It took me more than 1 year to grow a brand new channel from 0 to 1000 subscribers.
1 year is a lot of time and if you have opened this letter to see how you can get 1000 subscribers in 30 days, then this letter is not for you.
I will not be telling you to do sub 4 sub or any other good-for-nothing strategies that so-called YouTube experts talk about.
In this letter, you will find what it actually takes to get to 1000 subscribers on YouTube.
I will reveal everything we have done to get it to this point and everything I wish to do differently if I had a chance to do it all over again.
It was more than a year back and I was on a call with my friend and we were talking about doing something outside our daily job.
We settled on the idea of starting a podcast, a football podcast, and then a couple of more friends joined to start Kaalipost Talks.
The best thing that we did that time was we did not wait for the perfect moment and started with what we had.
We recorded our first episode using our earphones and mobile phone and the quality was horrible, I mean you could not even play that in your car when traveling.
Also, I was the only one in the group with some experience of talking to a camera and I remember in the first episode when we started recording everyone just laughed at each other.
But we kept showing up almost every week (or at least once every month). Since we were all working on full time jobs it was difficult to schedule episodes regularly.
But whenever we had the chance we kept creating and editing the videos even late at night and posting.
And one year later we have just more than 1000 subs on YouTube and 4,500 followers on Instagram and we are planning some interesting things.
Now I will give the complete strategy of how we got here on YouTube and Instagram. Everyone can’t get to this point in 30 or 60 days or 365 days even though it is possible to do that. But if you are a beginner who does not know how content works it will take time.
The Daily Wire Strategy
Now the first thing is to come up with a strategy to get people’s attention on YouTube.
And I’m naming our strategy The Daily Wire because I took it from them.
Daily Wire is a news channel and they have journalists who will have their own independent channels and each of them will post their views and opinions on whatever is happening around the world.
Their content strategy is as follows:
- a daily 40 min to 1 hour long podcast
- cut that podcast into 2-4 clips based on topics and post it throughout the day
- then take the best moments of the episode and turn them into shorts and reels
That is our whole content strategy, and anyone can copy this in their niche, and if you do it consistently the results will come. I guarantee you.
But posting these many pieces of content requires a lot of work and from my experience, I can tell you people won’t usually take these hard steps. That is why it is so easy to stand out in this world if you do the hard work.
Looking for simplification
Posting these many clips requires you to create many thumbnails and titles every week. That alone is not an easy task, but here is what I did to have a clear idea of what to do when I sit down to work.
I made my thumbnails into a template that I can repeat for every video and clip.
So every time I edit things I know that there won’t be any text there will be 2 faces and an image relevant to the video in the center. The image is the most important thing because it gets the click.
In one hour of work, I can make thumbnails for 5 or 6 videos, which means a week of content.
But you cannot just make any thumbnail make a template of it and expect to get clicks. You must know if this template will work or not.
That is why the next point is so important.
Copy what worked
Before we confirm a particular style of thumbnail is the way to go we may need to do some testing with different thumbnail formats.
I started looking through various podcast channels to find out what they were doing with their clips, what kinds of thumbnails worked for them and how can I simplify the process of making good thumbnails.
Finally, everything came to place when we decided we wanted to take the route similar to what JoeRogan was doing with their clips and a mix of what Daily Wire was doing with theirs.
Of course, we try to bring our style to it by testing the thumbnails with different text and no text variations before finalizing a particular style.
Now reverse engineering what worked for one person on YouTube is one of the best ways to improve your content game by giving your own spin to it.
Like I copied from the best podcaster on the planet you can also try to do the same with our Monday snippet Letters. If you subscribe to our free weekly newsletter every Monday we will send you an analysis of thumbnails and titles that worked on YouTube
links to the newsletter in the description.
Using trends
Now being in a football podcast means you are giving your opinion on what is happening in the football world.
That means there will be news and hot topics that happen daily and where I am from (Kerala) people love the game and the players.
When you make videos around trending topics they will get more views because of the hype around the topic. This is called trend hacking.
For us trends are famous transfers, controversies in football, football debates (like Messi vs Ronaldo), season predictions, etc. You can use the trends that are relevant to your niche and start making content around it.
For finding new trends be active on social media and use X.com’s trending tabs to see what people are talking about.
Trend hacking can get you views but it is a double-edged sword and can lead to other problems.
To be honest, I don’t like to run a news podcast channel, and I won’t recommend a beginner do that too, because of 2 reasons:
- there is always a time constraint to your videos
- needs to show up consistently (almost daily)
Hire an editor
If you could only take one thing from this letter and start your channel, I would want you to take consistency as the lesson.
Show up no matter what, record, and post it.
One thing that allowed us to become more consistent was taking the workload off our shoulders by hiring an editor.
If you can do so I would recommend you try hiring an editor or ask your friends who know editing to partner with you. A team effort will always be more effective than one person doing all the things by himself.
Instead of posting 4 shorts a month, we are now posting 10-12 shorts a month with the help of an editor. This has helped us reach more people in a short amount of time.
It can also help you build a skill set for managing people in a team. So hire an editor as soon as possible if you can.
That is it for this letter, if you found this helpful, here is the previous letter.