How I grew my YouTube channel from 0 to 100,000 in less than 2 years

So, do you want to start a YouTube channel?

I started in 2020 and since then it has grown to over 300,000 subscribers on YouTube and has gone from being a hobby to a full time job for me.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Luka, just a normal guy who finished architecture school, but failed to enroll in the university of my choice due to lack of qualifications, and decided to search for a way to make money online.

The origins It all started in 2012, when a lot of people still laughed at Adsense and the concept of online business, let alone use Youtube as a way to earn extra money!

After finding out that a friend of mine had started making a lot of money from a similar career, I decided to pursue it!

The first thing I did was get in touch with him, to ask him a few questions about the little nuances that made it all possible.

We had a long conversation on Skype where he explained everything from creating a Youtube channel, an Adsense profile, and finally, how to turn it into profit and now I’m going to tell you how to create a channel Youtube successful.

How to start a successful YouTube channel

What’s not working (or how to delete your channel sooner)? First off, let me tell you what’s wrong or how to kill your channel early (learn from my mistakes).

Attempt 1 to create a YouTube channel

The next day, February 8, 2012, I started the whole operation, opening my first Youtube account. I had the channel all to myself and the Adsense profile setup and ready to go, so I started to wonder where should I start?

What is the content that will attract the most viewers and, more importantly, put more money in my pocket! I took the path of least resistance (at least I thought so at the time) and decided to do some funny failure complications, but I also “borrowed” content from others. chains. Naturally, due to several copyright infringement claims, Youtube shut down my channel, but it gave me a good idea of ​​how many views I would need to get to make any money.

Back then, the CPC and RPM were significantly better than they are now, and you could make a decent profit with 100,000 views.

Attempt 2 to create a Youtube channel

Can you guess what it was? Yes, nothing but a music channel, which I created on September 18, 2012. It worked to my advantage that some big music publishers didn’t have their own official channel at the time and the content be broadcast all over the web.

I downloaded the content from over 1000 channels and uploaded it one by one. I worked on one song at a time, making lyrics videos in the process, and honestly, it was like taking candy from a baby.

After a while, my channel started to grow exponentially, with some of the songs reaching over a million views, and I ended up receiving my first “MAJOR” paycheck (which was $ 300 ).

Sure, this might sound laughable to some, but considering I was 17 at the time, I was doing pretty well in my book. Income grew steadily over the next couple of months, hitting $ 600, and that led me to believe it was the start of something big!

The crash and the newly found determination

One morning I woke up and to my surprise I failed to log into my account repeatedly! THE CHANNEL HAS BEEN CLOSED! I never even received a single warning email, and it was all gone.

Due to my copyright infringement warnings and the fact that a major publisher decided to open their own channel, all of the content was suddenly made unavailable. When you get used to the good life and a steady income of over $ 500 comes to you every month without moving a finger, plus you’re only 17, and everything is taken away from you in an instant …

I felt like I had been hit by a train.

After trying a few similar feats, failing miserably each time, I started to lose my will to pursue any further. I looked for my place in the sun elsewhere, finishing my studies and working part time as a waiter.

Still, it was exhausting and I realized that I wasn’t cut out for this lifestyle. Work my butt off in college, only to work for someone else my whole life? No, that’s not how it was going to end.

This time the result will be different! I will invest 100% of my efforts to make a career on Youtube, and whether it takes me 5 or even 10 years, I will be in the lead!

What not to do if you want to grow your YouTube channel?

• Don’t steal other people’s content, create your own. YouTube will find you and terminate your channel, and in the worst-case scenario, someone can sue you for intellectual property theft.
• Don’t buy views. If the views are low quality or low retention, or come from blacklisted sources, your video will likely be banned rather than rated. Btw, traffic isn’t always good – focus on quality traffic that converts well, not just numbers. I don’t see the point in spending money to get millions of views that aren’t even monetizable.
• Never do Sub4Sub. You don’t want a subscriber who has no intention of watching your videos. This strategy will leave you with a significant number of subscribers who won’t watch your videos when you upload them, your CTR and views to subscribers ratio will be really bad, and the YouTube algorithm will see your content as low quality content.

