 What's up everybody, I'm the Mangoos, you are awesome and with all of these new games coming out, I'm sure many of you are looking to jumpstart your creative career. It's a good idea too, the best time to start up is at the ground level of a game before it becomes saturated with established creators. However, this shit ain't easy, unless you're recogulously lucky, you're going to start with nothing and be nothing for a very long time. This is one of my first Paragon videos, it has five views, three of which are probably me, zero likes and one dislike. Yep. I want to try and give you guys some pointers how you can go from that to this. That's the extreme though, my video is really only average about 4k views after a month but you get the idea. The first thing you need to do is think about why you want to create content. If the answer is money, then go ahead and bail out now. You are not going to make any money off of YouTube for a very long time. And I don't mean like you'll only make five or ten dollars, I mean zero dollars. YouTube is connected to Google AdSense and Google is who will be paying you, however in order for YouTube to send money to Google, you have to have made at least fifty dollars. It doesn't end there though, in order for Google to actually pay you, you have to have made at least a hundred dollars. It does carry over so if you make fifty dollars this month and fifty dollars the next then you'll get some money from Google. Just to give you a frame of reference for how much you can expect to make during a month, I've made fifty four dollars in the last twenty eight days, so no soup for me. I'm happy if I can cover the cost of my Adobe subscription. I use Adobe Creative Cloud for editing and I will not make that money this month. I rarely get out of my channel what I put into it monetarily. I do however get much more out of it than I put into it emotionally. I do this because I love creating content, keeping people informed and making people laugh. If you set something like that as your goal, you'll be much happier as a content creator. Next up is the advice I give almost everyone who asks how to grow their channel. Thumbnails. The little picture you click on to view a video. It doesn't matter how much time or effort you spend on your content, if your thumbnail looks like two rats fucked a scrapbook, no one is going to view that shit. YouTube has a metric called CTR. That stands for click-through rate. That's the percentage of people who are shown your video and actually click on it and give it the time of day. If you've already established yourself as a content creator and have a loyal fan base, then your thumbnails don't matter as much. However if you want to attract a wider audience and grow your channel, you need to incentivize people to click on your video without clickbaiting. I'll discuss clickbaiting later. Your thumbnails don't have to be as pretty as mine. In fact, my style of thumbnail really isn't the best. It's better to use bright colors and big distinctive font for your lettering. There is an online program called Adobe Spark that is free and simple to use and will give you some decent thumbnails if you don't have or know how to use photo editing software. Now onto your actual content. You need to be able to carve out your own niche and set yourself apart from the other creators out there. The best way to do that is just to be really good at the game you create content for. Nothing will pull viewers in like a title that says something like, this is how you play Twin Blast at Diamond or some shit like that. Briddick and I had a conversation about this a while back. Briddick really is very good at Paragon and he's also very good at these Paragon-like games. He's able to hook people in with his skill. I, however, am only decent at Paragon. I will never be good enough to sustain a YouTube channel through my gaming skills. So I have to go a different route. For me it ended up being humor. First I established myself a bit with Casting Call and then really broke through when I started doing the Honest Hero Overviews. I substituted gaming skill with good editing and my natural wit. If you can't grind your way to the upper ranks or when you do, you find that other creators are already feeling that really good at the game niche, then you'll have to find another way to grow. I can't tell you what your niche can be. That's something you'll have to figure out on your own. A good example is Shark. I'll link his channel in the video description below but he does these fantastic cinematic edits that are unlike anything I've seen anyone else doing. You'll also need to somehow advertise your channel. Try to get friends and family to at least click on your videos and leave a like even if they have zero interest in gaming. I know this sounds pathetic but you gotta do what you gotta do to get YouTube to actually show your videos to people. If a game has a Discord Creator tab that they allow people to post their videos in, take advantage of that. You can also use things like Reddit and Facebook but don't go all out with it. Those sites aren't there to advertise your YouTube channel and folks will not appreciate you doing so. However, like I said, you gotta do what you gotta do. I'm certainly guilty of using the Paragon Subreddit to try and promote my videos. You just need to be conscious of how much you're doing it. Too much and people will just auto shit on your content. Maybe just post a video here and there if you're like really proud of it. The other thing is click baiting the dark side of the force. Here's the thing, it works. If you put a blurry picture of Bellica on your thumbnail and give it a title like Did Fault make a nude skin for Bellica? People will click on it and you will get a ton of views. However, they will be empty views and you will feel empty inside. I've seen people actually succeed by using click bait titles and topics but they'll never really be respected. You're going to need a thick skin. People will leave negative comments on your content. You can use that though. Instead of just getting pissed off, really read what they're saying and see if it's something you can actually improve upon. If they don't like your sound quality, try to fix it. If you're saying, um, uh, too much, work on that. Of course, there will be some things you can't fix. I get comments from people who don't want me to cover ethereal but that's not something I'm going to compromise on. Same with my language. Sometimes people will complain about my foul mouth. I get that. I'm not mad at them for disliking how I talk but I can't simply change the way I am. Even with all of that, being successful still requires a certain amount of sheer dumb luck. I was just kind of lucky that my honesty or overview for Moragash was so well received. However, it was my hard work at seizing upon that opportunity that has put me in the position that I am now. Things will be rough starting out but keep at it, keep improving and when you see your break, take that shit and run with it. This is the man goose wishing all of you success. You guys, have a good one. Man goose!