I Asked 2 Genius YouTubers How to Grow on YouTube

hey friends welcome back to the channel so I have interviewed two of the biggest YouTubers in the world Marquez Brownlee and Mr who's the boss who've got a combined total of over 30 million subscribers they're huge Inspirations for me personally and they shared some fantastic advice about how to grow your YouTube channel so let's just get into it yeah so I think this is super lucky that the videos that I know will do well are the most interesting to me also because they're about probably a piece of tech that is so cool that I want to check it out anyway right so on one half it's like what videos will do well it's uh the hottest gadgets the most impressive new things that people haven't seen before uh collaborations with really cool interesting people those I I know before we make them are like oh those are going to do pretty well and then on the other half is what do I want to do and sometimes it's well I want to check out this gadget this seems pretty cool well I kind of want to talk to this person they seem really interesting to talk to and suddenly like they're like meshing together and it's kind of the same pool of things so I think this advice is absolutely spot on and it really applies to beginners as well not just people who are as big as MKBHD I've taught over 3000 students in my own course the part-time YouTuber Academy and what I've seen for the ones who've succeeded compared to the ones who haven't is that usually the ones who've succeeded on YouTube are making content that genuinely interested in and yes there's an extent to which you have to figure out like what would the audience potentially want but if you keep on trying to appease the audience and sort of Chase the numbers you get to a point where you've just created a second job for yourself and the reason most of us started doing this YouTube thing was so that we could have freedom fun flexibility so that we didn't have a day job boss manager like breathing down our neck and telling us what to do and so if you fall into the Trap of forcing yourself to make videos that you fundamentally don't actually enjoy making just for the sake of the algorithm or the subscribers or whatever the thing might be then it's not a particularly sustainable way of growing a YouTube channel oh and by the way if you're interested in a more systematic way of thinking about this question of like what should my Niche be or what should I make videos about then in the link down below I've got completely free access to my Creator's Compass template but even if you're not one of our students you can sign up for that template completely free of charge no strings attached just like down below you can download the template and hopefully it'll give you some clarity in terms of this question of what do I actually want to make videos about so I've always actually been very numbers driven so even at the start when I didn't really have a schedule I still had like sheets on my wall of like how many subscribers I wanted to hear I've always had that in me and actually to be honest I think as the Channel's grown I've sort of tried to detach myself as much as possible from those numbers because YouTube is one of those things that you just you can't win there is a point when you start to think like what am I chasing here like how is my life different when I'm at 10 million versus 9 million or 9 million versus 1 million you know at a certain point you're making a living it's your business you're comfortable and so you have to kind of separate yourself from that you can't tie yourself to a number that you have no control over okay so obviously Aaron has way more subscribers than I do so the way that I think about this is trying to figure out what is the infinite game that I'm trying to play so in life you know there are two types of games there are finite games and infinite games finite games are played with the intention of winning so for example when I hit a million subscribers I will win when I hit 100 000 subscribers you know that is a finite game it has an ending whereas infinite games are played for the intention to continue playing like wanting to spend time with your friends is an infinite game it's not something that you're trying to win it's just something you're doing for the sake of continuing to do the joy is in the act itself and so the way that I think about YouTube and the way that now Aaron and Marquez think about YouTube is it's not like how do I chase the number XYZ or Revenue number XYZ but instead it's about how do I create a life where I get to make the content that I actually am passionate about and I get to share it with my audience and just keep on doing that and ideally build a business around it that makes it sustainable and again I think you don't need to be an absolutely huge YouTuber to have that particular attitude when it comes to goal setting you can always focus on what's actually under your control I've been doing YouTube now for the last six years and in that time I've never had a goal for my YouTube channel in terms of a subscriber growth or like a revenue goal or anything like that the only goal has been I just want to try making one or two videos a week and hopefully they will help at least one person and whenever I find myself getting caught up in the numbers I have to remind myself that nope this is the infinite game even if I had all the money in the world I would still continue to make YouTube videos because it's really fun learning cool stuff and sharing it with people online and some people are even interested in the stuff and that's awesome but because I know I would continue doing that even