How To Grow A YouTube Channel From 0 Subs In 2025 (Complete Guide) transcript

small channels if you're not getting views there are six things you need to do right now I know because when I first started I posted 65 different videos over the course of an entire year and my channel was about As Dead As at the end of that year I only had 150 subscribers which was incredibly frustrating but then something clicked and I went from getting 15 subscribers a month to 1,500 subscribers every single month in the space of just 6 weeks and the only difference between here and here aside from not crying myself to sleep every night was I started focusing 100% of my efforts on just these six things and that experience taught me a really valuable lesson success doesn't have to do with time or effort or money or luck it's more about where you allocate your time and resources you want to obsessively prioritize the small handful of high leverage tasks that get you 80% of the results for 20% of the effort and my hope is that the newly improved and updated method I want to share today will help you do that and this might sound arrogant but from the thousands of people I've worked with and multiple channels I've had I've never come across a channel as doing all six of these things yet isn't getting at least a couple million views so if you want to blow up your channel the first step is just commit to this method watch this video as many times as it takes you to fully internalize all these points and then just take action on them and ignore everything else ignore the noise anyway enough talk let's get into this and start our breakdown on the sixth most important step I want to teach you about the power of this number 77 see there's a book called Art and fear and in the book there's a famous experiment this teacher taught Pottery she had a class of multiple students and she decided to split this class into two and she went to the first group she's like hey your job by the end of semester is to create the perfect Clay Pot got it and they're like yep and then she goes to the other group and she's like your job is to create as many clay pots as possible by the end of semester so they go away there's the quality group and the quantity group time passes they work on their assignments end of semester rolls around they submit all their work and what's really interesting is when the teacher is reviewing all of their clay pots she finds that the best quality clay pot actually came from the group that was tasked with creating the high quantity of clay pots how could this happen well when you think about it it actually makes sense the way you get better at something is by practicing and essentially the quantity group just created so many clay pots got so much practice in that eventually they were creating near perfect clay pots and I think this is such an interesting analogy to apply to so many things in life but also YouTube see on YouTube I believe that quality does beat quantity but quality comes from quantity ultimately the more videos you create the more practice you get making thumbnails editing videos talking to camera and also the more opportunities you have to be discovered and that brings us back to this number 77 see I did a study of over 4,470 YouTube channels with 1,000 Subs we looked at channels primarily posting long form videos and what I found was that on average these channels had posted 77 long form videos I.E it takes an average of 77 long form videos to reach your first th000 subscribers which is an important milestone for most people because you need at least 1,000 to get monetized we use both our common sense and look at the objective data here clearly creating videos frequently is a very significant and important step to growing a new YouTube channel and that's why it's the sixth most important step in this method on top of helping you become a better Creator though the more videos you post the more opportunities you have to be discovered so if you post say one video a month by the end of a year you will have 12 videos I.E 12 opportunities to be discovered if you post two videos a week by the end of the year you're going to have 104 opportunities to be discovered which is a hell of a lot more than 12 and I think this is important because a lot of people think that channels just grow linearly like there's a linear relationship between like how many videos you post and how many views you get but normally in my experience it doesn't work like that you'll post a bunch of videos and eventually one will hit and get significantly more views than the rest and feed all of your other videos and especially if you're a beginner it might be hard to know which one of your videos is going to be that Viral big hitter for you and so if you're only giving yourself 12 shots at that Viral big hitter every year compared to say 104 statistically it would it's going to take you longer to find that video that clicks and be successful so for me when it comes to concrete advice and I know there are edge cases here but in general as a small Creator I would recommend posting one to two times per week that's long form videos at bare minimum post one video every 2 weeks as a shorts Creator I would recommend bare minimum three shorts a week or ideally once every single day I do get messages though push back from people when I say that like I had an animation Creator once come to me and be like Marcus I post videos once every once or two months cuz I I create in-depth animations it takes me one to two months to create these animations and without an expensive team I wouldn't be able to ramp up my production any faster I'm like okay that makes sense but you're giving yourself six opportunities each year to be discovered cuz you can only put out about six videos a year unless you're incredibly certain