[00:00] I monetized a brand new YouTube channel from zero subscribers in just six long-form videos across 44 days. I ended month one with 17,000 views, month two totaled 158,000 views,
[00:12] and as of writing this video right now, four months in, I had 725,000 long-form views spread across 14 uploads. I did all of this without telling a single person or pre-existing audience about the channel,
[00:25] completely faceless and I did it entirely using browse traffic aka I got viewers from the YouTube homepage to click my video which is the most powerful form of traffic and no I didn't use my resources to hire anyone I did
[00:39] every single part of these videos alone I came up with the ideas filmed edited scripted made thumbnails all of it by myself I did this by following seven simple rules and I'm gonna break these rules down to you today
[00:51] counter on screen let's go right away rule one I need to admit that I didn't tell anyone or any pre-existing audiences about this channel for my own benefit, and you shouldn't tell anyone about your channel for the same reason, or risk really holding yourself back and hurting
[01:04] the channel. The first of three major reasons is that I had to prove to myself and to you guys who watch this education content that I'm not like other educators. I am not sitting here telling you how to grow without any evidence of success outside of this channel. The same as when I taught
[01:18] you how to make shorts, I showed you that I had 26 million short views. The same as when I showed you how to grow on Twitch, I had 150 average viewers, and now I'm telling you how to grow a brand new YouTube channel, and I've monetized it in just six videos. The second major reason I
[01:31] didn't tell anyone is I had to prove to myself I was motivated by creating, not by desperately wanting views or wanting subs. Anyone can beg family, friends, Discord servers, and pre-existing audiences to go and subscribe to their new projects, and then, well, release videos. It's
[01:44] so much more impressive to have nobody, absolutely zero attention on the channel, and still consistently upload weekly. The third and most important reason, if I had told anyone, if I had told you guys here,
[01:56] or friends, family, other streamers, Discord servers, I would have completely killed the channel before it even started. You see, you guys are new creators. Your one goal watching this video is to learn how to create better content. If I told you right now,
[02:08] go subscribe to that channel and then link it, you would go there, subscribe, or you would go over there and see the videos. But you wouldn't engage with them naturally. You wouldn't, next time you see one on the homepage, click it, which would mean it would have a low click-through rate, and those who did click it
[02:23] wouldn't watch it for long because they subscribed not out of actual interest in the content, but simply out of a feeling of, I have to support this person, which makes YouTube say, hey, even this guy's core audience doesn't like the video. It's a bad video. This exact same thing is happening to
[02:38] you when you ask for follow, sub, or promote your videos to friends, families, or random discord servers. If you didn't tell a single soul, and all you did was upload a well-packaged and engaging video which I'll cover what I did to do that soon, then YouTube needs to read the title,
[02:52] the description, the metadata of the video and then test that video to audiences. From that test, it learns who likes the video and will recommend that video to more people like that person. If you get desperate and try to skip this step, you will just hurt yourself.
[03:07] Actionable tip time. Let YouTube do its job. Let YouTube find your audience. Don't be desperate. Don't try to inflate your subs or views with people who don't care about your content. Just Just focus on making good content and let the right audience find it.
[03:20] But what the hell does that mean? What is good content? Well, good content starts entirely with your ideas. You've likely heard this a thousand times, but it isn't just in relation to one video. You need to step away from what you can gain as a creator, what value you're going to get
[03:34] from the channel, and think about what value you can offer a viewer consistently with every upload. Dank Pods does headphone reviews in the same simple, honest, and fast style every upload. Coffeezilla exposes scams and the dark side of internet influencers with every single upload And I decided I would do short funny but in game reviews every single upload Out of these three examples the value of each is incredibly clear
[03:56] Viewers get recommendations for hedge funds. Viewers learn how to spot and avoid scams. Viewers get good game recommendations. What is also clear is that none of these three examples are going to stray from their value. None of us are going to upload a vlog of us in Japan one week, a random mouse unboxing
[04:12] the next or some barely ever stream highlight of us playing Roblox. You've got to remove your ego and realize that as unknown creators, nobody cares about you or me. When someone is scrolling through YouTube home, they need to click the video because it offers them value. I'll cover
[04:27] how I did that in a second, so stay tuned, but I want to make this really clear. I am not saying to only ever do one thing. I'm not saying niche down and never try anything. I'm saying to think Think of an audience, think of viewers and what do they need, what do they want and what
[04:43] you can give them. If they watch your video of you unboxing a new mouse and giving first impressions and then go to your channel and try to watch more content like that, but find it's full of unedited gameplay and stream highlights, they're going to be dissatisfied, let down, disappointed
[04:58] and leave. So, actionable tips. Consider what topic you think you can bring value to people with, despite yourself. Nobody cares about your basic websites, your blogs, or your personality-driven content yet.
