5 Boring But EASIEST steps to get 1,000 YouTube Subscribers (With Claude AI)

So a couple years ago, I was stuck making YouTube videos that would get 10 or maybe 20 views if I was lucky, and I was doing what all the common YouTube advice tells you to do. I posted on a consistent schedule, I made clean thumbnails, and I wrote titles that I thought people would click, but it didn't work. Then I found the method I'm about to show you, and it took me from those 10 views to more than a million subscribers. And I didn't just do it on my main channel, I did it on three other channels as well just to make sure that it works. And it also didn't just work for me. The same method took a community member of mine, Took another community member of mine from a couple hundred subscribers to 11,000, and it got my brother Zach to 1,000 subscribers in 19 days. And all of this has gotten significantly easier because of Cloud AI. So today I'm gonna show you the exact steps on the screen. It works in any niche, at any subscriber count, no matter how long you've been posting. So if you appreciate me making this type of content, let me know by gently cheers in that like button, and let's jump into it right now. And by the way, if you're struggling to get views, subscribers, or just picking a niche on YouTube, I have a free live training that I'm doing this week. Click the link in the description and pin comment below where I'm gonna walk people through this in real time, and you can ask me questions directly. And everyone who shows up to the workshop live also gets the Niche Validator Pro, which is a new tool that we made that is powered by Cloud. So that'll be the first link below. Now, the second thing is I put my free Cloud skills in the third link below so that you can run the same prompts I run while you watch. Oh, and by the way, I'm also gonna show you three alternative methods to get to 1,000 subscribers at the very end of this video as well. So step one is to understand the math. Why views come before subscribers? So the first step before I show you how to hit 1,000 subscribers with Cloud is to let me clear up what actually gets you there. Most people look at their subscriber count, and that is the wrong number to monitor. You get subscribers from views. So views are the number that matters. And the math is simple. In my experience, about one to two out of every 100 people, typically two, who watch a video, subscribe to it. And that's a conservative number. So let's just say 2% of viewers subscribe. So to get 1,000 subscribers, you need somewhere around 50,000 views across your videos. Now on some channels, it's closer to 100,000. But framed that way, the goal gets a lot smaller. So stop counting subscribers and start counting views. Get to 50,000 views, and the 1,000 subscribers come with them. So next, I'm gonna show you how to get that. So one of the big traps that people make is posting without a strategy because most creators fall into the same trap. They repeat the same process and they expect a different result. You post a video, you get 10 views. You post another one the same way, you get 20, and it keeps going. The advice sounds fine. Stay consistent, keep posting, and the algorithm finds you eventually. But posting on a schedule with no strategy behind it just wastes months. So I've seen channels with over 400 uploads that are still under 500 subscribers. I've seen channels with more than 200 uploads that never passed 100 subscribers. And they posted that much and stayed that small because they kept picking ideas that nobody was searching for. And I'm not making fun of them. I did the same exact thing and it is painful to watch. So here's the strategy that actually works. Step two, find a proven idea with the hot dog method. So this worked for people that I just mentioned and it's how I got to one million subscribers myself. So I call it the hot dog method. So say you open a high-end steakhouse on a street that already has five well-known steakhouses. You're fighting on price, quality, and reputation for years before anyone notices you. Now flip it. You roll a hot dog cart up to a crowd leaving a concert hungry with nothing else to eat and nothing else open nearby, you're gonna sell out. The hot dogs do not have to be great because the demand is already there. YouTube works the same way. You find a group that wants something, you notice they're getting bad videos on it and they're watching those videos even though they're terrible and then you give them a better one. And this step matters the most. So pay attention here. You're looking for a video that got far more views than the channel has subscribers. My rule is a five to one ratio. So the video needs at least five times more views than the channel has subscribers. So a channel with 50,000 subscribers and a video with 250,000 views is a five to one ratio. When you see that gap, the idea did the work, not the channel. And I also stick to channels under 100,000 subscribers. So finding these used to take me hours manually researching YouTube. Claude does it in one prompt now. So I type, find me YouTube videos in the high paying trades niche with at least five times more views than the channel has subscribers and give me the link. You can write that prompt however you want and here's what it returned. It found a video called highest paying trades jobs that nobody is talking about. Almost 2 million views on a channel with fewer than 50,000 subscribers and that's well past five to one. And that video is the exact video idea that my brother used for the first video that he ever posted. Oh, and that video popped off and got over 800,000 views. He didn't come up with anything new. He found an idea that already worked from a channel that was making mediocre or preferably bad content and then he made his own version. And there were other strong ideas in that same list too. So when Claude gives you an idea like these, screenshot the title and thumbnail and save them in a Google Doc. And that brings us to step number three, which is make a better version. Okay, so don't skip this part. You take their idea and you make your own video out of it. That means a better title, a better thumbnail and a better video than theirs. So Zach took that trades idea and gave it a stronger title than the original. Same idea, better packaging. And his version got more than 800,000 views. Literally one shot, one kill. Very first video we tried worked like gangbusters. All right guys, quick break. This video is sponsored by me. I wanted to let you know that I'm gonna be doing a live training this week where I'm gonna be revealing the YouTube content advantage in 2026. It is a completely free training, no strings attached. In fact, I'm giving away even more bonuses at the training. Just as an example, I'm gonna be giving away my Niche