Why do we gravitate towards the same YouTube creators, publishing the same kind of content again and again? It's not like nobody else is talking about those same topics, but yet we choose to go return to certain channels. There is something that draws us in time and time again. Why is that? Well, there's a secret sauce, a magic ingredient, and on today’s Today episode of TubeTalk, we're going to be discussing that exact ingredient.

I think it's fair to say that I've seen a fair number of channels, big and small, with creators across virtually every vertical, and every niche. Something that's always struck me is, how come two channels, which are virtually the same could get radically different audiences? How come some get more subscribers, and more views, versus others which may have equally great content, but are just not resonating with the YouTube audience? What's that missing ingredient that the one channel doesn't seem to have?

Well, one critical element is the way the story is told. Being a great storyteller is critical on YouTube. We've been telling you this forever now. Which is why I'm super excited today to speak with 

, who is the Founder of Transformational Storytelling, a facilitation coaching and consulting business based in Vancouver, Canada. Jordan spends most of his time leading business storytelling workshops for some of the biggest companies in the world. In this podcast you will learn:

How storytelling is the key to connecting with your audience

How every creator has this skill, they just need to build on it

The audience wants to build that connection with you so let them

Why copying other creators will stop you from finding your true voice

Subscribe to TubeTalk: The Video Marketing Podcast!

TubeTalk has been informing video creators and marketers since 2014, and is one of the most respected and listened to podcasts in the online video industry. Subscribe today so you never miss an episode! You can find vidIQ's TubeTalk at:

Why Story Telling is the Greatest Skill For Any YouTuber: Full Transcript

Liron Segev: Jordan, welcome to TubeTalk.

Jordan Bower: Thanks, Liron. I'm happy to be here.

Liron Segev: Tell me, what do you do, this transformational consulting, this storytelling consulting? This sounds exciting. What do you do that?

Jordan Bower: Yeah, so I'm a Storytelling Consultant. Maybe I'll just take a quick second to give you a sense of how I got into this in the first place. When I was about 26, 27 years old, I went through what I called at the time, my quarter-life crisis. Imagine, I had a job I hated. I had a girlfriend I liked but didn't like enough. I was feeling like I just didn't know who I was in the world. I wanted to do something more meaningful.

I wanted to do something more creative. I had an okay job, but not a great job. I was thinking like, "What do I do?" One day, over the course of more or less two weeks before my 26th birthday, I quit the job. I dumped the girlfriend. I moved out of my house and I bought a plane ticket to India.

Over the next more or less three years, I went back and forth to India, three times for about six months. India is cheap, which meant it was an easy place for me to travel for that extended time. I spent a lot of time when I was there, wandering around, meeting people and really poking at my own story. "Who am I? What does it mean to be someone like me in the world and what do I want to do?"

At the end of a bunch of soul searching that ended up taking about five years, and ended with me walking from Canada to Mexico, I founded this business called Transformational Storytelling. The work that I do in the world, is often with big organizations. Although I work with everybody, from small entrepreneurs, all the way to some of the biggest companies in the world. I teach storytelling in a way that's a little bit different than most people think.

Most people tend to think that storytelling is like, I'm going to get up on stage and I'm going to tell you this anecdote. For me storytelling, like what story literally means, is taking information and infusing it with emotion.

Who want to motivate people to change, the leaders of organizations, salespeople. I work with lots of people across some of the world's biggest organizations, teaching them how to speak with more emotion. Which is going to give them more trust, more credibility and most importantly more connection.

You can imagine like, what's the most common question any of us get? You know that question, "What do you do?" Maybe you've got an answer. "Oh, I'm a YouTube creator, I've got a channel like this. I'm a consultant, I'm a whatever." People would say, "What do you do?" I noticed myself having to tell the story over and over again. Gradually what literally happened is, I got sick of my story.

I started having to think, "Well, how can I tell the same story in a different way?" That insight is the heart of what I teach people now. How to tell the same story in a different way, so it's going to be more meaningful, more trusting, more impactful on whoever your audience is.

Liron Segev: Well, and whoever your audience is is pretty important. Identifying who you're speaking to, do you then adjust your story accordingly?

Jordan Bower: Yeah, and I mean, this is maybe the jumping-off place for good storytelling. Is, there's never one story. What you learn, what we all learn as we're communicating is, how do we find a match between the story we want to tell and the whoever we're trying to connect with? I use the acronym harmony, we're going to get into this a little bit later.

Harmony is like two voices different singing together. When you're communicating information to somebody else, even if your information is smart, solid, logical, one person is going to think a bit differently than the next person will.

To be a good storyteller, is to have an aspect of being kind of like a chameleon, where you find creative, innovative ways to tell the story a little bit differently. Depending on what you're trying to get across, and who you're trying to get it to.

