How To Get 1 Million YouTube Views In 43 Days
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These numbers have certainly been making my eyes pop over the last week.
But these aren’t numbers related to my niche blog…
It’s the result of just one YouTube Short.
Some of you may remember, late last year I began putting efforts into my niche site’s YouTube channel.
The strategy was simple: create Shorts on “borrowed” video content (that’s already on YouTube) to build up the subscribers as quickly as possible.
I converted my then-writer into an all-around creative assistant as he has passion for the niche and talent to create vertical videos.
In fact he came up with some excellent ideas over a couple of months of Shorts posting.
I had some early traction with some Shorts, where a couple of them would break the 3,000 or 6,000 views mark.
One of them had a copyright strike when it started trending too fast and the contents used in it were too “hot” to “borrow”.
But for most content in my niche, it can be used and reused from other creators, and they usually don’t seem to mind.
Probably because it would be a nightmare to hunt down all these borrowers and file copyright strikes, especially when the footage is being clipped and tweaked.
And another reason is that it’s free publicity.
Jacky Chou has talked about this before in creating Shorts for his own indexsy channel; at first he would use interviews from big podcasters as footage and run subtitles over them and publish.
It does work. It’s an easy source of content and fairly fast to produce if kept simple.
In my own attempts, I’ve published a variety of Shorts.
Some more meme-like to capture laughs, and others more detailed and analytical, and some borrowing interview content, cutting it down, subtitling and publishing.
For a while, I couldn’t say what worked best — YouTube Shorts feels just like luck of capturing lightning in a bottle.
But then, something very ironic happened.
In late February, I decided that I wanted to put a pause on YouTube Shorts with my assistant.
In part, the results were starting to take a downturn as the views kept dropping and it felt like we were being “punished” by the YouTube algorithm. I kinda wanted to wait it out.
Another reason was that I knew the niche site was about to struggle with generating revenue, and I couldn’t justify to keep paying someone for work – although good – that doesn’t produce ROI in the short term.
We published one last Short, and then called a break on it.
43 days later…
That last Short has generated over 1,000,000 views and 665 subscribers for my niche site’s YouTube channel.
I started this year with plans to invest more attention into the YouTube side of things for broadening the brand potential and a long-term strategy.
I gave it a good go over a few months, and when I gave up (temporarily), I had the greatest result I could have wanted.
I want to get the niche site’s YouTube channel to over 1,000 subscribers which fulfils one of the YouTube monetization requirements.
As it stands, the channel is just a couple hundred subscribers short of that goal. In the next 1-2 weeks, I should hit it. Sweet!
The other requirement for YouTube monetization is one of:
- 4,000 public watch hours on regular “long form” videos, or
- 10,000,000 public Shorts views
As I’m checking my stats right now, I have only around 80 public watch hours, but I now have over 1 million Shorts views on the tally.
I started to switch tactics back to longer form videos for YouTube, but with what has happened, it’s easy to think now:
“I just need to replicate this Short success nine more times!”
Maybe that can happen.
I’ve struck lightning once, so now I just need to try doing it several more times.
I’ve immediately setup my assistant to once again start creating Shorts in the exact same style, just with different topics.
Hopefully, we can get lucky a few more times!
Who knows what will happen come the moment of monetization review by YouTube, too much “borrowed” content might not go down too well.
But I guess I’ll tackle that bridge when it comes to it.
Perhaps this helped you see the potential of YouTube Shorts to grow your channel fast.
It seems to come down to finding the right mixture of highly-consumable content style and the right trending topic. Plus a lot of luck from the algo.
Are you putting efforts into YouTube this year?
Why, or why not – drop me a reply and tell me about it!
