How to Grow a Gaming Channel FAST (Ft. Spiffing Brit)

in a lot of cases YouTube is a platform that takes creators years and years to master but if you're willing to put in the work get your reps in and get some experience it may not take you years and years to find the success you're looking for on YouTube I've studied tons of gaming channels that have grown from0 to 10,000 subscribers in their first month now they're shooting past the 50k 100K and even 300K Mark like this one and this one and this one I've gone out of my way to talk to some of the

biggest gaming creators there are such as spiffing Brit to trying and figure out some of their strategies on how they would grow if they had to start all over from scratch today so if you're starting a new gaming channel or you've been at this for quite a while and you're just starting to feel a bit stuck hopefully we can help you out here before we dive into the advice of someone like spiffing Brit let's give just a quick refresher on the algorithm for anyone who's kind of new to this whole YouTube scene first of all

going forward let's stop calling it The algorithm and I want you to think of it from now on as the audience the more an audience watches your videos the longer they watch those videos the more those videos can spread to The Wider YouTube audience really YouTube's end goal is to make sure that viewer has the best experience though and if that viewer is saying hey I like this then they're going to be like cool maybe more viewers do this means that you have to meet the audience's demand so you can make the best video ever

about Farming Simulator 2017 but guess what we're well into the 20120 is now and nobody is looking for that game you can't expect to get millions of views covering game that's become ancient and one that no one's really thinking about anymore but okay what about playing a game like Minecraft something that is kind of old but everyone still owns it and still plays it to this day well now we have a a different problem because now you have to make the best video in the world because Minecraft is a very saturated Market how are you

supposed to stand out there is a much easier and much faster way to get that first thousand subscribers if that's what you're aiming for and it doesn't involve you having to become the best Minecraft player in the world you need to play smart and fight battles that you know you can win I would say the fastest way and to get like a th subscribers it's it's not to copy the content of say your favorite creator that you're watching if your goal is only to get th000 subscribers just find something that is a gap in the

market that people want to watch but can't see how do you do that well there are a number of ways really you could pick up a game that you absolutely love and that is popular but maybe you found that the tips and tricks and guides out there are insufficient and maybe you can make some to fill that void or you could do what a lot of new creators do and try and find a new upand cominging Emerging Market it could literally be a brand new game is coming out just go harass a developer for an

early access key make a few videos on that game get them out before everyone else does or right at the start of it and suddenly you've got an audience appearing out of thin air that will just watch anything you make you don't even have to be interested in the game but trust me that will easily get you to 1,000 subscribers that's what I did it's a walk in the park I promise your videos will get pushed to a lot more people if you don't have a lot of competition right ideally there's going to be maybe

an existing audience waiting for somebody to serve them what they're looking for although I wouldn't go so far as to say that's a walk in the park or is it we'll come back to that framework in a little bit but first if you're having some trouble even jump starting your channel then you need to listen to this shortcut very carefully it is not easy to get a $1 million idea that actually works and believe it or not even the biggest creators on YouTube do not find this part easy at all but there is a workaround

that nearly every Creator takes advantage of gaming or not and if done successfully those channels grow way faster oh hey uh just want to interrupt this video real quick to let you know that right now it's Creator Appreciation Week here at vid IQ that means for this week only we are offering 50% off of our boost memberships if you don't know what that means basically vid IQ isn't just a YouTube channel we actually have a whole Suite of software tools that can help you create videos what's cool is that these tools actually link into your

channel and using your Channel's actual data they can do all sorts of things for example we have a feature that gives you ideas every single day for new videos you can make we have an AI content generator where you could basically just give it a prompt and it's going to produce all kinds of results for you you'll get a title a description a script it even provides a sample voiceover and thumbnail backgrounds as well and we have tools that go well beyond our AI tools such as our keyword tool this can help you produce search

driven content based on actual things people are actually looking for on YouTube right now so if you want to join the 3 million plus creators that are using our tools every single day then please check out the link in the description and now back to the video creators everywhere like to take a simple proven format and put their spin on it a recent very popular example is trying to cross a video game from end to end in one single straight line from tears of the Kingdom to Grand Theft Auto to Skyrim this is something that

is starting to become more and more popular as people find it to be a really fun challenge that can work in all kinds of different games and scenarios and this trend actually originated from outside of the gaming space itself so for your first attempt if you want the best results here I want you to take an existing format of maybe some kind of challenge or something like that and bring it to a game that you're already familiar with and that is popular that audiences are actually looking for and make sure to study the title and

the thumbnails of the videos that are doing a similar thing because those can give you guidance I'm not saying you should copy them I'm saying you should put your spin on them it doesn't have to be crossing a map a straight line though it could be so many things you could take an iconic game like doom and try and do a pacifist run you could speedrun a famously slow game like Monopoly honestly this is where the creativity part of YouTube comes in the sky the limit here what I'm trying to do right now is give

you ideas to avoid making the biggest mistake that I've seen gaming creators make since the dawn of YouTube I call it off-the-shelf content any person can take a video game that they bought online or at a store and sit down and play it so when a YouTuber does it what's the big deal do not post a video where it's just you playing a game exactly how someone else would play the game if they just went to Walmart and picked it up themselves if you want to stand out take this really popular game and bring something

