The SECRET to Growing an Audience Even with ZERO Followers

I'm going to tell you the dirty truth about growing an audience on YouTube, even if you have zero subscribers.

Now, I'm going to tell you this simple truth, and it's that no one starts at the top. All right? I release a video now on my guitar channel, and I will instantly get thousands of views on a video. But it didn't start that way. In 2017, when I released my first video, I uploaded the video, and I think I got one view, which was probably me checking out my own video. In actuality, it took me two to three years to really start getting the ball rolling. I tell people all the time YouTube is a snowball effect, and you have to start somewhere, and that somewhere is ground zero for most of us. All right, if you're seeing this video, you can probably look at the subscribers for this channel. It's just about over 600 versus my other channel that has about 245,000 subscribers. All right? Even on this channel, I. I have to start from the bottom again and get that snowball rolling. And how do we do that? We do that through consistency. Most content creators, we give up before we even get started. All right? We put in a lot of work and we're like, great. In 30, 60, 90 days, we're going to be amazing. And that's just not at a long enough time frame here on YouTube, you really have to extend that out. If you want to be a successful content creator and you want to build a brand and grow an audience, you need to expand that timeline from 90 days. You need to expand that out, like five years, okay? Because that's how long it can take to get the ball rolling sometimes. I mean, you look at a lot of people today who are some of the famous people. Gary Vee. Gary Vee was doing Wine Library, and he was being consistent with that content, and he's a big shot now. But look how long it took him to get where he is. It took years. It took decades. All right? It took a lot of time and effort to get to the point where he's a superstar. So for a lot of you guys, right now, the biggest thing is you need to expand your timeline. That's number one. Number two, you got to get consistent with your content. All right, in 2020, I am my first video take off. All right, 2020. I think you heard me say earlier. I started. I uploaded my first guitar lesson videos. 2017. All right, 2020. Or is it really the tail end of 2019? It was two and a half years later, I finally got my first video to take off. And if you look at my Google Analytics stats, you just see like this little bit of a trickle and this little bit of an upward trend. But it's not like this floodgate opened up in a year. If your goal is to be successful here on YouTube or be a successful content creator or a successful course creator, you have to check off the content box every week. All right? I know some of you are like, oh, I'm really busy. I can't do, like, if you can't post one video every week, you don't belong here in the content creator space, because that's really what it takes. Okay, and what's a piece of content? All right, it could be a long form video. It could be a video that's five to 10, 15 minutes long. It could be a short. Okay, what's a short? It's under 60 seconds, guys. If you can't post one short every week, you can't create a 60 second piece of content every week to build your brand and your audience, then you might want to think this career path as a YouTuber. And it's a lot of work, all right? And there's going to be a lot of videos out there that tell you like, oh, YouTube is passive income. YouTube is not passive income at all. I actually have a video up here. You guys can go watch that and see why it's not passive income. You have to put the work in, all right? You have to make sure you're checking off that box. Did I do a lot? I do a long form piece of content. My guitar channel, it's two pieces of long form content. And now I'm trying to get into doing a short every week. I'm like, okay, come on, I can put down 60 seconds and I can record a short and put it up on YouTube every week. I owe that to myself and my audience because I want to grow my brand. Let me tell you guys a quick story. So I know some of you know me as a YouTuber, some of you know me from my guitar channel, but I actually started a business in 2010. It was teaching guitar one on one, privately out of my home and teaching voice lessons. And, you know, I built this business up. And in 2020, February of 2020, 10 years later, that business was making about $90,000 top line revenue, okay? And I was probably paying myself about six figures at the time, but it took me 10 years to get to that point. Now, you guys all know what happened after February of 2020. All right? Covid hit the whole Bottom fell out of the service industry. We lost 35%, 35% of my business overnight. But what I was doing in 2017 is I was starting to post content on YouTube. I was building my website, I was posting content on my website. I was posting content on YouTube. I did that for 2017. I did that for 2018. I did that for 2019. I did that for three years without seeing any real result. I was maybe making like a couple thousand dollars a month. I mean, that helps, right? I'll take a couple thousand dollars. But it wasn't really anything to write home with. And then Covid hit. And you know what happened? In April of 2020, I made $16,000 in one month for myself. All right, but the moral of the story is it took me 10 years to get there. That didn't just happen overnight. I wasn't successful during COVID because of COVID I was successful during COVID because in the years prior, I, I set everything up. I had the website, I had the content, I had my course created and built. I had the landing page, I had the mailing list. I had three years of work put into this. For this one moment, people are like, oh, you got lucky. No, you don't get lucky. You put a lot of hard work into it. And if the right thing happens at the right time and you put the work in, you can be successful. But I just want to remind you, it took me 10 years to get there. I recorded over 70 videos before my first video took off and actually got some recognition. All right, so the biggest thing I want you to get out of this video is a mindset change. You need to change your mindset. You need to understand that YouTube is a long term game. It is a long play. If you're working on a 90 day timeline or even a one year timeline, it's just not long enough. It's not long enough for you guys to see the real results. So I want you to change your mindset, get consistent about your content, make a schedule, get dedicated to getting the content out there, because the more you wait, the longer it's going to take. Now, if you're someone that struggles with content creation paralysis, and you need help getting into a schedule, you're feeling overwhelmed, go check out that video over there or where I share with you my content schedule and how you can go from feeling overwhelmed to feeling excited about creating content for your channel.