Liron Segev: Does that mean that storytelling can be done effectively, by all types of niches, all types of industries? Whether you are a vlogger, but also the how-to type channels. The, looking for a solution channels, like “How do I unblock my toilet?" Once people know how to unblock the toilet because you've told them how to do this, there really isn't a reason to subscribe to come back to your next video, because you've just given them a solution.

Could we use the storytelling elements, to not just give them the information that people want, but also to connect with that audience?

Jordan Bower: Yes, and I would even go one step further to say that, you are already telling a story no matter what you think. There's already a choice that you're making. If you're just talking about your toilet, and you're shooting your toilet and you're shooting how to fix it, I mean, you're telling a story.

Liron Segev: Are there certain elements of a story that we need to pick out, and we need to deliver in a certain way? Or maybe I should just give them the facts, give them the specs and then get out of there.

Jordan Bower: Well, I like to say that, learning storytelling is different than say learning code or learning a foreign language. If I tried to learn... I don't know, Russia. I have to start from scratch. I got to learn, what does the alphabet look like? What are the basic words to say things like me and you?

I have absolutely no basis for that learning framework. Storytelling is different. Every single one of us has been steeped in stories. We've been listening to stories and telling stories, since the moment we came into this planet.

It's a very interesting skill to learn, because all of us start with no experience and gradually and steadily build up experience. I like to say that, when we're thinking about storytelling or learning, or trying to become a better storyteller, there's really three Ts. I call these Ts: tools, tactics, and taste.

Good storytellers are iterators. Which means they try, we fail, we try again, we fail. Gradually, we slowly get to the heart of the story. We need to go through a process of trying things out, and seeing how the audience reacts. It's one thing to have a thought, and it's something different to take that thought and put it into form. The tools of storytelling are all about iteration.

Of course, they can be learned and they're simple. It can be as simple as writing something out, doing some reflective writing, editing, coming back to it over and over again. The tools are simple. The tools are all about effort.

The second T, I call it tactics. What you'll see about tactics, is that there are certain commonalities of great stories that apply across the board. Whether we're talking about how-to videos, whether we're talking about one-on-one connection videos from influencers, or Hollywood movies, or good advertising or great books, or speeches, or Ted talks.

Any or most of them are built on the same basic foundational tactics. The reason those tactics work, is because they're linked to the way our brains work, right? There's like certain ways that we learn and process information as human beings, and the cognitive biases that go with it. That makes us more susceptible and more interested in narrative techniques or tactics.

The third thing is taste. I think this one is really important. It's really important that we know what a good story looks like for ourselves, so we have something to aspire to. The more that you can develop your taste of what's good and what's not, that helps to guide the creative development.

All three of those things together, tactics, tools, and taste are essential for the process of becoming a good storyteller.

Liron Segev: Could talking-head videos still be able to make those connections? Or our visuals and story go so hand-in-hand, we have to think much bigger?

Well, I want to equivocate and say both. Which means that, if you're going to make a talking-head video, your talking-head video will certainly be much, much more interesting by becoming a better storyteller.

Storytelling can be a massive business, and it can be a totally micro-business. The important part to know is that the approach and the tactics are exactly the same. Once you start getting good at it in an inexpensive way, then it's quite natural to start to see how you might be able to scale.

If you know how to grab people's attention and connect to them, people are interested in you. They want to be able to find the people who have that specific skill.

Liron Segev: Okay, what are the elements that make up a good story?

Jordan Bower: I've used this word, harmony because it really rings true in terms of, storytelling is emotional and it's something that we should feel resonating inside of us. When we're thinking about a good story, it's important not to take these ideas and call them how-tos. They're more like ideas, guiding ideas that can help us understand good composition.

It's important to know first, before we go any further, to know that these aren't rules. Storytelling is an art. Like any art, rules are made to be broken. You're going to find these kinds of principles across all good stories, no matter what they are.

Every great story is based on hooks. It's not just a hook that starts the story, but it's the series of hooks that move us through the story. The English word, ‘entertain’, literally means to hold between. If you look at that in the etymology, at entertain, hold between. What is it that we're getting held between? One really easy way to think of this, is the question and the answer.

The word ‘suspense’ literally means asking a question and then suspending the answer. Let me give you an example. "You'll never guess who I just saw in the coffee shop. Before I tell you that, let me just give you a little bit of background."

You see what I did? Is I offered you a question, with some sort of compelling answer and now I'm suspending the answer. It's worth thinking about, well, what kinds of questions are compelling? If I said like, "You'll never believe what's on the bottom of my shoe." Or like, "You'll never believe what the most popular word in the newspaper was today."