if I won the lottery for example it means I'm playing my infinite game and that means I shouldn't stress myself out worrying about the numbers and setting goals that are fundamentally outside of my control by the way if you're wondering about the absolutely sick background music that we've been using in this video and that also have been using on my channel for the last six years that has been kindly provided by epidemic sound who are very kindly sponsoring this video epidemic sounded absolutely amazing I've literally been using them since day one since like June 2017 when I first started my YouTube channel and I've had a monthly subscription to them ever since then we keep on paying the thing every month it's so good it's like by far one of the best investment that I've made in this YouTube channel and they're just a fantastic huge library of royalty-free music that you can use in bit pretty much whatever way you want in your videos epidemic owns 100 of the music that they use so there's not a single chance in hell that you're ever going to get a copyright strike for any of those tracks in the future and the library has over 40 000 different tracks of all sorts of different moods and genres and also over 90 000 sound effects so you can have cool funky interesting sound effects in your videos as well they add new tracks to their catalog every single week and all of the tracks are produced by professional musicians in fact a few months ago I visited their offices in Sweden had a bit of a jam sesh with some of the people in their team it's such a fantastic team the vibe of the company is absolutely fantastic and they're just so friendly and so nice and it was just awesome actually meeting the people behind this company in real life anyway they've got two main plans they've got a personal and a commercial plan so we are using the personal plan which is perfect if you are a kind of YouTuber or a podcaster or blogger or anything like that and that's great if you're creating content for your own personal channels and it works on YouTube and Facebook and twitch and Instagram all that fun stuff or alternatively if you happen to be a freelancer or an agency or a brand then the commercial plan lets you use the background music in your clients videos without ever worrying about a copyright strike now if you want to try out epidemic sound 100 I would recommend it then check out the link in the video description and that will give you a totally free 30-day trial where in those 30 days you can browse the library to your heart's content you can listen to the music you can check out the tracks on Spotify as well they're genuinely quite nice to listen to while studying or while working for example and then you can incorporate those into your videos and have some sick background music in your videos and during that one month trial any music that you use in your videos actually stays copyright free forever so even if you cancel the trial after that you can still use the music and not worry about getting copyright strikes so thank you so much to epidemic sound for sponsoring this video and for inviting me out to Sweden to hang out with your team it was a fantastic experience but it is fascinating to see people like set very specific goals that are clearly not in their control but to attempt to guide all factors towards accomplishing it like like saying like if I decided today all right we have a certain subscriber count we want to hit 20 million subscribers by the end of 2024. how on Earth would I guarantee that I really don't know but I think doing more and better would get us closer to it that's kind of that's kind of all I can control and then beyond this thing around setting goals that are fully within our control I really like Mark Heather's way of thinking about the quality of his videos and here's what he had to say about that the overarching goal behind everything is we want to make what we want to watch it translates pretty well towards like the entire business and if you keep that in the back your head towards any part of what we do it makes a lot of sense so when we consider like what videos we're gonna make it's what what would we want to watch what would we want to subscribe to that's the type of Channel we're trying to build I love it we want to make what we want to watch I think that's such a great way of thinking about YouTube and thinking about making the journey more sustainable over time so consistency this is by far the most common question I get from my students on my YouTuber Academy and here is what Marquez had to say about it the number one thing is it's fun we enjoy it I we're all nerds here at the studio I enjoy Tech trying trying a new piece of tech every day is like what that's like the dream it's super fun um and genuinely having so many things under my belt now that we feel calibrated enough that I can turn around and give my opinions on a piece of tech and actually share it and have it be valuable is super cool we're also video nerds so it's fun to make videos and that's fun too when we get we try to get better at it every time I think also probably a little piece of that interview around that same point was uh as a creator you you see this sort of a lifespan of a Creator right it's it's typically relatively short as far as careers go but luckily as a tech Creator or as a product Focus Creator the pressure's not on me to like keep it interesting or keep it spicy or whatever it's it's actually just up to the tech companies and I'm just having fun following along pointing the camera at the stuff and uh and evaluating and reviewing and checking it out so it's a sort of a nice combination of all those