Genius Advice for Small Channels

your first video is not going to get views period it's not your first 10 are not going to get views I can very confid say that so stop sitting there and thinking for months and months on in and just get to work and start uploading there's literally no such thing as a perfect video a lot of people give up too soon because they're not getting enough views you literally could be a year away from that video that you just made taking off because you just stopped uploading give yourself 10 years give yourself 10 years at

this craft making videos posting them online getting made fun of for at least five of those years and then maybe at the end of 10 maybe you'll have a little bit of success if you're a small YouTube channel or maybe you haven't even started a YouTube channel yet I want you to know that it is totally possible last year I started two brand new YouTube channels from zero and I was able to grow them very fast getting hundreds of thousands of views even with not a lot of subscribers now before I share with you how

to do this I want you to hear from some of my favorite creators on advice for growing your small YouTube channel you had no money what would be the first 10 videos you tried to uh to make on a new channel I guess that's advice for a new person huh and nobody knows you yeah nobody knows me yeah like Hally I have a mask on and you also I guess don't have the wisdom well if I don't have what I have in my head then I would say just fail like just a lot of people

get analysis paralysis and they'll just sit there and they'll plan their first video for 3 months and I I'm any of you listening if if you especially if you have zero viewers on your channel your first video is not going to give views period it's not your first 10 are not going to get views I can very confidently say that so stop sitting there and thinking for months and months on in and just get to work and start uploading like all you need to do this applies to people who have not uploaded videos but have

dreams of being a YouTuber is make a 100 videos and improve something every time do that and then on your 101st video we'll start talking like maybe you can get some views but you know your first 100 are going to there are very freak cases like Liza Koshi or Emma Chamberlain who have really good personalities and it doesn't take them so as many videos and it's just like people who are 7'5 and making the NBA like yes there are free cases you can find but for the average person like us you know who don't have

these exceptional personalities and you know backgrounds in film making just make a 100 videos improve something each time and then talk to me on your 101st video well the improve something each time is the tricky one how do you improve something each time the second one just I don't know put more effort into the script the third one try to learn a new editing trick the fourth one try to figure out a way that you can have better inflections in your voice the fifth one try to you know study a new thumbnail tip and implement

it the sixth one try to figure out a new title there's infinite ways that's the beauty of content creation online there's literally infinite ways from the coloring to the frame rate to the editing to the filming to the production to the jokes to the pacing to every little thing can be improved and they can never not be improved there's no there's literally no such thing as a perfect video item number one is that no one cares about your videos this is two categories of people do not care number one your friends and family do not

care and number two the the audience also does not care firstly on the friends and family front I was so worried when I started YouTube 6 years ago that people were going to say bad things about it I was afraid people were going to judge me and then I started making videos and I realized no one cares no one cares people are busy with their own lives people are doing their own stuff they do not give a flying toss whether or not I have a YouTube channel or whether or not I make videos they're never

watching my videos my videos are not aimed at them and so me making videos is not for the sake of my friends and family and so many people get held back by the worry of what their friends their family their co-workers their boss their aunt their Uncle their dog is going to think about their YouTube channel no one cares everyone is doing their own thing you can absolutely do YouTube and I guarantee your friends and family will not care secondly the other category of people that doesn't care is the audience when I first started making

YouTube videos 6 years ago I thought people would care I started making videos about me and my friends singing songs a cover of payone by Maroon 5 a cover of Adele or whatever and the way I now think about this and what I kind of wish I'd known before is that videos on YouTube are not actually free people are paying for watching your videos they're just not paying with their cash they are paying with their time and attention and those are two currencies that are even more valuable than money and so when you're new to

YouTube and you make a video and it doesn't get any views and you think oh the algorithm doesn't like me it's not that the algorithm doesn't like you it's that your video is not worth watching people have not decided to click on that video people have not decided to watch it because it has not provided them with any value and these days increasingly people have so many choices of how they can spend their time on the internet the thing they want to do is they want value whether that's value in the form of entertainment or

education or inspiration it needs to have some kind of value and if there is no value in the video then people will not watch the video and if people are not watching the video the algorithm will recognize that no one's watching it and is therefore not going to recommend it and this is enormously liberating and enormously freeing when you're getting started because it means you don't need to overthink it no one's going to watch the first several videos anyway you have to start off by being bad and over time by being bad repeatedly you will

eventually be good at making videos your videos will start to add value you you'll start to figure out what your Niche is and then when people give up their time and attention to watch your videos it will actually be worth it for them and now the algorithm is going to start recommending you and then your channel will grow and then at some point you'll become a millionaire and then life will be all great when people come up to you and they say Casey I'm thinking about being a YouTuber what advice could you give me a