The most compelling questions are the ones that promise an emotional payoff. If I ask you a question that promises some sort of emotional payoff, you're going to be interested.

People can't remember what they had for breakfast yesterday, but they can remember the climax of a movie they watched 30 years ago. How is that possible? Well, the answer is emotion. The stronger the emotion, the more meaningful it's going to be for the audience. We hook people with emotional content.

Liron Segev: You give them a pitch, more of, "Today, I'm going to show you five reasons or five ways to make your Wi-Fi faster. Stay tuned, and I'll show you how to do that." We told them about the same kind of hook.

Jordan Bower: That's a really nice clear hook. The next question is, how do you take a hook like that and add an emotional payoff?

I'm linking two things together. I'm linking the piece of information that I wanted to communicate, but I'm wrapping it in emotion that's going to make it more interesting for folks. In great stories, there's not just one hook. There is a progression of hooks that build on top of each other. One question leads to the next question. What happens over the course of the story is that questions become more specific because we know more now. You know this pattern because it's in every single movie you've ever watched.

When it comes back to a YouTube video, even if you're doing a how-to, it's like, how do you find a number of hooks that are going to lead somebody all the way through to the end? How do you hold the juiciest, most emotionally meaningful moment of the whole video to almost at the very end, so people will watch all the way to get to that? Yeah, that's the question

Jordan Bower: The A, is of course Audience. How do we know our audience? We might say, "Oh yeah, my followers are women aged 24 to 30. Or my followers love toilets. The question for all of us is, how do we go one level deeper? Who are they really, these people? What is it in our story that's going to be truly interesting to them? Who are they as people? What values do they have? What are they yearning for at a real human level deep inside?

Being able to reach your audience at that level, that really captivates us. It's really important when you're considering your audience and think about, "Which of these major deep human themes are going to be the one most likely to resonate?" Remembering that the audience isn't just looking for toilet advice, they're looking for life advice wrapped up in toilet advice. How do you bring those two things together? Does that make sense?

Liron Segev: Yeah, so you're already thinking of your content very differently. Instead of, first you put A, and then you do B and then you do C, that's the boring bit. That's just the how-to, it’s how else do you bring people along for that ride?

Jordan Bower: It's a strange thing about making content because you write a book, you make a video, you do any of these things, you spend so much time thinking about what you think you're trying to get across.

Most of us spend much less time watching the video from the audience's perspective, and seeing the stream of content as if you were them. What A reminds us to do, is to get out of ourselves, however we can, and literally switch sides of the screen.

Now, you're your audience watching back at you. How do you look from their perspective? What do they know or not know about you? What might they want to know more of about you, or the subject matter or so on?

Liron Segev: Love that, because I think that a lot of us would probably put a tick mark into, "Well, me as the audience member, did I receive the information I was looking for? Do I know how to make my Wi-Fi faster? Do I know how to get the best out of myself on camera?" The answer is probably, yes, because I've delivered enough value in the video. That's where it stops, brilliant.

Jordan Bower: On to R. R is about relationships. Relationships are the real reason we love to watch and we love to engage in any story, because as we all know, we're social animals. What we try to do as storytellers, is start a relationship between what we can call our characters and the audience, as quickly as possible. A subtle way to do that is, "Hey, I'm Jordan and I'm going to be introducing you to my toilet."

If you can give me a little bit more detail about the character, then it's going to be interesting and more fun for me to watch. Think of the difference between shooting a cell phone camera info video, in a white room by yourself, and shooting it in one of your favorite places in your house.

If you can create a relationship, not just with you, but also with the setting and the world around. What it does is, it transports us. Now, we're not just sitting alone in front of our computer or in front of our phone, consuming your information. We're literally there with you, in relationship with you as you're moving through stuff.

The strength of a relationship is what draws us all in. Relationships are like catnip to humans. The more you can tell us about the relationship, the more juicy the relationship is, the more we'll be hungry for it. Does that make sense?

Liron Segev: Does that mean that we have to give a little bit vulnerable, a little bit open and beyond just the content that we're trying to deliver, but also being ourselves? As opposed to acting a role?

Jordan Bower: Yeah, totally. Really putting the relationship first. Like you say, being vulnerable, it's so essential, because that's what we want as audiences. We don't just want the Google Maps voice talking to us. We want humanity, we want resonance, we want connection.

Liron Segev: Well, okay. Everyone, I just wanted to reiterate that point, because I think it's super, super important, so many people are still making that mistake - everything has to be a 100% perfect or it's a failed video.

That is such flawed thinking, because we're not all perfect. We all going to mumble, we all going to step over our own words. It's just natural. We would rather could make a connection with someone who's real, than an avatar or the Google Map voice. Love that.