things I think that come together to just we just keep making videos so that's method one for staying consistent with YouTube just find a way to make it fun find a way to make it feel good because if you're making YouTube videos and you feeling like you're having to work really hard for it and it feels like pushing a boulder up a hill there's only so long you can do that there's only so much discipline and willpower and stuff that you can apply to that before the boulder just comes running down the hill and crushes you along the way and then here's Aaron talking about an alternative framing for how to stay consistent with stuff so I think this is really important actually it is said a lot you have to really love what you you do so it's the fact that I had all this Tech in my house because I've been buying it anyway as I was growing up and I was so passionate about that Tech that I just I was having fun doing it my first two years was basically me just kind of like roaming around my house trying to find things I already had using equipment I already had and just filming it and just talking I wasn't thinking about things like you know watch time or retention or like you know consumer insights it was very much just a case of oh this is fun and it was Aaron's 301st video or something absurd like that that was the one that went viral that really helped his channel take off in my case it was like my 91st video in marquez's case it was his like 100 and something video and often you'll find for most YouTubers who are actually big and successful on the platform that they spent ages just making crappy videos to learn the art and the science and the skill of actually making videos and I see so many people these days who have this expectation that like I want video number one to take off and it's like video number one's not gonna take off like people are fundamentally paying for your videos they're not paying with money but they're paying with their time and so if the video is not very good then you surely cannot expect anyone to pay for that video with their time and attention and time is everyone's most valuable non-renewable resource and so if we think about it from that perspective it always boggles my mind when you know sometimes even students on my YouTuber Academy or people that come to me in the streets and ask for YouTube advice they're like yeah you know my Channel's not growing that fast and I'm like cool how fast is it growing they're like well I'm on 800 subscribers that's pretty good how many videos have you made like four and I'm like four videos for 800 subscribers it took me 52 videos to get like 800 subscribers so fourth 800 is really good but also if you look at the videos they're not they're objectively not that good and there's a lot of leveling up to be done and so again I think if you just focus on the factors that are within your control I.E I'm gonna make a video every week and I'm going to try my best to improve it a little bit each time that's a way easier recipe for consistency than trying to again Target certain view counts and that segues us nicely into this next question which is how do we make our videos better anytime I see one of your videos I feel like ridiculously inspiring like oh my God like the amount of post-production has gone into this it's insane it's a kind of the the way I describe it is a an aggregation of micro refinements so it's like all that stuff hasn't happened overnight if you kind of go back through the channel and watch one video every year you just see a few new things each time so like the day that I decided okay I'm gonna spend more time on music and try to create moods with what I'm saying the day I decided to put my face in a circle so I'm visible at all times and we've tried these experiments looked at those graphs seen that they've worked and then realized okay these are Mainstays is it like you have a gut feeling that when I put my face on the thing while showing overlay it'll work and then you actually and then you look at the data or yeah yeah exactly that so you have a gut feeling you try it it works or it doesn't work and then you action it this is it it's ultimately an aggregation of micro refinements which is a fancy nerd way of saying just make the videos a little bit better each time and I think it's so interesting like even if we take Marquez as a channel for example you go all the way back and you look at first few videos and you see just how much things have improved over time and yes they've now spent half a million dollars on a freaking robotic camera to get incredible shots for their introductions but it was a freaking kid in his bedroom making videos reviewing laptops back in the day and you can see just the aggregation of micro refinements over time that lead to the Masterpiece that you see today on YouTube and actually here's another thing that Marco says thing that we do with the money that we make is turn around and make better videos and this is something that Casey neistat talks about as well he says that he makes money so that he can make videos whereas a lot of people make videos so that they can make money and so one way of thinking about how to make your videos better is that if you have money coming in thinking but thinking about okay what are the ways that I could invest this into my YouTube channel into improving my production value or improving my writing or improving my thumbnails or even potentially hiring a team and all of the big YouTubers these days they have their own teams almost no one is a one-man operation anymore or if they are they're completely burnt out like I've got a team of 14 people like me and 14 other people