that one of those six videos is bound to go viral I don't like those thoughts and so what I recommended to him was be a bit more open-minded think about other types of Animation related content you can create maybe it's behind the scenes videos showing how you're creating your in-depth animations maybe it's tutorial videos showing how you create your animations maybe you throw in animation challenges where you spend you know several hours to animate a certain story and the purpose of it is a time constraint challenge so it can't possibly take you very long to create maybe you find a way to create lower effort animation videos to just focus on refining your storytelling and then when one of those low effort animations blows up then you put in the months to turn into a high production animation like the options are endless but you get the idea I really like the quote stay true to the vision but be open to how it plays out cool this guy wants to be an animation Creator but maybe posting six times a year in the beginning is not the best way to get your channel off the ground so be a bit more flexible with the type of content you create so you can be more frequent and then as you build up that experience and traction then you can start focusing on quality over quantity and so that brings us to our next point on the method let's do a thought experiment I want you to think about your favorite YouTuber have you got them in mind so for me someone I'm enjoying watching is Alex hosi now if you were to ask me why do you like Alex hosi I could probably come up with a couple CP of reasons see the first one is he doesn't sell an online course and so that I feel like increases my trust in him that he's sharing unfiltered information because there is no pay wall for his information to hide behind he's also a philosopher he doesn't just talk about business he talks about life and psychology and how those things interact with business and I could continue fan Girling of this beautiful bearded man but you get the idea the reason I share these things is I wanted to introduce you to a concept called X factors these different points I just mentioned some of Alex hos X factors I.E the unique blend of traits skills or characteristics that make him someone I want to watch over everyone else and chances are if you bring your favorite Creator to the Forefront of your mind if I was to ask you why do you like this person you'd probably come up with X factors and so now here's my question to you what are your X factors as a YouTuber do you have a unique standout quality or combination of qualities that give viewers a reason to choose you over watching one of your competitors now if not that's okay you're just like me when I first started but that's probably one of the reasons why you're not getting as many views or loyal followers as you would like now finding your X factors can be challenging I think everyone does it a different way but what I can do is maybe share how I found mine what I did was think about the unique traits I had and the value that I wanted to provide to my audience so for example an obvious one my original gaming channel that I talked to you about earlier it was a comedic channel the the goal was to make people laugh and so a reason someone might want to follow my channel over someone else's channel is my channel is the funniest right so the value I wanted to bring was humor then once I figured out I then consciously leaned into that and tried to exaggerate that so instead of just trying to be funny I tried to be more hilarious than everyone else in my space I thought about it as almost as like an objective statistic like I wanted to have the highest laugh rate per minute of any YouTube video in my space another thing I wanted to do was be unique see there were a lot of channels out there that were just sort of repurposing very common memes and so I decided to try and lean into that value which which I did by basically creating my own memes I would find clips and photos that weren't really that popular but I found really funny and just invent memes to share in the videos most of them pretty horrendous but I think people started to appreciate that I added something new to the meme space another characteristic I had was I'm Australian and for some reason British and American people see Australians as sort of like novel wild men who live in this upside down country and so basically I just played into that I exaggerated the Australian qualities I have used slang talked a bit more Bogan Etc and that was something that people appreciated and found novel and set me apart so maybe something you could do is think about the value you want to bring on your channel and the characteristics you have then pick out the ones that you think viewers would most care about and then intentionally lean into those and exaggerate them cuz while developing X factors probably isn't going to help you get a lot more views for example like some of the other points later in this video will but it is going to help you retain those viewers and turn those views into loyal subscribers when you do get them obviously just putting out frequent videos and having X factors isn't going to be enough to be highly successful on YouTube though and so that brings us to the next point on the method see back in the day there was a YouTuber I really liked he had some X factors that Drew him to me first he was a very relatable character I felt like I could resonate deeply with him I won't share who he is cuz I'm about to talk about him but take that with what you will he also had this witty British sense of humor that I personally got addicted to British he made videos interacting with and pranking his family he played all these unique games oh and side note I didn't spell family with two M the the lighting is just a