If you feel like giving up, watch this first.

Key Takeaways

there are so many of you out there who again say you're struggling to get subscribers this is one of the big reasons people don't subscribe to your channels it's true people watch your channel for you and if you're struggling to get people to subscribe to your channel it's your fault but don't be frustrated I don't want you to feel discouraged this is something that you can fix you can get people not only to subscribe to your channel but keep them watching on your Channel video after video after video they're going to be dedicated members of your audience for a long time I'm going to share a couple very simple things that you can do that will explode your subscriber growth exponentially let's go the first thing you have to do on your channel is build relatable characters um this helps Foster emotional connection with your audience it's going to make them feel like they know you that they can trust you it's going to make them engage with you and your channel on a deeper level and overall you have to have this if you are not fostering this type of connection with your audience then they will not stay uh remember YouTube is a platform of connection and people have to feel connected to you in some sort of way in order to help them stay on your channnel and not just bounce to some other channel where they can get that emotional connection so how do you do this well the first thing that I would recommend is focus on your emotions this is going to come through in things like uh facial expressions tone of your voice speed of talking your gesturing think about it from the perspective of your audience how do you want them to feel when they're watching your video I'm going to say that one more time cuz this is super super important how do you want your audience to feel what emotion do you want them to feel so rather than focusing on your own emotional output to the camera focus on what you want your audience to feel do you want them to feel happy do you want them to feel sad do you want them to feel scared or annoyed or frustrated really focus on how you want them to feel imagine you're having a difficult conversation with somebody but it's someone you really care about right when you have a conversation with them you're not going to think well I want to come across this way but you will much easier be able to think to yourself I want them to walk away from the conversation feeling a specific way about me and whatever it is we're talking about and that can help guide you through that conversation so much better than just focusing inward on yourself and your own emotion that you're trying to Output now both is good but I think that the focusing on your audience's emotion the emotion you want them to feel is sort of a secret hack it's a really really smart thing to do because then it focuses more on the people that matter like of course it's great if you can make yourself feel or come across a certain way but if you can make your audience feel a specific way that's going to make all the difference and honestly since you're not in the room with them like tone of voice gesturing you know facial expressions those are all the things that are going to help you show those emotions forward and it's going to help kind of mold how the audience feels the second one is to allow your quirks and unique traits to come through now this doesn't mean you have to be weird um I mean just think about me on this channel Julia and Ricky on this channel we're not coming across weird all the time but we definitely have our own little quirks we have our things that we think are funny we have the things that we mention you know I often times mention that I'm a cheap skate right it's just those little things that allow the audience to get to know you a little bit better uh and it's going to show a little bit of vulnerability because a lot of the things where like if I'm talking to the camera and I mess up well maybe I could make a cut there but if I just mess up if I could just make fun of myself a little bit and go I can't tell you know cack off my tongue today that's a way better way to approach it and it just lets the audience know that you're comfortable with them and people are really going to see that shine through and they're going to like that so I would highly recommend doing this one so that you can allow yourself to be vulnerable with your audience even if it's a little bit uncomfortable the last piece of this is allowing your audience to see your character growth and development now what I mean by that is over time on your channel you're going to change and improve and you're going to become you know a different person just throughout different stages of your life I don't necessarily even mean as a YouTuber I just mean that as a person you're going to grow and change right we are Dynamic people but on YouTube if we think of it like a pie chart right YouTube is only seeing like a 3% sliver of who we are and so we really have to choose and curate what we allow people to see and we want to allow people to see as well of a rounded person as possible on our Channel because when someone sees you as a well-rounded person they're going to connect with you better so if my channel was about cars right maybe super cars that would be super awesome you know maybe I think about well what are what's my audience seeing about me well they see that I love cars maybe they see me at my house occasionally so they can kind of see how I interact with my family members briefly but then maybe I also you know go on errands and they see me doing different things maybe I'm running a business or whatever you know you can think about what elements of your life that the audience are seeing and some things you may not want to share and that's okay but if you can give them a little bit of a well-rounded version of yourself you're going to build the character on your channel that people want to come back to someone that they feel like they relate to someone that they feel like they trust that is the goal of character building here I'm not talking about pretending to someone on camera that you're not that's not what this is about at all you want to be yourself but you you only get to show so much of yourself and so you have to be so careful to show the pieces of yourself that you want the audience to see and I'm not talking about hiding things either I'm just talking about giving them the best version of yourself at all times I'm going to show you a couple clips of some big YouTubers who have started on YouTube a long time ago and they just weren't near as good as they are now and then I'm going to show you a newer clip of them so you can see the contrast let's take a look do it do what just do it I am sitting on $5 million in cash and competing for it open the and this really cool light right behind it so I really hope