6 Signs you are going to blow up on YouTube (keep going)

So look, it's no secret that most YouTube channels quit. And the terrible thing is that a lot of them quit right before they're going to blow up. And no, this isn't gonna be some motivational speech about, "Whoa, you're just one video away. You just have to post one more video and you might blow up." What I wanted to do in this video is walk you through some actual measurable patterns that I see over and over again in super successful channels right before they blow up. And after tracking thousands of creators over the past decade, I've discovered that successful YouTube channels show 6 specific signs right before their channels take off. And no, these are not just gonna be vanity metrics like views or subscribers. Those things really don't matter. And another really crazy thing about these signs as well is that a lot of YouTubers that are showing them don't even realize how close they are to a potential breakthrough. I see it happen so many times where they see that they're growing a little bit slowly and they think, "You know what? This is just how it's gonna be forever with my channel." And then they give up right before everything changes. So if you're feeling discouraged about your channel growth, if you've been wondering, you know, should I maybe pivot to something else, then this video, at least my hope with it, is that it'll give you the clarity that you need to make those decisions. And if you're not seeing these 6 specific signs yet, don't worry at all, because I'm going to show you exactly what to do so that you can start seeing these signs. And I'll start with the most important one. Now, before we talk about that, I do think that there's something really crucial that you need to know about YouTube success, because everybody talks about going viral, getting millions of views, or beating the algorithm like you can just do it overnight. But the reality that most people see is completely different. YouTube success is actually quite predictable and it follows a lot of patterns, and those patterns always show up before explosive growth happens. When I started my first faceless YouTube channel at just 14 years old, I had $300 in my bank account. I had no idea what I was doing. I was just a kid trying to figure this out. But then I scaled my channels to making more money than my parents while I was still in high school, and then shortly after that I was making millions of dollars per year from my channels. I'm not saying this to brag by any means, I just want to show you what's possible with YouTube. And the way I was able to get there was by obsessively tracking everything. And I consistently noticed that my most successful channels and videos all showed the same exact warning signs right before they took off. The same exact patterns were appearing to me across multiple different niches of channels that I was running, whether it was my entertainment channels or my educational channels or my business-focused channels. So the difference, at least what I've noticed, between creators who make it and those who quit way too early is not talent. It's not luck. It's not even the quality of their content. It's understanding the metrics that actually matter, and it's recognizing when those metrics are pointed towards inevitable success. And if it's pointed away from it, we can then steer it towards that success. And I'll show you exactly how to do that. But let's start with the first sign. The first sign that you're about to blow up is a fundamental shift in how you are probably approaching content creation. You stop trying to entertain everybody and you start solving specific problems for specific people. This was the single biggest turning point in my entire YouTube journey because when I first started YouTube, I was making what I like to call commodity content. These are videos that can easily be commoditized, things like top 10 videos, random entertainment videos, content that thousands of other people are making. And with tools getting better and better, it makes it even easier and easier to make this content. And it's kind of just a race to the bottom because everybody's making this type of content. But here's what changed everything. I realized that educational content in the right niches can make over 10 times as much money per view than entertainment content. So this flips everything I knew about YouTube on its head, because instead of needing millions of views just to make some decent money, I could make even more money with less views, but the right views. Let me give you some real numbers from my experience so we're not just talking about this. My entertainment channels on average were making $3 to $10 per 1,000 views from ad revenue alone. But when I shifted to educational content and I implemented the proper monetization strategies, then I started making over $100 per 1,000 views. And that's not an exaggeration. In fact, one of my educational videos has made $55,000 from ad revenue, which you might be saying, Matt, that's amazing, but it's probably made over $1 million from the digital product that I was selling from it. And you can't sell something like a digital product, whether it's an affiliate product or your own, unless you're doing something educational that actually solves somebody's problem. It's the same amount of work to make an educational video or an entertainment video. Sometimes it can be a little bit harder in the beginning, but it's virtually the same amount of work, but one approach makes you 10 times more money. Now you're probably asking, "Matt, how do I know if I'm making this shift?" Well, you can tell because you start