around the YouTube channel and the Social Media stuff and the various things we're doing in our business and various YouTubers like absolutely huge YouTubers call me up for advice on how to grow their teams because they realize that oh crap I'm kind of burnt out right now I need to build a team and I just love talking about this stuff because like I think the business side of YouTube is so fascinating and it's one of my favorite topics and it certainly completely changed my life having a team of fantastic people around me so that this whole thing of doing YouTube for the first two years of this six year Journey so far it was just me but then I slowly started hiring and then very quickly started hiring and then slowly started hiring again and now we've got this fantastic team and it means that I can focus on the stuff that I really like which is making the videos and every single thing else in the journey is taken care of by the team around me so it's just so good so if you're at the point where you're making I don't know a couple of thousand a month from your YouTube channel or the business around it I would really really consider hiring a team potentially even before then if your time is worth more than uh the hours spent video editing for example when I'm scripting I'm thinking of three different people okay so there's three people I know in my life of different levels of I guess Tech enthusiasm and so with every line I've almost reached a stage where I'm scanning it being like is this interesting to all these three people would they watch this would they watch this would they watch this would they understand this is this funny to them all that kind of stuff and I think when you do that you end up with a script that is a little more broadly appealing than it would otherwise be so I think for most beginners thinking about three different viewer avatars as which is what Aaron's talking about here it's probably a bit Overkill it works for Aaron because his side is his channel his channel is now absolutely huge but if you're starting out as a beginner generally I recommend acting as if you're just speaking to a single individual just one person and one way of thinking about this is who is that one person who is just going to be the prime Target demographic for your channel who is that one person who's going to be shouting your name from the rooftop saying oh my God like Jane Doe's channel is like the best thing I've ever seen in my life because of X Y and Z and it involves thinking about that person from a demographic and Geographic perspective like how old are they are they a boy or a girl like where do they live where do they go to university what's their education like all that kind of stuff but then also from a psychographic perspective so what do they like what do they dislike what are their hopes and dreams and Ambitions and if and the more of this image you can get in your mind of who this person is the more targeted your message can be but then it's almost like kind of this Avatar this target Avatar is the lenses the target audience Avatar and the content is the content but you view it through the lens and it and it sort of broadens out like diffraction or whatever it's called with a lens and actually way more people than that specific Target Avatar will then are more likely to Vibe with the thing because because the message is targeted whereas if you try to make a video that appealed to everyone unless you are really really good at making I don't know Mr B Style videos that do appeal to a huge range of people generally it's way easier especially as an educational YouTuber to focus on a single Niche demographic or in Aaron's case two or three people and really tailoring your message to that and even though for Aaron's Channel he only focuses on three specific avatars he's got like 15 million subscribers so clearly there is more than just these three people who are watching the videos now when it comes to planning and scripting videos here is Marquez talking about end to end the entire process that he and his team follows for the tech videos but you can apply it to whatever your videos are as well Step One is the phone arrives at the studio and I take it out the box sometimes I shoot the unboxing if I know that's going to be part of the video and I put my SIM card in it I set it up and I start using it I start testing it we have a so I actually mentioned I forgot one of them earlier a writer researcher script supervisor David will help me with a lot of the research and making sure we've got all the points worth mentioning about this device about this phone all in one dock so I'm taking notes as I'm using it we're brain dumping into this document and then eventually we get to the point where we're like all right I think we've got it I think we've got everything let's turn it into a script a story a through line something that's worth watching that's basically my job is to to translate all of this information into the headline the thumbnail the thing that will live on YouTube then we shoot the thing so there's sort of two versions I'm sure you do this too there's a-roll and b-roll so you shoot your a-roll where you're talking to the camera and then you have pieces where you know you're going to be you know you're talking but you also have like footage ready for when you're gonna talk about that stuff we typically start with shooting a-roll so that I have all of the talking out of the way and then we know all the little quirks and things that I've mentioned and then we will go shoot all of the rest of the b-roll to cover all the things we need we cover the whole script everyone has access to the script