Being a Maker on YouTube —What I’ve learned getting to 10k subscribers

I’ve been working on a YouTube channel actively for about 13 months. My channel is called “GeekToolkit” and it’s primarily focused around helping others enjoy technology through projects and tutorials.

I’d like to share what I learned in my first year to help others that want to create ‘Maker’ channels. Some of this others have covered, but I’m hoping to provide some new takes as well.

1. Progress over perfection. Every video will teach you if you let it. Every video can make you better at some aspect of the platform. YouTube is about so many skillsets coming together…writing, marketing, keyword research, editing, audio, lighting, performing, SEO, and more. When I upload I take time to critically look at the video, decide where I want to focus on the next one. More importantly, I gain feedback via comments on the video, and the multitude of YouTube tools to gain insights into how the video is performing. Make 60 terrible videos. Or 100. Just…make them. Each one is a class that you can use to learn from and improve.
2. Pay attention to your viewers. When someone takes time to comment on a video, I treat that as a gift. I carefully read the message, and answer every one I can. This does two things…one is it engages your audience. As a maker I’m putting my content out there to help others build or learn. So I want to help them if they have issues, receive feedback if I can make something better, express joy when they’re passionate about the project. The second thing this does is show YouTube that people are engaged in the video, and engagement can help promote the video on the search algorithm.
3. You’re playing a game against an AI. When you are starting out on YouTube you’ll hear a lot about the “Algorithm”. This refers to the search algorithm which is deciding which videos will keep someone on the platform the longest. One of the many ways that this works is when people find what they’re searching for. When you start out, you want to give that algorithm all the help it can get so that it understands your content. You do this through several means…one is your title. Another is through keywords. The description is yet another. Taking time to make sure that these all are filled out verbosely, yet accurately will help the search engine show your video to others. An amazing facet is that the stats for YouTube will show you how many ‘impressions’ a video gets as far as being shown to potential viewers. My last video has been shown 5,800 times to people in 2 days!
4. First impressions are competitive impressions. Your thumbnail is your audition tape. If you don’t put work into it, it doesn’t matter how amazing your content is. People get a series of thumbnails and titles to scroll through for search results. So you’re audition tape has to beat out whoever else shows up on that page to actually get your content viewed. For makers who are showing off new gadgets this can be especially hard. How do you convey in a photo what you just spent a video’s worth of time trying to communicate? Take time and master the art of the thumbnail.
5. Flow with the (data) stream. This was very hard for me. In short it means go with trends, it indicates it’s what people want to see, and you can use trends like a window display into your channel. For instance, I wanted to do videos that were only about my personal projects. One day I filmed a video about home automation which I’d setup at my place, and it exploded in popularity. I did a second one, and it also did really well. I didn’t want to become a home automation channel so I created a few other videos about projects and other topics. In the comments I noticed people asking for more home automation content. I realized that the home automation videos were drawing in a community that appreciated my projects. I also realized that few people were searching for ‘how to create a dynamic picture frame’ while thousands were searching for ‘home automation’. I had to learn to quit fighting the trend essentially. Searching for Home Automation was popular. I had to quit being stubborn, and embrace that fact. That embrace lead to gaining a bunch of subscribers and fans that also now get to see my project videos.
6. Timeless video content can become popular at any point. I purposefully tried to avoid content that was only relevant for a certain time period such as holidays or world events. I notice that many of my videos get popular months after I publish the video, and continue to grow.
7. Video success is very much a popularity lottery. I never know when I upload a video how it’ll perform. Even after a year of gathering data, I still get surprised. Sometimes a video doesn’t get a lot of views until a year later. Every video can have a shot at going viral or getting hundreds of thousands of views. Of course, every video can flop and end up getting less than a hundred. I choose to put out two mediocre videos vs. one great one. It doubles my chances that one will gain interest, and if it does I can do a follow up and invest much more time then. I know that this changes as your channel grows and you establish a ‘brand’, but at the start people are much more forgiving.
8. Make use of playlists, end screens and cards wisely. If you have a video that isn’t doing well on the search algorithm that you believe is a good video, try adding it to the end card of a popular video. I actually build out a mesh of content. For instance if I have success in my home automation projects, and want to promote my digital picture frames, I’ll add home automation features to the digital picture frames. Then I can link from my home automation playlist to my digital picture frame videos. This cross links my projects and home automation videos, and guides my viewers to content that they would’ve not necessarily found otherwise.
9. Participate and leverage other communities. One of my biggest successes was to create articles on Instructables.com as well as my videos. I figured some people like to read, while some like to watch. So by having a YouTube channel and an intractable, I could cover both. Another thing I actively do is contribute on Facebook to 3D printing and Home Automation groups (two areas which my channel features). This helps me know what others are asking about to help with content ideas, and helps me show and promote my videos because it can directly help the communities. One thing that you should never do is only join a community to submit videos. That’s essentially spam, and it’s a terrible thing to do, both as a strategy, and as a person.
10. Master the YouTube video Analytics data - I spend a portion of my time researching tips on filming, audio, and content creation. But a larger part is just understanding the statistics and tools that YouTube provides. They’re incredibly powerful. You can see where your traffic is coming from, how you’re being discovered, top search terms that lead to your video, and so much more. Understanding how to interpret that data is worth the time investment.
11. People subscribe to people — I’d be remiss to not mention to have fun. If you’re not enjoying it, it’s going to be hard to put the time and effort and personality into a video that others will want to watch. People really are drawn to either the creativity of the content, and/or the content creator. If they love your project but you don’t make an impression, you’ll get the views, but not the subscribers. Let them like you as a person and you’ll gain someone that will forgive you for mistakes and enjoy your effort and genuine passion.

You’ll notice these tips are about how to make content that is discovered, enjoyed, and viewed. I don’t talk much about how to get subscribers because that part seems to happen naturally if you nail content and search engine optimizations. If your thumbnails and keywords are solid, then a potion of the impressions YouTube naturally provides will watch your content. If your content doesn’t waste their time and they value it and/or you, then a portion of them will subscribe. The only trick then is to keep going. The more content, the more opportunities to get discovered, the better you’ll get at making the content, and you’ll begin to spin a flywheel that can get up to quite a speed.

I hope this article helps those aspiring to become Youtubers that are also Makers. I wrote the article I wish I’d read before I started.