An year ago, I was standing at 100 subscribers!
That was a great feeling, indeed. Getting my first 100 subscribers took me a full 3 months’ time of weekly regular video uploads.
Fast forward to today, exactly (or almost) an year later, I have crossed 1050 subscribers, while being semi-regular with my video uploads. (It’s a slow growth, yes) – although helpful tools like TubeBuddy, TuberTools, and people like Backlinko’s Brian Dean, VideoCreators, Nick Nimmin have helped to a great extent in making this smooth.
Nevertheless, there is always an idea of what to upload next to YouTube on my chosen niche of Amazon KDP – all thanks to the author community’s questions!
With this incredible journey (although, it’s just the beginning) so far, I have learned a thing or two about really making it on YouTube. I just wanted to document my thoughts in this blog post about those lessons learned.
Although, these are just a few, it took a year for me to really get these! Will keep adding more to this list in the coming years.
- Responding to comments improves the overall watch-time: the logic behind this observation is that when people get their replies via the comments from the channel owner, the credibility tends to improve. The people who comment and get a response, start to feel that there is a person behind the scene who ‘really’ responds to their queries. This builds trust, improves chances of them watching our next videos without any question (assuming they also subscribed).
- Hitting on the ‘Like’ button tells me that a viewer just liked what he/she just watched. But hitting on the ‘Subscribe’ button tells me that he liked what he saw, but he also expects more of such videos in the coming days. Same goes for ‘follow’ on Facebook or Twitter – the expectations are for future content mostly, than for what they saw just now. That being said, consider that the very content that made them come to your channel, is sold. That’s why they want to see more of similar content.
- Contrary to the popular belief of ‘asking’ people to subscribe, I have observed that when I focus on creating extremely useful content, I don’t need to ask people to hit on the subscribe button; they naturally do (am guessing, FOMO is at play here). This is because when the content they came to watch has already connected with their intrinsic expectation of some value in what they are watching, there is no need to ‘ask’ them to ‘check the time’ when you’ve already sold them the ‘watch’ – they will automatically do that.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYupwP5yK6CSyiXT3KRs8Tw/videos