then it gets edited for the most part that's just me ingesting all the footage and laying it down on the timeline and then if there is any sort of extra fancy visuals then we'll go sort of Next Level say this one as a robot shot in the intro I'll be editing the main video while Andrew Vin and Brandon will go off to the robot studio and will make their incredible Masterpiece and then that can tie in back to what I've been editing so they'll give me a couple ideas we'll pick one we'll go this is one that would really work with the YouTube tagline and sort of you can see the Whirlwind happening as the content gets made it gets to the end of the process I finish the video we give it one last walk through the whole timeline watch the whole video together any last adjustments okay it's good export upload publish now IELTS Mark has how much attention he pays to the data and the analytics behind his YouTube channel and here is what he said I could obsess over the numbers and sort of focus every ounce of my attention on maximizing the numbers on paper and theoretically that means it's a good video because people made it to the end and I successfully maximized retention but I'm not that's not my only focus and I think if it is my only focus I might lose a little bit of the rest of what makes a good video the numbers we pay attention to them I think they're sort of a guiding force they're the bumpers on the bowling lane more than they are the bowling ball itself you know does that make any sense uh yeah we pay attention to them but we don't live by him I think this is a great way of thinking about it analytics are the bumpers on the bowling lane they are not the bowling ball itself and really this idea of using analytics as a guiding force is something that Aaron talks about as well so I found things like for example if I ask people to subscribe really early in the video it was detrimental because you'd get a um a drop of like 20 of viewers potentially but they wouldn't be subscribing they'd just be irritated by the fact you've asked them to subscribe without showing them why yeah um because at the start of a video in the first like 15 seconds people are very very easy to lose it's at that point that they decide whether they're going to you know full screen you and kind of invest in this video or whether they're gonna you know click on one of the 30 that are kind of grabbing their attention from the side generally what I recommend for most beginners is do not look at your analytics because they're going to tell you the wrong things and the numbers are not going to be statistically significant but generally when you're at the point where you've got a few hundred to a few thousand views on each of your videos at that point it makes sense to start vaguely using analytics as a little bit of a guiding force because you can see if there are any interesting broad level patterns in the data but even then the the thing that I always say to people is that it's so easy to over index on like micro refinements in the analytics and to lose the heart and the soul of why you're doing it in the first place and what you're actually doing so these days I for example almost never look at my own retention curves we've got some on my team who does who sort of looks at a big picture but for me it's way more important to just be able to make a video where I speak from the heart and talk about something that I think might be vaguely interesting to some people or at least helpful to at least one person and so this video for example is going to be really long we've not done a lot to like you know if I cared a lot about retention I would be adding loads more b-roll me loads of stuff going on and it'll be much it will be a much tighter cut but really my Approach for this video in particular is hey if you are the person if you're watching this right now if you've got a if you've gotten to this point in the video hey thank you for watching this forum secondly can you hit the thumbs up for the YouTube algorithm it really helps us but secondly if you're the sort of person who's watched this far that means you genuinely care about this topic and I've interviewed these people maybe you've not seen my interviews about them and like I've interviewed Marquez and Aaron maybe you haven't seen the long form interviews on my podcast plug for that one or even if you have it's worth revisiting some of these lessons and so I can include the sound bites from these interviews I can offer my own commentary and that means that this video is going to be really long and it's not going to be particularly optimized for attention but that's okay because the point of the video is to be helpful and if you're watching this and you have your own YouTube channel I'm hoping at least that you will find some of this video helpful and that means I can really go on for as long as I want because the people that are watching are the ones who are finding it helpful and so the other kind of mental model for this that I often talk about is when it comes to analytics it's so easy to just think about the numbers and to forget the fact that these numbers are real people like you watching this right now you are a real person we've probably never met but I suspect if we ran into each other in London at some point we'd have a good conversation because you're at this point in the video so you're also a nerd you also care about YouTube maybe you Vibe with the way that I'm I do content on this channel but you're a real person whereas on analytics you would be a little blip you would you wouldn't even register as a data point on analytics and so it's just it's it's too easy when looking at analytics