Steve Dotto here. Thanks for joining me today on our journey to 100,000 YouTube subscribers. You know before I began the journey to 100,000 YouTube subscribers, I was on another journey and that was to 10,000 YouTube subscribers. That was my journey in 2013. It was a goal that set part way through the year that we attained just by the skin of our teeth. I want to take you back and talk to you about what happened in the growth to that first 10,000 subscribers and an important decision that I made that I think is a lesson that you’re going to have to learn, that you should learn and should concern if you want to grow your own channel into significance.
The lesson that I learned in reading what many other experts had said is that publishing regularly on a schedule, a predictable schedule is really important for growing your audience. It’s important for your own personal discipline but it’s also important that your audience trusts you, learns that you will deliver when you say and begins to expect it, anticipate it and look forward to your videos coming out.
So here was my journey last year. The early part of the year, I really wasn’t committed to building this YouTube channel into a business. I was doing it because I thought it was interesting. I enjoyed producing the videos and experimenting with different ways to produce screencast videos and how-to videos. I liked telling a few stories. But it was a hobby as opposed to a business.
Over the sum of that year, I said I want to spend some time and see what I can really do, growing this channel and see if I could turn it into an asset that I could turn into a business. I thought at the time I would mainly be using it to build a mail list that I would then use to sell courses and other things. I hadn’t determined at that point that the channel itself could be a business unto itself. But nevertheless, I determined that I was going to spend a little more attention to it. I wasn’t going to come into it 1000% but I was certainly going to make a much larger effort.
So over that summer holiday, one of the things that I determined I would do is make a commitment to publish once per week for the remainder of the year. When I got back from my holidays in late August or mid August, I started publishing each and every week. I did that through the year and I’ve done that continuously now up to this point here. As of today when this video is being recorded, it’s March 4, 2014. So I’ve been doing that for six months or so now.
Here’s the point. You can see in my number of subscribers gained, you can see the point that I changed my strategy and I began to publish weekly. I did a few other things which we’ll soon be talking about, other techniques that have helped also increase my subscription uptake. But the biggest thing was publishing each and every week.
Before that, I kind of muddled along. 500, 500, 450, 500 subscribers every month, which isn’t bad but it’s certainly not something you can build a business on. Then in August, at the end of August, I began publishing each and every week and look at the result. The first month alone, spectacular. I more than doubled the number of subscribers per month, not my total number of subscribers but subscribers per month in the month of September. October, again significant growth while 200 more subscribers in November. December, it dropped off mainly because Christmas time ended up being a really dead time. The week after Christmas, the people looking at productivity videos dropped off dramatically. I think I also missed publishing in that period of time because I ended up with that terrible flu. So I think I missed publishing as well. That kind of combined to drop off the number of subscribers but still we still had nearly 1100 subscribers which was more than double what we’ve been averaging just a few months so it was by no means a disaster.
But look what happened when things settled down in January. We exploded up to 2,400 a week, more than doubled our previous months’ total of subscribers and then February we continued on an upward trajectory, hitting nearly 3,000 new subscribers in February. So I’m seeing nice, actually fairly steady growth since I determined that I was going to publish once per week.
I have now determined after growing the YouTube channel to over 10,000 subscribers that I’m going t make the YouTube channel a part of my business. I’m going to commit myself to growing it the way that I grew my TV show back when we were on broadcast TV. So I’m going to pay a lot more attention to it. Instead of something that I do off the side of my desk and instead of being an experiment and a learning process and kind of a fun hobby almost, it is now going to become something that I take very seriously in and work hard at growing.
So I’ve set a new goal of reaching 100,000 subscribers, which you know about. Now I’m not going to reach that goal with this current growth. Although this is impressive, I think it’s impressive anyways, the number of new subscribers that we’re going and the way we’re tracking towards new subscribers. I think if I follow this path I’ll probably end up at the end of the year somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 subscribers, which is not where I want to be. I want to be at 100,000.
So how am I going to reach 100,000 subscribers? Well, frequency is going to be the first step that I take. I’m going to increase the number of videos I publish each and every week from one to two. That means a lot more work for me. I think it’s more than double the amount of work to produce two videos because there’s a lot more research in coming up with the stories. But that is the first step that I’m going to take.
So now from March and April, you’ll be able to follow the trend with me. We’re going to see if going from one video per week to two videos per week is indeed going to make enough difference to help us get towards our target of 100,000 subscribers. Your lesson for today though is frequency is important. Having a publishing schedule, coming up with an editorial schedule that you’re going to adhere to so that your subscribers and your fans can expect and know that they’re going to be delivered content on a regular basis that they can look forward to and they can rely on is a tremendous key in developing a successful YouTube channel.
I hope you found this video to be useful. You can subscribe of course to our channel here. Each week, I do several productivity videos and at least one YouTube growth video for you to learn from and hopefully enjoy. I’ve enjoyed preparing this one for you. I’m Steve Dotto. We’ll see you again very, very soon.