thinking of video ideas by asking, "What expensive problem can I help my audience solve?" Instead of asking, "What would just be fun to talk about?" So the creators that are about to explode understand that YouTube is not just a content platform, it's a business platform. And they use YouTube to build real businesses that have the potential of generating revenue from the first day instead of just hoping for AdSense checks 6 months later. So if you've recently started focusing on teaching, tutorial content, and problem-solving videos, even if your views haven't exploded yet, you're already positioning yourself in a way that you're gonna be apart from all the other commoditized content out there. Now if you're not seeing this yet, my recommendation is to start by choosing one specific problem that your target audience faces and create your next 3 videos around solving different aspects of of that problem. But shifting your content focus is just the beginning. The second sign is about what you measure, and this is where most creators make a critical mistake. And at this point you might be saying, okay Matt, so what should I be tracking instead? Well, most struggling creators, they obsess over vanity metrics, things like subscribers, view counts, and Social Blade rankings. But creators that are about to blow up focus on what I like to call revenue metrics. Here's the difference. Vanity metrics feel good, but they don't pay your bills. Revenue metrics, on the other hand, may start small, but they can compound into potentially life-changing income. When I analyze all of my most successful students, they all track the same things. Things like revenue per thousand views, email signups per video, and conversion rates for their products or services that they're promoting, either as an affiliate or their own product. For example, I had a student who made over $100,000 per year from a channel with 3,000 subscribers, according to him. And that's because he focused on revenue metrics. Metrics. Every video he created was to sell a $997 digital program that he was selling. Meanwhile, I see creators with hundreds of thousands of subscribers who struggle just to make $1,000 a month because they only care about this: view counts, subscribers, vanity metrics. They don't matter. And so if you've started thinking about your YouTube channel as a real business instead of just a creative outlet, if you've begun tracking how many sales that you get from your channel, then you're developing a business mindset that's gonna separate you from all the other creators out Now if you don't know how much money that you're making per 1,000 views yet, this is something that you definitely want to be tracking and you want to be monetizing correctly from day one. But even tracking the right metrics is not enough. The third sign reveals the systematic approach that separates sustainable channels that you can scale up to the moon from one-hit wonders who have a viral video and maybe they get a bunch of views and subscribers, but it doesn't matter at the end of the day like we discussed. So what is that third sign? The third sign that you are about to blow up on YouTube is that you stopped relying on viral luck and you started building what I like to call systematic growth. Instead of hoping that one video is just gonna change everything and you're just waiting to upload the next video which is gonna be your one-hit wonder where you get a million views and it'll change your whole life, that's not how YouTube works. You want to create systems and funnels that generate consistent results. This is a huge breakthrough for me personally. Early on in my YouTube career, I was in the hamster wheel of chasing viral video after viral video. I'd spend days researching viral trending topics. I tried to time different algorithm changes that were happening, and I was basically gambling with my channel strategy. At the time, it was all that mattered to me because higher view counts meant more money. But then I discovered what I like to call now the symbiotic system. And this system basically meant instead of creating random videos and just hoping for the best, I started creating collections of videos and they all funneled traffic to a single money video. This money video was a long-form video that provided massive value and then led the viewer to a paid solution. And trust me when I say that this system completely changed my entire business. That video I mentioned earlier that made $50K in ad revenue and then probably sold $1 million of courses, that was a money video following this system. Now, this doesn't mean that you're gonna make $1 million if you implement this, but this was a night and day difference in my business when I did. So the creators that are about to explode on YouTube are not just making individual videos. They're building content ecosystems where every video supports and amplifies the other. So if you've started thinking about how does my channel work together, you know, How is this video going to feed into another video on my channel? How am I going to get a higher subscriber-to-view ratio? Which in of itself isn't a metric that really matters because as we discussed, subscribers are vanity metrics, but it is an indicator as to how many people are wanting to watch more videos on your channel after watching one. And if all of your videos are in the same niche, then that is a very good sign that you are following this protocol. But if you implement the money video on top of that, then you can turn one view into another view. You increase your session time because you're keeping people on YouTube YouTube will push out your videos, plus you're