Jordan Bower: Yeah, and I would say too, one last point on relationships is, don't underestimate that you have a relationship with your audience. You also define the terms of your relationship. Our first fear is, "Oh, we're going to get judged. These people are going to judge us."

When we're worried about other people's judgment, we're much more likely to be focused on the perfection. If we flip that on its head and say, "You know what? We want to give something to somebody. We're creators. We're bringing some creative product to the world. Something that no one else in the world has ever done before.

Only we can do it in our unique way." It's a gift. When we start to change our attitude about that, then we can become a little bit easier on ourselves as artists and creators.

__*Liron Segev: If you're trying to emulate somebody else, it's only going to get you to a certain level. People have already connected with that person. How can they connect with you? Why are you the best gaming channel? Why are you the best tech channel? Why would I choose you over thousands and thousands of other channels? It's because of you. That's what you bring to the party. __

Jordan Bower: My advice to you if you're someone who thinks like that, remember that every great artist started off in the same place you are right now. Like Michelangelo picked up sculpting hammer for the first time and had no idea what he was doing. Leonardo da Vinci, the same thing. Everybody starts from scratch. It's really important to love the process. What I would say is, find a favorite artist and learn about them.

Liron Segev: We've got the hook, we've got an audience, we've got relationships. What's the M?

Jordan Bower: M is Movement. What's really important to know, is that stories move. Imagine if I was a YouTube creator and I'm making a video, and the whole time I was talking in a monotone voice. Would you want to hear me talk for more than 10 seconds?

It's really important to remember that stories move. They move literally from start to finish, but they also move emotionally from start to finish. You'll see, if you go watch a movie, over the course of two hours, you're going to get all kinds of emotional experiences.

What we look for in good stories, is the diversity of emotional experiences. Even as you're starting to think about your video, how can you bring in different emotional elements? I would say, in the beginning, if you're just starting, just try to bring in one different emotional tone.

It's ironic. Like with the message, you want to be clear in your message, but with the emotions, you want to be experimental. You want to be creative. I remember when I was learning to be a photographer, that some of the advice I got was to change the angle that I was shooting at. The moment I start to go down and go up and move from side to side, I start to give myself a diversity of tools to work with. You're just doing something that breaks your habitual pattern. Now, over the years of being a storyteller, I've learned how to talk like a storyteller.

The emotion comes through, the passion, the pauses, all of that, all of that is totally learned. It doesn't mean it's inauthentic, but it's like something that I learned gradually, works with audiences. I want to be understood, I'm playing with these various tactics.

What I notice in workshops, is that when people tell their story, whether it's a story of how they became who they were or how they started their YouTube channel, they tend to tell it chronologically. It's like reading a police report.

Even just starting the story in a different place, is going to take you to a different level. Challenge yourself to tell the story in a different way. I already gave you a little bit of a hint of how to do this, in the first letter, which is hook. Look through the story and ask yourself, "What were the most emotionally impactful moments? When did something interesting happen?

When did I fail? When did I succeed? How do I tell a story where those are the main building blocks, as opposed to the chronology? My advice is, just experiment.

Liron Segev: All right, we've got a couple of more letters. We need to get on to the O now.

Jordan Bower: The O, is about Open. Open is a really interesting thing to think about stories, because you think like, "Hey, I've got a story to tell. I want it to have a point." As we talked about a little bit earlier, the best stories are open stories.

We love stories that have that feeling of openness. If you can find some way to make it more of an exploration or a creative experience, that draws us in. As audiences, we don't want to be lectured at. We want to be provoked with open questions that ask us to participate. Every great story is participatory. If a story isn't participatory, it's propaganda. Does that make sense?

Liron Segev: Again, we keep on going back to the unblock toilet for some reason. Once I know how to unblock my toilet, once I know how to get the best out of my camera on my phone, I will get the fastest internet at home. What else can I do to make them have that openness?

Jordan Bower: Well, let's think of the attitude you bring to your channel. If I was like, "Hey guys, I'm Jordan and I'm going to show you how to unblock your toilet." Like what I'm delivering to you is clear, but it's also very closed. If I was to say "Hey guys, I'm Jordan, the handyman. I am a home expert. No matter what goes wrong in your home for the rest of your life, I'll be able to help you with it. Whether it's your kitchen sink, whether it's the toilet, whether it's what to do with your leaves outside.

I'm the guy to go to, to help you with everything in your house. Today what we're going to do is, we're going to talk about the toilet." What I just did there, is I opened up who I am in the eyes of the audience.

Liron Segev: With YouTube, we were told specifically to follow a formula if you want to be successful." Whereas a lot of that needs to be unlearned now because the platform has changed. The algorithm has changed. The way people consume information has changed.