How to broadcast your Youtube channel

YouTube’s success is all about planning and timing. Here are the exact steps I took to build a successful YouTube channel and you need to follow them if you want to be successful on YouTube.

Determine your niche

Among many interesting topics, lifestyle and gameplay were the most popular, but it was really not my area of ​​expertise. I decided to make my way, and do something never before seen in Serbia, a Do It Yourself channel!

As I have always excelled in the creative areas of work and graduated from architecture school, this was tailor-made for me. I named it “Kucni Trikovi”, which roughly translates to “Lifehacks”. Tip: Focus on a niche, don’t be all over the place if you talk to everyone you don’t talk to. Try to come up with a unique idea that people want to see, but that can still be done frequently.

Define your audience

This is one of the most important steps you need to do before you even start your YouTube channel. When you ask new Youtubers what their target audience is, 90% of them will say: Everyone, I have fun content that everyone can watch.

Newsflash: FALSE!

Understanding your target audience and what you can offer them is really important. Start by researching other successful channels in your niche, subscribe to them, and determine a specific group of people who watch this type of video.

See what people love to watch in your niche, see the trends, stay on top of what everyone is talking about, and create those videos. Find subscribers to these channels outside of YouTube, in Facebook, Google+, Instagram groups because they are interested in your topic and they are potentially your subscribers and viewers of your videos.

Promote but don’t spam and use these groups to research future video topics.

Create attractive YouTube channel illustration and profile icon

Invest in channel design (you can hire a designer Fiverr for cheap). It’s the first thing people see when they land on your channel. Your channel’s Youtube channel artwork is the same as your Facebook profile cover photo. The profile icon is the photo that appears next to your videos and channel on YouTube playback pages.

Make sure your channel artwork attracts visitors. This creates the visitor’s first impression and many will make a subconscious judgment based on what they find here.

Create quality content

Maybe I preach to the choir, but it’s so true. Thumbnails may attract viewers, but great content will turn them into followers.

Due to my previous experience with Youtube, I know that the public expects a full package, so on time, start doing voiceovers.

One tip I can also give you is to keep an eye out for current trends as Youtube has specific algorithms that push video with currently interesting topics to the top, just be sure to give your own spin on it, be enough different for separate yourself from the rest of the crowd.

For example, these were the fidget spinners in recent memory. Watch your videos from the viewer’s point of view.

What videos would you click on?

Spend time researching SEO, tags, keywords, use the TubeBuddy extension… and most of your viewers and subscribers will come from YouTube search and video suggestions.

In short: be remarkable. It’s not enough to post videos every week, you need to deliver your content in an engaging and entertaining format that separates you from the crowd. The biggest sin on YouTube is being boring.

How to gain an audience on YouTube?

How to get big on YouTube?

You may be wondering what the right place to start is? Most people forget one fact: YouTube is the second largest social media network, just after Facebook.

There is a community on YouTube and some of these people don’t even have profiles on other social networks.

Don’t waste your time trying to get someone on another network who never watches YouTube to watch you when people are already watching YouTube and following YouTubers.

Now when you understand that YouTube is a community, not just a place to host your videos, you should start interacting with other members of that community and start working a bit on self-promotion by commenting on other videos from. your niche (maybe include some humorous remarks, so your comment reaches the top where it can be seen by a lot of people).

Comments on other people’s videos will have a major impact on the number of views your videos and profile receive.

By commenting, you earn about 50 subs per day on average, in addition to the “normal” gain. Please note that comments containing spam are very risky. If you are flagged, you will be “banned from shadows / ghosts” for an uncertain time.

Right now, you think anyone can read your comments, but no one else really can. This also happens if you comment too much, or if you don’t really watch the videos and comment in the first few seconds.

It happened to me once, so I couldn’t comment seriously for a few days. I guess I’ll be commenting about 5-10 videos per day (1-4 per hour).

Instead of being spam, my tips were to be quick to comment after posting your video, to be funny AND to like the comment yourself so that you stay at the top of the comments for a while longer for others to comment. viewers read and like it too.

do not forget to Comment on other users’ comments on videos in your niche. People love to get noticed and will likely be curious to know, visit your channel, watch videos and possibly subscribe.

