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Steve Dotto here. How the heck are you this fine day? Me? On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m 14 or 15. The reason is we did it! We hit a milestone last week. We hit 50,000 subscribers on our channel, which is exactly half way to what my goal was for this year. So if I look at my yearly goals, I’m falling way short but let’s celebrate the success that we’re having, shall we? We started the year out at about 10,000 subscribers, stated a goal and tried to hit a hundred thousand subscribers. That wasn’t practical but we’ve done this all pretty much organically, without spending money on the channel, grown more than two times, and there are lots of lessons that we’ve learned in the first half of our journey to 100,000 subscribers. So in this, I think, the 34th instalment of my vlog on Growing your YouTube Channel to 100,000 Subscribers. Let’s take a look at the things that I’ve learned in the first half of our journey, shall we? Alright, 50,000 subscribers, it’s a big number but it’s just a number. What’s important is every single one of those subscribers is a potential viewer on the channel. Let’s talk about what I’ve learned about servicing that audience, about becoming a conduit for knowledge and information to an audience and to a community. When I think back on where I was a year ago to what I’ve learned in the last year, I think one of the things that I’ve grown to appreciate the most is how YouTube is a social network and the audience that I’m growing are not fans. They’re not subscribers but they’re a community. I think that’s because one thing that I’ve done since day 1 is I have made sure that I spend time in conversation with that community. Now I’m not saying every YouTube content creator is going to do this but if you do want to grow a community as opposed to just an audience, I think that this is something that you have to consider doing. So my routine almost every day, not every day but almost every day, certainly every day that I’ve kind of had a normal schedule is in the morning after I’ve kind of gotten things started, got coffee in my lap and I’m ready to get going is I head into the YouTube channel and I go into community. I’ve done this to the detriment of some of my other social channels. I don’t spend as much time on Facebook as I used too. I spend way less time on Twitter, much to the chagrin of many of my social media friends. But because of YouTube’s Google+ integration and the fact that I’m having people that are watching my videos commenting and asking me questions, and it does take me quite a bit of time to go through this space, I’ve decided that this is the best use of my time in social media – talking to our audience, to the community in YouTube. Now this is a strategic decision you’re going to have to make because at some point you’re not going to have time to do everything in all media or at least I’m certainly not going to so you have to choose which ones you’re wanting to spend time in and you’re going to have to spend less time in some of the other social platforms. Now the YouTube integration with Google+ is not as clean as one would like because I’ve discovered as I go through that thing slips through the cracks and I don’t always understand exactly what’s happening with Google+ as I go along. That might be my shortcoming but I think to be honest it a little bit more has to do with Google+ just being a little bit confusing and about how it all fits together with everything else and YouTube and Google+ kind of inventing it as they go. But of course being YouTube content creators, we’re no strangers to inventing it as we go so it’s not like we can criticize Google something that we do so much, is it? No, I think we better just give them a pass on that. So every morning, I spend time going through all the comments and then it’s going to be up to you to decide at what threshold and what level you want to comment and engage with your audience. But I would say that as long as you are genuine with your involvement and you’re actually genuinely having comments and having conversations that you’re probably on the right foot. Now what I’ve been trying to do is comment back on every single comment that has been posted. As we hit this mark, this number of subscribers, it’s getting more difficult. It’s starting to take more time and I’m starting to recognize that things like the thanks that I get here and I appreciate them, but for the most part I’m just going to give them thumbs up. I have commented in the past on each one but by giving them a thumbs up, I’m also giving them my Google+ and Crassenstein will realize if they look back that I’ve given it a thumbs up, I’ve given it to Google+. So I hope that they recognize the fact that I’ve read it and appreciated the comment. If you write a little bit more, I then will respond as best I can. Some questions just don’t have answers for. There’s not much we can do but for the most part if I haven’t answered or if I have an idea in a way to comment back, I do on each and every comment. What’s happening is those comments are turning into short conversations and I’m getting almost as