Orlando Miner: how to get youtube subscribers, grow channel, video views

Hello everyone, welcome to my channel. My name is Orlando. And today we're gonna be talking about some YouTube stuff. How to grow your channel and how I went from zero to 1,400 subscribers that I have right now. I did that in about four months. And what I've learned from YouTube and what I've learned how to grow your channel. And obviously I'm still learning, but I think this is a really good milestone for me to make a video like this. From what I can see, I'm growing a little bit faster than some of my peers. That started around the same time as me. I just wanna talk about some things that I thought out of the box and what I did to do that. And then we're gonna jump into some analytics so you guys can actually see the numbers and how it really transferred over. Okay, so let's jump right into it. So number one is I jumped on a trending topic, which was the stimulus check thing. And I didn't do that on purpose, guys. I did that because I was just really, truly interested. It was something I was talking about anyway. It has to do with money, had to do with the economy. And so I figured, you know what, I see a lot of other people doing it, so I'm just gonna go ahead and do it and kind of throw my own take on it. And it allowed me to get used to the camera, allowed me to get the audio correct, allowed me to see how I can run my process as far as making videos goes. And it had very little editing in it. So it was just something that I could really just jump into and give people my take on. And it worked out really good. It worked out pretty good. It got me that initial jumpstart. So my suggestion would be to find topic, especially because I'm in the finance sector, there's not really that many big trending topics when it comes to finance. I mean, every once in a while you'll get something. And I think for finance, this was really a big one when it comes to the stimulus check. So you wanna try to find something that maybe that's in your niche that allows you to jump on that trending topic and especially starting off with zero subscribers, if you can just start trickling that in into zero to 100 to 200, I think that would be fantastic. And you will, not only will that be great for your channel, but I think it's great motivation. So number two is quality content. Now, I know you guys have seen this from other YouTubers and whatnot, but it's so true. When I first started this, I was really, really keen on the type of video camera that you see me recording on, the setup, the lights on both of these sides, the mic that I have right here. I refused to have the type of content that looked really bad or you couldn't hear me or anything like that. For me, it was probably one of the number one things that I was really passionate about to make sure I had everything together. It took me about two to three weeks just to get my setup together. Now, I'm not saying that you need to take that long, but for me, I just needed to make sure the lighting was right. I just need to make sure everything was right. I didn't wanna come out the gate making bad looking or bad audio YouTube videos. I just did it. Before I even uploaded my first video, it probably took me about three weeks to get together my whole setup so that you could see the quality that you're seeing right now. I wanted to make sure that it looked really good. And then once I got that together, then I can work on how I speak and how I do this and how I look and the audio, how I say the words and all that other stuff so that I'm trying to get my message across the way that I want it to get across. So that was my main goal is I wanted to do that. And then the content that I, for me, the content that I provide, I already knew that content, like I said, like the back of my hand only because I've been doing finance for 15 plus years. So to me, I live and breathe finance. So for me, it was super easy to get it across for people to understand and to bring it in a format that I can educate people on. Okay, so here is the meat of what you guys were looking for. So what is one of the things that I did to grow so fast? One of the things is that after I knew, I jumped on a trending topic and I could kind of see that my content was decent, that I was growing as far as the way that I communicate and people were saying, wow, your videos are great, I like the way that you speak, everybody was saying my content was good. What I decided to do was, I decided to give my videos a test. So what I would do is I would take my video that I thought was the best and if my video is good as I think it is, I would then go to Google Ads and then place that video in whatever keyword that's relevant to whatever it may be. Now, I didn't wanna spend a lot of money on this. So I would just make the, as far as the how much it costs per click, it would be about 5 cents. I would put my video right above like Graham Steffens or Meet Kevin or one of the other big YouTubers in my finance sector. And then I would see people click on it and then I would see if it could hold their attention. What was the click-through rate? Was my thumbnail really that good to allow them to click on it if it was at the top? When they watched my video, did they go on to another video? Did they stay for a very long time? I wanted to know exactly and get real fresh data that if I was at the top, if I beat all of these guys that are number one in my field, if I was above them, because that's what ads will do, they will put it above you. Do people really wanna watch me? Do people really have interest in what I bring to the table? And I got some really good data back. I got data that said, yeah, you need to work on some things. You know, I would get a really bad click-through rate of 1%, which is horrible, horrible. But Google Ads is synonymous for giving back click-through because that's just what it is. People are pushing you out. They don't know who you are. And so I just got really bad click-through rates. I was expecting to get like a three or 4%, but I got like 1%. Sometimes it was underneath 1%, which meant that my videos weren't as great as I thought they were. So what it told me was, is that my videos weren't clickable, for one. And then once I looked at the data from within to see, because you can see where people dropped off at, people would watch maybe 25% of my video. They wouldn't even make it past halfway or get to the end or 75 or to the very end. So it just showed me that I needed to work and work and work. And that was at the very beginning of when I make content. And to be honest with you, now that I go back and I look at my content, I go, ugh. I've grown so much from the first time that I did videos. You know, I know that was only four months ago, but from now to where I am right now, it's