selling something, so you're monetizing to the next level as well. If you're not seeing this yet, then make sure to make one comprehensive pillar money video that solves a major problem for your audience, and then plan your next 5 to 10 videos to drive traffic back to that video via end screens. So once you've realized that views and revenue are two completely different metrics and you've started optimizing for revenue instead of views, then you've achieved what 99% of creators are not able to do. The fourth sign you're about to blow up on YouTube is that you start seeing comments coming in saying supportive things on your videos. Now, this in of itself does not mean that you're gonna automatically, you know, blow up on YouTube or anything. However, it is a good sign early on in your channel that you see people saying that, hey, this content was helpful, this was a great video, this is gonna actually help me a lot. And if you're getting comments like, hey, this is gonna help me, These are from people who are likely helped by your educational content. No one's gonna say, you know, "This video is helping me," if it's a just general top 10 video. Now, if you're not seeing this yet, make sure to make as valuable content as you possibly can and make content with the viewer in mind. Think about the end result that someone will get from watching your video that they can take away from it. Like, for example, I'm trying to give you specific actionable things that you can do on your channel as you go through this video if you're not seeing any of these signs, so you can walk away from this video with more value than you had when you came into it. Now the 5th sign is when you stop treating YouTube as a hobby and instead you treat it like a business. What I mean by this is that you're investing into your channel. This does not have to be money. This can also be the time that you're putting into your channel. If you're putting, you know, consistent time into your channel, even if it's just a little bit every single day, over time that can add up to huge results. This is one of the most important lessons I've learned over my past 10 years on YouTube, that small consistent actions lead to gigantic results. The people who fail on YouTube don't invest anything into their channel and they treat it like a hobby. Now another thing I honestly gotta say, the people who do succeed on their channels are in a lot of instances people who invest money into their channels as well. This doesn't mean that you have to do this by any means, but all I'm saying is that This is what I've seen. I know it's scary, especially if you're not making a ton of money from your channel, to invest something into it. But what I will say is that if you have a plan for your channel and you have a system that you're gonna follow for your channel and you have the money to invest, that is a circumstance where I would be more comfortable investing into your channel to grow it. What this means is hiring people to do the stuff you don't like to do. For example, one of the biggest things that most people don't love to do when it comes to running a channel is video editing. So you can hire people to do that for you. I recommend Upwork, by the way, for that. Plus, if you join my personal program I have called Tube Accelerator, we also give you access to my content team, which can do that for you. You don't have to by any means, but it's an option available to you. The 6th sign that you're going to blow up on YouTube is one of the most telltale signs, and in my opinion, it's the most reliable indicator that you're going to blow up on YouTube. And the sign is that you're not guessing. You're taking concepts that have already worked and then improving on them and making them better. This could mean writing the scripts yourself, or this could mean using a tool like TubeMagic to help you write the scripts where you put in multiple different context videos from videos that have already worked. So you're not just relying on luck for this. The creators who blow up are not the lucky ones. They're the ones who consistently generate content based on what's already worked in the past. And this could be a remix of different types of ideas that have worked in the past. It doesn't mean to just copy videos that have gotten a ton of views. It means to recognize patterns. A lot of times you might find a pattern working in one niche that you can repeat in another niche as well. And so if you're not already seeing the sign, make sure to make your next 5 to 10 videos on topics that have already gotten over 100,000 views in the past. Now, if you want to systematically develop all of these signs as well as everything that I personally know on YouTube, I put together everything you need into Tube Accelerator. And this is not just another YouTube guru course with random videos of free stuff that you can find on the internet. It's a complete guide and you get access to me and my team and even my content team who can make videos for you. And this program is not cheap by any means. However, it is quality. It's the best YouTube program in the world, in my opinion, but it's not a fit for everybody. However, if you're interested in building a sustainable and potentially profitable channel, then feel free to book a call down at the link in the description for Tube Accelerator. And now if you want to discover more about how I run faceless YouTube channels and how I make them into a business, then feel free to check out this video right here, which is basically a free course and a free guide for exactly how I run these faceless channels. You'll get a ton of value from it, and I will see you there.