 Today we're talking about three things I learned from my first thousand subscribers on YouTube. If you have a YouTube channel, or you're thinking of starting one and you wanna hit your first thousand subscribers, here's the mistakes I made so you don't have to make them, let's get it. Hey, it's Christian, the work from Anywhere, Digital Marketing Guy. Today we're back talking about your first thousand subscribers. Now, I watched a whole bunch of YouTube videos to try to get my first thousand subscribers and a bunch of the stuff I kind of listened to, but it didn't really take it in and implement it properly. And looking back, I can see the mistakes that I made. And so today, one of my other channels just hit a thousand subscribers. This one has a bit more. I'm gonna show you the three lessons that I learned. So the first lesson is focus on thumbnails. Now, this is the most cliche lesson you've probably ever heard when it comes to growing on YouTube, right? And I kept making these thumbnails on my computer, on Canva, and I thought they looked really cool and then I'd upload them to YouTube and then I'd be browsing through my phone later on YouTube, kind of double checking my channel and realize that the thumbnails are like microscopic on my phone and most of my traffic is coming through mobile. And so I stopped designing thumbnails for my computer, something that looks awesome on desktop and I actually would just think, what does this look like in its smallest form on my mobile phone and designed for that every single time? And the things that I learned about that is number one, the face needs to be very close to the camera. So I was studying my competitors in this niche and I saw that the face or the figure on the thing, most of the time took up the whole entire thumbnail. Now, I'd also put a little bit longer text. Sometimes I'd put text at the bottom or the top and I realized that all my competitors, their text was only a couple words and it took up basically the whole thumbnail. So if you're scrolling through on mobile, it's a tiny little thumbnail that's gonna take out pretty much the whole screen and you can clearly see what's going on. And then the third little tip here on mobile thumbnail design is in the bottom right-hand corner of a YouTube thumbnail, it shows you the time code. And so you shouldn't be putting anything important, that's text or the subject of the frame. You should not be putting that in the bottom right-hand corner of your YouTube thumbnail. So I try to just steer completely clear of that space. So that's lesson one, design your thumbnails for mobile and they're gonna look good on desktop and mobile. If you design only for desktop, they might look great on your computer and nobody can even see them on mobile. Lesson number two, more work does not equal more views. And this goes for thumbnails and for video editing. So I've done this on multiple channels where I've spent weeks editing one single video. The next week I was too tired to edit a video. So I simply recorded something in one take and threw it up there. In what I came to realize was sometimes the one take videos that took me 10 minutes to shoot and edit did a lot better than the videos that I spent two weeks on. And so just because you work harder on content does not mean it's gonna perform better. It's all about the subject matter, getting your viewer to buy in, do they wanna stick around and see what happens and do they care about the topic that you're discussing. So just because you put more work into something, just because you have fancy titles or animations or graphics does not mean that your video is gonna perform better. So focus on the subject matter first of your content. Talk about things that solve problems for people that are emotionally captivating to people and then worry about production value second. Now the caveat to that is you need to have good audio quality, whilst people are just not gonna watch your videos. But you can mess up your video, you can not have fancy editing and cuts, you can not have fancy motion graphics and that content can still do really well if you are talking about something your audience is interested in. So that's tip number two from growing to 1,000 subscribers is more work does not equal more views. So find out what your audience actually responds to and if there's something really simple you can do over and over again that they absolutely love, try to do more of that. It's gonna take less of your time and get you better results on YouTube. And the third tip that I realized getting my first 1,000 subscribers is to stay focused on the process and let go of my need for results. There's this quote I love from the Bhagavad Gita. It is, you're entitled to your work but not the spoils of your work. And all this does is it makes you outcome independent which means you're not sitting there refreshing your analytics, deciding if you're gonna do another video or not based on how many views this one got. And the thing that really did it for me on YouTube for this was seeing these stats that I'm gonna read you right now. Somebody aggregated data and they found that YouTube channels with 10,000 to 100,000 subscribers had an average of 418 uploads. YouTube channels with 100,000 to a million subscribers had an average of 1,171 uploads. And YouTube channels with over a million subscribers had an average of 3,873 uploads. So I just decided I'm not even gonna look at my subscriber base. I'm not even gonna look at my view count until I have 100 videos for this channel. And when I did that, it took off all the pressure to get immediate results and I focused on the process instead of the outcome. In order to succeed on YouTube or in business or in health or in any area of your life, you have to focus on what you do every day that produces results and be patient. Cause those results that you're looking for, they come long after the work that has been done. So I have about 20 videos on this channel that I'm referring to right now with the thousand subscribers. And I know that those 20 videos are gonna get the most amount of views probably a year from now or two years from now when I have 100 or 200 videos and all that traffic is just feeding back into my existing video base. So I was really building the foundation for my channel and I know when we get to 10,000 or 100,000 subscribers that those videos are gonna keep getting played over and over again. And that's the cool thing about YouTube is it is an asset that you own and it pays off for years and years and years. So these are the three tips I have for growing 2,000 subscribers. They're really the three mistakes that I made. So number one again was design your thumbnails for mobile. So yes, focus on thumbnail design but focus on thumbnail design for mobile. Number two was just because you put more work into something doesn't mean it'll get more views. So focus more on what your audience is interested in and what you're interested in but find that combination of something that's simple for you to do that your audience absolutely loves. That way you can produce more and less time and give your audience more of what they want. Number three was to focus on the process and let go of the outcome because it's going to take hundreds and hundreds of videos to have a successful YouTube channel. And if you're looking at stats or subscribers after every single video, wondering if you should keep going you're going to quit and give up. So the only thing that you can do is just let go of that outcome, focus on the process, keep making videos, have fun with it, get better every single time and you'll grow your YouTube channel. I'm still working on it. You probably are too. Let's grow our channels together. If you're on here and you want more of this subscribe to the channel right now and hit notifications. That way you'll get every video. Again, it's Christian, the work from Anywhere Guy. Thank you for watching. I appreciate you. See you on the next one.