this turns out so Market housing prices and Bitcoin recently reaching brand new record highs so the first one is forgetting to set up permal links oh that's a terrible mistake AI has completely changed the game and then Google didn't do us any favors did they the difference is huge right it's honestly kind of shocking to see big big successful YouTubers in a state where they just are not on the top of their game but that's the growth trajectory that can happen on YouTube right now we are actually starting a storytelling challenge a 10-day challenge where you can walk through the steps of becoming better on YouTube You're Going to be a better Storyteller you're going to keep people hooked on your videos longer and you're going to build a community of people who relate to you and who trust you if that's interesting to you if you have 10 days and you want to dig in and become better and if you want to exponentially grow your success on YouTube go check out the challeng Link in the description below we'd love to see on the inside all right the second piece that I want to talk to you about today is leaning into conflict now this one might sound funny right off the bat but it is so important to keep the viewers hooked right so when we're talking about the storyline of your video we need to have some sort of curiosity we need to have we need to make them wonder what's going to happen next and you might think to yourself well Nathan in my videos I there's not a lot of storyline I'm just teaching people how to repair their car or I'm just showing people the gaml or I'm doing ASMR how do I do this how do I make conflict okay well let's talk about ASMR what's something that people come to your channel for it's sort of like for this satisfying you know crackling or sounds or you know whatever right so what's the what's the conflict there well maybe there's something that's satisfying and then maybe there's something that could potentially be satisfying and they know that it could potentially be satisfying so there's just like that almost little bit of like you know I always see those slime ones the Slime ASMR so imagine that you see this perfect slime you know and you know people who do ASMR they like to like just like kind of run their fingers over it and then you can hear it in the microphone right well as you do that and you like they know that you're going to break into that slime you're building some tension right they're wondering like is it going to be crackly slime is it gooey slime does it have sparkles or sprinkles or whatever in it that's tension that you're building that's con there's some amount of conflict that's building there and then as you you know continue to do your video you can break some of that tension now okay let's talk about an auto Channel imagine that you have a a job that has to be done well you can either just do the job but what if you put some sort of like Stakes around it like you could tell people if your breaks fail then that could put you in a life-threatening situation this is something that you have to check and here are the three easy steps that you can do that and then maybe as you're changing the brakes you could tell a story of someone that you knew who had brake failure you know like there's so much that you can do and you can say you know it all you know this whole story came down to this one little piece and you can show them the one little piece that failed you know there is storytelling there is some amount of conflict and then some resolution that could be built into that I mentioned a little bit earlier some Stakes building stakes in this is something that a lot of us don't think to do especially for channels that are not like challenge style channels but building Stakes setting a foundation for what has to happen by the end of the video maybe you're setting yourself a time limit maybe you're setting yourself a budget maybe you have limited other limited resources like if you're sewing maybe you have a sewing Channel you know and you have to create something but you only have this amount of fabric or you have very little space or maybe your sewing machine is broken like set some Stakes around it and it doesn't even mean like that your sewing machine has to be broken for you to do a challenge without a sewing machine you could just say in today's video I'm going to be doing this and I don't have a sewing machine today I'm going to be doing this all by hand but I have a specific amount of time as you build Stakes into it it gets a lot more interesting same thing kind of weaving that into challenges if you're struggling to find conflict in your video like turning it into some sort of challenge can make all the difference it's again all those time elements it's the you know limited resources limited money whatever it is this is a great way to get started it may be hard for you to figure out exactly what that looks like on your channel and if you're struggling to see what it looks like comment your channel uh topic below and the style of videos that you do and we'll see if we can jump in and give you some ideas I think that that would be awesome okay the last part of this that I talked about a little bit earlier is the tension right the tension allows for people to have their curiosity tickled a little bit right we're not going to give them everything that they want all up front you've probably seen the videos on YouTube where they like sort of tease something up front at the at the beginning of the video but then right as it gets to the part that you want to see they like cut it and then they go back to the beginning of the story that is one way that people you know that's one style that they use to build tension it works really really well so one thing that I saw earlier a video that I was just watching the other day I've been looking at 3D printers something that I've been getting into and this person that I watched they got this 3D printer and they were reviewing it and I was curious to know how well it performed but as part of their video they put it on this in they put the 3D printer on this incredibly wobbly table now any of you who know anything about 3D printing know that a 3D printer needs to be steady so that as it like 3D prints in the air right it's not going to just like go all over the place but they were shaking this table and I can't even tell you I'm so shocked that the 3D printer didn't even just fall off the table but in the video they said later on we're I'm going to show you how this 3D printer is so so stable and it has these stabilizing settings that even though the table shifts like this it can still print and then later on in the video they did it and that kept me hooked I was like there's no way that that printer can do that and honestly it sold me on the printer too so you know there's so many ways that you can do it whether you're reviewing stuff whether you