[05:10] They need value. So ask yourself, why would someone care about this upload? Now, once you have your value, for example, like I did with quick, funny, in-depth game reviews, we need to actually make them clickable. There are three rules I use to make a video clickable, and if I follow them correctly,
[05:25] I've been managing to get between 10% to 15% CTR, and you're probably thinking, wow, is that good? My tiny, dead channel gets that. Why aren't I growing? Everybody gets CTR incredibly wrong. They set specific numbers as a goal overall, but
[05:38] every niche and every video is actually different. In your head, a big CTR is good, but my biggest video on this channel has over 3 million views and a 2.3% click-through rate. Theoretically,
[05:50] 2.3% is a terrible click-through rate, but it's also my best video. So why is the CTR so bad? Well, plain and simply, it has 82.5 million impressions, aka the video has been
[06:03] shown 82.5 million times to potential viewers. Which of these three CTRs would you want on your video? 100 views out of 1,000 impressions, aka a 10% CTR, 10 views of 30 impressions,
[06:16] aka a 33% CTR, or 3 million views of 82.5 million impressions, aka a 2.3% CTR? It's a pretty simple answer.
[06:29] The 3 million views, obviously. So why did it still do so well? Well, that brings us to the three rules of title, thumbnail, and cam. This video has a very large cam, or total audience metric.
[06:41] The title is 32 easy tips to grow from zero viewers on Twitch. The total audience of this video is every single Twitch streamer trying to grow. They desire easy tips they can achieve today.
[06:54] They want a lot of them, and most importantly, they want no barrier for entry, which is why zero viewers is key. If I draw a series of circles, you can see the outside Y is the largest audience, and
[07:06] that is all streamers. If the title had been How to Get Twitch Partner, suddenly you'd lose a huge section of your audience who don't care about that yet. That's too hard. That's too far away. You go from millions to a few thousand people who are interested.
[07:21] It's a smaller circle. When we create a video idea, title and thumbnail, we need to consider our TAM and avoid unnecessarily cutting off huge sections of our potential audience. One of my favorite examples of this is when I covered the SteelSeries Alias and SteelSeries Sonar release I could have titled it SteelSeries Alias Review but nobody knows what the alias was and why it mattered to them so instead I titled it SteelSeries Just Sold Streamer Audio For Free
[07:47] By the way, we go from this tiny niche circle of people interested in this unknown microphone to appealing to almost every streamer and then also raising a question of how did they solve it, how is it free if it's so good, and the viewer needs to click to find out.
[08:01] video got 100,000 views. If we look at the gaming niche, CallMeKevin does something really powerful with his games because he often plays things nobody knows about. If nobody knows about it, he isn't going to put the game in the title because that would lull the TAM. So instead,
[08:14] he writes, the best free Steam game takes place entirely on your desktop. What he has done there is make his TAM every single Steam user, every gamer who wants good games, every gamer on the
[08:26] budget and he has raised so many questions why is it good how is it free how does it take place in your desktop and that's why users then need to click it to answer these questions this is a creator with 3.5 million subscribers and a decade of experience who isn't using his face to sell
[08:43] his content because he knows he can reach a larger audience by focusing on all steam users rather than just all me kevin fans so why are you putting your face in your thumbnails why are you focusing
[08:55] on your personality when even the largest creators aren't doing that. So, actionable tip time. When creating ideas for videos, you need to remove your ego and yourself from your title, thumbnails, and ideas. Think like your viewers. Think like your audience, and think about your total audience
[09:10] metric. Do people want to click on Let's Play Haze 2 Episode 69? Of course not. I don't know you. I don't know if you're good at Haze. I don't even know if you're going to be a fun person to watch, and most importantly, I haven't seen the other 68 episodes. But I would probably click on
[09:25] the most anticipated sequel in gaming is here. Because I don't need to know who you are, I don't need to know what Hades is, I just need to be a gamer interested in seeing what the most anticipated sequel actually is.
[09:37] And when I do click, your intro needs to perfectly reiterate and tell us what your title and thumbnail said. It needs to hook and engage me. Promise me you're not wasting my time. If I click a video called The State of Indie Horror Games
[09:50] where the thumbnail shows me the most recognizable horror mascot and the word boring, then you better instantly address that. Which is what Stella J does. Once Upon a Time in August 2014, Five Nights at Freddy's and P.T. are released four days apart.
[10:04] Triple A's TV has come to their own thing, but this would mark the beginning of two very distinct categories in the indie horror scene. Mascot horror and good horror. This branch is so boring! At those 15 seconds, set up the entire premise of the video.
