I was able to grow a little niche YouTube channel to 160,000 views a month in one and a half years.
Inspired by Neil Patel’s mega-post on how to grow your blog to 100,000 views a month I decided to create my own version for YouTube. I’ve had a lot more success on YouTube than with blogging.
In fact, it’s been my main traffic source for years.
And the truth is – I didn’t even use videos to do this. I did this just by using a static image and adding some music.
Buy views and comments on youtube, I’m sure you’re asking yourself in which niche I was able to do this, and get away with it. The answer is: The music industry. My first online business ever – apart from a small classified ads business that I ran straight into the ground – was me sitting in my room with a computer and some music making software. All I did is create new instrumental beats (most of them sounded like crap in the beginning) and upload them to YouTube.
Before you think this has anything to do with luck, let me explain how I started out and some of the difficulties I encountered.
Growing a YouTube channel is not something that happens over night. Just like everything, it takes a lot of time, consistency and patience. My videos didn’t even reach 100 views when I initially started out. And getting my first 100 subscribers was a slow and mind-wrecking process.
I posted links to my YouTube channel on Facebook and asked people to subscribe to it. That’s why networking is so important in the initial launch phase of your channel: You need to have at least a couple of friends and fans on Facebook who are interested in the content you’re publishing on YouTube. When you’re starting out, YouTube won’t give you any traffic from related videos and searches.
1) The 100-Rule of Building a YouTube Channel
Once I got about 100 subscribers on my YouTube channel from continuously posting my channel and videos on social media sites, something magical happened. I don’t know how it works or why it works, but I can almost guarantee that this is a part of YouTube’s algorithm.
I call it “the 100-Rule”.
From my experience, YouTube starts to send you significantly more traffic once you’ve passed the threshold of 100 subscribers. That’s when the “snowball” starts to roll down the hill and your views, engagement and subscribers start to compound over time.
Buy real youtube views likes and comments, I also found this rule to apply when it comes to videos. In my experience, YouTube rewards quantity. Especially in the beginning. Before I had 100 videos uploaded on YouTube, my traffic was pretty low. But once I hit that 100-threshold of uploaded videos, I got another huge traffic bump.
I can clearly remember the day that my organic YouTube traffic started to kick in. I had linked up my YouTube channel to send me notifications per email whenever I get a new comment, subscriber or friend request. The day my YouTube traffic started to kick in, my inbox was crammed with notifications to the point where I got this weird feeling that “something must be wrong here”.
Anyway – Nothing was wrong.
It was right around the time I hit the 100-subscriber threshold and soon later the 100-videos threshold.
From that day on I was forced to turn off all YouTube notifications. Because just deleting all “New subscriber” and “Mr. XXX commented on your video” notifications took me a couple of minutes every day. And trust me, it gets super annoying after a while.
2) Consistency Is the Nr.1 Key to Traffic
Once I understood how much YouTube values quantity, I figured out I’d just do more of what seems to already work. So I uploaded more and more instrumentals. Keep in mind – These “videos” were just crappy self-designed pictures and some instrumental music. Nothing fancy. Nothing that one would consider to be super high-quality. But just by uploading on a consistent basis, YouTube sent me more and more traffic.
So I hustled my ass off and produced new beats and uploaded them to YouTube.
I won’t lie to you, it was a lot of hard work.
But I was getting around 39,000 views a month by this time.
After a while I got frustrated because I wasn’t able to scale my own views. It seemed like the more I wanted to scale my YouTube traffic, the more videos I had to feed the YouTube machine. And trust me – The YouTube machine is greedy and very hungry.
Here’s an example what happens when I get lazy and don’t obey the consistency-rule.
If I go from posting 3-5 videos per week to posting 1-2 videos per week, I get a 19% drop in traffic within a very short time.
So finally, I had another epiphany that allowed me to massively grow my YouTube channel…
Team Up and Create an Authority Channel
Up to this point I was the only contributor of videos for my YouTube channel. I was like a”one man army”, producing new music and uploading new videos 3-5 times every week. Uploading the videos is really the easy part. But creating the music, that was the hard work.
Making more than 3-5 beats per week is almost impossible, even if you’re a super-producer.
But to scale my traffic, I needed to upload more videos.
So I stepped it up and reached out to some of the best music producers I knew. I created a central YouTube channel that would promote and distribute the instrumentals of all producers. I created contracts. I studied more marketing. I changed my business model. And most importantly I eventually had a team of 6 producers total.
Now I was able to upload 5-6 beats per week to YouTube. And that’s exactly what I did.
A couple of months later my traffic went from 39,000 views a month to 160,000 views a month.
The YouTube machine was happy and rewarded me for it. My channel was growing very fast. I was getting 590 new subscribers a month on a consistent basis. Which allowed me to get a total of 9,579 subscribers to this present day. I’ve almost reached the 10,000-threshold.
If YouTube gives you a bump when you reach 100 subscribers, I wonder what happens when you reach 10,000?