Validator. And this is gonna be available for both Claude as well as ChatGPT, which is a super valuable piece of software where you can finally figure out what the best niche for you is. So do not miss out on this training. Make sure you sign up for it down in the description and the pinned comment below because you only get it if you join the training. So if you don't join now, you might miss it. But that being said, in the workshop, you'll get to meet me. You'll get to ask me questions directly. So I look forward to meeting you. So click the link in the description and the pinned comment below. Make sure you put it on your calendar. And if for whatever reason you missed out on it, you weren't able to attend, make sure you still click that link because we might be having workshops in the future as well and you'll be the first to know about it. So yeah, hope to see you there. And now back to your regularly scheduled programming. Then step four is write the script and publish. So the video that Zach made that got 100K views, he wrote that with Claude in about 15 minutes because this is probably where Claude saves you the most time. Actually, it's really good at every single step, but this is one of the better ones. And really, you just have to keep the prompt simple. Just as an example, this is roughly the same prompt that we used in Zach's first video. And you will see how simple it is. Zach basically just said, write me a script for the video title. And these are the jobs that I want to talk about. And then he just yapped, right? He just did what I like to call a yap session where he turns on voice command and he just yaps off the top of his head for a little bit. And then maybe he'd press enter, goes back and forth with it one or two times. And that's it, it's done. And that took him 15 minutes because he did tweak things here and there, but it came out clean and it sounded like him. Then he filmed it with a very basic camera on his phone. And that's the whole process. No expensive camera, no studio. That first video got more than 800,000 views and Zach hit 1,000 subscribers in 19 days. His editing was basic and his thumbnail was plain and it didn't matter because the idea was right. He didn't open a steakhouse. He ran a hot dog cart in front of a crowd that was already hungry. Now, one honest note here, this is simple, but it's not effortless. And it did require a little bit of work, but it really is that simple. And again, the basic cloud skills to do this, click that link in the description, the pin comment below, should be the third link down there. And also if you wanna learn how to do it better or you wanna ask me questions directly, then attend my live training this week. Click the first link in the description in the pin comment below. All right, step five is to plan the next two months. So for step five, you need to plan the next two months. You publish 16 videos to a week, each one built on an idea that you already know works. Then say a third of them find their audience. Those keep getting views day after day. And at about 2% subscribing, you get new subscribers every day. And by the end of one to two months, you're past 1,000. Now, not every video works. Zach's first one didn't, it got him 1,000 subscribers in 19 days. But he also had me as a brother. But realistically, probably one video hitting or maybe two or three videos max hitting is going to get you to 1,000 subscribers. And that's the best way to do it. And that's the way that we recommend to almost all of our clients at first. With that being said, there are three alternative ways to get to 1,000 subscribers, which are shortcuts or cheat codes, but they have their pros and their cons. Now, by the way, these are all ways that are within YouTube's terms of service. So I want you to check out this video right here from Dan Martell. 1,000 plus hours of learning Claude in 15 minutes, beginner to pro. It got about 486,000 views and it was posted two weeks ago. Now, I saw Dan Martell pop off and I think his content's really good, but I was wondering how in the world is he getting so many views? Is he just especially handsome? Is it something about his nice blue shirts with his muscly body and really nice background? I just couldn't quite see why he was getting so many views. Like I thought his content was good, but I just didn't understand why he would be getting that many views. But then you go to settings here and you look at audio track and it says 17. And basically what that means is it is auto-dubbed in many different languages. And so a significant amount of his views on this channel are coming from the fact that the channel is auto-dubbed. In fact, I would probably estimate that at least 80% of his views are coming from people outside of first world English speaking countries. Now, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. I'm not making fun of him. I'm not calling him out or anything along those lines. I think this is actually a smart move. What the game of YouTube is all about is getting most of the right views. And you might be thinking, well Shane, most of the views he's getting are the wrong views. So what in the world are you talking about? Well, there's a very powerful concept called social proof. And when you click on a video and you see that 400,000 other people watch the video, you're just more likely to actually watch the video yourself than if you click on a video and you see that 17 people watched it. And when you're watching a channel and it has, let's just say 100,000 subscribers or 2.8 million subscribers, like in his case, you're much more likely to actually give the channel a chance and watch the videos than if you click on a channel that has 50 subscribers. So social proof is an incredibly powerful concept. And this clearly gives a lot of social proof. And so I think it's a really smart move for him to do this, but I don't think it's right for everybody. This is definitely a case-by-case basis because there are downsides to doing this. The main one is 80% of the audience you attract is probably not going to be people that are ever gonna be able to buy anything that you have to offer. But let's just say he posted this video and the channel in general just didn't do this, but he posted this video without having all those audio tracks on, he probably would have gotten significantly less views. Let's just say maybe 40,000 views. But because of the fact that he posted this video with those audio tracks on, he got 486,000 views and he probably got like maybe 80,000 or maybe 100,000 of the right people to view his channel because of the extra social proof. Now, by the way, if you wanna know how to turn this on, you really need to do it upon upload of a video. And we are recommending this method to a decent amount of our community members now. But again, this