young upand cominging Creator if I wanted to do what you've done for so many years Casey what advice do you give me I that question I hate it my response is always why no like let's if you ask me that question and like let me like that's a big qu you're asking me to do work right now yeah yeah yeah why and if their answer is anything other than like there's nothing I love more than making videos or like I grew up here and nobody knows about X you know like there's some genuine passion whether

it's artistic or or sharing a perspective anything other than that if it's like if the word Mr Beast is anywhere in their answer my response is don't or prime yeah yeah because like that's that can't be the mission I get I got asked this the other day in the airport I get I get to ask this question sometimes and it is difficult cuz like I I too want to stress how difficult it can be if you don't love it this kid came up to me you know what what advice can you give me I said

he's like I I want I want to make videos I'm an up andc coming I said okay how many videos have you make was well n yet I'm thinking about starting I said all right kid you're what 1920 give yourself 10 years give yourself 10 years at this craft making videos posting them online getting made fun of for at least five of those years and then maybe at the end of 10 maybe you'll have a little bit of success consistency for me is my general advice for these people but you are right it needs to

come from a place of like kind of this is what I love it's just how I'm Wasing patience is the other thing I say because it's it's a little bit of a answer nobody wants to hear that no like what's the one piecey what's the one piece of advice like I don't have time I don't want to stop my Escape Oro I just want to roll past you and give an answer patience it's always like patience do you have 10 years to commit to this and they look at you like youve three heads they like

yo I thought Mr Beast said and it's like no everyone has different audiences so what works for Mr Beast might not work for me right so what I did is like I did my own little experiment like when I knew I wanted to get into shorts I told myself I was going to upload every day for as long as possible and I think I only about like a week or two in it didn't it I didn't I didn't get that far but the goal was essentially to upload as much as possible quantity is what makes

quality when I was doing that quantity I would analyze my retention graph and this is just like one example I'll just pull out for you so there was one video after 5 days I got I think it was like 50,000 views in 5 days right which I on average I usually get like a million so I was not happy with the performance and I pulled up the reten ention graph and I noticed on the last second it was a huge dip it was 70% 1 second later it was 45% like a 25% drop in 1

second and the retention was 83% so what I did was I went to YouTube Studio I trimmed off that 1 second YouTube removed this feature by the way YouTube please bring it back but just by removing that 1 second at the end it went from 83% to 88% and the video went flying and that that's why like every second counts on a short like every single second because when you think about it let's say you have a 30second short right if you lose 1 second that's already 97% that's three percentages you know if you have

lose two seconds that's 6% so when you think about it I'm sure it's like you're not just losing one second you're losing double or even triple because that 1 second accumulates to 2 or 3% of the video so there's been some incredible advice already and there's even better advice coming up later in this video but I wanted to touch on a little bit of advice that I've learned from personal experience this last year growing some YouTube channels and literally getting hundreds of thousands of views on these videos on a channel that had less than a

thousand subscribers and I really think for me a big part of it came down to the packaging which if you don't know what packaging is it's your video idea it's the topic it's the title and it's the thumbnail so that is not even the video itself a lot of people put all their effort into shooting YouTube videos and what they don't realize is and where they're lacking is their thumbnails aren't good their titles aren't good their ideas aren't good so I have some very practical advice on how you guys can come up with better video

ideas that will actually get you more views because your videos might be great you're just not getting any views because this part is lacking so one of the things that I started to do was I'd come up with way more video ideas than I actually needed so if I was getting ready to make my next couple videos I'd come up with like 50 video ideas and then throughout those most of them were pretty bad maybe 40 of them I'm like these probably wouldn't get views and out have 10 of them that are pretty decent and

then what I do is I take those 10 videos and before I just choose one you really want to validate that idea and how do you do that how do you make sure before you press record that it's going to get views that there's interest in this that people actually care about this topic and the video idea and so you don't waste all your time you know on this YouTube video what I would do this sounds so simple but it just works is I'd go on YouTube I would type in kind of the video idea

that I was looking to make and if these videos were getting more views than the subscriber count then I would know this was a good video idea for me to make because I knew that YouTube was working on pushing this topic or this video idea out to more people Beyond just their subscriber base maybe it could be oversaturated but often times people want to watch a lot of videos on the same topic so it's okay if you add in to the conversation people want to hear your voice and it is still worth making that video

now there's going to be a lot more YouTube strategy coming up in our YouTube 1K challenge which is a free event that we are hosting and this is a 5-day YouTube challenge on how to get to your first 1,000 subscribers and make your first $1,000 on YouTube so you can click the link down in the description if you guys want to check that out and join us at the challenge but let's get into some of the other advice from these YouTubers when I first met you I had just gone full-time as a Creator and you