Jordan Bower: It's a really great way to roll into the N. H is Hook, A is Audience, R is Relationships. M is Movement, O is Open, N is Now. With now, it's all about thinking through how do you be relevant? How do you tell a story that's relevant to what your audience is experiencing now?

Again, going back to the, O, that's a great way to be open. Is now you're not just talking about your toilet, but you're Jordan, the handyman, who's helping give you life advice for what's happening in the world right now. Finding a way, and making sure that there is a way to link the story you want to tell, to what's happening in cultural context. That's so essential now because if you don't, somebody else will.

What does it mean to be a good storyteller? The world very clearly needs great storytellers right now. Developing the skill is so essential, not just to get people to watch your videos, as important as that is, but to also be leaders in your family, community and so on. Do not underestimate how impactful storytelling can be, throughout all aspects of your life, relationships too

Learning the art of storytelling can transform you from a good YouTuber into an amazing one - and it's such an easy skill to learn! Find out more on this week's episode of TubeTalk.

Why Story Telling is the Most Valuable Skill For Any YouTuber: TubeTalk 201 with Jordan Bower

Although this post is all about gaming channels, the advice is applicable to all types of topics. However, check out our video on ‘

How to Get Your First 100 Subscribers on YouTube

’ for tips and tricks for every YouTube creator.

6 Ways to Get Your First 100 Subscribers as a YouTube Gaming Channel

How long have you been active on YouTube? And, in that time, how many subscribers have you gained on your channel? If you’re struggling to hit your first milestone then check out the following 6 tips for success

#1 Determine Your Value Proposition so Viewers Subscribe

As you can imagine, competition in the gaming space on YouTube is heavy. And as time goes on that competition is only going to increase as more and more gaming content creators are enticed onto the platform.

So as you continue on your YouTube journey towards that first 100 subscribers you need to ask yourself, why should people subscribe to me? And once you determine that, that needs to become your value proposition.

What’s a value proposition? It’s simply what makes your channel valuable, and if that's something you haven’t determined yet, that's my first assignment for you. Determine your value proposition and then make it clear upfront.

If you have less than 100 subscribers you need to build some credibility and authority around that value proposition.

You need to put your money where your mouth is and show us just exactly how you're going to help us master the game of Temtem, for instance. Luckily, you can do this in a multitude of ways. You could do tutorials, you could give your take on Temtem versus games like Pokemon, or you could show highlights of some of your best moments in the game where you conquered some of the most challenging boss fights.

But keep in mind, it takes time to build credibility and authority, and you're going to need a few videos under your belt before people start seeing that you actually are the master of Temtem.

This advice assumes that you've niched down your content to at least one genre of game if not one game altogether. We recently published a video on the subject and I highly recommend checking it out because I go over exactly how I would go about niching down into at least a genre of a video game.

#3 Create a Video Library of Content on Your YouTube Channel

Once you have decided which game or genre you’re going to focus on, I recommend building a healthy library of videos.

Even if your plan is just to make one video a week, I would recommend starting out with about three to five videos on the subject that you're covering. This will do a few things for you.

For one, it's going to help your potential subscribers know exactly what kind of content they're going to get if they come back wanting more. Secondly, you're giving YouTube more data to help better categorize your channel. The third thing this is going to do is give you the opportunity to diversify your content out of the gate.

Let's say you don't want to just make Temtem tutorials, but you also want to create some generic ‘let's play’ content where it's just you playing the game for 20 or 30 minutes. You can do a couple of ‘let's plays’, and mix in a tutorial and a review or two. Now your potential subscribers have a really good idea of what kind of videos you make around this game or the genre of games.

#4 Run a Channel Audit so You Know What’s Working

This seems like the perfect opportunity to show you the 

 we offer here at vidIQ. As you build up a library of videos, you're going to be getting a lot of data points, so run a channel audit often (even every day) and take a look at videos that are getting decent views, and decent engagement. Then, double down on that kind of content. Give your audience more of the things that they're coming back for.

You can also use this tool to determine videos that could use a little more work. You can go into these videos and determine why did people only watch for a short time, which is an amazing opportunity for you to learn from your old content and make more engaging videos going forward.

#5 Work Extra Hard on YouTube Custom Thumbnails

So you've picked your game or your genre and you know exactly what content to create to get you your first 100 subscribers because now you're giving them value on a very specific topic.

So with that out of the way, the next thing we need to focus on is your thumbnails. Generally speaking, I've seen countless creators do one of two things. First, they take a screenshot from the game and let that be their thumbnail. YouTube just chooses it for them and it very often doesn't really match the title of the video, so as a viewer and I'm not really sure what I'm going to get.

Secondly, I've seen a lot of over-produced thumbnails where creators try to cram as much text and tiny images into an already tiny thumbnail as possible in order to try and communicate what the video's about in just one little picture.

