1500 % Subscriber Growth in One Week

We wanted to share our experiences and short-term outcomes since attending our first Creator Day at the YouTube Space in London last weekend.

Headline outcomes: Added 256 Subscribers - this is 1500% Increase compared to the previous 7 days

Inspired

The biggest impact of the creator day which led to all the below, was being inspired by everyone we spoke to at the event. I know it sounds cheesy, but we hadn't realised just how low our excitement regarding our channel had become before that weekend.

Since the event we have had so much more energy, ideas and drive; it’s probably greater than when we first started the channel 11 months ago.

So, what did we specifically do over the last 7 days?

Branding – New Channel Banner for our page

One of the simpler tasks we did was to review the branding on our channel’s page. We have always been fairly happy with the branding for our channel, but thought a new striking, fun banner which included Olivia’s face would be a good idea. Yes, we have a logo for Digitales, but Olivia’s face is on every thumbnail and she is in every video; in order to support a memory pattern, we added Olivia to the banner.

OLD BANNER

 

NEW BANNER

 Yes, even the T-shirt Olivia is wearing is branded 

Branding – We created a new template for our thumbnails

We have always created our own thumbnails, but we haven’t really focused on making sure we use a consistent pallet, font, etc. For the last three videos, we have settled on a colour scheme, font and font size. Olivia will always feature on the thumbnail but it will be a crop of her head and shoulders instead of full length portraits due to the thumbnails being very small on many devices. We are happy with the new layout, however any additional suggestions and feedback is always welcome!

Branding – Designed new business cards for Summer in the city

After winning passes to the Summer in the City event next weekend, we decided to make some new business cards and flyers, which fit with the new look we created this week. We hope to meet lots of interesting people next weekend and get energised and inspired again.

Content – Created and posted 5 videos in 1 week

One of the biggest takeaways from the creator day for us, was deciding on what content we should continue to make on our channel and which content we stop doing. Digitales has always been quite a broad channel with videos on Tech, Games, Anime, Films, Events, Cosplay, etc. Our 5 videos last week were:

• Drone footage from Spain and the Creator Day – Tech Vlog
• New Trailer – Branding
• iPhone 8 update – Tech
• Samsung note 8 updates – Tech
• New Nintendo 2DS XL – Gaming and Tech

As you can probably tell, we decided to focus on tech and gaming; we came to this conclusion through a few exercises:

We decided to look at a broad selection of current and new subscribers and see who else they had subscribed to; we also looked at their ‘liked’ videos to get more of an insight into why they subscribed to Digitales and what our audience demographic is.

Next we used analytics; not the YouTube Analytics, but google analytics. YouTube analytics is a useful tool, however it is quite limited compared to the detail you get from google analytics through AdWords. We launched a small campaign on our trailer video with targeted marketing on keywords, topics, locations, interested, age groups etc. From a week of analysis, it became very clear that gamers were more likely to enjoy our channel and subscribe. All this insight, plus our own interest in tech and gaming, helped us to focus on what content to continue to make in the future.

Workflow – Invested in a teleprompter

To create more time for making more content, we decided to see if we could reduce the time it takes to film the videos. We looked at all the time it takes to try and learn all the technical details, numbers, prices, competitor information etc. and decided that writing it down and reading it from a teleprompter would be a more efficient way of producing the footage. We invested in a cheap teleprompter for £160 and used it in the last few videos. It does take a bit of getting to used to, but so far it has been worthwhile as we filmed most of the videos in about 30 minutes!

Workflow – Created scripts for all or part of the video

Having two of us running the channel has always been a massive bonus; however, depending on the subject, one of us may know a lot more than the other. Creating scripts has made it easier to convey detail in a succinct and informative way without rambling on in the video and our audience has already noticed. Before we got the teleprompter, everything was done from memory and many takes. Now we can convey information in a 4 minute video, which previously took 6-8 minutes. Hopefully this will reduce the drop off on our videos and keep our audience sticky!

Content – Included giveaways (Rafflecopter)

Whilst at the creator day – we met Rebekah Jones who told us about Kingsumo giveaway. We looked into it and it looks great, but does have a cost associated with it. We had a quick search for competitors to look at different prices and found Rafflecopter; Rafflecopter is probably not the most comprehensive site, but the free option offered enough for us to try it out. Also, if you know a bit of HTML you can make the form look a bit smarter without paying for the full solution. With our giveaway entry form up, we shared it to our Facebook page and embedded the link into our video descriptions on YouTube.

Our main giveaway this week is the review model of the new Nintendo 2DS XL. In the first part of our video we talked about the giveaway and did about 3 – 4 call-to-actions throughout the video. So far, we have had a huge response from our audience and had a huge number of users subscribe to enter our competition. The giveaway has also been a great way of interacting with our audience with lots of people commenting to tell us why they like our video, would like to win and what their favourite games and memories of Nintendo are.

Non-Organic Growth – Promolta

Last week, we were contacted again by Promolta regarding adding views and subscribers to our channel through promotion on external websites to YouTube. We decided to give it a small trial on one video. It quickly became clear that the video was getting a lot more views and we took a look at the analytics to see if we could determine how and why. By looking at the external website source in the analytics, it became clear that all the traffic was coming from snuckls.com and baymack.com. Both sites incentivise people to watch a portion of YouTube videos in order to get tickets, which are entered into a raffle to win cash. Doing research on YouTube, it seems like it is very easy to game the system and even though these are real views on your videos, they will be short views and extremely unlikely to subscribe as the person is focused on quantity of videos they watch not what the video is about etc. I don’t recommend using these solutions.

Community – Responded to every comment we got this week on all videos

As mentioned above, this week we have responded to 100s of comments on our videos to engage our audience and gain some insight into who they are and why they decided to comment. We actively gained subscribers this way as we turned on email notifications for new subscribers, so we could see when someone decided to subscribe if they didn’t say so in the actual comment.

Community – Posted more on the creator community – won SITC passes!!

This week we also utilised the creator community site by reading other articles and entering the emoji competition to win Summer in The City passes  Whilst the site itself can be a little frustrating compared to other forum solutions (notifications don’t work very well, no native mobile app etc.) it has been a useful source of information.

We also joined the London Small YouTube Network, but haven’t had time yet to introduce ourselves and get involved.

Thanks for reading and hope you found it somewhat useful!