probably will be, but this is what's working right now, and it behooves you to actually just give it a shot. Just how about you try it before you start hating on it or just rejecting it flat out. Next up, Brian Bishop. Hey Evan, quick question. Celebrity endorsements and collaborations, how did you make contact? Did, did you message if he sent and he replied, or you made the video and he just hoped he would see it? So for most of these It's starting to change a little now, but for most of them, I never made contact. But it also didn't surprise me that they would share it. I would always make something that, that I'm proud of and that if they saw it, they would be proud of it. So when we made the 50 Cent video, before we press publish, it's, if 50 saw this, would he be proud of it? Would he want to show it off? Because we're always trying to put people, not necessarily just put them in a positive light, but we want to share their best knowledge, the best things that they've had to say. We've sifted through hours and hours and hours of research, of interviews that they've done, that pull together the 10 nuggets that they've said over the course of their career. And so it's a tribute to them and their advice and their wisdom. And so I never reached out to 50 Cent to say, hey, can you share this? But it didn't surprise me, never surprises me ever when any of these people share their videos because it was made that way with intention that if they saw it, they would want to share it. Next up, Valerie. Wow, Evan, thank you for confirming what I knew to be true. Great quality content daily, easier said than done. That's true. What hacks, if any, can you offer about how to accomplish 2 great quality videos daily? I've heard about using batching. What other tips, tricks, tools of the trade work for creating daily quality content? Also do a lot of live streams on my channel and shocked to find out from you here that is not the best. Thank you again. And I'm one to take action on what you shared here. I love it, Valerie. Yes, I love it. Uh, okay. So tricks to creating content, um, daily batching is definitely important. So batching is basically taking the tasks that you're doing, repeatedly and crunch them into one. So for me, I used to film every Wednesday, and now I film once a week for the most part. I'm sorry, once a month for the most part on a Wednesday. That's why when my sound went out, it impacted so many videos because the sound was out for pretty much that entire recording day. And so every espresso, every top 10, every Mentor Me, you know, it was the same issue with the sound. And then when, when I filmed it again the next month, everything was fixed. So now all the new ones coming out have better audio. So I'd definitely be looking at batching the recording time, batching the researching. So think about your typical process. If it's like research and then record and then edit, if I wanted to make 2 videos a day, I'd be trying to think about how do I record those 14 videos in one day. So I'd be looking at recording in one day. To get that done, how much research do I need to do before? So do you need one day of research? You need two days of research? You need three days of research? Do you need to have somebody help you with the research? Then in the post, in editing, this is where it becomes insanity. Uh, the editing is just a crazy long process. How much time do you need? And I'd be looking at how do I bring on somebody to help me. So batching first, then building a team underneath me to help me, whether that is somebody who you hire, whether you go to someplace like Upwork and hire a part-time editor to assist you, whether that's a friend who volunteers and contributes, a fam— a family member, uh, a client who you can maybe exchange services with if they do the editing for your channel and you help them with whatever product or service that you're selling, building a team becomes paramount. I could not do this without my team. You know, we have 8 people who work on the YouTube side of things for me. That's how we make 3 videos a day. You know, I have 2 and a half editors on my team. I have a person whose sole job is to go out and do research. You know, people in the comments. A cameraman, obviously. So building a team is going to be super important to your process. And then I'd be thinking about new series. What kind of consistent new content can you come up with on a regular basis that doesn't require in-the-moment thinking? Because you're thinking, oh, what's my video going to be about? I have to record it today. It's probably not going to be, you know, super high-quality stuff. But if you're in advance thinking, okay, I need to come up with 3 new series for the next month that's going to come out, what am I going to do? What's, what are my series going to be? What am I interested in? How am I going to document that? Um, and then paying attention to each series to see if it's working. Like, this is just about how to create the content. Then you got to make sure the content is working right. It's got to be delivering and performing for you. The comment about the live streams, it's just unfortunate. I love live streaming. I love live streaming because It's so great to interact with the fans, with you guys, with the audience. It's just how YouTube works. They give you a big boost, but the replay value isn't great. And so if you're really good, like if you really wanted to go twice a day and you could pull this off and you're great in front of the camera and you need minimal editing, I would even use the YouTube Live tool. This is what I'm doing actually right now. I'm recording this using the YouTube Live tool. But it's not being broadcast live to you. It's being broadcast as an unlisted video. And then my editor is going to pull this, save it, mash it up, pull out all the ums and ahs. And I've been coughing