much back as I’m putting into it at this point here. So one of the nice things that’s happened with the channel’s growth in the business side of YouTube—remember the whole goal behind this vlog and my experiment here on YouTube is figuring out if YouTube can be the basis for a business so I’m always looking for revenue opportunities coming out of YouTube—by having conversations with my audience, they have told me or my community is what I should be calling you, with conversations with my community, reading between the lines you’ve told me what you want as far as products that you’re interested in buying from me, what you’re willing to spend money on. As I was posting videos on an ongoing basis, I noticed that any YouTube videos that I was posting on Evernote were getting far more traction, far more engagement and far more interest. So when I decided on adding a revenue leg kind of in my whole business here, Evernote, creating a course on Evernote was the first place that I turned and it was quite successful. I’ll talk about that in a few moments but that grew out in the sense of engagement in community that I have in the channel. And I enjoy it. I kind of feel a real sense of ownership over the channel and I just feel that the amount of time that I’ve spent in conversation here, in building it into a community has turned it into a really interesting place. It’s turned it into a place that people are obviously finding value in. I’m seeing the same people posting multiple times and I’m getting really nice feedback. So it’s a two-way street but it’s one that you have to consider getting on, I think if you really want to grow your channel, certainly if you are a personality that wants to be a part of the channel and you’re not just an entertainment or a re-broadcaster of things or something like that. But for the style of community-growing of YouTube that I’ve chosen to do, it’s important. Once again I will reiterate, you’re probably going to do so at the expense of some other social networks. For me, Twitter is the one that suffered the most, Facebook a little bit. So you’re going to have to ultimately at some point pick and choose. One of the other things that as I’ve been thinking about what’s happened in the channel is the style of videos that I’ve produced has changed slightly but I’ve gotten more comfortable with my voice in each of the videos that I produce, my kind of quirky sense of humour, a little self-deprecating at times, a little curmudgeonly or a lot curmudgeonly at times. So I’ve let my personality come through and it seems to be again creating some engagement with the audience. People are enjoying the video. They’re finding them to be engaging as well as informative and I think that is tremendously important. One of the things that I decided to do at the beginning, probably it will sound like it’s because it was a brilliant idea as far as composition and as far as creating a brand but it was more out of laziness, is I let a little mistakes go. I don’t mind having little mistakes in my videos and it’s never bothered me. I’ve never watched it again and said oh, I really should’ve redone that. If I feel that way, I do redo it. But for the most part, I’ve allowed little things to happen. For this kind of quickly consumable information that has a little bit of shelf life but not a tremendous amount of shelf life, I always thought it was good enough. Now I didn’t want it to be just good enough from the perspective of taking shortcuts. I don’t want you to consider that for your video. But I think that if we were musicians, we would look at ourselves as jazz musicians rather than classical musicians. We’re improvising as we go and every time we improvise, you hit the odd sour note. But jazz musicians don’t shrink, pull back and start over again when they hit a sour note. They just keep on going and they recognize that the narrative that they’re creating, that the fullness of the piece will carry the day and that one sour note or that little mistake in the middle, it really isn’t a reason to stop. It’s just to continue moving through. And here’s the most important thing I think content creators have to recognize. This carries forward for if you’re doing a live presentations, if you’re doing webinars, if you’re doing videos, if you have a mistake that you decide is okay to continue on through, just continue on through it. Don’t be embarrassed by it. Don’t be concerned with it. The audience doesn’t get concerned unless you show concern. If you show fear, if you show the fact that oh jeez, I just really screwed that up; I wonder what I should do or maybe I’ll keep going, well then they feel uneasy about it and it becomes an issue. But if you make a mistake and then you just keep on going and you plunge through it and you don’t let it act like it bothers you at all because it hasn’t bothered you at all hopefully, then it won’t bother the audience at all. So as you’re creating your video, not in all cases but in a lot of cases, if you can, think about it as jazz rather than classical, the odd little mistake, the odd little missed note here, the odd little thing that you tried to go down that avenue and it didn’t quite