Matt Ragland shares what worked growing his Bullet Journal channel to 10,000 subscribers. His 10-block system took off unexpectedly. The two lessons: start and stay consistent, then watch what your audience actually engages with and double down on it.
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Hey everyone, my name is Matt, and welcome to another Bullet Journal productivity video. In this week's episode, though, it's a lot of celebrations and two important lessons that I want to share with you as you're looking to grow and create something in your life that you're probably using the Bullet Journal for. And I wanted to start off by just saying thank you to everyone who's subscribed, to everyone who's commented, watched, and liked any of these videos over the last several months, or over the past 17 months that I've been doing this. That's where I want to start, because, like I said, there are two things that I want to bring up that I think are going to be really helpful to you as you're starting in your own creative journey, or a task, a habit, a milestone, a goal that you want to hit. See, I started this YouTube channel in February of 2017, and the way that I started out was just, you know, kind of vlog style. Really glad that you're here. It's a beautiful day in Nashville. My hair is happy, and my dog is happy too because she gets to walk around. Sharing my day, sharing my work, talking about what I'm dealing with and some of the things that I was going through, some of the celebrations, and struggles that I was having. And that's where I went for a lot of my early content, just kind of talking about what was happening in my life. When you're starting out something new, I think that you do really have to focus on just the act of getting your content out there and being consistent with it, because you want to create not just an initial community, but you also want to create like a library of content that when people find you, they see that you're serious and not just like you have something here, you have something there., but you have a whole lot of content that you're ready to share with your audience. The other reason that you want to have this library of content for yourself is that you're going to see certain topics and certain videos start to bubble to the surface, and those are the ones that you really want to pay attention to. It's almost like a spaghetti against the wall theory where you just throw a bunch up there and see what happens, see what sticks. I did see going into the fall of last year that there were a couple of videos that were doing a little bit better than others, and one in particular was a just a very a very casual, like within my daily vlog, bullet journal walkthrough. And that one had more views. Like usually at this time, like, if I had a video that had 1 or 200 views, I was feeling really good about it. And this video had like 500 or 600 views. And I was like, oh, well, that's pretty great right there. And since I was getting to the end of the year, I was like, okay, well, this video is a little bit better. And I was just getting to the end of the year, people are starting to plan for next year. Let's do a big bullet journal video for, you know, planning out 2018. And my goal for that video initially was I hope I can get 1,000 views and maybe like 50, maybe 100 subscribers from that. Because at the time I was sitting at about 600, 650 subscribers. And like I said, I'd started in February, so I was feeling pretty good about that. Like maybe this, you know, like best case scenario, maybe this video helped me get to 1,000 subscribers. So I shipped that video the last week. Of 2017, right in between Christmas and New Year's, and within the first week it had 1,000 views. Not like, not like overall, not like this. I was hoping like all-time lifetime views would be 1,000. Within a week it had 1,000, and I was also really close. I think on January 1st it helped me get to 1,000 subscribers then, not total. And then after taking 11 months to get 1,000 subscribers, I then had my next 1,000 subscribers by January 25th. And so 11 months to 1,000, less than a month to 2,000. And so within that time, I was starting to think, I was like, okay, this like very casual one that I did in August did well. And then this one is really blowing up. Like, it really, really was, especially for me. Like, I was like just checking, I was like, oh my gosh, more? That's awesome. It's like, you know what, I'm going to take this, and I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do like a short series of bullet journal videos, and I'm gonna see how that goes. And so being able to, but I wouldn't have been able to see that trend, even that really small dot that I could connect back for an earlier bullet journal video, if I hadn't done like all this other stuff to see that this one was clearly higher than the other ones. And, you know, where did I go to learn or to figure out which video should I do next after that, like, 2018 planning one. But there was one thing that probably a lot of you have seen now in that video that I called the 10 blocks and the 10 block system. And a lot of people were asking in that first video, well, tell me a little bit more about the 10 blocks. How does that work? I'm kind of curious about this, but I need some more explanations. I was like, okay, that's gonna be the next video. And then that one did well, and then people asked more questions, and so I did another video based on your questions.. And so many of these videos that I've done for you in the past 5 months have been questions that came up from the community, either in comments or on Instagram or Twitter. And so thank you so much again to, you know, allow me to enjoy doing these videos so much, because it is a lot of fun for me. And I know because you've told me that it's really helpful for you. So again, 2 things to take away as you're like in the middle of or just beginning a creative journey of your own. Maybe you're tracking with a Bullet Journal or some other system that we've talked about, and hopefully one that you're starting to create for your own, is number one, make sure you get started and be consistent with your content. Because number two, the way that you can be consistent with your content and build that library of things that you're talking about, you're going to start to see from your audience which topics are going to start to bubble to the surface and are going to start to rise up and be like, ah, this is the one I should really start with. Because even inside of like the overall topic of Bullet Journaling. Like, I went one kind of topic or subtopic lower. I'm not quite sure which direction. A lot of you come in because you really like the minimalist nature of the way that we talk about the Bullet Journal and different journaling systems here, is that it's not overly, it's not overly pretty. It's, it's very simple, it's very straightforward, but it's really effective and allows you to get back to living your life and getting after the goals and habits that you really want to take advantage of in order to level up with whatever you're doing. So just once again, thank you so much. If you're watching this for the first time, you're like, this guy is— I don't know, he's just on here talking about, you know, getting to 10,000 subscribers. I'm just really happy about it. I want to say thank you to everyone. There is so much good happening on this channel, not just with the content but in the community as well. And one of the reasons that I do strongly say that the content is great is because it's coming directly from people asking questions. So give this a subscribe, give it a thumbs up, and I can't wait to see you in future videos. I've got some really good ideas lined up. If you want to sign up for the email list, also just go to bulletjournalguide.com or look for any of the links in the description, and you can get the entire productivity pack to make sure that you are making progress on the things that matter to you. All right everybody, thanks again. Hope you have a great day. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