do any other style of Channel you can build this in and it's so important one thing that I would also say as you do challenges and as you you know make stakes and you build tension it's okay for you to vulnerable and honest about certain setbacks that you have in the video that's something that makes for a great story as you have setbacks as you set Stakes you know or you set parameters for your video if you fail or if you just didn't quite make it or you made it just by the the skin of your teeth let people know you don't have to feel bad about failing the challenge people like to see sort of this EB and flow they like to see you struggle a little bit it makes for a great story the last thing here is a little bit more of a practical application type thing but I want you to focus on the visual now this might feel really obvious since we're talking about YouTube which is a video platform but you would be shocked and maybe you even know that so many people don't focus on the visual rather than focusing on the visual they just like way overe explain everything uh that's something that we're even trying to do better about on this channel is giving you better visual so that you can Envision what it is that we're talking about not only is this going to enhance the storytelling but it's going to capture your viewers attention people again so many people when they're watching YouTube it's a very visual experience it should be that's the whole purpose so as there's things coming up on screen or they're seeing visual you know visual repres representations of whatever it is you're talking about they are going to be so much more engaged so a uh starting with strong b-roll I'm talking about not just a screenshot but what can you do to that screenshot to make it more interesting you know could you you know have the screenshot appear and then zoom in on a specific spot and then do like a little highlight Circle and you might say well I would love to do that but I don't have the tech technical abilities well what if you had a desk and you had camera pointing down at the desk and you just had a print out rather than a screenshot from your computer what if you just print out the screenshot and then you can use a Sharpie marker or a whatever and you can Circle the part that's important and then all you have to do is zoom in the editor there are so many ways that you can accomplish things like this it's going to make a big difference um outline everything in your video that should be shown visually when you're going through your editing process you know just watch through the video one time take out a pen and paper or have a note on your computer and and note down every little thing that you want to be visually shown in your video after you've listed all these things out I want you to separate them into easy medium and hard so what I mean by that is if I want to go if I feel like visually I want to show the a shot from the top of a mountain that's going to be kind of a hard thing to get it's going to take time it's going to take resources I put that into the hard category you know maybe you have some things that are medium difficult maybe it's you know outside of your home or whatever but you could feasibly do it and then I want you to get the easy things maybe that's a screenshot so I want you to separate them into easy medium hard now after you do that what I want you to do is I want you to separate those all of those now into two camps uh descriptive visuals and visual metaphors I want you to do this because the descriptive visuals are going to be those visuals that are just super key to making your video as helpful as possible or to make it so that people understand the storyline and what's going on so things like screenshots right if you're showing a specific process those are going to be really important to help your audience know what what you're doing so they can follow along this could be text on the screen these are more of like the basic type of things things that are going to help your video move forward on a very practical standpoint the second part of this is the visual metaphor camp and I want you to think of things that are going to help your audience feel certain things and have certain emotions you know this could be like in editing you put something like a clock ticking you know maybe you're doing a challenge and there's you know time is running short and so you put like a visual of a clock ticking and then a sound effect of a clock ticking it could be something like that a time lapse of the sun rising and setting so it's stuff that's like maybe more cinematic maybe it's stuff that's just going to more visually give people an idea you know maybe it's like just random b-roll of you working crazily at your at your computer or at your sewing machine or whatever it's not something that necessarily you have to have to move the story along it's not something that the audience has to see but it's really going to make their experience in your video a lot better now once you have these two things separated out I want you to take you know you have the easy medium hard in the descriptive side and then easy medium hard in the visual metaphor side and I want you to pick out of those lists which are the most important for your video and I want you to start chipping away those get as many visuals as you can in both of these camps if there are some super hard ones to gather sometimes it's just like man I wish I could have this in the video but there's just no way you know maybe there's some stock footage out there that you could get and maybe it's just not possible to get it but it's good to think through every little thing that should go in your video so that it's as good as possible I know that's a lot there are a lot of things you know from uh visuals to leaning into the conflict to building good characters on your channel I know that feels like a lot but just think these are three generally simple things that you could do and I promise you as you do these things people are going to feel more connected with you there are so many of you out there who again say you're struggling to get subscribers this is one of the big reasons people don't subscribe to your channels uh your channel is not growing because they don't feel connected there's no reason for them to come back to you they don't want to bookmark your channel because they don't feel like there's anything there for them give them a reason to come back give them a reason to stay I know you guys can do this if you want to become a better Storyteller getting people to stay on your videos longer and on your channel longer becoming a dedicated member of your audience join our storytelling challenge today get in there don't hesitate and if you just need overarching help getting your strategy for 2025 all set up go check out this video it's going to help you a ton see you Channel makers