How I blew up a NEW YouTube Channel with 6 videos FAST (2024)

I started a new channel and didn’t let anyone know I did.
Because I don’t want my existing audience to screw up the results of my test.
I wanted to have a 100% clean start, like anyone else on YouTube.
It blew up with 6 videos and I got 1000 subscribers with it.

How did I do it?
And how is it, that experienced YouTubers can pull this off and you don’t?

So what I did, I hand picked 6 videos from my main YouTube advice channel, which I thought were really valuable.
Each of these videos that didn’t do as well as I expected, but I knew the audience retention was good.

The first thing you should know is that videos almost never pop-off immediately after upload, especially not on new channels, because the algorithm is very cautious in the beginning with who to suggest videos to.
In this case it took 6 weeks for the first video to blow up, 8 weeks for the second video.
Other videos of me took sometimes 9 months and others even 14 months.

A simple pattern for blowing up

When you want to get more views on your videos, you should always look for patterns in the videos that did well.
What lessons can you learn from that?

Potential

The first thing to notice is how broad they are in terms of audience.

My audience is YouTube creators.
There are more beginners than professional creators.
So the potential for views is much higher.
Often the competition is also lower, which makes it a good topic to go after.
But in this niche the competition is really tough in the bottom part.
But I’ll talk in minute how you can beat the competition, which I did.

Beginners have the potential to be with you on your channel the longest, because they have so much to learn.
So investing in this group is really valuable

I’ve applied this technique to multiple of my videos, some of them got 0.5M views, which is a lot in an educational niche.

This applies to most niches, not only educational niches.
For example, I’m making plans to reboot my retro video gaming channel.
Some consoles where sold more than others.
That means that more people have nostalgia for the most sold consoles.
The Genesis will have a bigger audience than the Master System, and the master system bigger than the 32x.

How I beat the competition?

Two videos on the new channel blew up, one got 20K views, the other 40K.
One is titled “0 views, it’s not the algorithm”.
The other is titled “how James Jani got 1M subscibers”.

how badly do you want to watch these videos, purely based on what they are about, so the video idea?
Look at the thumbnails: how badly do you want these videos based on the title?

So if there is a big WANT to watch that video for viewers, it gets more views.
I sounds logic right?

How do you know if my audience wants to see this topic?

But how can you create this WANT? How do you know your audience wants to see a video.
The first step you always should take when you start a YouTube channel in any niche is research:

You should know who your competition is,
so you know who you are up against and
you know what works for them (because that probably works for you too)
you know how strong their video titles and thumbnails are.
You should know your value proposition, in other words: what makes you unique?
Why should viewers click on your videos instead of the competition?
And most importantly, you should know avatar, your ideal viewer.
What is their gender, age, family situation, financial situation.
Because THEN you can investigate what are their fears, their motivators, what are their pain points.
Because each of those are video ideas and triggers to click on a video.

When you have a cooking channel, it is really easy to fall into the trap of making recipe videos.
But there are already so many videos out there on those topics.
1st Why should viewers watch yours? What’s your unique angle?
2nd if they see a recipe video on YouTube Home, they just HAVE to be into THAT particular dish at THAT specific time.
What are the chances? Slim!

But you don’t have to make recipe videos.
Because if you did your audience research, you know that one of the pain points of your audience is: rice tasting like card board (it’s just an example).
Why not make the video:
"5 genius ways to make rice INSTANTLY taste better".
What are the chances of someone clicking on that on YouTube Home if they have always struggle with that?
Much higher!

A lot creators skip the research phase because they think it’s boring.
But as soon as you realize how important this is, and how quickly you can grow with this, you don’t how fast you wanna do this.
In my video training Viral Strategy I help you with this step-by-step.

Once you get some views, you should take a look at is your audience tab in YouTube Analytics.
It literally gives you what other videos your audience watched, and what channels they watch.
In other words, what they are interested in.
Can you create videos hooking on the similar interest, but with different videos.

#1 thing that get you views

Once you know what makes viewers WANT to watch the video, you need to communicate that to viewers.
This is what titles and thumbnails are for.

Here’s a little quiz:
What is more important for views?
a) the video contents
b) the title+thumbnail

The number 1 thing that gets you views is your title and thumbnail.
Because that’s what viewers click on, so that is what gets you the view in the first place.
This is how you keep your competition at a distance.

The videos contents really doesn’t matter that much… yeah … it shouldn’t suck, but other than that.
There are so many YouTube gurus out there with bad advice, and literally nobody cares, because viewers don’t know better and their thumbnails are clickable!
YouTube abides by the law of who’s having the strongest thumbnail.

So it is really important to ask yourself: if I see this thumbnail on YouTube Home, would I click on it myself.
Be honest, because there is no point in lying to yourself.

Yeah but we have auto play now on Home and Mobile, right?
Yes, sure, but viewers still see the thumbnail. And the title keeps showing.
But you should also think about how you can make the first few seconds of the video interesting.
That boring 1 minute intro which everyone keeps doing, is so 2022.

The number one hack to make better thumbnails, is to make the thumbnail before scripting the video and filming the video.
This allows you think of a unique angle or intrigue and build the video up around the thumbnail.
And if you promise yourself never to continue with the project until you have a clickable thumbnail, you will never ever release videos bad thumbnails.

Focus on this traffic source, unless …

When I look at the traffic sources of the videos that blew up, we see that I didn’t get traffic from YouTube Search, but from YouTube Home.

The big views come with YouTube Home and Suggested, 5M, 10M views, not from YouTube Search.
These 2 traffic sources is what blows up YouTube channels.
You trigger these with good video ideas, titles and thumbnails.

If this works so well, why does every youtube advisor, including myself, will tell you to focus on YouTube Search as a beginner? Why is that?

The first reason is that traffic from Search is pretty stable.
Although it takes a while for YouTube search to pick it up, you can get views on videos for years to come, like this video I uploaded in 2017, it still gets me 50 views a day.
With each new video you stack more daily views onto the total amount of daily views.

With YouTube Home, traffic is always in spikes and bursts.
One day you get a lot of views, the next day, none at all.

The second reason why YouTube educators say that is because YouTube search is a pretty safe bet.
YouTube Home and Suggested are a risky strategy.
Because videos aren’t always picked up by YouTube Home and Suggested, especially for small channels.
That’s what happened to the rest of the videos on the channel.

Coming up with good video ideas is what most creators struggle with, that’s why I created the Viral Strategy bootcamp, so that will never have to be a problem again.
Making clickable thumbnails to trigger YouTube Home is even harder, that’s why I created the Thumbnail Secrets training, so you can do it too.

Doing keyword research right, is a pretty easy skill to learn.
I mean RIGHT, so not with a tool that fantasizes scores, but proper manual keyword research
If you focus on the keywords with not a lot of competition, it is pretty easy to get views.

But in this case I took the risky route with YouTube Home, but it payed off.

When you are serious about YouTube and want to take it to the next level, take a look at my video training program: Viral Strategy.
The program takes you step-by-step through the process of getting views, subscribers and going viral.

For new creators I included a module that guides you step-by-step through the process of starting, creating and setting up a YouTube channel.