were so great you gave me this worldview this perspective of don't think algorithm think audience in my role I've always gotten a lot of questions about the algorithm is like what time should I upload to optimize for the algorithm what time you know how often should I upload and the way we design the algorithm is actually such that we want to give audiences the video and other content that they're going to be most Satisfied by and so if the audience doesn't really care whether you upload it at 3: in the morning or 7 at night

then the algorithm shouldn't care easy either and so what I encourage creators to do is when they have some of these questions they immediately kind of think about algorithm like replace the word algorithm in their question with the word audience that's going to give you a better answer because we're we're aiming to serve the audience and so the more you focus on understanding what your audience wants and finding the best fit with them the algorithm is going to match that yeah that one of the biggest things for me was when I stopped thinking why didn't

the algorithm like this video I started thinking why didn't my audience like it as a Creator I think um the more that you can put yourselves in the shoes of viewers and go through YouTube and browse around and uh see what's going to make you uh as a viewer be interested in a particular video versus another video it might give you more perspective you may not get just thinking so much about your your own videos all the time uh look at from the viewer perspective for new creators or smaller creators because when you say the

algorithm follows the audience they worry that they don't have an audience yet for the algorithm to follow so do we do anything for those those creators yeah so we have a team that is specifically focused on this challenge of trying to identify um audiences for creators that are just getting started for videos that don't we don't have a lot of um information about and so yeah with with those um videos and channels we do need to uh try some different approaches the title the description when when there are viewers that that show up that seems

like they might be interested in it will show uh that video to those viewers and see which of them react we really want to make sure that there is a path for new creators uh to get started it's a metric we track how many how many new creators are succeeding on the platform we we're very focused on that we we care a lot about it because we do believe that there's a lot of opportunity there with new creators coming along with new ideas all the time and we want to we want to help those creators

be successful Sean if you were starting a YouTube channel in 2024 what would you do especially considering that you've been in the YouTube game for 17 years now you've started multiple channels three silver play buttons how would you get started in this new year yeah so I wrote down five things when I thought about about this question and the first one is courage you have to start messy and I think about this you know I have some tactics as we get into it but now that I've had the chance to coach so many different people

that have started YouTube channels and grow their YouTube channels I've realized that really the first thing that holds us back is our self and our fears and our mindsets we feel like we're not ready we feel like man is anybody going to care we feel like am I going to be judged is there going to be negative comments and these are all legitimate mindsets but you're not going to get results if you don't start you're never going to know if you don't start everything that you want in life is outside of your comfort zone so

I do want to lay a foundation that um you got to start before you're ready you got to start messy you probably have a million questions even if you've already been subscribed to or the think media podcast or other channel for a while you still probably are like but what about this but what about that you have to just start and my second tip is Clarity and we can hit that one in a second but the the reason that I say start messy is there's really two kinds of people maybe you're already a a professional

a business owner so you're already know you're in real estate you already are in carpentry and so you know like you're going to start a DIY channel helping people fix stuff around the home you know that you're going to start a real estate channel to get leads clients and sales in your local community you know you're a musician that uses Ableton so you want to start doing music tutorials like you already have Clarity so if you have that we can dial that in when we get there in a second but there's this whole other category

where you know someone's listening to this they know they want to start but they're unsure they they have a million questions about what Niche what topic what about this what about that and I would encourage you to just start posting videos just try something don't overthink it because we do learn by doing and I know for me because I didn't have Fierce Clarity when I started I just started posting random videos on my Sean canell Channel there's a million lessons of mistakes I made but the benefit of that was I started to learn how to

film I was learned how to edit I experimented with this topic that topic and even though the brand ended up being kind of not great and the niche wasn't really clear and I was all over the place and that wasn't my successful YouTube channel I haven't even uploaded there in years it was a personal development experience a skill development experience and I like to say I have four YouTube channels that helped me eventually start a successful one so absolutely in 2024 start as soon as possible don't put it off don't just watch YouTube videos don't

just consume information we learn by doing take action press record you got it takes courage you got to get uncomfortable so just start I kind of want to bring it back to the person who's starting out right what pitfalls are they going to run into what can they avoid what kind of mistakes are people making that either make them quit YouTube and like they just give up on it or maybe they're making some mist mes that so they're not getting views anymore yep what would be one of those that you think a lot of people

