Lauren Bateman recounts how she grew her guitar-teaching YouTube channel to 100,000 subscribers. She emphasizes persistent content consistency, tailoring videos to a defined audience (older learners, males), engaging with commenters, learning platform mechanics (thumbnails, cards, end screens, tags, descriptions, CTR, view velocity, watch time), and a breakout video (uploaded July 2017) that suddenly gained traction in October 2019 and accelerated her channel growth. She received her silver (100k) plaque after YouTube’s verification/background check.
Questions this video answers
July 20, 2021.
100,000 subscribers (received the silver plaque).
About 20–25 videos.
About 1,500 additional subscribers in her second year.
Around the end of October 2019.
Chapters
Hey guys, in this video I'm going to talk about what it took for me to get my 100,000 subscriber plaque.
Now, I was super excited when I got this because it is a lot of hard work. YouTube is not easy. So I want to start this by saying this did not happen overnight. But I'm going to share with you the process I went through, my story of how I got here. Now my bigger YouTube channel is a guitar lesson teaching channel. I am a guitar teacher. That's why I got a guitar back there. I started out just like any other YouTuber. I uploaded a video, super excited about it. I released it, I launched it and I went and checked my views and I got one, which was probably me just watching the video because I was so excited about uploading it. So I was like, that's cool, whatever, I'll just upload another video. And I upload another video and I think I got zero views because maybe I didn't even look at that video. And my first video was actually super awkward. What I'm going to do today is show you a very, very simple chord. Not a chord, a song. So you can see I had a lot to learn about YouTube. When I first got started. I didn't have nice cameras, I didn't have fancy equipment. But I just pressed play and record. And that was the most important part. If you're just getting started with YouTube, you just consistently be putting out content. My first year in YouTube, I think I only released about 20, 25 videos, which really isn't enough to get going on your YouTube channel. And I wish I knew more about how important consistency was in getting data into the YouTube algorithm. Remember, it's an algorithm, it needs data to work. So you have to put in the time, you have to put in the effort to, to get that data in there. Now, a benefit I had is that I do have a background running businesses, I do have a music school. So I knew a lot about kind of marketing and audiences and branding. So I really focused in on who my audience was, what their problems were and just tried to answer those problems. So for me, I really focused on older learners and males in particular who, who, you know, maybe wanted to learn guitar their entire life. And I decided like, I'm just going to tailor my content to them. I don't care if anyone else watches. I'm going to focus on just hitting this demographic and hitting it hard. That meant all the music I was doing was catered towards that generation. And from that point forward, I really started gaining some traction with my YouTube channel. Hope you're finding some motivation in my YouTube journey here. Real quick, don't forget to subscribe and turn on your notifications. This way, YouTube will let you know when I release more videos just like this. Now, I think in that second year, I only got an additional 1500 subscribers, but it was enough to make me feel like I was actually starting to get somewhere with this process. Trust me, I know all about grinding so hard and then wanting to give up. I almost gave up twice on my YouTube channel because I was just like, oh, this isn't happening. And I fell into those same traps that a lot of beginner YouTubers do. And you're saying, well, the YouTube algorithm is not paying attention to me. It doesn't like me. This isn't going to work. And then you realize you've up to uploaded 20 videos. 20 videos in the grand scheme of YouTube, is literally nothing. I probably have hundreds of videos on my channel right now, but 20 isn't really going to get you anywhere on YouTube. You just got to keep grinding and you just got to keep posting that content every week. So after my second year with YouTube, I learned how to use cards. I learned how to use end screens and tags and descriptions appropriately. I wasn't even doing any of this stuff correctly. All right. My thumbnails were horrible. They were dark. They were. You couldn't even read the text because I had so much text on the thumbnail. I was, like, doing everything wrong in the book. Then all of a sudden, towards the end of October 2019, my videos all of a sudden shot up. My subscribership was going crazy, and I started selling guitar, like, much more frequently than I was before. And I was like, what the heck happened? So I went over to YouTube. I saw a huge spike in traffic. One of those old videos that I have recorded back in July of 2017, all of a sudden started getting suggested by YouTube. Yeah, that's correct. I had a video that sat on YouTube for two years, over two years, did absolutely nothing. And then out of out of the blue, just started blowing up. Once again, this video is horrible. It's dark, it's grainy. I didn't have the fancy cameras, but it didn't matter. What mattered was the content in that video was made for my target audience. And my target audience loved this content so much that they felt compelled to like the video. They felt compelled to comment below the video and let me know how much it helped them and. And that sent signals to YouTube that, hey, this video is important. People are liking this, let's start showing it to other people who are like these people and see if they like it. And guess what? Those people liked it too. So it just goes to show you the importance of if you don't have all the SEO stuff perfect. And you don't. Fortunately, I did have a good title on this video. Out of the blue. I don't know how I did that. I just did. But I didn't have any of the other stuff in place. And I really believe the engagement on that video, the commenting, the likes, really made this video come to life. So it's very important to engage. Anytime someone would leave a comment on my YouTube, even to this day, I reply to every single comment made on my YouTube channel because it gets people excited about engaging with the creator. So once this video took off, I knew I had to dive all in on YouTube because that video's got over, like, 1.6 million views right now or something. And still to this day, I continue to get views on that video all the time. And that's the magic of YouTube. Unlike Instagram and Facebook, you can post a video once and get viewership on a video for years, sometimes even a decade later. There's some of these guitar teachers that recorded videos 10 years ago, and they're still getting thousands and thousands of hits on those videos every single day. Imagine having one of your videos work like that for you every single day. So like I said, I was like, I got to dive in. I got to figure out, I got to learn everything I can about this platform. I need to learn how this works because I'm a very systemized person. I'm a very mathematical person, too. And, you know, my background's in science, so I wanted to know how this thing worked inside and out. So I really dove in and started learning more about, you know, click through rates and view velocity and. And, you know, analytics, how to analyze videos before, during, and after your uploads, how to increase watch time by adding cards and end screens, how to properly tag videos, how to write descriptions appropriately to give YouTube enough data so that they would serve these videos to people in my audience and beyond. And all of that hard work paid off because last month, I jumped over the 100,000 subscriber mark, and I sent my message to support, and I said, hey, I did it. They do a little background check to make sure you're not breaking any of the terms of service, and they shipped it out to me. And probably within two weeks, I had my silver plaque. So if you're just getting started on YouTube and you're feeling frustrated, my best advice to you is to keep going. I started off just like you. Uploaded one video, got one view, and that was it. And my videos didn't get a lot of traction the first year. Okay, I was maybe getting 10 views, 20 views, 30 views here and there, but I stuck with it. I built a website around my guitar teaching, and through that website, I would recommend people go watch my videos. All right? And through my newsletter, I would recommend, hey, go over to YouTube and watch my videos. I didn't know that YouTube loved that. I was just doing it because I figure, like, the videos on YouTube, you guys should probably go watch the video on YouTube, not my website, right? So I'd highly recommend, as much as possible, promoting your content, getting people over to the YouTube platform. And if you guys are interested in learning more about some of the YouTube hacks I've learned over the years, go check out that video right there.
