The Ultimate YouTube Guide: Tips for Success

Do you want to succeed on YouTube? Are you tired of reading random SEO or AI slop about YouTube or endless Reddit posts along the lines of “I got to 1 million subs, here’s what no one will tell you?”. If you answered yes to any of those questions, then this post is for you.

I’ve provided 16 tips below that will likely help you on your YouTube journey. They are based on my own experience running a channel since September 2020. Whoa, it’s been a long time!

Define “success” realistically

I have nearly 6K subscribers, but I don’t make a LOT of money on YouTube. But I do make enough to pay for a one-week vacation per year to a modest location (flight, car, and AirBNB). Not very much, but it’s something. For me, that’s success already.

For you, the definition of success might be different, but you need to define what it is. And you need to make it realistic. Your first goal should be something along the lines of making a thousand dollars per year and getting two thousand subscribers.

Can you do more than that? Sure, but here’s what you need to know:

If you’re goal is to get to 100K subscribers, you MIGHT be setting yourself up for disappointment. Most people won’t make it there.

While there are methods and techniques you can use to get more hits and subscribers, it can’t work for everyone because viewer watch time is fixed. Okay, it does grow a little, but it’s basically fixed. So the survivors who make it there will make it seem like anyone can do it, but that’s just not true. It’s mathematically impossible for everyone to simultaneously to have one million subscribers. Some people just won’t make it, so at first, aim to be realistic.

My goal for example is to reach 15,000 subscribers in five years. That’s the prediction at the current rate, so my goal is merely to maintain the current rate of subscriptions. And my “would-be-nice” goal is 20,000 in five years. Nothing groundbreaking, and it could happen if I increase my subscriber rate just a litte to what it was about a year ago, as I slowed a little since then.

BUT, at my current rate, getting to 100K will take 50 years, so it’s not really a goal for me now.

Does that mean I won’t try and increase my subscribe rate to make 100K realistic?

No. I will, but it doesn’t bother me that much that I’m more of a niche channel with a smaller audience. Look at it this way: if I can multiply my views by 3, which hopefully will translate to 3x the ad revenue, then that will already be a wild success for me. And if I can get 15K subscribers, that’s also a wild success for me.

Personally, I think starting out with the goal of making a full-time salary is unrealistic for most people. A few people will have the right combination of traits to make it happen faster, but I’d say 90% won’t have that. But I think most people can make about $500 a month if they persevere and have something unique talking about and put in the work to make quality content.

Keep in mind one final thing: you’re going to make around 80-100 USD per month at 1000K views per day, less if you’re in a non-tax-treaty zone. So if you want to make a thousand dollars per month, you have to aim for 10,000 views a day. It’s harder than you think. Keep your expectations realistic.

Ask people to subscribe

It’s surprisingly, simple, but asking people to subscribe while you’re talking in your video works. You can also do some variants of this: use a subscribe button animation, or a clickable subscribe watermark. And put a subscribe button at the end, although I think this last one is less effective because many people will drop out before the end.

On the other hand, make sure you place the call to action strategically. Don’t take up too much of the first part of your video with diversions because that will cause viewer time to drop. That’s why I like subscribe buttons: they might be less effective in some cases but they don’t make the video longer. Putting the call to action (to subscribe) near a funny or entertaining part will make it less likely for people to stop watching.

Don’t focus too much on subscribers

So I just finished talking about subscribers, and of course, everyone likes to have subscribers. They ARE important, as your audience is important. But focus more on the whole picture: some videos with a good and regular rate of views, a few more subscribers, just putting your stuff out there, some great comments, etc.

What’s actually more important than volume is LOYALTY. If I put out a video, even if it’s a little random and not very addictive, I’ll still get 200 people who watch it. Those are my most loyal audience members. I make videos for them more than all of my other subscribers. If you have 100,000 subscribers but only 1000 watch your videos, that’s worse than having 30,000 with 10,000 watching every one of your videos.

It’s good to LOSE subscribers

You know what? I actually LOVE it when people unsubscribe. Why? It’s because those people were not really into my channel and they were on the fence! It’s so much better to have subscribers who really enjoy watching your videos and watch them to the end. The people that weren’t sure should just go somewhere else and that’s the beauty of free choice!

Losing subscribers actually means you are casting off the chaff and building a more loyal fanbase, too.

