Nothing comes easily in life or business. You can find ways to speed things up, cut corners, and make the route from Point A to Point B as efficient as possible - but gaming the system any further than that will be ultimately fruitless.
There’s a reason for this. Hard work pays off. More importantly, it shows. Not immediately, admittedly - but that’s the point; hard work is hard because it takes time for your efforts to take hold and create impact.
If you’re thinking about getting into this YouTube game, this is the best piece of advice you’re going to read today.
Remember cheat codes for video games? Up, down, left, right, Start and A together. I think that was for Sonic. If you smashed out that button combination at just the right time during the intro sequence, you’d gain access to parts of the game that would usually take many days of play to reach.
As kids, we did it every time that cartridge was plunged into the system. We were kids; the idea of cheating was fun and slightly naughty, and it made the game immediately more enjoyable without any of the hard work.
I’ve grown up a bit since then (kinda) and I now understand why hard work matters.
I didn’t just jump into this YouTube career - I spent nearly twenty years grafting in other industries. Sixteen of those years were spent working for the same business where I worked my way up from support desk operative to Sales and Marketing Director. I then left that business and started my own, where I worked from a spreadsheet with nothing on it to a business that ensured I could pay the bills and retain enough profit for future endeavours.
All of that stuff was damn hard work. Blood, sweat, and tears - all literal.
In 2020, I started the Mark Ellis Reviews YouTube channel. It took me three years to reach 100,000 subscribers. It represented the hardest work I’ve ever undertaken in my life. And then it got even harder after hitting that milestone and proudly unboxing my plaque. Anyone who suggests that it’s plain sailing in terms of audience growth and partnership opportunities after 100K isn’t telling you the truth. The stakes are simply raised and, if you decide to go full-time, every ounce of effort you put into that business takes on a whole new meaning.
Every subscriber I won and lost during those three years was down to me. Those people chose to click that subscribe button (either way, depending on whether they were enjoying my stuff or otherwise). They either gave me their time or decided they’d had enough. But they physically clicked with intent - it was their decision, not mine.
When I passed the 100K milestone, my audience continued to make those decisions, and they still do to this day. Is this guy worth subscribing to? Has this guy had enough of my time? It’s entirely up to them - all I can do is focus on publishing the best videos I can make (or, more specifically, we can make as a team, these days).
There are other options. It’s no secret that you can hand over money and, in exchange, receive new subscribers. You can do the same for views, too. Do it the right way, and it doesn’t violate YouTube’s terms and conditions and, technically, you’re not doing anything wrong at all.
YouTube Studio has a ‘Promotions’ feature which enables creators to pay to have their videos distributed to a wider audience. You can choose from “more engagement”, which can boost your subscriber count, or simply “more views” which, well, you guessed it, pumps more views towards the video you’re promoting.
I have no idea how YouTube conducts these campaigns, but I have used one of them myself. This was the result of a dreadful brand partnership I wrote about on Substack last year. I can’t mention the brand or the PR company in question (it was the latter causing the trouble), but we ended up agreeing to use the YouTube Promotions feature to boost the views of a video. This wasn’t part of the original deal, but it came about because the PR company had decided - without my prior knowledge - to send a boatload of fake views and engagement to the video after it had been published. This is bad news; YouTube, understandably, does not like farmed engagement of that kind, and there was a very real chance that the influx of that questionable audience could significantly damage my channel.
The Promotions feature seemed like a fair (if frustrating) compromise. Being YouTube’s feature, there was no danger of it significantly hurting my channel, yet it would still boost the video in the way the PR company desired. They spent £3,000 on the campaign, and the result was tens of thousands more views than the video would ever have gained on its own merit and 3,221 new subscribers. Despite this, engagement with the video remained desolate.
We can draw a simple conclusion here. If you have the budget to spend on YouTube Promotions you will grow your channel faster. You’ll gain new subscribers at a rate that you simply can’t match if you focus on natural growth. You’ll watch the views of videos that would normally tank, skyrocket. You’ll see all of the lines on your analytics charts shoot skywards at the most linear and unnatural of angles.
Apart from engagement. You’ll need to accept that there will regularly be strange discrepancies between your view count and the number of comments left on those videos. Once again, that’s not illegal or inherently wrong, it just appears to be how this form of content promotion works.
There are other options for gaining subscribers and views without putting the effort in, but they rely on paying external forces to pump fake viewers into your channel and, as noted earlier, that’s a very poor idea if you care at all about your YouTube channel. Please do not do this.
This leaves the question: which ship do you want to sail? Let’s confirm the two options:
Ship A: You build a YouTube channel with nothing but damn hard work and recognition of the fact that it’s going to take you a long time to hit big numbers.
Ship B: You build a YouTube channel with a combination of hard work and a focused, strategic boost of your numbers via paid campaigns that provide a shortcut to subscriber and views growth.
To be clear, I’m sailing in Ship A. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that hard work is immeasurably more satisfying and ultimately more rewarding than taking shortcuts. The latter option will almost certainly provide you with opportunities faster and might make you feel good momentarily, but it doesn’t make you a smarter business person. More importantly, you’re not building a proper audience.
Know. Like. Trust.
Those are the three factors all creators must strive to gain from an audience. You can only do that if the audience is real and if the people within it have consciously decided to follow you.
Those are the creator businesses that last, which demand ultimate respect, and which the best brands value most highly.
Now, can anyone remember what that cheat code for Sonic actually did?