bit weird so yeah don't don't worry about that but anyway I would religiously watch this guy's videos but then one day it was like a shift he stopped being relatable and he he tried to be like this cool persona he stopped having the same sort of goofy British sense of humor he stopped making videos with his family he stopped playing those random games and I ended up finding myself just being drawn to other creators because this old guy I felt like I could go to his channel now and I didn't know whether I was going to like what I saw I felt like I couldn't rely on or trust him to be the person I knew him to be now you might have heard me say the word consistent there and you've probably heard a lot of YouTube experts rave on about how consistency is important for some reason consistency has become this word that everyone just equates with frequency which we talked about earlier but they're two different things posting lots of videos is not being consistent that's being frequent consistency is a different thing entirely which we're going to talk about now and it's incredibly important sitting at number four on our method consistency involves you becoming a reliable predictable person but not in a boring way it's about keeping things like your tone your branding your production style your morals and values and your topics consistent for example if one week you're using your phone to post long unfiltered rant videos about how big corporations screw the general public and then the next week you're using a $5,000 Studio to create short PR friendly videos about lifting more people out of poverty and then the next week you create a video that's just like a Minecraft let's play with no commentary like it's not that any of those videos I just listed are necessarily bad and wouldn't perform well if you implemented some of the things we talk about later but they're very inconsistent they would attract a very divided audience and one of the biggest problems with that beyond the fact it's really hard to build loyal fans is that the algorithm really all it does is follow viewers and see what they want and then just give them more of what they want and if viewers come to your channel click on one of your videos enjoy it then go to your channel and realize oh there there aren't any more videos here that I'd like to watch it's going to be really hard for the algorithm to build up a profile of who your target audience is I.E it's going to be hard for the algorithm to give you more views and this is especially important with the topic aspect of consistency every time you create a video I want you to think about the Golden Rule which essentially is a litmus test question you should ask yourself am I certain that this video I'm creating will attract the kind of person who will want to watch all of my other recent videos if not you're probably not being consistent enough now all this being said caveat I'm not saying you shouldn't experiment as a small Creator you should experiment consistently doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result Einstein had something to say about that me for instance I posted 65 different videos in my first year on YouTube like I talked about earlier but I posted about 15 different types of videos during that phase and consistency might seem to be at odds with the concept of experimenting but what you want to do if you haven't found your lane yet is be consistent in blocks do something consistently for four 5 6 seven eight videos when you feel like you've maxed out like you've done everything you can with that type of content to get views and you're doing it consistently and it's not working do something different and then consistently do that thing for a while until you've maxed it out and you feel like no more opportunity there then do the next thing and the next thing until you find that thing which if you do all the stuff in this video you will find that thing and then just double down on that stay consistent on that for one that's the kind of thing that took me from 15 subscribers a month to 1,500 subscribers every single month in the space of just 6 weeks and I know that might sound sort of hypy you're probably thinking well marus Jo it's more complicated than that it is a little bit more complicated than that while consistency at least the way I've explained it I think is very very important we need to go to do something else the next point which is something you've probably heard a million people say make a cool video make better videos make better videos everything you want as a Creator comes from making the best videos possible create great content but what does this actually mean everyone says it but what does it mean I would simplify and Define great content as content that retains viewers so for example if you go to your YouTube channel and you go like manage videos then you hover over one of your videos and click on analytics and you scroll down what you'll see is this blue retention graph here this graph essentially visualizes how long people watch your videos for a graph that cuts off really short and goes really low means a lot of people are leaving your video I.E bad retention AKA not good content a graph that stabilizes and stays pretty high throughout the whole video You're retaining people good content and what's really cool about these graphs is we can use them to figure out firstly whether our content is good and secondly based on the nature of how these graphs look we can figure out what we need to do to improve and I would say at least as a beginner there are three main things you want to focus on to get to the point where you're creating good content first you need to stimulate people you need to create a video that actually engages them and there are multiple different ways to do this if you're creating an