Lets Talk YouTube

[Mark]

Do you know if most of you subscribers on Youtube are fellow magi, or laymen?

About 60% of our current subscribers are fellow magicians or amateurs. In the beginning this was only 10% as my subscriber base was made out of laymen and spectators of either my magic or music.

Were there any special techniques you used to gather such a large subscriber base?

Something that really seems to pay off is the fact that we keep everything very personal. Whenever someone messages us and doesn't put their actual name anywhere, we like to look up that person's name before replying just to be able to put "Dear Asad" on top of the message. Sometimes it scares people (especially in case Richard actually googled it when there wasn't any name in the channel information or in the videos) but in the end people will always look at it as "Those guys actually made time for me personally!"

Another thing is that we do not send out mass messages. People reconize it as spam and impersonal whenever they see more names in the "Sent to". If you want to send the exact same message to more people, be sure to sent it one by one.

Something else to gain subscribers would be a good, solid contruction. Be sure that you know what you want, and make sure people see that. Put video titles in the same way, have a design that's good on the eyes, etc. Ourselves, we lack a bit of structure as people never know when to expect a new video, but this also makes things more mysteriously which is actually part of our image anyways so people don't really care about that. As long as it suits you and your videos.. you can do a whole lot. And be sure to not rip off any other channel (unless you are making parodies).

Also, you may want to look up confrontations and allow them to take place, may this be about yourself, anything on the news, or anywhere really. If you are good at discussing and are able to either prove others wrong, to make up with them in the end, or both, do it! This could get you a lot of attention. I have luckily been accused of video editing which resulted in every magician on the internet checking me out, many hating on me. I easily proved those haters wrong, and thus left them no choice for them but to support me. If I actually would've had edited my videos, I could've said sorry and then they would still support me so it works either way. Keep it mature though.

Do you have any advice on how some of us smaller channels can grow?

Other than going by what I said in the previous answer, there is something I have always been suggesting and which actually paid off for quite some friends of mine. That is, looking for similar channels and videos and asking every other person who seems to like it for feedback, privately. This includes video authors, people who leave positive comments and subscribers.

Keep in mind not to send out mass messages, and try to put their name in top of the message, if not their username. An explanation on how you found them would work great too. As example: "I noticed that you like the art of card magic a lot. Now, I was wondering, could you please tell me what you think of mine? I would like to get feedback to see if I'm any good or not, and I would really appreciate this."

Thanks!

You are more than welcome! Hope it helps!