like crazy. You guys haven't heard it because I'm sick and you don't want to hear that stuff. But there's another one. She's going to cut out all of that stuff and then put together a final video. But you could do it as a live video. To unlisted and then release that as a video, and it would do better than if you released it as a live video itself. It sucks. It's just the way YouTube's algorithm works. I wish they change it. I've been trying to figure out a better live strategy for myself and talk to all the YouTube guys, and unless you're in gaming, uh, there's no real major application yet for live, and that, that really sucks, but I'm working on trying to figure something out. Next up, Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan, ladies and gentlemen. Why you say this could apply to other social media platforms? Every social media platform has an algorithm, and you just need to understand how the algorithm works. The posting 3 times a day may not work everywhere. I'm not saying posting 3 times a day works to Twitter or to Instagram or to Facebook or to Snapchat. You probably need to post a lot more, to be honest, if you look in the other platforms. But it's understanding the platform's algorithm to be able to win within it because you can win on, on your talent and you can win on your looks and you can win on your message and you can win a whole bunch of different things. But you can also win by being worse at all of that stuff and just understanding how the algorithm works for that social media network. So I know YouTube best. I'm trying to share the advice that's helping me quickly build my YouTube channel, but you can use the same metrics to figure out and deconstruct how other social media networks work. Facebook isn't a great example because it's a paid platform right now. you know, to try to get organic reach is not, it's not the game in Facebook. Um, so let's go to Instagram, looking at Instagram, and I don't have a major presence on Instagram. I haven't really focused a lot of attention on Instagram. So I'd be looking at what hashtags do I want to be a part of? It's hashtag culture on Instagram. You have to pay really important attention to the hashtags. I'd be looking at how many times should I be posting? Pictures. You know, am I posting a picture once a day, twice a day, 10 times a day? You know, you could start by deconstructing who are the people that you look up to and respect on Instagram, and then see how often they're doing it, and then try. And if someone's at 5 a day, you start by matching that and you say, hmm, what happens if I go to 6 a day? Why don't I go to 2 a day? And then you look at your different series. Okay, so I have one series that's motivational quotes, another series that's pictures, another series that's selfies and other, whatever. And then you just see this series is getting lots of attention. This series is not, let's kill that one. Okay, we're gonna kill that one. Let's put in a new one. What's it gonna be? Hmm, I gotta brainstorm. It's all the same stuff. You're a content producer. You're just playing a slightly different algorithm. So each social media platform functions on its own, but the methodology can be applied to all of them. I think the most important part is just understanding what are the key metrics that we're chasing. And then optimize for that. So for YouTube, all I care about is looking at the watch time and looking at the subscriber growth. And again, this is all within my mission. I want to, I want to help a billion entrepreneurs. I want to do it the right way. It's all about believe, right? I could get to a million way faster by, by posting, uh, the top 10 stupidest things Steve Jobs ever did in his life. The top 10 arguments between entrepreneurs, right? It's just, that's not me, right? That's not my one word. It's not what I'm all about. So within your value system, right? Then you figure out the most important metrics for that social media structure and you just attack. Next up, Tubitus. I was uploading one video per day for like 2 months straight and my views went from 10 per day to 100 views per day. Imagine that. "Then I stopped for 3 weeks because I had a test and it started— and I started again 3 weeks ago and now I'm on 80 views per day and growing. So it really works a lot." Congratulations. Keep going. Keep doing it. Now make those videos better. Sarah Makes Art. "I wish I could do daily videos, but I'm barely managing with 2 and 3 edited videos a week. I started to livestream on most days that I don't upload, so at least I would have activity on my channel most days of the week." Yeah, again, I would pay attention to are the live streams helping your channel or hurting? Look at the watch time on them. Look at the subscriber growth on them. Are they leading to growth to your channel or not? The only danger is sometimes the live streams, as it did on my channel, a lot of them were leading to flat or negative subscriber growth. And so it's why I killed them and moved them to a different series, sorry, different channel. This is important. 