entertainment type video like Mr Beast or for example my old channel the way I stimulated people was with lots of editing fast-paced edits sound effects memes jokes and content that was genuinely good like if I was creating a funny moments video The Moments actually needed to be funny but not every video has to be like that you can have very Bare Bones laidback Style videos that are still very intellectually and emotionally stimulating to people maybe you're talking about topics that are incredibly relatable to them or maybe you're telling a story that keeps them stimulated even in the low energy Parts because people want to know how that story ends now the signs of you not stimulating or engaging people properly throughout your videos is usually your graph will be a steady gradual decline not many people will make it to the very end of your video now in saying that it's impossible to retain everyone for an entire video but some of the best content on YouTube objectively in terms of retention like Mr to Beast will retain up to 80% of people throughout the entire video and so that's something you really want to think about and optimize the second thing is eliminating friction points so you might see a graph that's not too bad but there are certain moments where a large amount of people dip they leave and the rest of your video might be good but there's these high friction obstacles that are just triggering people and causing them to leave in droves an example of one for me in this video you're watching right now is right about hick and you see how this kind of like flattens out and there's that point there at 214 where I then lose like 2% % of my audience in the space of 15 seconds which 2% might not sound like a lot but when we're talking like 30,000 people have watched this that is a number of people which I will put on screen for you so clearly something happened at this moment that caused friction that made people leave the video boom and these things can be super trivial for example something I've noticed is whenever I say the word money or invest people are like oh no I would never invest in myself or my YouTube channel they leave the video or another one I had a student who was creting like anime content once and he had this face cam and funnily enough whenever he showed his face on screen people left the video he wasn't like an ugly guy or anything but for whatever reason when they saw his face people dipped and so we we got him to stop showing his face especially so early on in the video and his retention improved by like 10 or 20% I.E remember retention means good content and then the third thing you want to think about is whether your content is dissatisfying people so we've all been there we've watched a video all the way to the end and regretted our decision to have watched that video and it's not a great feeling sometimes it makes us want to leave YouTube entirely which is probably good for us to be honest at the very least it makes us not want to watch videos from that Creator anymore like think about those videos where you get click baited into thinking something's going to happen you watch the whole video and that thing never happens so it's possible to have a video that seems like higher retention but at the end everyone leaves and feels very dissatisfied and then this one is a little bit harder to figure out sometimes you can figure out with dislikes or negative comments if you're getting a lot of them that can be a sign also if you're getting a lot of views and like high retention on your videos but no one sticks around that's another sign but most of us I think if we're really honest with our content we're able to kind of get a gauge of whether or not people will be satisfied with the video they watched all this being said so You' got three things to focus on sure there's like a gazillion things you can talk about that will increase your attention but if you just focus on these three this will get you to the point that your content will be good enough to start getting tens of thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of views oh and for those of you who don't have like any daa you have no retention graphs to look at or they're very spiky because you haven't got many views what you can do is look at your competitors videos figure out how they're structuring their videos what they say how long it takes them to say it what Their audience comment and timestamp in their videos I.E showing you like hey people appreciate these moments and use that information to help calibrate your videos so they're the perfect combination of stimulating frictionless and satisfying but that leads us to the obvious question which is if we're not getting views on our videos how do we get people to actually watch them in the first place well that brings us to the next point on the method because this will sound thank you Captain Obvious but if you're not getting clicks you're not getting views you don't have the opportunity to even retain people in the first place so something you can do is go to your analytics of every video then come across to read reach and in reach it's going to show you how many people the algorithms actually pushed your video out to cuz a lot of you guys are like oh the algorithm isn't sharing my video now one problem you could be having is something we'll talk about in the final point in this video and if you're doing that thing which I'm going to keep all nebulous and mysterious so you watch my video all the way to the end you will be getting some Impressions and Impressions is showing you that the algorithm is actually promoting your video what I see with a lot of careers is they get some Impressions but not many of those Impressions actually click on their videos why is that well it's because your packaging isn't clickable enough