Work in progress…

Hello, PLANET EARTH! I’m Dr Jake! On Fridays I upload reviews of cool tech, mostly bluetooth smartwatches from Amazon & Gearbest. I also do food, Lego, tips & tricks, vlogs & much more! Oh, and if you wanna WIN an Apple Watch clone, subscribe! At 5000 subscribers I’m giving two away.

My channel has steadily grown since I started uploading regularly towards the end of 2015. I’m currently have over 750k views and 3.5k subscribers. I gain over 500 subscribers and 90k views per month, but you can track my latest stats at socialblade.

So far, the biggest lesson I’ve learnt from building a YouTube channel, is to have patience. For the majority of people, viewers do not materialise overnight and your hard work may seem to go unrewarded in the short term. Hand in hand with patience, is persistence. If you stop publishing videos before you’ve gained a nice subscriber base or a cache of popular videos, you definitely won’t succeed. Here is an (evolving) list of tips for building a successful YouTube channel. I say “evolving”, because my channel is in its infancy and it feels like I’m learning things daily.

1. Find a niche. A topic not done to death by other people, and something that you have enthusiasm for. If too many people are doing the same thing, it will be harder for you to grab a share of the views. And if you genuinely enjoy filming your videos it will come across and translate into success. Your niche should be broad enough to be interesting, but not narrow enough that people know what to expect when they watch your channel.
2. Upload regularly. As I eluded to above, don’t give up – you must upload at least once a week. If you upload regularly, you will attract subscribers who will expect and watch your latest offering. Also, the more videos you have on your channel, the more content there is to be found by potential subscribers & search engines. There are some boring stats out there about the number of videos that the top channels have – generally, they have hundreds.
3. Be professional. Upload regularly, yes, but not if doing so sacrifices the quality of your videos. You wouldn’t watch rubbishly edited, boring videos, and your viewers don’t want to either. There are no shortcuts to interesting content.
4. Ask or you don’t get. Ask people to subscribe, suggest that they check out your other videos, get your friends to watch your channel. I have often heard it said that you need to “hustle” for your first 100 subscribers.
5. Exponential growth. You gained 1 subscriber today and you’re disappointed? The more subscribers you have, generally the more views you will have, which again leads to more subscribers. Put another way, your subscriber rate will increase as your channel grows, so don’t expect to gain 1k in an afternoon.
6. Don’t be lazy. Titles, tags, descriptions, thumbnails, editing, channel layout, they all require time and effort. Fill them all in or your channel will suffer.
7. Set targets. For me, it was 10, 100, 500, 1000, then 5000 subscribers. Let your audience know that’s what you’re aiming for and offer an incentive like a prize or a special video. How high should you be aiming? Well, small opportunities are already opening up for me at 3.5k subs, and from what I’ve read 10k subscribers is really the make or break moment for a YouTube channel. That’s where I’m heading next! But don’t quit your job just yet!
8. Again, be patient. After you’ve done all these things, you will have to sit and wait, and be prepared to tweak your approach to optimise your views. For years I had several goes at sporadically uploading disjointed crap and hoping that it would go viral before things started to click – both in terms of what I realised I should be doing and in terms of audience growth.
9. Please, please, please. Don’t launch another gaming channel.

I am open to sponsors, reviewing your products, or product testing. If you are interested in a collaboration or affiliating in some way, please get in touch.