3 videos a week that are good is better than 5 videos a week or 7 videos a week where half of them are bad, right? Like, again, I said, I wish I could be at 5 videos a day. I'm not because I can't produce 5 quality videos a day. I keep testing these series with you guys and a lot of them just don't pass the muster. They're just not good enough. You don't like them enough. So if you liked all my new series, then I could be at 4 videos a day, 5 videos a day. You don't like my new series as much. And so I'm constantly testing new stuff to see, hmm, do you like this one? How about this one? You guys like this series? How about this series? And so you want to be at at least a video a day, but good. It's got to be good stuff. So don't just throw crap at the screen. You are leaders. What I'd like to know is what exactly is the payoff for having a million or high number of subscribers? After busting one's butt to create that much content for YouTube, what will one actually get in dollars and cents? $1,000 biweekly, $750 a week, $250 a day, $100 an hour? What are the analytics on that, I wonder? It depends on your niche and depends on how much you do kind of outside of YouTube. If you're only focused on AdSense, it's not a great business model. And you can, you can really ramp up the numbers. You can look at whatever you're making now, whatever your CPM is, and I think for most channels it's $1.50 to $2.50, something like that. Um, so you just ramp up the numbers and that's what you're going to make. It really depends on the niche. Again, I, I met some people at ClamorCon who had, you know, million, million subscriber plus channels and they're still trying to make a full-time living and haven't hired anybody in their team. And in my business we've got 8 people on the YouTube side and I'm not at a million yet. Right? So it depends on— some markets are easier to sell. Some have more interest from brands and have more avatars and dollars flowing into it. And some people are just better entrepreneurs. You know, I started this from the beginning as a business. You know, it's why I want all the comments responded to. You know, these are our customers. These are people that we care about. You know, it's not just a hobby for me. It would never was just a hobby. It was, okay, if we're going to do this, it's— this is part of my business. This is part of me making an impact to help entrepreneurs. So there's a lot of factors that go into it, much more than just how many subscribers that a YouTube channel has. Next up, 2 Minute Tips: Great analysis and thanks for sharing. When you have a niche that's fairly focused, you do get to the end of What there is to share. I've seen a number of providers in my category come to a brick wall. My challenge now is to expand my content while still making it relevant to the niche. There's gotta always be ways to grow, always be ways to learn. At the beginning for any channel, your audience is gonna be mostly beginners, right? For most businesses, your audience is gonna be beginners who want to learn something, and they might learn the basics really quickly. You can do a couple things. You can not just show them the how-tos, you can bring on questions from an audience, right? So somebody asks a question down below, you can always encourage it from your audience and then go and answer that question. You could do a review of how somebody is doing your thing. I don't know what it is that you do, but you can do a review of how somebody is doing it and give feedback and tips and advice. You can try to tie it to some a local news story that's happening or an international news story that's happening. You could try to bring in, if you see a famous entrepreneur or someone that you look up to, how they might do it. What do you think that how Steve Jobs would knit a sweater? You know, I don't know exactly what you're doing again. You have, you could take requests, like if there's anything art related, make it like this, like can you make a portrait of this person. There's always room for creativity. There is always, always, always in any field, any industry, room for creativity. As soon as you say you hit a brick wall, that's your opportunity. It's your opportunity to be more creative and find another way, and that's going to be your chance to bust through. Next up, Eclectic Alu. So refreshing. This really makes sense. I don't think I can upload once a day, but I appreciate honest advice and having this as a goal is helpful. Also, thank you for telling these sub for sub guys to go make good content. Listen, that's an honest approach. I appreciate that. Not everybody can go and make one quality video a day, and that's fine. You don't necessarily need to go out and do it right now. You know, there's a lot of people who want to start a business, wish they could be in it full time, but you can't right now because you have bills to pay and you have a full-time job and you're doing this in the evenings and weekends. You know, that's understandable. It's realities of life. It's just having it as a goal, like this is where I want to get to and trying to work towards it. If you see it as an impossibility or you just reject it out of hand, then you're never going to get there, right? But if you see it as, okay, that's where I want to be, this is this new standard I have for myself, this is what we're going to work towards. I'm gonna get better at it. You can. When I made my first videos, it took me, took me 2 days to make one video. You know, take a camera and, and I recorded and it would suck and record again and it would suck. And just 2 days to make that one video, just recording. And now again, in front of a camera and just talk, because the repetition, you get better at anything. Through the repetition, you get better. And so what might seem crazy to make one video a day now, if you have that as your goal, you'll find ways to make it happen. Doesn't mean you need to quit your full-time job or make drastic life changes. You'll find ways to get better. You'll find hacks to help you improve. As you do it more and more and more, you will just get faster and more efficient at it. And so I love the openness and the approach eclectic aloo. And if you can't do it right now, then it's fantastic to have that as your goal for the future. All right guys, gonna end it there. Don't know how long it's been. It's been a while. My throat is burning. Thank you for the love on the series. If you have a question you'd like me to answer in the future version of the How to Get to 1 Million series, leave it down below in the comments. Thank you guys again for watching. 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.