[10:17] They reiterate the title and they make a statement that you're either going to 100% agree with or 100% disagree with. Either way, by the 15 second mark, you are completely engaged. There is no, hi, welcome back to my channel.
[10:29] No big title singers, no asking for subs or begging for likes. Just some great music, a fantastic script, and subtitles perfectly done so that you're constantly engaged and reading the content. It looks intense and dramatic or over-edited, but it isn't.
[10:44] It's addressing your click before slowing down and covering the topic through the rest of the video. It's front-loading engagement. actionable tips. Make sure your title, your thumbnail, and your cam are structured so that you know who your audience is,
[10:57] what value you're giving them, and why they're clicking. Then make sure the first 5, 15, and 30 seconds of your video reiterate that value and pay off that click. And please, give your audience value and don't ask for value from them by begging for likes and subs early.
[11:13] This heavily leans into my zero-fluff policy. When you're watching a video back, reading a script, or even simply recording, ask yourself, Does this matter? Does this help the viewers gain value? Am I stretching the length of the video for no reason by doing this If the answer is yes then you should cut that section If you line up your video or script and mark the timeline as point A B C D and F and then ask yourself if a viewer is watching do they need the information they gained from
[11:36] point B to understand or enjoy point C, or can a viewer go from point A to point C without missing anything, without having any issues for the rest of the video? If they can, then point B isn't needed.
[11:48] When I did this, I found my videos became much shorter, punchier and ended up always being around the 7 minute mark. And you know what? My retention rate climbed to 50 or 60% because viewers weren't getting bogged down in crap that didn't matter.
[12:01] I had stayed on focus to the original value, the reason they clicked, and that meant they stayed with me as long as possible. Actionable tip. Remove your ego and stop leaving stuff in because you like the sound of your own voice.
[12:14] Don't ask for value. Don't expect viewers to watch you because you worked hard. Cut the crap that doesn't appeal to the reason they clicked and don't get distracted going on random tangents. Next, arguably this will cause a lot of debate but it's pretty simple, you need to release
[12:28] consistently. This isn't because the YouTube algorithm or whatever will be nice to you. It's not even because audiences have the memory of a goldfish and forget you exist if you only upload once a month. This is entirely because you can set a deadline and stick to it.
[12:41] If you make and release an entire video every week, you will be able to look back at every upload and ask, okay, what worked? What didn't work? And you will improve so much faster if you upload 52 videos in a year, where you are able to improve just a little bit every upload,
[12:57] instead of uploading 6 videos in a year, where you've spent months polishing endlessly for them to be perfect in your eyes. Actionable tip. Set a deadline and stick to it. The enemy of creativity, of success, of YouTube is perfection.
[13:12] I hate the term good enough because people use it to justify laziness, but if you've put in hard work, effort, and your heart into your title thumbnails and videos, but respect your deadline and say, this has to go out today,
[13:24] and you'll always end up going further than someone who is constantly pushing their deadline back just to polish the cut a tiny bit more. And now for the most important step of the entire video, if you want to grow, you need to make the viewers, your audience, actually feel something.
[13:37] A running trend through all of these steps, if you go back through, is focusing on your audience and how they feel. When Stella J's video is titled The State of Indie Horror Games and Freddy Fazbear is there with the word boring, you are damn right the audience is going to feel something and quit.
[13:52] When they click his video, he says, mascot horror is boring. You're damn right they're going to feel something and keep watching. When they listen to his justification without pausing to beg for subs or likes, when he cracks a joke, they're going to either agree, disagree, laugh, not laugh.
[14:05] But either way, when they make it to the end, they have an impression left on them. They're a different person. I've had a lot of failed YouTube channels, and I've realized almost all of them failed at this step. I wanted to grow on YouTube because I wanted to be a YouTuber,
[14:17] not because I was passionate, but this channel, Strange Games, was successful because I'm authentic with you. I am passionate about sharing my experience and helping others grow. A little too much, honestly. Seeing people struggle fucks me up emotionally. And on the
[14:31] new channel, I'm also passionate. I'm passionate about indie games. I could talk about them for hours. I have strong opinions about what is good, bad, what genres are overhyped, what trends need to die off, and when I talk about those things, it lets viewers feel something.
[14:43] actionable tips. You're going to likely struggle if you're uploading for the sake of it or uploading content you don't care about. If you aren't passionate about this, if you aren't excited every time you sit down to create, well
[14:55] then you need to go back to step two and start thinking of ideas. Ask yourself what do you care about? What can you talk about, argue about, have opinions on and defend for years to come? Once you have that answer, you'll be able to make
[15:08] content that makes viewers feel something. Click here to learn more about how I design thumbnails and here to become a member of the channel for just one dollar no sponsors no swaps no hassles see you next week really pleased to become a member of the channel see you guys next week bye