I can't stress enough, please don't skimp on your thumbnails. As gamers, we have a lot of awesome opportunities to make really colorful, eye-catching thumbnails because video games have already done half the work by basically allowing you to play in a work of art.

Now I do understand that some games make this a little more difficult than others. Like Temtem is a very visually appealing game, but what about a game like Braains.io? Braains.io is kind of a zoomed-out, top-down game and taking a screenshot and trying to make it a fun clickable thumbnail is a little bit tough, but a lot of creators have kind of found a way to make this work for them.

The fact of the matter is even if your game doesn't really allow for nice screenshots to be taken within it, be sure to put in that effort yourself and find a way to make your thumbnails clickable and eye-catching. Perhaps take a character from your game, and make it the hero of your thumbnail, but make sure that people visually connect with your game rather than just simply taking a top-down screenshot and calling it a day.

For more information on creating the perfect custom thumbnail (and why it’s vital that you do) check out 

So up to this point, if you've been following this advice, you now have a strong value proposition, you have amazing thumbnails, you have a clear idea of exactly what your channel's about and you've communicated that to your audience. You're starting to build up that authority and that credibility by posting a number of videos that identify you as an expert on whatever it is you're covering.

Now that you've honed in on the value that you're offering your viewers, it never hurts to ask people to subscribe, I can't stress this enough.

Think of it this way, they've already clicked on your video out of interest. They saw your thumbnail and thought oh wow, that looks nice. They looked at the title and said, "Oh wow, I actually need to know "how to beat that boss fight in Temtem." Then they've clicked.

Now, let them know, you do this thing kind of a lot and you would like them to subscribe. When you watch videos here at vidIQ you'll notice that right at the bottom of the screen we always put something that indicates, hey, don't forget, you can subscribe. We make videos like this all the time. It never hurts to invite people to explore your library of videos a little bit deeper and decide if you're a creator they would like to visit again.

YouTube Gaming Channels: You’ve Got This!

Getting your first 100 subscribers on YouTube is probably going to be the hardest uphill battle you'll have on the platform. But once you get that first 100, you may find that 200 isn't far off because by now, you've built up a lot of credibility. You have a library of videos. You have an upload schedule and your audience is coming back for more.

YouTube is a marathon, not a sprint. So enjoy the time it takes to get your first 100 subscribers. Learn with every video you make and you'll get there, I promise.

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level and 

 then make sure to download vidIQ. Join over 1 million other users and use vidIQ to help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

And if you’re really serious about growing your YouTube views and subscribers, sign up for exclusive access to the 

 and learn how to launch a successful YouTube Channel in just 30 days.

Your first 100 subscribers on YouTube is a big deal, but every channel is going to face its own set of struggles along the way to this goal. We show you how gaming channels can break through this first hurdle

How to Get Your First 100 Subscribers as a YouTube Gaming Channel

How often do you upload gameplay videos to your channel? In gaming, daily uploads are common, with creators maybe recording for a few hours, breaking that content up into smaller clips.

I've seen many reuploaded live streams broken up into several episodes, which gives the gamer ample content to upload every day. But is that the right strategy?

Building a Gaming Channel on YouTube: Upload Frequency

Now, the strategy of recording for a long time and then breaking it up and uploading segments of this recording every single day has its place on your gaming channel. But I've tried this for myself and I can tell you, if you're looking to grow your channel instead of just engage your current audience, this strategy isn't going to be very effective.

YouTube won’t necessarily reward you if you upload content as much as possible. If you're just uploading “episode 82” of your gameplay video, that's probably not a big search term that anyone is looking for.

Daily uploads do have the benefit of getting seen by your own audience because you've made that a schedule, and it's pretty easy to upload content every day when all you're doing is hitting record and just playing your favorite game. And for the bigger, more established channels, YouTube may just push your content because you're just uploading so many videos. But let me explain why smaller, newer channels should take a different approach.

Why Uploading Daily Gaming Content isn’t the Best Strategy

The first issue you're going to have is burnout. When I was doing this on my channel, I was trying to upload every single day. But not only did I get tired of the game fast, I got tired of all of it - editing the videos, creating thumbnails, trying to think of new titles and tags. It can just be too draining to make that much content all the time.

More importantly, it became harder and harder to come up with ideas about what I was going to do in every video. Even if it was a game like Minecraft where I'm building something, it doesn't take very long after about 50 days or 50 videos in to run out of things to build.

Combine all of those problems with the fact that my YouTube channel just simply wasn't growing made me look for a better solution.