like the packaging of this video now the main aspects of your packaging are your title and thumbnail a million people are talking about how important your title and thumbnail are because they are actually important yes it's cliche but it is cliche because it's a truism but what I want to do in this video is give you two things I don't hear many people talk about that I think are really important to creating good packaging and titles and thumbnails so the first one is your title and thumbnail need to collaborate with one another so for example if you see this thumbnail you have no idea what this video is about when you see the title though you're like that all makes sense why this is just like a yellow thumbnail or let's say you see this thumbnail you're like okay what's going on then you see the title and you're like that makes sense now now obviously these are exaggerated examples to illustrate a point but what I see a lot of small creators doing is essentially treating their title and thumbnails to separate entities often they'll have the exact same text that is in their title in the thumbnail of their video you're just wasting all this screen real estate think about your title and thumbnail as a team they work together in collaboration to win The Click for example on the first gaming channel Chann I had which I apparently talk about relentlessly I would have you know like Fall Guys funny moments or Spider-Man funny moments in the title but then in the thumbnail I would show a funny screenshot or moment from the video which might seem kind of obvious now that I say it but you'd be surprised how many of my competitors at the time would have like funny moments in their title and then just put funny moments in their thumbnail text now the other thing you want to think about is psychology essentially you want to think about the deeper meaning like the narrative tension behind your thumbnail like not just what are the physical visible ele M on screen but what story or meaning do they have for example on my first channel I had a thumbnail that performed really well for me for those of you who don't know Star Wars essentially Obi-Wan this guy is stabbing Anakin this guy who is his Apprentice now this thumbnail would not have got clicks if Obi-Wan was just like stabbing a random guy but because he's stabbing impaling that doesn't make it better does it violating no that's not better either killing but because he's killing Anakin his a it adds narrative tension it adds a story and so even though this thumbnail breaks some best practices in terms of it's a bit grain it's a little bit hard to see it performed extremely well for me and not every thumbnail is going to have like a story as deep as this in it but I would highly encourage you to think about the meanings and implications and things that are being subcommunication through the images or overlays or texts that you choose in your thumbnails and you'll unlock a whole new world of clickability and if you can nail these two things plus all the obvious things everyone talks about like like make sure you stand out and make sure you don't lose 79 words in your thumbnail make sure you use contrasting colors and I'm roasting myself there because I've said those things in multiple videos cuz it's true but everyone says it though if you can do that I can guarantee you your videos will start getting views if if you don't do the other things I talk about you'll be surprised at how many more views you get there's a reason this point is so high on the method it's actually above create good content if I had to pick one thing creating good packaging is going to result in you getting more views than even just creating good content which is crazy so make sure you get this right but everything we've talked about today is going to be a complete waste of time without the final point on this method we left the best till last so one of my favorite analogies for life but also YouTube is you cannot polish a turd think about a movie for example a movie can have the best actors the highest budget best editors best directors amazing marketing but if the plot of the movie sucks or the movie is about an objectively boring topic none of the experts will be able to save it you could have the best thumbnail designer best editor everything perfect but you'll fail if you have an uninteresting video idea which is the final most important point on our method now I didn't really understand what an interesting video idea was initially because it sounds like a nebulous term so let's break this one down so first let's look at the idea part a video idea on YouTube is essentially the way I Define It Anyway is the combination of your topic and format so topic is essentially if you ask yourself what is this video about the answer to that question will be the topic so for example in this video about how to tie your shoe the topic is tying your shoe now format is about how the video is presented or structured and essentially you can derive the format of a video by basically making yourself describe that video without mentioning the topic so if I was trying to describe this video without using the topic the topic is tying your shoe so I can't say that so I'd have to say it's a how-to tutorial let's do a couple more examples on my old Channel cuz I love talking about myself Star Wars Battlefront that is the topic of the video the format of the video is a funny moments compilation well how about this video I survived 24 hours of military training the topic is military training the format is 24-hour survival challenge okay so now we're going to S what a video idea is what makes a video idea interesting well the easiest way to deconstruct that is to figure out what makes a video uninteresting and I would say there's three really big points the first one is it's