Growing a YouTube Channel to 1000 Subscribers in 1 Week ISN'T Luck.
Ludwig, a famous Twitch streamer and YouTuber, challenged himself to grow a channel overnight to prove YouTube ISN'T luck.
“Is getting big on YouTube mostly luck?”— Ludwig, doesn’t think so.
Ludwig set out to prove that getting big on YouTube is a skill. He’s so confident he set himself a high-stakes challenge:
“I’ll create an anonymous channel and grow it to 1000 views overnight. I’m so confident, I’ll delete my main channel if it doesn’t work.”
In his video, Ludwig called MrBeast.
MrBeast said, “getting big on YouTube is 99% skill”. And surprise surprise, Ludwig had the skill.
In the first 4 days of uploading his first video he was able to gain 11.6k views and almost 1000 subscribers.
I’ll be going over the strategies and skills Ludwig used to grow so dramatically in this post.
Ludwig’s Insane Growth Skills
Ludwig set up a basic channel with a profile pic and banner and set to work.
Quality and Up-front Investment
First, he wrote a script for the video titled: “How a Door Made this Man $1,000,000.”
Second, he invested $131 for a voice actor & video editor to produce a super high quality video for the channel.
The main lesson here is: YouTube rewards quality. Invest into it.
Regardless if it’s $131 or $0 & some free-time, some type of investment into creating high quality online content is an ideal long-term play for gaining and retaining subscribers.
Invest into creating high quality content. Period.
Getting Your First Eyes
Now you have a video published. The goal now is to get as many eye-balls on it as possible.
Ludwig did this by donating $50 anonymously to another big streamer called Mizkif with the link to the video attached.
The lesson here: sometimes a bold marketing investment pays off.
Mizkif ended up watching the video (which was about him) along with his audience of about 50,000.
Within minutes, the video skyrocketed to almost 1000 views and received about 250 likes.
3 reasons I think the video did so well was because of its high relevancy, high quality, all in front of a large ideal audience.
A perfectly mixed cocktail like this does wonders for a channel’s growth. Search for the perfect mixture & timing to market your video.
If you’re liking this post so far, share with someone you know who is a content creator.
Appeal to Another Creator’s Audience
The main reason this strategy worked so well was because he:
“stroked Mizkif’s ego”
When you get the the actual creator to watch your video about them in front of a large audience (like Ludwig did with Mizkif), you’ve hit gold.
And since the video was about themselves, they’re more likely to click it. You’ve appealed to their ego.
Video growth is easy when its about famous, relevant people.
Use their brands to boost your own.
Using bigger names as a launching pad for growth is what a lot of the up-and-coming channels do to build relevance and view counts.
The Week After
After the initial bump in views on Ludwig’s video, the growth didn’t stop there.
Here’s Ludwig’s numbers 4 days after:
The most important number to look for, Ludwig says, “is your YouTube recommendation percentage”.
In Ludwig’s case, 30.2% of his video’s total view count came from the algorithm. This means YouTube is favoring your content because its relevant & popular.
Once the YouTube algorithm latches onto one viral video, the next video is even more likely to be recommended.
From there, build yourself a palace on-top of the algorithm. 🏰
A Summary
YouTube ISN’T luck. Do this instead:
Create high quality, relevant content. (Like Ludwig did)
Market your video by sharing to a large, ideal audience.
Rinse & repeat until the YouTube algorithm favors you.