The turning point for me was to cut back on the amount of content I made. Only then did I start to see progress. That's because instead of just making content as often as I could, I took a step back and asked myself, "What are people who play Minecraft really searching for? What are the problem areas? So adopting that quality over quantity method helped me grow, and that was a huge learning curve for my channel.

Now, as someone who started a gaming channel, I, like many of you had somebody or a few people I was watching who inspired me to keep creating. I would watch their channels as a fan and I would see them uploading every day and I would see their videos getting thousands of views and it made me excited.

 I could really understand what is making those other gaming channels work. The tool allows you to choose any channel you want and check out how their videos are doing based on views per hour, views in general, or just the date uploaded.

The reason I've picked these very large Minecraft creators relative to the size of my own channel, is because they appear top for the search term Minecraft. These are well-established creators who can get almost 20,000 views every hour on a video that was posted two days ago, but even they still need to be putting in that quality work.

You'll notice that a lot of time has been spent on their very custom thumbnails. These are not screenshots taken from Minecraft, these are handcrafted, custom thumbnails that are all very eye-catching, and have a lot of color to them.

There's one specific channel I want to point out that does a really good job though and that is 

. The thumbnails are pretty nice. They are screenshots from the game and they simply say Minecraft and then what it is. SkyBlock, The Survival Guide and so on.

What's cool about this channel is everything is still part of an ongoing series. There’s a series about SkyBlock, but specifically going to the nether in SkyBlock, which is going to be a term viewers are searching for.

What Pixlriffs tends to do is stay within that same Minecraft world. So in effect, these are still, let's play videos as you may know them, as you might create for yourself, but they all have a purpose.

The point of me showing you this is on this channel, everybody's happy. Pixlriffs is making content that's probably going to get him discovered by a new audience and his current audience gets to watch as he plays Minecraft and progresses through the game.

Why Bigger YouTube Gaming Channels Can Upload Every Day

Now, these creators all have pretty large audiences. They also have great custom thumbnails and titles, and a lot of time and effort has been put into optimizing their content. You'll also notice that they have a pretty high upload frequency, they upload quite often, but what is important to remember when looking at your competition, especially when you try to compare yourself to larger channels, is that these channels are a lot more established than my own.

Some of them are doing this as a full-time job, some of them even have teams of people helping them with new thumbnails, editing, and research, etc.

As a new smaller channel, this is definitely a struggle I had. I had to remind myself that I have to start somewhere. I can't come out of the gate at the same level as these other creators. Even if I know I can make quality videos as nice as theirs, I can't do that every single day without quitting my day job or hiring a bunch of people to help me. I'm not saying that's what you have to do to get to this level. I'm just saying for me at the time, that's what I've struggled with.

All of our journeys are different. Mine is going to be different from yours, and from other creators, but one thing we all have one thing in common and that's every single YouTube channel starts with zero subscribers.

They start by asking their friends to subscribe and they test things out and then they slowly grow over time. Some of the big creators have been around for quite some time and that also gives them an advantage in the Minecraft space.

The point is if I want to grow as a Minecraft channel today, I'm going to have to try a whole lot harder because a lot of those questions that people are searching for are being answered already. There are a lot of competitors who are already covering those topics.

So when I say quality over quantity, it's especially important to remember that depending on the game you're playing and just how popular it is.

So do daily uploads help grow your channel on YouTube? Yeah, absolutely. If you can upload one video a day and you've put in the time, and the research, including creating an awesome thumbnail, an awesome title, awesome tags, and you've done everything you can to make sure that video is as high quality as possible. If you can do all of this, then go for it.

But if you don't have time to do all that work. I would highly recommend instead of daily uploads, perhaps just publish one or two videos a week. This is going to give you time in between videos to come up with those ideas to make a nice handcrafted thumbnail or to really research your keywords and titles

The key is to be consistent with your publishing schedule. You want to make sure that you upload videos frequently enough so your audience is used to finding them and YouTube is used to knowing when it should push your videos because you've uploaded them at the same time consistently week after week.

So say you upload your one or two videos a week and you find yourself with some extra downtime and you think, "Oh, that Dan guy's totally wrong. I want to make daily videos." I still think that's totally cool because as you make those more searchable, high-quality videos, you're going to want to maybe put some more out there for your audience to watch that has already subscribed, has already decided they like you.

There's nothing wrong with posting a regular old gameplay video every day, but the main take away for you is that quality over quantity is going to help with the overall growth of your channel to bring in those new subscribers.

Is uploading daily content really the right way to grow your gaming channel on YouTube? We take a look at why this may not be the best strategy for new or smaller channels.

Will You Get More YouTube Views if You Upload Gaming Videos Every Day?

Many gamers on YouTube were inspired by other gaming creators. And the first creators we discover are often the ones that are well established on the platform and seem to be able to play any kind of video game they want.

