How to Grow Your YouTube Channel as a Producer: @BENJII YANG
Jan 21, 2021 18:00 · 903 words · 5 minute read
Everybody who’s watching this show wants to all know the same thing. How did you go from zero to a million? How were you able to drive consistent streams? & Obviously, when you’re doing these things and they’re organic and they’re real, you’re gonna drive sales as well because you’re building a customer base, you’re reaching more people, it’s just you know, it’s the whole process. So, kind of you gave us the background, but how do you really think stuff started transitioning into actually growing, making sales, building a customer base, like where did you see that click in and like what do you think you did and are doing to continue that? Yeah, so to figure out how I got to where I am now it has to start from, I would say from 2016 to 2017 right.
A lot of people don’t understand YouTube is actually, it’s not an entertainment space, you know? For viewers it’s entertainment space, for content creators like anyone that uploads beats on YouTube, it’s gotta treat it as a marketing platform, right, and the goal of your marketing platform is to drive traffic to your beat store, right, like BeatStars, so back in 2016 2017 I didn’t really understand that. I was treating it like an entertainment space, right? So, I was uploading beats like whenever I felt like it and like Angel said, you know, like my thumbnails were all over the place, like there was no theme, right, and I wasn’t focusing on a niche or a demographic of artists, right? You’d see me… I’d do like a Jacquees beat, like a Bryson Tiller beat and then all of a sudden I have like a Gunna beat in there, like it doesn’t make sense, you know what I’m saying and then there’s really no fan base because there’s nothing to be a fan about, like there’s no sound, you know? So, that was me going 2016, 2017 even 2018 but the turning point was when I realized that it’s a marketing platform and you have to really treat it like a business, you know? Like Timmy said like a Chick-fil-A, you know when you go Chick-fil-A it’s chicken sandwiches, like that’s what you go to Chick-fil-A for, you know? You don’t go to McDonald’s for chicken sandwiches, right, so that’s when I was like, okay yo sh*t, let me make this switch.
So I kind of picked one sound that like I really love doing because at the end of the day it’s like, if you don’t love doing it, it’s not going to take you far, right? So I chose like that R&B Trapsoul lane because I just love that music. So, I would say around mid to late 2018 I started focusing exclusively on building my R&B Trapsoul sound right and then from there I downloaded this app it’s called VidIQ for YouTube, so anyone viewing, if you guys don’t have it get VidIQ or I think the new one is TubeBuddy, as well.
02:27 - Yeah, we have the TubeBuddy integration on BeatStars, just throwing it out there, go ahead.
02:32 - Exactly, yes! So, either/or is perfect, right? Either way, I’m pretty sure on both of them there’s this thing called “keywords” and you can see the competition and ranking of certain keywords. So, what I did was in my head I came up with, okay, who are the three to four biggest R&B Trapsoul artists out right now, right, and at that time it was Bryson, Party and Summer Walker was just starting to pop off around that time too. So, I was like okay let me focus on Bryson because I feel like I can capture his sound better.
So you can see from my channel, if you go on my channel from 2019 all the way till now every single beat I have has Bryson in the title, right? That’s me, that was like my chicken sandwich was Bryson, you know? So, I focused on that and that’s when I really started building a fan base in the following because everyone… because you know, if you go on YouTube everyone’s like, “yo, no one can do Trapsoul like Benjii” blah blah blah, right, and it starts to gain traffic and the thing with YouTube is once your channel starts to pick up momentum and traffic they actually start to promote you more because you’re actually bringing in more revenue to the actual site, right? So, obviously it’s a slow start but once you get the ball rolling you have to keep that momentum and that’s when you’re going to start showing up on suggested pages the home pages, all of that, right? So, I was doing that until like… what, I would say around June, July 2019 and you know I got lucky and I got rewarded for you know sticking to that one keyword and then I had one beat its called “Beautiful Mess” right, that was the one that had 1. 8 million views on YouTube, that one actually if you go look at the analytics it showed up on every single search, even if you search “type beat” back around that time, just “type beat” it popped up on just “type beat”, I think it was like number four, right? So, that was kind of the turning point for my whole channel. .