is not a 100% it works in every single case type of method. You typically want to pick ideas or topics where it would be interesting to an international audience, which obviously talking about AI is something that is interesting to an international audience. Okay, next method of getting to 1,000 subscribers fast is probably one that you know about already and that is to simply just post a bunch of shorts. So there are definitely downsides of doing this. There are countless amounts of videos from people basically saying that shorts actually ruined their long form content or shorts were just a massive waste of time and on and on and on. And for the most part, I kinda agree. I think that that same amount of time that you put into shorts, if you just would have put that into long form content instead or just working twice as hard on long form content instead of doing half shorts, half long form, you would have gotten a lot more out of it. With that being said, there is an argument to be made, again, just for social proof to get to a few thousand subscribers using shorts and then kinda taper off of the shorts and just start posting long form. With that being said, generally speaking, in probably about 99% of cases, your short form audience is gonna be very different than your long form audience and you're gonna struggle to break through from short form to long form. Typically, the people that do well are people where their short form audience and their long form audience are just simply different. So it's almost like you're growing two different platforms at once. There are notable exceptions, such as LawByMike. So LawByMike is somebody who originally kinda popped off with short form content and he did a really good job of doing that and he got millions and millions of subscribers and then lately he has been posting a lot more long form content and having a ton of success with it, right? All of his videos are doing like a million views plus and he's crushing it. And that is because, in my opinion, without getting too much into the details, the value proposition of his shorts are almost exactly the same as the value proposition of his long form content, which is great. So this is an option for some people as well and we do recommend this to certain people. All right, so the next option is what's known as promotions. So this is where you take one of your videos and you promote it and you get subscribers from doing that. So you can see here, of course, I've messed around with this. I've tested this out a little bit. Of course, I have a big channel so it doesn't really matter to me, but I messed around and tested it out. And you can see I paid about $200 and I would get about 2,000 subscribers. In fact, 2,600. And pretty consistently across almost all of these videos, I got about 2,000 subscribers. So I only tested it out about, I think, 12 times overall. But yeah, pretty consistently, I would get 2,000 subscribers across all of these videos that I spent about $200 on. And this is a way of getting your subscribers up a little bit as well and also boosting your videos just a little bit. Now, there are downsides to this method too. Just like all of the other methods, there are downsides. It's not just pure good with no downside, right? First thing is it costs money. So you're probably gonna have to spend a little bit of money to get those subscribers. Second thing is, these are not going to be very dedicated subscribers. Now, these are real people. These are not like fake subscribers. They are sending real people to your channel, but they're not gonna be especially dedicated subscribers because they saw your channel pop up via an ad, right? So it's always gonna be a little bit different than someone who saw your channel pop up organically. With that being said, again, in the right situation for the right channel, this can work out really well because you're basically just promoting your video to the exact audience that you want to attract with your video. Now, there's a way of doing this. The simple way is to just do it within promotions. The more complicated way, if you wanna get really detailed with the targeting, is to actually go into Google AdWords, which is the company that owns YouTube, and run ads directly in there. That is another way of really getting the right people to watch your channel and subscribe to your channel. Now, do you have to do any of these three methods? Absolutely not. The vast majority of people in my community that have gotten results have not done these methods. But with that being said, these can probably help you get there a little bit faster if, again, it's the right situation and the right person. And that's where having a proper strategy comes into play. And that's exactly what I wanna talk about doing in this week's live training. So again, attend that by clicking the link down in the description in the pinned comment below. And I know 99% of you are just gonna watch my videos, get a ton of value from them. You're gonna attend my live trainings, get a ton of value from that, and we are never gonna end up working together one-on-one and that is completely fine. I always wanna give 100 times more value than I receive. With that being said, there is gonna be 1% of you out there, maybe 0.1% of you out there that want that one-on-one attention, right? You either want one-on-one mentorship or you want us to literally just do the work for you. If that sounds like you, go ahead and click the second link in the description in the pinned comment below to book a call with the team. We're very limited in the amount of people that we can work with one-on-one. We accept less than 18% of people who apply. And we're only accepting five people right now. With that being said, if you want help growing your YouTube channel, growing your personal brand, and coming up with a strategy to monetize it, well, that's exactly what we help people do. The typical people that we help are going to be business owners, both online and in person. Typically, these are business owners that get clients, but also we help YouTubers who are getting a lot of views but struggling with monetization. We also help YouTubers that are crushing it, but they wanna crush it even harder. And we help people who are experts or people who are very experienced in their careers, typically on the older side, and they have a lot of value to give to the world, right? We only work with educational channels. We don't work with entertainment channels. But if that sounds like you, go ahead, click that link in the description in the pinned comment below to book a call, and we look forward to talking to you there. With that being said, check out this video right here on exactly how we were able to help my brother Zach's channel grow from zero to 1,000 subscribers in less than 19 days.