boring like whatever is being shared in this video is not novel unique or streem enough to actually deserve any level of attention if I was to make a video about what I ate for lunch today nobody cares if I was to make a video about who is Marcus Jones nobody cares trust me I've done that experiment so when it comes to coming up with an interesting video idea and you need a format that's also somewhat interesting and by the way interest can be relative to what it is people who would want to watch your video are looking for so for example a how-to video it might not seem interesting but if no one else has already made a video teaching you how to tie your shoe to people who want to Le how to tie their shoes that video is now incredibly interesting and worthwhile of attention and we'll talk more about that in a sec the second aspect of interesting is timing so let's use video games as analogy cuz I've been talking about my old gaming channel let's say you're a gaming YouTuber a new update comes out in the game that you play if you cover that new update the day it releases chances are that video is going to be a lot more interesting than if you made the exact same video 6 months later why because 6 months later everyone already knows basically everything there is to know about that new update cuz it's been out rages and so even though it might seem like the exact same video the interest factor is no longer there essentially we're talking about Trends here you need to get on the trend early if they too late there is no unsatisfied interest and then the last aspect I think about a lot is supply and demand some people talk about this as Tam let's continue with our video game analogy let's say you're making videos for a game that was released 10 years ago and is basically dead there are no players of this game if you made a video on it chances are you're not going to get views because the demand for that video the amount of people who want to watch it is so minuscule on the other hand though if you were to take a topic or type of video that has had a lot of demand say like a Minecraft Let's Play you would also need to think about the amount of Supply like how many other people are making Minecraft Let's Play videos a metric ton of them and so while there is a lot of demand for Minecraft let's play style content there's also a huge amount of supply for that content so unless you can add something very unique and novel to that sphere the supply is outstripping the demand so in other words topics or formats with no demand equals not interesting and topics and formats with really high demand but much higher Supply also means not interesting because the demand that that interest has already been satisfied there's none for you to claim this is probably the most complicated aspect of YouTube it took me years to like understand this but if you get this right this is the most important and number one factor of YouTube success in my opinion so before I go over how to find interesting video ideas let's do a few examples so which of these two videos would you rather click on thumbnails are very similar titles are almost identical but the formats are different a whole story driven video of you approaching one girl to get over your fear of rejection is not that interesting it's been done a million times on the other hand a compilation format of you approaching a 100 girls that's interesting that is worth multiple millions of views how about this video the world's largest explosion is a much more extreme topic than just a big explosion and so obviously that one's going to get more views or how about this one easiest way to make $10 a month on Tik Tok obviously you're going to click on this one because the demand for people wanting to learn how to make $10 a month from Tik Tok is just so low like no one cares so just notice how like the packaging and all the editing and everything else could be exactly the same but just by having a more interesting video idea the video just a completely different ball game but before we go over how to find these ideas I want to quickly recap everything we went over today first you want to upload videos frequently the more videos you post the more opportunities you have to be discovered but also to practice and develop your skills as a Creator second you need to cultivate impactful X factors that will set you out from the crowd and make people want to come back watch your videos and become loyal fans third be consistent so as not to divide your audience but also more importantly to help train the algorithm on who your audience is so it can more easily send you views fourth create great content I.E content that stimulates them enough to retain them doesn't have annoying friction points that cause them to leave and also leaves them feeling satisfied with their decision to have watched that video by the end you also want to create attention grabbing packaging I.E tiles and thumbnails so you can actually win clicks and have the opportunity to impress people with your content and last but not least you need to become a master of developing highly interesting video ideas because without that you're polishing a turd and everything else Falls in a heap and now I'm going to risk severely dissatisfying you right now because I have been recording this video for an hour and 21 minutes yes this video will end up being much shorter than that but apparently I can't string a sentence together so what I'm going to do is link a video up on screen where I walk you step by step through an actual case study of how I would go about finding viral video is and this is actually almost the same as the method I used to blow up a brand new channel from zero to almost 6,000 subscribers with just one video so click that video on screen I'll see you there thanks so much for watching