work, that’s okay. That’s okay. We can just keep on going and keep moving in the right direction. Now let’s take a step back and talk a little bit about the business of channel and the things that I’ve learned about the business of the channel because the goal of this series is to figure out if we have a business here on YouTube, if YouTube can be the basis for a business. Increasingly, I believe that it is. I have a lot of confidence that it is. So as far as revenue into my business directly related to YouTube after a little bit over a year into it, we started really on this journey of September 2013 so we’re a year and two months down the road, if you think about any small business starting out, a year and two months is usually the painful time. Cash flow might be an issue and you’re not really making money in that period of time. You’re still learning and making mistakes and I think we’ll be making mistakes for some time to come. But let’s talk about what the real revenue is that I’ve recognized. Again, I’m a solopreneur here. I’ve done this all by myself. I haven’t had anybody else really doing any piece of the puzzle so this is the real deal, as if you started out by yourself, built it up and built something that mirrored the sort of channel that I built. So as far as the revenue pillars that I’ve looked at, I’ve got advertising revenue from YouTube itself. I’ve got patronage. I’ve got our Patreon supporters who are supporting the channel as a sense of community, which is turning out to be far better than I ever imagined. We’ve got online courses and I’m developing digital products. I’ve really only started that a year into the process. So over the first year for the most part, I did have a couple of courses but I didn’t really hit my stride with the courses. Instead, I was really concentrating most on community-building, finding my voice, figuring out how to make videos, how to increase the number of views in videos, increase the number of subscribers, increase the traction and created a footprint in the online world. I concentrated on that but now I’m trying to sell digital products. So those are the three kind of main pillars of revenue that I currently have and that I’m working with. Each of them is actually doing pretty well, I would say. In hard dollars, not one of them is probably enough to support me but in AdSense revenue, which we’re not supposed to share, we’re not supposed to share how we get to the numbers, but we’re allowed to share the gross numbers so we’re in early December now, last month in November we brought in $1,700 in AdSense revenue based on the size of our audience. We’re at 50,000 subscribers. That’s not bad, I think. I think it might be a little bit higher than the average YouTube content creator can expect because I suspect that my cost per view is a little bit higher just from what I’ve read online but you can extrapolate that for what you want. Even if it was half of that, it’s still pretty reasonable money. It’s still enough money to help pay for your services. Even $800 or $900 a month, with half, with 50,000 subscribers, you start to recognize that AdSense ad revenue on YouTube is a potential that can actually make a bit of a difference in your business. Now having said, certainly if you’re a solopreneur like me, not if you’ve got 15 people working for you. It’s a whole different story, right? But one thing that we have to recognize always when we talk about AdSense revenue is we are not in control in any way, shape or form of how it continues because the numbers that how Google is or how AdSense is doing with selling advertising, the perceived value of ads in the online world, we have no control over any of those things. I’ve seen that even in this one year where my AdSense revenue is climbing, climbing, climbing and then it plummeted down precipitously like down to a third in the revenue in the course of two months. Then it took another two or three months to climb up. So there’s a five-month period from a point that I hit a peak till I climbed back to that level, which had a huge impact on revenue. Now at the dollars that we’re talking about right now, that’s not the end of the world. If it is, you’re in a very precarious financial situation. But if we increase our numbers by ten times and we start talking about $17,000 of revenue that you’re getting and all of a sudden that plunges down to a third and you’re suddenly looking at $3,000 and that $17,000 is actually supporting employees and other people behind, AdSense revenue becomes very precarious indeed. So it’s never going to be the revenue source that I count on. I am always going to look at AdSense revenue as a bonus and something which is always at risk because I have so little control over so many of the factors engaged with it. But I’m still happy to see the numbers come in. So that’s AdSense revenue. Far more in kind of my wheel house of what I can and can’t control is the Patreon revenue that we’re getting. Now Patreon is the site that where people come and support you by basically donating money, by offering patronage to your channel in order to see that you are able to continue to produce content. What offer my patrons is if