make it's funny cuz those kind of feed into each other I find that a lot of people give up too soon because they're not getting enough views so they get discouraged I've had videos that 240 days after they've been rele released start taking off two almost a year so like and like viral taking off yeah and you could you literally could be a year away from that video that you just made before you quit or right before you quit h taking off because you you just stopped uploading yeah so I mean I think a mistake

people get is they they get bored they're like man this is boring well you might be get it might be very boring because it's time for you to start working with other people I know it is a lonely Journey if you are just like grinding and doing it all by yourself but even if you found like a collective or you started masterminding with a few friends or maybe maybe you started one you're like hey uh every Monday we're going to meet on zoom and just like you kind of did this right with your so if

you just kept if it was just you and you were just cranking it out I I I would imagine you'd get really discouraged but now you have guys being like dude try this thing you know like let's do that so I think find yourself find a community and I do love that about V is that there's a community of people constantly it's every day it's 24/7 of people checking in on each other testing video ideas and things like that don't allow yourself to live in discouragement it's okay to get discouraged but don't don't live in

that because then it's going to cause you to quit and by you quitting there's that ripple effect of what could have been or what should have been uh what probably should have been I I actually think that if you do not quit on YouTube that is the number one recipe for success is the trying at YouTube I feel like we're trying at YouTube we still are trying like we're always testing new formats testing new things and that's actually the goal so you know we started this conversation talking about Fitness and that you sometimes we have

these end goals well the goal is to build the lifestyle so if if I get discouraged in the journey and it causes me to quit I actually lose because the goal was to just stay on the journey y so don't allow discouragement to cause you to quit I love that um our video editor for think media Nate he's over here he um he has a similar story with his channel and so Nate's fil Nate Dog Nathan's dogs I'm just kidding go ahead his his channel is called uh Nate's film tutorials and do you your video

that took off it initially the director's one it didn't take off right away and so and I think he was even you know probably a little bit discouraged because he posted this video and and I was like dude this video is fire like this is going to get a ton of views and all this stuff and it like just tanked and it it was also at a point for him where he was a slight pivot from like videography to film making and I was like but bro like just commit to the film making like commit

to the pivot and and uh is this it right here so okay so check this out dude dang 100 a 100 days in it ends up getting 6,000 views and how many subscribers you had like 20,000 subscribers at the point so that's not a lot of views for him but after 100 days it jumps up and it just keeps skyrocketing and now it's at 283,000 views wow so similar to you right just like found the audience and here you can take this back name and this is this is actually a a thing that is happening

on YouTube okay it's when you're just posting consistently and one video goes nuts what do people do after that one video goes nuts and what does YouTube do number one people start checking out the order of videos YouTube starts serving your next uploads the your older uploads and then it it starts to like fill in your your channel if you hypothetically or you know like an illustration it's like an empty cup let's say you're empty and you have this one go viral and now there's spilling over into other stuff so now my even for me

older podcast I uploaded 2 months ago they're starting to take off but it's because people are starting to binge the channel and it's because Nate didn't quit that people can now go back they can go forward and so this is why you don't want to quit exactly there's a lot of people who would post a video and then they would be discouraged after 159 days yeah they would give up and and then like their Channel takes off and they're like there's all these new viewers coming in and they're they go to your channel like you're

inconsistent you don't post anymore right you haven't posted in six months and so what what you have to do is stay consistent even when it's hard and then YouTube rewards like The Snowball Effect happens through consistency of recommending another one of your videos and another one that's how YouTube works and it's like and honestly if you're in finances there's this term called compound interest I would say this is a little bit more powerful yeah because because the amount of compound interest that takes place with attention then it really puts the ball in your court to

be able to do what you want to do sell what you want to sell you know live how you want to live you know um so yeah I would don't make the mistake of quitting if you're a very small YouTuber and you can upload a video a day and like all the videos be average and like none of those videos will really stand out none of it's like epic enough where like the algorithm is going to go oh this video like this video is good like we need to spread it feel like a lot of

small YouTubers they just post like videos that aren't bad but they're not great and they just do that and and none of them ever pop off so they never get an audience where it might be better to like you know upload half or a third or even like a fifth of the videos but make the videos you upload so freaking good that like the algorithm has to promote it and that you know it has to find audiences for it because it's such an interesting and good video when you like set a consistent schedule and you're

constantly having to upload videos that aren't as good as you'd like because you got to hit oh this Monday I said I'd upload every mon day you know like that's a dangerous trap because then you know the viewers notice that the quality isn't as good and it makes them less likely to watch and I think it hurts your Longevity if you want more tips and advice for GR your YouTube channel then you're going to want to watch this next video I hope you guys enjoyed this one and if you did please hit that subscribe button

and we'll see you guys in the next video