The other YouTubers in your niche are not your competition! They are and they will be your most loyal fans.

Connecting with other YouTubers in my niche, through their YouTube videos and social networks, allowed me to forge reciprocal relationships. They were sharing my content with their audience and that was the turning point for my channel.

How to do?

1. Enter your keyword in the YouTube search bar
2. Go to “Filter” at the top and in the “Sort by” column. Then click on “Upload date” and select the most recent videos
3. Pick a video that you like and that relates to your niche. Watch it, comment on it and share it with your audience

Believe me, YouTuber will do the same for you!

Promote your videos on other platforms

Facebook also offers a ton of opportunities, where you can share some of your videos to attract audiences. Share the content with your friends and maybe ask them if they can do the same. Do you know someone who has a large number of Instagram followers? Go ahead and ask them a favor. Even if you get a negative response from that person, what’s the worst that can happen?

Create engaging miniatures

My advice would be to always make 3 or 4 thumbnails and ask some of your friends which they click first. In my experience, it works like a charm. If your thumbnails suck, many won’t click on your video if it isn’t relevant or appealing. At the end of a day, the thumbnails (and the title) will determine your CTR. If your thumbnail fails to capture your viewer’s attention, you’ve failed. You can use TubeBuddy’s Thumbnail generator to create thumbnails and save precious time.

YouTube SEO

Believe me, none of your videos will go viral (you can forget that), none of the biggest YouTubers will yell at you (don’t waste your time contacting them), you are on your own and you have to use YouTube and try to post your videos in popular YouTubers’ suggested videos, and place your videos at the top of semi-popular or long-tail search terms. Some basic SEO tips:

• use the main keywords of the title
• use a limit of 5000 characters in the description (use your keywords)
• create playlists around your main keywords
• meta tags (use relevant tags)

How do I do? First, I have SEO friendly title with the main keywords. Then, again in the tags, I add the title keywords, and several combinations of long tail tags using my main keywords. Then if I have some extra space in the tags, I’ll add other relevant keywords that don’t fit the title, and finally, I use the “description section” to take care of the others. keywords related to the video.

How to find (see) competitor tags on any YouTube video

In the video playback page, press “CTRL + U” to open the source code page, then click “CTRL + F” on your keyboard to open a search box, type “keywords” into the search box, hit enter twice and voila these are… tags for your competitor’s video.

If you don’t want to do this every time, use Buddy Tube which has a built-in tag viewer feature that will appear for every video on your screen. Don’t just copy the tags from the competitor’s video. If you do, your video will be a stream of views for that competitor’s video.

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and SEO is a major issue so you need to pay attention to it. Tube Buddy is one of the best tools that helps you with YouTube SEO.

SEO is the only way to get your videos to the top of search terms and in the video suggestion section.

Do some keyword research and take those tags seriously. Tube Buddy allows you to research keywords for tags and it will tell you their search volume and competition volume.

How to get YouTube subscribers

Now when you have an audience, your channel viewers, it’s time to turn them into subscribers. It’s quite obvious that what is most important with engaging subscribers is making sure you have really, I mean really high quality content. If your content sucks, people don’t really care.

Subscribers are the main asset of your YouTube channel and as soon as you post a new video the majority of your subscribers will watch it right away and you will have those initial views which are the most important to the YouTube algorithm.

If your videos are good enough most people subscribe on their own but I never assume my viewer can read my mind and I like to ask for likes and subscriptions at the end of the video, and you should too.

Add the “click here to subscribe” subscribe button to encourage users to subscribe – the main thing is to make it as easy as possible.

Likes are very important. The more likes (and dislikes 🙂 you get, the more engagement your video will have. The higher the engagement, the more Youtube’s algorithm will promote your video and suggest it to other people.

As a result, you will get more viewers and hopefully more subscribers. You can use this simple trick to increase the number of YouTube subscribers.

Just add “? Sub_confirmation = 1” to the end of your channel URL and you will get that URL in the form of http://www.youtube.com/user/XXXXX?sub_confirmation=1. XXXX is your channel ID. You can share this link on social networks, blogs, forums or in emails.