you come and help me pay for the channel then I don’t have to spend a lot of time worrying about advertising revenue and bringing sponsors on. Instead, I can spend that energy and that time creating more content and for that, we will give you some perks, we will give you some bonuses. So it’s very similar to Kick Starter except we’re not dealing with a single project. Instead, we’re dealing with ongoing content. This is popular for people like me that create vlogs or that create ongoing video content. It’s incredibly popular with musicians and artist, people who write books, those sorts of things where the patronage models that we would’ve seen back in the Renaissance where people supported the artist for future work to ensure that they could create future great work rather than paying them for the work that they’ve created, that model, that level of trust and that level of relationship is what comes out of Patreon. Now we’ve seen some nice growth in Patreon in our channel in the last couple of months and that’s primarily because I’m figuring out the perk program. I’m figuring out what I can offer patrons as perks that really makes sense. The thing that happened before was people were getting access to early access to my videos and things like that. But once I’ve started to develop the digital products, my courses, and I was able to say to patrons at the $10 level, you get free access to my course which means it will only cost you $10 to get access to it if you’re just a patron for one month, but over the course of the year it’s about the same if you would buy the course. But you get the warm and fuzzy and you get the nice feeling of actually supporting ongoing content, more access to me where I respond very, very quickly to anybody that posts questions on Patreon, etc. So it just seemed to suddenly click into place when I started to offer the courses as perks. That’s something that I’m going to take a good hard look at as we move into 2015. I’m going to tweak the system a little bit but I’m thrilled with how Patreon is coming together and I love the sense of community that I feel from it. It’s an even more intimate sense of community that I feel with the YouTube channel which is still a pretty good sense of community and one definitely folds into the other. But now Patreon, unlike AdSense revenue, is passive income to a certain extent but it’s something that I feel far more in control of because it’s a small, defined group that we can reach out and touch and we can offer new things to. I just feel a lot more in control of the business process and where the value can lie because I determine what additional value I give the patrons, not the patrons having to determine like in advertising revenue what money is worth being spent. So this is a step up as far as reliability and I’m happy with how the Patreon side grew. I think for many YouTube content creators, Patreon is going to be a really nice viable option. I’m still waiting to see what YouTube is going to produce. They’re talking about producing the same kind of options of subscription-type memberships but they haven’t really pushed it out or at least I haven’t seen it where they’ve pushed it out where it makes me think twice about the fact that YouTube might have something that would make me switch from Patreon for this particular service. The third leg of revenue that has come to the channel is of course these digital products that I’ve started selling. Now I’ve got two main courses that we’re selling right now, one on Evernote and another one on Task Apps. This is the landing page for them that you can see here and they are selling quite well. Now what I’m learning to do is I’m learning new ways of promoting them to audiences that haven’t seen them. Almost everybody that’s a part of my community has now seen these courses or has been offered them or know that they’re available so now I’m having to find fresh markets and fresh eyeballs to see them. But that’s all part of the ongoing process of building the channel as well. It’s bringing new people in and when new people come in, a certain percentage of them might be interested in the course. The actual revenue from these courses exceed anything that I’ve gotten from the other properties that I have because the bottom line is because you can make fairly large sales. If you put on a webinar and you have 200 people out to and you close 10%, that’s 20 sales. In my model here, that’s $2,000 in revenue that comes in very quickly and in quite a controlled manner because if you spend the effort of putting on the webinar, you know that a certain percentage of people are going to buy so it’s a nice, classic internet marketing model. But it’s definitely growing out of the YouTube channel. So between those three pillars of revenue, I’m starting to see that this year, this coming year is just a year and a half now into the business venture that I have a real business. I don’t have fear now which I did. To be honest with you, right from the first nine to ten months that I was doing this, I said am I really ever going to be able to turn this into a business that I can make money on? Now I can see that I can indeed. Here is the final