new to it maybe you're really really good at it or you're practicing to do some kind of tournament that's coming up maybe you just are terrible at the game maybe you don't take the game seriously at all channels like let's game it out do this all the time they take a brand new game and they play it in an unintended way so when you start ideating your next gaming video sit down and come up with a solid premise before doing anything else but be cautious here because there is a big Pitfall you do not want

to fall into when you're just kind of finding your voice on YouTube one of the biggest mistakes that gaming channels make and I partially blame myself for this is that they tend to start with just one game and they never think about deviating from that one game back in the day I used to tell creators this is a great strategy to start a YouTube channel and part of me still believes that because if you are just starting out it's good to kind of focus on one thing but as you start to get used to the

idea of making videos you really got to be thinking maybe 3 years into the future when the game you're playing is long since dead focus on a certain category of game for example instead of of just one game forever you need to be strategic here you could be the news guy for example but that's a nich market maybe 90% of people don't care about the news updates for that specific game then what this is still a solid strategy from starting a YouTube channel from scratch but keep in mind your total addressable Market here is just

small going for gaming challenges opens up that total addressable Market but of course it does lead to more competition and basically a total addressable Market is well think of it like this the entirety of YouTube is a total addressable market right you want all of the people on YouTube to watch your videos right however you can't make everybody happy so that's not really possible so you have to Niche down into a more specific market so Mario games would be a more specific Market Mario speedruns would be a very specific market and one that's probably still

pretty big however a really awesome challenge where it almost doesn't matter what game it takes place in people can just sense that it's going to be entertaining now that's a very big toil addressable Market cuz now it no longer focuses on just one game anyway there's a lot of nuance around the conversation of a total addressable Market but what you're trying to do as a Creator is cast the widest net possible and one that makes sense what happens if you've already casted too small of a net though you find yourself in the situation that I'm

describing right now where you're just doing one thing and everything feels really narrow and you're not sure how to get out of it you've succeeded you're getting views but you're starting to run out of ideas or motivation you might be struggling to find a path to grow and you might be finally at the point where you're like I got to do something else well it's time to Branch out this is probably the biggest issue branching out from your one audience or your one game is really really challenging because so many creators attempt it and then

they feel immediately burnt like they'll go okay I make uh Minecraft content but I really like playing csgo so I'm going to make a csgo video Once the issue is your audience is just going to get Whiplash from that they they're not going to watch that it's going to get 10 out of 10 the Creator will panic and they won't try any new kind of content again for like six months and they'll just keep burnings out on this one game that they don't want to play so if you're going to Branch out there's multiple ways

to do it and I think the the best way to do it is to either find another popular adjacent market so if you play say one popular strategy game play a different popular strategy game Canadian guy a who we've spoken to in the past had something similar happened on his own channel he started out by focusing on Crash Bandicoot but he found a way to Pivot and slightly open up his total adressable Market by also covering Spyro he's also found other games that cater to an audience that would like games like crash and Spyro they

already happen to have a lot of crossover themselves basically he exponentially increased his is total addressable Market but what if you really want to do Minecraft I mean after all it is a massive market right earlier I said you have to be the best Minecraft player in the world but you've seen smaller channels kind of come up and have success of their own and you don't think they're the best in the world right so yeah maybe you can do it right if you're going to go into a saturated Market it can 100% be done you

can do it believe in yourself but also do not just do what other people in the market are currently doing you have to find the Emerging Market inside of that saturated game do you remember the example of the 100 days in Minecraft videos that started to pop up a while back these days that concept of spending a 100 days in Minecraft is incredibly oversaturated when it first emerged though it was seen as revolutionary and it didn't even begin with Minecraft in the first place 100 days content had been popularized by all kinds of different games

in the past Indie Games strategy games games like stard Valley creators realized that you know Minecraft itself is really saturated but not a lot of people are just trying to spend 100 days straight in the game so they had a fresh concept they brought it into Minecraft and lo and behold it just continued to snowball from there and so if you're going to break into a saturated market like say Minecraft you've got to ENT up with either an established hook that people would recognize or would find interesting that is proven to have worked or you've

either just gotten a one in A- million idea that no one else has ever done and it's going to shake the landscape and if that's the case hats off to you but that's like a one in a million shot so yes with YouTube you need to be creative and you need to be strategic if you want to grow but that doesn't mean you have to do videos that you just don't love doing it also doesn't mean you have to only play a couple of things even if you want to make content about a lot of

stuff let's take another look at Canadian Guy this is what his long form videos look like but if you go over to his live streams he's blowing off steam being opinionated bonding over completely different genres let's look at someone like Josh dri ha he's on Twitch but on YouTube he has multiple channels that kind of serve different purposes and scratch different itches that he has as a Creator a lot of the creators we've highlighted today have something in common they build channels about themselves and what makes them unique as people this protects them in case

inevitably one day they decide they want to play something else becoming a gaming personality is not easy but in this video here we talk a little bit more about that and dive in on a number of different subjects if you're trying to grow a gaming channel right now