Don’t do what’s not compatible with your personality

There are some things that just don’t work for me. And, if you like making videos for YouTube, you’ll likely find that only a subset of techniques works for you. Don’t force yourself to do something you don’t like.

Here are some examples from my own channel to give you an idea of what I mean:

1. Quick gear reviews: I realized I prefer to test a gear for months or even years before reviewing it so I’ve stopped accepting the majority of gear in exchange for a quickly-posted review
2. Posting regularly: I hate being on a schedule. I post frequently, but somewhat irregularly. Does posting regularly work? Sure, it probably does a little. But it’s just not me.
3. Shorts: I HATE smartphones and don’t want to encourage smartphone use. Plus, I HATE the type of content in shorts. Useless. Can it get hits? Maybe. But I’ve even heard that it can harm channels that are strong in long-form content. Did I mention I HATE phones? I wish the smartphone were never invented. I actually wish the internet were never invented. Or at least, stayed at 56K modem speeds. Then people would REALLY only watch videos they liked!
4. Live Stuff: I don’t like going live or doing things live. It’s just not a format I’ll likely ever want to do. I vastly prefer pre-recorded, like Glenn Gould.

Understand the most important variables

I’ve talked a little about thumbnails, titles, etc. But are these the most important? Nope. Here’s what you need to think about, in order of most to least important (with the least still being important):

1. Unique content
2. Watch time retention
3. Thumbnail
4. Title

So yes, thumbails are important, and so are titles. But watch time retention is even more important. If viewers are clicking away from your video even after clicking on it, the algorithm won’t promote it. If slightly fewer people click on your video but love it and watch it to the end, that’s way more useful in getting your video a steady stream of viewers.

But by FAR, the most important thing is unique content. Do something new and different compared to everyone else out there. If you make a tutorial and it’s the only one of its kind on the internet, AND it’s in demand, it won’t matter if it’s a little shoddily put together without top-quality audio. People will watch it if it answers their questions.

On the other hand, you can make everything else PERFECT, but if there are 20 other top-quality videos out there doing the same thing…then even a perfect video can do poorly!

Polish those first 30 seconds

Let’s take a look at this YouTube audience retention graph:

Why are the first 30 seconds highlighted? It’s because the first 30 seconds is where you either retain or lose your viewers. The best thing you can do is make the first sentence interesting. State an interesting or surprising thing, or a controversial opinion.

Another good strategy is to tell viewers what to expect, or make them anticipate.

And avoid this stuff:

1. Overly long introductions
2. Repeating the title of your video
3. Repeating anything

Hey, I’m not the best at intros. But after three years of YouTube, I realized that a lot of my intros were losing audience members because I was being overly drawn out and introducing stuff that the audience already knew. I still am not perfect at it but a bit of polish goes a long way.

Have good-quality audio

If your audio sucks, fewer people will listen to you. At a minimum, get a good microphone, record about 20cm from your mouth, and do a bit of basic processing. And of course, the most important: record in a GOOD space. Carpeting and furniture go a long way to making your audio sound better. Echo sucks. Empty rooms suck.

BUT, I’ve seen plenty of channels with just average audio quality with 100K+ subscribers. I recently saw a pretty popular channel with pretty terrible audio. So, you don’t need to approach perfection, but it helps.

It’s mostly about hard work

Lots of people try and find tricks to get their views up. And some of them work: hook onto trending topics, making very catchy thumbnails of a certain type, more addictive editing…..but the truth is, all of that pales in comparison to HARD WORK.

Even if you’re great at making addictive videos, but only make three a year, that’s not going to go too far. It’s still true that 80% of it will still be hard work and regular output.

And when I say hard work, I mean SUSTAINED hard work. If you have dreams of 100K subscribers, it might take ten years to get there.

Use a second platform

If you’ve got a second platform, like a website or instagram or something, that can help you get subscribers IF your platform is related to your channel. Start a newsletter, website, etc. IF it makes sense for you.

(If your second platform is UNRELATED to your channel, don’t expect many subscribers from it.)

Conversely, you can use your YouTube channel to drive people to a product you make if your product is related to your channel. That’s often a way to get more revenue than simply putting ads on your channel. The darktable course I helped make on Udemy brings in more money than the ads on my channel, for instance. But it only does because I drive traffic there with YouTube.