part of our look at growing the 50,000 subscribers, what we’ve hit there. I’ve seen that the revenue models are starting to work and hopefully you’ll determine whether or not the numbers that I’ve shared with you start to make sense if you want to make the kind of investment. Know that it might take you a year to reach this kind of level. But the last part is now that I’m reaching this level, I’m recognizing that the business systems and the information systems that I have that tell me about the activities of my community have to be improved. Now I posted a few weeks ago that I’ve outgrown Aweber, which is my email software that sends out my newsletters and that I was going to make a shift and I was going to buy a more advance CRM or customer relationship management package that’s more designed for information marketers. I’ve made that decision and I’m just in the early stages now of setting up my actual software. Now I chosen InfusionSoft as the tool that I purchased. It was very close between InfusionSoft and Ontraport and to honest, I don’t know which one is better. If you ask me ten years from now, I won’t know which one is better because I’ll never know just how good Ontraport could’ve been because I’ll be spending all my energy in InfusionSoft. But having said that, I believe that they’re pretty much a muchness that it’s going to be more reliant on the energy and the creativity and how I use the tool that’s going to determine my success than the tool itself. A carpenter with a 14-ounce hammer and a carpenter with a 16-ounce hammer, one might be better, but if you use it your whole career, you never know that one will be better. You just know that you make good buildings. That’s what I’m hoping to do. I’m hoping to take this tool and apply it and learn to make it work for me. So the key that InfusionSoft is going to give me is it’s going to give me intelligence of what activities I do which actually generate revenue downstream. Now I already know which activities give me happiness. I know what type of videos I post that you reply to that make me feel happy and that I enjoy publishing. Those aren’t necessarily the ones that are always going to make my business advance. Now I’ll continue to make those but I want to know which ones make money and which ones just make me happy. I want to know what type of webinars generate the most traffic, not only for new subscribers to the newsletter but potential purchasers of the product that actually resolve into buying a product from me at some point down the line, be that joining my community as a Patreon supporter or purchasing one of my information products because at the end of the day I still have to figure out how to make this work because of business. I also want to know what activities I do draw people into the community that are just watching more videos and just kind of contributing to the community itself. Both are valuable but I have to know which ones are generating revenue versus which ones are just generating community and then I have to decide what balance I want to attach in order to keep my venture moving ahead in a profitable and controllable manner. So that’s the intelligence that I’m hoping to get from a tool like InfusionSoft. Now stick around in the channel because I’m going to actually be recording a lot of my enrolment process of setting it up and talking through the process because I know it’s such a confusing tool. It’s not that InfusionSoft is confusing. It’s that getting your head around what a CRM can do for you, especially for people that are into information marketing, what we can apply and where it can fit for us, it’s not self-evident necessarily. You get ideas. You kind of have rumours of things that might help you. I’m going to try and make them concrete and try to make them easy to understand. That’s one of the goals that I have moving ahead this year. That’s really it. I need to thank everybody who’s been participating in this. Forgive me for being a little bit of a pat on the back through this entire episode today but we’ve worked hard to reach this point of 50,000 subscribers and I’m proud of that fact. I’m proud of the community that we’re building up. I’m proud of the fact that you’re taking the time to engage, ask me questions, give me value back and I do feel that real sense of community that’s growing out of this. That is something that’s so unique and so different from my days in the broadcast television world when I had an audience but I did not know who my community was. I didn’t have a community. I just had an audience. I’d prefer having a community and I hope you enjoy being part of my community. So with that, I’m just going to say thanks so much. If you haven’t subscribed to this channel, please subscribe to the channel. Sign up for our newsletter. And of course, I’ve talked a little bit about Patreon. If you are intrigued by that, please click on the link. Take a look at Patreon and see if it’s something that you might want to participate in. But really the big overall message today is thank you for your support. Thank you for your encouragement. I appreciate both. I am Steve Dotto. Until next time, have fun storming the castle.