to obsess about the numbers and to forget about the people and that is something that I try and remind myself of all the time when should you start Outsourcing stuff okay this is a big question Outsourcing here is what Marquez had to say about the octopus analogy okay so the octopus analogy is like as you start off as a Creator you're a solo Creator there are all these different things that you do that you really want to be good at but you you have a main focus so for me it was like I want to review Tech I want talk about tech but I also have to be a professional cameraman and I have to be a professional video editor and lighter and I have to be a professional inbox manager and and Finance and Accounting and taxes and I also have to do all this other behind the scenes stuff and audio and and the list goes on and so you feel like an octopus you've got eight armed they're all doing different things in order to stay on track at this point the team we've built is all of the arms that I've cut off so they're all much better than I am at holding a camera they're much better than I am at set design they're much better than I am at sound design that's still Graphics so the thumbnails are all better the the sound is all better everything is better about everything we make because of the team and that is the purpose of the team and this is pretty much exactly the way that I think of it as well um the way I think of it is like a I should only be doing the things that I fundamentally want to do and the things that I'm actually good at everything else should be outsourced to someone else on the team preferably someone who actually enjoys the thing and is better than me at doing the thing I don't really like looking at spreadsheets for example but Angus my general manager loves a spreadsheet and he loves accounts and things like that so that's fantastic because it's a strength of his and it's a thing that he enjoys whereas it's a weakness of mine and it's a thing I don't enjoy and that drains my energy and so great let's Outsource that sort of thing to someone else and the other way of thinking about this when it comes to building a team is to ask yourself if I could clone myself what would I have the clone of myself doing rather than me and often that gets people over the hurdle of worrying about like oh it'll be hard to find someone it'll be hard to train them no no one can edit like I do all of these things we discuss so much of the stuff on my YouTuber Academy with my students they're always so resistant to Outsourcing their editing and then the ones that do say oh my God Outsourcing editing has completely changed my life I think I was probably at my lowest point when I started YouTube and to be honest even when I started it for the first few years it wasn't a big part of my life and I was quite embarrassed about it and I wouldn't tell anyone I think for me YouTube was like a vehicle towards confidence and I was almost lucky that I found it and like but I think there was like an internal sense of like I am doing something that other people aren't doing and that's quite that's quite nice this is such a nice way of fitting it and it's so inspiring as hearing Aaron say something like that because you see his channel is like one of the most successful Tech channels in the world he's making ungodly amounts of money he's like you know one of the most recognizable faces of tech in the world and yet he started off making videos where he wasn't even showing his face because he was concerned about his confidence and insecurity and worry that people in school were going to make fun of him and you often see that this is the journey with a lot of different YouTubers like we all generally start off as somewhat Misfits because mostly it's not a normal thing to do to sit in front of a camera in your bedroom and just make videos for a very very long time it's kind of weird but generally for most of us we find that like the Journey of becoming a YouTuber and growing the channel and growing the business really helps us grow in confidence it helps us boost our skills it helps us make friends along the way and so whatever stage of the journey you're at if you've gotten to this point in the video I would just say keep going keep up the motivation keep up the consistency I know the journey can feel harder times but on the other side of discomfort on the other side of the the trough there is like a world in which you get to have the best job in the world where you get to learn cool stuff make videos about it build a community of friends and fans and audience around you and in some cases even make like insane amounts of money doing it so I hope you found this video interesting if you did like this video check out this video over here which is more of a step-by-step framework for if I were to start a YouTube channel completely from scratch these are the exact steps that I would follow so check that out over there thank you so much for watching and I'll see you later bye

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 340,034

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali abdal, ali abdaal productivity, ali abdaal, ali abdal, how to grow a youtube channel, how to grow on youtube in 2023, how to grow on youtube, how to grow a youtube channel today, make money on youtube, beginners guide to youtube, beginner youtube, advice for youtubers, what i would do today on youtube, ali abdaal youtube, how to grow a successful youtube channel, how to grow a successful youtube channeloutube in 2023, youtube advice, advice beginner youtubers

Id: 15lyO5qmtg0

Length: 25min 48sec (1548 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023