This Thursday, I thought I’d do some YouTube Q&A for you guys or take a question that one of you asks, do my best to answer it. This week’s question comes from KIDS 312, who wrote and asked this.

  • “Tim, should we use advertising on YouTube to gain subscribers on first days of a new channel? Because I’m doing optimizing videos, everything as you recommended, but it’s going very slow. Do you recommend advertising videos on YouTube to gain more subscribers?“

That’s a good question. If you are just getting started on YouTube, no, I do not recommend that you go and put paid promotion behind your videos and your channel in general. And the reason for that is because when you’re first getting started, like, everyone who’s starting thinks that their content is awesome, and that the only problem that they have is lack of exposure. And if they just got exposure, that their channel would blow up, and they would be doing great.

The only problem with that, though, is that I have actually never seen that be the case. Now, if you’ve been doing videos for like a year or two, maybe even six months, go back and look at some of your very first videos. Do you think that they’re as awesome now as you thought they were then?

Like, I sure don’t. I’ll put a link at the end of this article to my very first YouTube video ever, from March of 2006. And although at the time, I thought it was, you know, a half-decent video, now I look at it, I’m like, “oh, man, that’s so painful”.

So every creator that’s starting out has a lot to learn about themselves, about their voice, about their personality on camera. How do they talk to their audience? Who their audience actually becomes and is. You just need a lot of time to learn a lot of those lessons.

And you actually have this gift when you your channel is smaller, in that you can experiment with a lot of different things. You can try a lot of different new ideas. You can see what really works well, and what sticks and what doesn’t stick.

As opposed to like, when you’re just getting started out, and all of a sudden, let’s say you got a million subscribers in your first week, OK? Let’s just say that happens. And now you’re kind of stuck, because they all subscribed for this one style or this thing.

But maybe three or four months from now– you’re still kinda new at this– you realize, I don’t really want to do that anymore. Well, now you’re going to alienate and lose a lot of people. So take advantage of the time while your channel is small.

Now, if you do want to put paid promotion behind your channel, I recommend only doing that behind videos and content that have already proven that they will convert well for you. Putting money to promote videos that already aren’t working won’t suddenly make them start working, you know? But if you have videos that are working, that are taking non-subscribed viewers and successfully converting them into subscribers, and you see that they become commenters, and they start becoming an active part of your channel, then at that point, yeah, some of those videos might be worth promoting. Otherwise you’re really just wasting your money.

Now, I have an ebook that might be helpful for a lot of you guys who do want to optimize your channel to successfully convert non-subscribed viewers into subscribers, and then how to convert those subscribers into an active and engaged part of your community. That book is called “30 Days To a Better YouTube Channel.” So if you want to take a shortcut and save yourself a lot of time from figuring out a lot of the lessons and the things you’ve got to work through in the beginning, like I said, this book will take you on a shortcut straight there.

Also, you’ll find a link down there at the end that’ll go to our sponsor here at Video Creators, FameBit.com. And you can find other YouTube creators to collaborate with there. If you want to start growing your exposure and start mixing audiences with other people, and having them promote you, and you promote them, and just kind of cross-pollinating that way, that can be an awesome way to start building your exposure on YouTube and start getting an audience, that won’t cost you anything.

And while you’re on FameBit’s site, you can also find brand deals there of companies who want to pay you to talk about their products and their services inside your videos. You do need a minimum of 1,000 subscribers to sign up. So if that’s you, check out the link in the description below and start landing brand deals to earn more money through your channel, and also start growing your channel’s audience through collaboration.

I have two questions for you guys. One, how would you answer this question for this person?

  • “I have paid to promote my YouTube, my family’s vlogging YouTube channel before.  And what I learned through that experience, just to condense it all down for you guys into a nutshell, is that only 1% of the views I paid for converted into a subscriber that actually ended up watching more of our videos down the road. Like, you get more subscribers, but it’s really hard to turn those paid viewers into, like– in my example, anyway, it’s hard to take those paid viewers and convert them into active and engaged subscribers that actually became part of your community going forward.

    So I’ve done paid campaigns on other YouTube channels to build exposure for something. But if there’s a budget for growing an audience and building subscribers, I think that it’s better invested spent in, like, flying to someone’s house and doing a collaboration, you know, or some other– meeting up with– like, put that money into travel and actually collaborate with someone that could really work well for your channel and for their channel. Thoughts?”

So number one, I really want to hear how you would answer this question.

But two, if you have done paid promotion that builds subscribers on your channel, what’s worked best for you?

Give us some tips and ideas down there below. I’m really looking forward to learning from you guys. I know you all have a lot of great advice. So share all that stuff down there.

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