You can run Giveaway or PayOff

Post your goal in public, you can use your Facebook profile and this simple step-by-step “subscriber payment method” process:

• Let them know your current number of subscribers (e.g. 100 subscribers)
• Tell the world your goal (e.g. 200 followers)
• Pick something fun, interesting, unique, or different that you will do once you reach 200 followers (e.g. shave your head, do something funny in public, do a crazy dance on video , a free gift, embarrass you, or whatever)

It’s a great way to get the word out about you and your channel with little effort and fun. People love this stuff, they will join you in supporting you and helping you achieve your goals.

Comments are another indicator of engagement. Encourage comments by posting your own comment as a question when posting a video. Again… more engagement = more views + more followers.

Tip: comment on each comment. When you do this, drop keywords in the responses and your video will start to get indexed in Google for those keywords – this obviously gets more traffic.

Get the hard work done with video engagement right from the start

Do the hard work with commitment early on to get a “snowball” on the chain. At the beginning or at the beginning of your channel, you should do all the work necessary to attract an audience to your channel.

After a while of YT indexing your channel and seeing real engagement coming to your channel, they will start promoting your content, you can see quick results within days no matter if they send you 5 views, at less it was suggested.

This is already a good sign, you will slowly get your new content from the suggested videos and it will grow on its own as long as you stay consistent with your uploads. This is when the snowball effect kicks in

How can I get my YouTube video suggested on some popular videos

With trial and error method. Correctly optimize your videos with relevant tags related to targeted videos. Stay consistent with your downloads, the more you upload, the more likely it is that a video will take off.

Start a Profitable Business on a YouTube Channel

Of course, it’s like any business. You can make tons of money by opening a bar, restaurant, photography business, with Amazon Business, etc. But most don’t.

Having a video that makes a few bucks here and there doesn’t seem like much when you post each one. But when you have hundreds of them, each becomes one of the hundreds of little “workers” for your budget over time.

Once you’re there, even if you never post another video, you can expect to earn $$$ completely passively from the royalties.

The beauty of this is that these videos will continue to make you money if you never spend a minute more on them, but know that Adsense = little potatoes.

The pay is horrible, for the same number of views you can earn 3-4 times more elsewhere.

The real money is owning and promoting your own content rather than relying on AdSense. You can do affiliate links, product placement… depending on your niche.

Don’t worry, the advertisers will contact you themselves once you reach 50,000 subscribers.

My final words on building a successful YouTube channel

When my chain started to grow, and I adapted accordingly. In addition, I have always maintained a good flow of communication with my viewers through social media platforms. This is absolutely vital if you want to build a strong community.

If I wanted to put it all in a short summary, I realized that success won’t come overnight, and to become great I would have to work hard and make sacrifices.

At first, it’s tough and it’s hard to stay motivated when no one is looking at you. With a little luck and, above all, patience, everything will work out.

If you’ve already gained a large number of followers, it’s important to connect with them and build a community.

You can ask questions through the videos, respond to their comments, or even play some of the top rated during the video.

Speaking of community, there is no better way to maintain it than by creating popular Facebook and Instagram profiles. This way, you can design specific polls regarding the content, which can provide valuable information.

Another important thing is the average length of your videos. Your goal should always be to force viewers to watch the content for as long as possible.

It’s no secret that YouTube promotes videos and channels with high total viewing times. The longer the video, the more income you will generate.

BE CAREFUL, do not go too far. Statistics show that the optimal length for a video is 5 to 10 minutes.

Similar to any other business, Youtube has its ups and downs. Because the algorithms change every two months, income will fluctuate, but the most important thing is to stay active!

As for me, I am currently still in my “Lifehacks” channel, which allowed me to meet great people, and also opened up other business opportunities. Honestly, I love my job and wouldn’t change it for the world!

At the end of the day, if you’re happy to work in an office job, this is your choice, but if you’ve always wanted to find out what else is there, don’t be afraid and take the risk!

Believe me, if you put in enough time and effort, anything is possible. Pick your favorite topic, invest time and 200% effort, and you will reach the top. Remember, creativity begins with self-confidence!