So with that in mind, starting a gaming channel and playing whatever you like seems pretty easy, right? I mean, there are millions of gaming channels with billions of views so why shouldn’t your channel be just as successful?

Why PewDiePie Can Do What He Likes on YouTube

One creator in particular, has inspired a huge number of gamers - Felix Kjellberg, AKA 

In a recent video, all about how to start a YouTube gaming channel, I discussed how to grow your views and subscribers by narrowing down your niche to just one video game. A lot of YouTubers responded by stating they wanted to play multiple games within multiple genres on their channels and still grow. One comment on that video really stood out to me. The commenter asked:

“What about PewDiePie? He plays whatever he wants, when he wants and is not afraid of being bad in a game. He does everything on his channel, not just games.”

Something really clicked with me when I read this comment. And I realized why so many new gaming channels seem to be all over the place when it comes to their coverage of games and different genres.

A lot of gamers think if it's good enough for PewDiePie, it's good enough for me. And that mentality may be actually a pretty good way to start a YouTube channel because you have to start somewhere, and you're going to need some practice. But trying to follow in PewDiePie's footsteps in 2020 is a different matter.

How PewDiePie Went From Zero Subscribers to 103M

What if I told you that PewDiePie once had zero subscribers. He started his channel in 2010 playing primarily horror and action video games and was so popular he reached his first 1 million subscribers in July of 2012. If we take a look at some of his older videos from around nine years ago, you see PewDiePie probably had a pretty familiar journey playing around with various games on his channel until he got into Amnesia, and never really looked back. Horror games were PewDiePie's bread and butter.

Let's take a look at another creator’s journey. 

 is currently at 25 million subscribers, and if we're sorting by the very oldest videos on his channel, he was also playing a lot of horror games at the beginning. He was exploring a niche while testing out other games. Some of these videos have custom thumbnails, some of them do not.

, now with 23 million subscribers was playing a lot of first-person shooters in the beginning. That's how he got his start on YouTube - this was his third upload way back in 2013:

These are some of the biggest names in gaming today and they got their start just like us with zero subscribers, testing out different content, staying within their niche and growing from there.

How to Find Your Way on YouTube as a Gamer

For those of you with gaming channels, I have a strategy I want to share with you for finding your way. I want you to know that if you still struggle to figure out exactly what you would like to play on your channel, it's okay to start testing by playing some different games. These videos can be great practice if you are just getting started on YouTube. You should also be working on your titles, tags, thumbnails, and descriptions of course.

If you're playing different games at some point you’re going to find one game, or even one genre attracts more views and engagements than your other content. That's when I want you to pounce and double down on that game.

As long as you played the game with the intention of hopefully making more videos around it, which I would imagine you did, this strategy is going to grow your channel a lot faster than if you continue just playing random games and ignoring those moments when things kind of stick.

It happened to me. I was inspired to start making videos on Minecraft by watching other Minecraft content creators. But one day I was gifted a new survival game that had a lot of the same aspects; build, mine, craft. I tried it out and I put it on my channel, and that video got more views than anything else I had published previously. It blew up, so I did about 30 or 50 videos on it.

I still wanted to make Minecraft videos from time to time and I did, but for the most part, this other game was driving the growth of my channel and I always made sure to have new episodes out all the time.

Now I got lucky because that game was a gift from just a friend of mine and played it and it worked out, but a lot of you aren't going to have the same luck.

 to look for new games to test out on your channel. Start by testing out different keywords and key phrases around your genre. Let's say your genre is building survival crafting games like Minecraft, but you don't want to play Minecraft itself. So just type in “survival game”, switch your category to gaming, add your competitors, then choose your view per hour threshold. The Trend Alerts tool will also send you emails to keep you up to date. Ideally, you want to pick competitors that are closer to your level of subscribers, and channel views, etc.

Many, or I would argue probably most. gaming YouTubers start a channel and they don't know where it's going to go, what they're going to play, or even for how long. Unless you already know that it's okay to test out different games and we want to encourage you to double down when one of those games becomes a viral success on your channel. I use the word viral loosely because that success is relative to how other videos have performed on your channel.

Millions of gaming creators have been inspired by PewDiePie to create their own YouTube channels. Let's take a look at how he built his success on YouTube and how you can follow in his footsteps.

How to Start a Successful Gaming Channel like PewDiePie

Making content around video games on YouTube has to be some of the most fun you can have on the platform, but getting discovered, maybe not so much.

It's not going to be as easy as hitting record on your next Minecraft building session or wiping the floor with everybody in Fortnite. So the purpose of this post is to help you get discovered on YouTube playing games in 2020.

Ready to start your gaming channel on YouTube in 2020? Here are 6 tips to give you a heads up on the competition.

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