Take breaks from YouTube

Pretty self-explanatory, but you won’t get far if you burn out. You’ve got to take breaks. That means taking breaks from obsessing about stats, too.

Moderate comments (maybe)

This isn’t for everyone. But I moderate all my comments, and I just delete the ones that are childish and insulting. I don’t get too many of those, but I do get some.

Just being able to delete them before anyone can even read them is very calming. And satisfying, because I know the person who wrote it took time to write it and one microsecond click just erases it.

I’m not too draconian. But comments that don’t make sense, that are full of only emojis, that were poorly thought-out, etc. all get deleted. There are too many idiots out there.

Don’t waste time

Don’t waste time in your video. That doesn’t mean your video has to be highly information-dense. After all, a lot of YouTube is entertainment. But it has to have something in it. My personal style is being succint, and even then I didn’t realize how much time I was wasting until I edited my latest video. It was about 6 minutes and 45 seconds after the basic cuts. But then I went back and spent another hour on it and asked myself again and again: is this part really necessary?

After cutting some more, eliminating pieces that I didn’t need, and even eliminating vocal pauses in places where B footage and sample shots were being shown, I actually cut the video down to 5:52, which is a reduction of 53 seconds or almost a minute!

That has to be tempered by your audience, so you’ve got to know your audience. With gear videos people expect a fast pace. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are videos of people just doing stuff with a lot of empty space, and that’s a niche too. But keep in mind some of those people also have a charisma or magnetism that might make them interesting to watch all on their own, sort of like some actors.

So based on this tempering, don’t waste time.

Don’t care what other people think

A lot of people focus on the technical stuff: thumbnails and editing. But I think the truth is, you also need to have or at least adopt a certain personality when producing content: don’t care what other people think. Of course, constructive criticism is useful, but I really mean that a YouTuber shouldn’t be emotionally affected by stuff like:

1. Negative comments
2. Downvotes
3. People not watching the video until the end
4. Low/no views
5. Not achieving success

At the core, you have to like making videos and be somewhat distanced from your viewers.

Don’t watch YouTube

Okay, sometimes you can gain insights into how to make it by copying the techniques of others. But I’d say that you can learn all you need to by occasionally checking on what’s new on YouTube. Check it out 3-4 times a year. Beyond that, you won’t learn anything.

Actually, that’s a general principal. In all art, sometimes exposure to other art can be an inspiration. But the amount of inspiration you need is very little. Maybe a quick viewing here and there.

For example, as a photographer, I do check out the work of other photographers very occasionally. But not too much. I find that seeing a new style a few times a year is enough input for me. Even for those who like viewing the work of others, the internet makes it too easy and overabundant. I’d say at least restrict yourself to once a month.

As for YouTube: I rarely watch it. If I really need to figure out something, I might watch a specific video. But other than that I can go weeks without looking at a single video. I occasionally search it to see if the topic has been covered too much, but even then I never watch the videos.

Just go straight to the Creator Dashboard, upload ‘n forget.

Work smarter, not harder

Regularity is important. Lots of content is important. But…I just added up the stats for my channel in the last seven days. I have over 300 videos, but about 29% of my traffic came from just the top five videos!

Now, in all cases, some videos will be more popular than others. But this is a bit of an extreme skew. If I had spent more time making videos that have a wider appeal, I could be having a lot more traffic right now.

The truth is, I’ve made a lot of videos that just didn’t work out well. And that’s part of the learning process. And some of them I still enjoyed making. But it IS true that some of them were a bit frustrating to make.

You should still make videos you enjoy of course, even if they don’t have mass appeal. BUT, if you put just a little bit of effort into finding topics that have mass appeal AND that you enjoy making, you can definitely increase the views of your videos with less work.

My rule now is that I put 20-30% of my effort into targeting popular or highly-searched topics, with the restriction that I still have to enjoy the process. And I also still allow myself to make videos here and there that are sure to do “poorly”, because they’re still fun.

Conclusion

I’ve learned a lot about YouTube, and I’m still learning. But if there’s one thing you should take away it’s this: set reasonable goals, work regularly at it, and only keep doing it if you enjoy it. If you don’t enjoy it, something’s wrong. If you don’t upload regularly, then you won’t make it. And if you have reasonable goals, you won’t get disappointed when you find out you have no chance of reaching 100K subscribers. Now start making videos!