[Progress Thread] Road to 100k Subs on YouTube in 2023

[RaizenBread]

Enter January 2023, I finally mustered up the balls to put myself out there and start the YouTube channel I've always said "one day" about.

I want to build a personal brand, documenting my "second life" as a futures trader and providing educational value to people wanting to trade futures contracts. I've been trading for 4 years so have built up a decent amount of knowledge and experience, and it's the one thing I truly nerd out about and am totally infatuated with.

What makes my channel "different"?
Social media is inundated with the "lambo" daytraders, and the stigma of a trading influencer on the whole is pretty negative... The typical image of your 21 year old TikTok kids all tatted and blinged out; scammers selling easy money dreams and peddling low-level trading courses. I'm wanting to take a more grounded, realistic, and genuine approach. Nothing flashy; just a regular dude using the markets as a way to cover the bills, pay off debt, and invest into more tangible assets. Financial freedom - I just wanna wake up with the wifey in a homestead in the countryside, trade in the morning, and spend the rest of the day fishing for trout man. That's it.

This thread is to document progress and keep myself accountable and achieve my goals set for the year.

Goals:
1. Reach 100k subscribers by December 2023
2. Make a combined income of $30k USD per month as a result of my personal brand

How I'm going to achieve this:
1. Produce 1-3 videos per week as my work schedule allows (currently working full time in cyber sec.)
2. Get monetised on YouTube to receive ad income (the finance/trading niche earns some of the highest CPM on the Tube)
3. Affiliate income from my trading prop. firm of choice (affiliate deal secured)
4. Income from my trading course (work in progress - this is the "fastlane" aspect of this whole ordeal)

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I only started this channel on the first week of January, the growth I've seen so far has been outstanding and far beyond what I expected this early.

Here's where I'm standing so far, at the time of writing this post:

Channel link: https://www.youtube.com/@cammycapital
- 1024 subscribers, 20k views
- 4 videos published
- Affiliate deal with TopStep Trading secured (my prop. firm of choice)

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Short term goals moving forward:
- Up my video output to 2 per week
- Spend an hour per day creating content for my trading course

---

I'll make weekly updates here with growth stats, income stats, and any other relevant findings in regards to channel growth. I'd also love to spitball and go back and forth with other YouTube creators and share growth strategies.

Stay tuned.

 

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[RaizenBread]

Stats and game plan to start the week tomorrow:

---
Subscriber Count: 1,195 (monetisation requirement met for subs )
Current Watch Time: 1.4k (4k required to reach monetisation requirements)
Total Views: 23.2k
---

This week my goal is to exponentially increase my watch time stat. The videos on my channel are rather short (below 10 mins). I have a long form video idea for this week that should be around 30 mins long. It's going to be part of an ongoing series that I'll put in a Playlist on the channel to encourage viewer retention.

The key to making these videos, which I'm trying to burn into my subconscious, is to focus on solving problems and helping people. In my case this will be helping people by providing clear and concise content simplifying some trading concepts. I've had great feedback on my first "simplified concepts" video, with many comments asking for more which has validated the effort I'll be putting in this week.

Funny enough, my most popular video is my worst visual quality video... hammering home the fact that it's not necessarily about the production quality of the video, but moreso about the value it provides and the problem it solves. Although, I am definitely intent on greatly increasing the quality of my videos with better lighting/backdrop and an actual camera rather than my iPhone.

I'm still blown away that this has all happened in just 30 days. Just a month ago, I had no subscribers, and no idea if this would gain any traction or not.

That's the power of just taking action folks, I've now learnt my lesson.

Onwards.

 

[Anon3x156]

congrats on your quick growth!

please focus on developing your core video making skills and building an audience, instead of focusing on getting monetized. Even if you get monetized you're not going to be making a lot of money with the current amount of views you get.

remember Youtube is a marathon and not a sprint, may the force be with you in your Youtube journey.

edit: also I see you're new on the forum, please check @Valier 's thread on his YouTube journey if you haven't already.

 

[Gavingonz]

It's late so I'm not going to dive deep into your channel just yet but I subscribed,
I was put on to ICT about a week ago by my uber driver, awesome to have found someone here who knows about him.
Any updates with your channel?

edit: just binged channel, great content

 

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[Premixedd]

Stats and game plan to start the week tomorrow:

---
Subscriber Count: 1,195 (monetisation requirement met for subs )
Current Watch Time: 1.4k (4k required to reach monetisation requirements)
Total Views: 23.2k
---

This week my goal is to exponentially increase my watch time stat. The videos on my channel are rather short (below 10 mins). I have a long form video idea for this week that should be around 30 mins long. It's going to be part of an ongoing series that I'll put in a Playlist on the channel to encourage viewer retention.

The key to making these videos, which I'm trying to burn into my subconscious, is to focus on solving problems and helping people. In my case this will be helping people by providing clear and concise content simplifying some trading concepts. I've had great feedback on my first "simplified concepts" video, with many comments asking for more which has validated the effort I'll be putting in this week.

Funny enough, my most popular video is my worst visual quality video... hammering home the fact that it's not necessarily about the production quality of the video, but moreso about the value it provides and the problem it solves. Although, I am definitely intent on greatly increasing the quality of my videos with better lighting/backdrop and an actual camera rather than my iPhone.

I'm still blown away that this has all happened in just 30 days. Just a month ago, I had no subscribers, and no idea if this would gain any traction or not.

That's the power of just taking action folks, I've now learnt my lesson.

Onwards.

Congrats on taking action and starting on your journey to live a better life!

I have a few questions for you as I am in the same niche. I have been trading futures (well, trading overall actually) for about 7 years and am looking to grow an audience and sell a course to help others learn a practical and realistic way to trade the futures market.

Are you editing all of these videos yourself, or hiring out and having them build the thumbnails as well?

Are you advertising anywhere for any of this (Discord groups, twitter, etc. ), or is this 100% organic via YouTube?

 

[TeeJay_]

Good job!
One of my little obsessions is to look at the big youtubers (+1M subscribers) and look at their oldest videos. Most still only have like 5-6k views. And then you fast forward and they get constantly +500k views on each new video.

There's something magical witnessing the improvement and growth of people.