been a complete night and day difference. So then I did the same exact thing, guys. And I went back and I said, you know what? Let me go ahead and upload a newer video. And when I did that, it ended up what? I ended up getting like 5%, 6% click-through rate on my newer videos. And then I also saw people making it 75% through the video. Now I know what you're thinking. How much did I spend on this? I probably spent 60 bucks on this. And I just used it as experiments, guys. You're not using it to shoot you through. You're not using it to gain a bunch of subscribers. You're not using it to gain a bunch of views. What you're using it for is to find out if your videos are quality to people that you don't know at all. And that was the key. And then once I saw that my videos were doing well with these strangers and whatnot, I thought, okay, I'm on to something. I'm on to something. So then most people ask me, hey Orlando, what video did you get most of your views from? And to be honest with you guys, I got most of my views from a video that I just did randomly. I got most of my views from a video that I did on an individual named Jay Morrison. It was based on a scam. And that video I just did on a whim. I was sitting in my living room and I just said, you know what? I was looking at something online and a news article or something came up about him. And I said, you know what? I'm just gonna go do a video on like what to look out for. How to avoid scams like this. Because this guy, he did real estate and he was doing like in a, you know, a bunch of people lost money and whatnot. I remember I did that video on the whim. It was late night. I just did it. I just said, you know what? I'll just go ahead and do it. And I'm gonna go ahead and show you guys what that video looks like. So I want you guys to take a look at this analytics here on this video. It's the, it's called how to avoid the Jay Morrison scam or something like that. And once you take a look at it, you will see that I have about 13,000 views on this, about 1400 watch hours. And I got about 119 subscribers off of this video. My watch time hours about 1400, which was amazing because obviously I was trying to get monetized at the moment. It just worked out so good. When I made this video, it was just something that I just made on the whim. I didn't even think it through. It wasn't a process that I just said, you know what? I'm gonna put this content on my list of things to do. I literally thought about it and went and came straight into my studio here and just made the video right off. Then when I made that video, I said, you know what? I'm done making this video, was doing really good. And I was then sitting again in my living room and some additional information that came out. And I just said, you know what? This is the last time I'm gonna make a video about this, but I'm gonna go ahead and go into depth a little bit more into this deal. And so what did I do? So I made a second part of the video and I thought to myself, you know what? I'm gonna go ahead and go in a little bit more in depth in this. And so that's what I did. Okay, so I wanna go over these analytics, the part two of that Jay Morrison video that I did, just so you guys can really see exactly what I'm talking about. You will see that I had about 8,000 views on it. I had about 1,400 watch time hours and about 75 subscribers on this video. Now, what makes this video so good for me is the fact that if I scroll down here, you'll see the watch time hours, the retention. The retention was about 10 minutes and 37 seconds, 42%, which is really good for my channel. And it was the amount of time. So for the first video, it was 12 minutes. And so that watch time was about six minutes. It was about that halfway mark too. And that's really good. But in this 25 minute video, allows people to watch my video and the retention is 10 minutes. As we all know, retention is king when it comes to YouTube and then promoting your videos. So what ended up happening is I'm continually getting promoted. My videos continue to get pushed out because of that high retention. But what's really good about this and what allowed my subscribers to continue to go up was this almost 8,000 views spilled over into my other videos and people started watching my other videos. I have about 90 videos right now. I know that's a lot for the four months that I've been out, but I was really pushing on the videos with the stimulus and then my regular kind of like evergreen videos. So when people watch this video, I had a lot of content already available for people to watch from the stimulus stuff. And then also from my, just like I said, my core evergreen content that is really the core of my channel. And so that really helped me out a lot. And so my suggestion to you is, is like I said before, I think the biggest thing that I don't think anybody is really talking about is using Google ads to test your videos. You can do it cheaply and it can give you some great data. Some of my friends know when you obsess over the analytics of trying to push your video and what do you need to do to push your videos, you can get, you know, you can really find out a lot of the fine details of what you need to do, thumbnail, retention, click-through rate, all of that stuff really matters. And the one thing that I can say that allowed me to continue to push is to do those test videos in an audience as far as ads, because it puts you right at the top, whoever's in your category. And a lot of people use ads just to push, get subscribers or views. And that's not what you use it for. I mean, you use it for, to test out your videos, to see exactly where you need to improve. And with that being said, it comes out a lot cheaper. You don't end up spending thousands of dollars like I hear people spending. You end up spending 30, 60 bucks to figure out if your video is good. Another bonus thing too, is someone that you can really talk to about YouTube and really kind of get your points out. I don't care if it's a group. I don't care if it's an individual. I really wanna do a shout out to Justin at Pushing Profit. He has a Push, that's the name of his channel, Pushing Profit. Dude, he has really helped me out. We're going back and forth with ideas. He's kind of been my buddy when it comes to YouTube and you really need someone like that. So really, really find someone that you can kind of share those ideas with and kind of bounce ideas back and forth. That also helps too. And you can do that in YouTube group that's on Facebook, or Reddit, or any of these other groups or social media outlets. Once again, guys, if you got value out of the content that I just provided here, please hit that subscribe, like, and notification button. As always, it helps out my channel and I will see you guys in the next one. Thanks.