Anyone who knows anything about the internet, will tell you one year online is like 10 years offline. The wave of changes that can happen in such a short period of time is simply overwhelming as well as routine on the world wide web. Platforms come and go in matter of months, rules change overnight and trends change by the hour.

But YouTube has managed to hold onto its leadership position of being the go-to place for streaming content online. YouTube is an absolute powerhouse when it comes to video content, but the funny thing is video content is only JUST grabbing the attention of marketers.

What does this mean? YouTube is the next gold rush for internet marketing, or more accurately, video is the new gold rush of internet marketing. A gold rush you really should be getting involved in before the market is saturated. You always want to aim for first-mover advantage when it comes to carving out a place in the market for yourself.

However, and there’s a big however. Youtube has been constantly changing the rules to it’s content creators in terms of how they can earn adsense. And one of these big changes that took place a few months earlier this year is the 10,000 views on YouTube criteria. Edit: Since 2018 it has changed to 1000 subscribers and a monthly view count of 4,000. 

All channels need to garner 10,000 views on YouTube before they can apply to be a YouTube partner. A.K.A start earning adsense money from their content. This can be rather intimidating if you know how many channels exist on Youtube with less than 100 subscribers and an average view rate that’s in the 2 digit figure range. It’s a tough crowd guys.

But fortunately, I’ve already gone through the process and earned my 10,000 views in under a month. I did it entirely from organic traffic and did zero external marketing for any of my videos. I didn’t even share it with family and friends.

So let me show you how I did it and you can go off to repeat the process and start earning adsense as well!

• Market Research

This should be the first thing you do no matter what type of business you start. You can always start with your own hobbies and passions, but never restrict yourself to just those. Unfortunately, sometimes what you enjoy is just not a profitable niche. 

Though I will say, when it comes to YouTube; you need to be passionate about your niche because viewers love authenticity and hate fakers. Don’t even bother trying to make videos about anything you don’t like as they’ll smell your fakeness from a mile away. (you might reach your 10,000 YouTube views from the large amount of hate you’ll get though, but you probably won’t be able to make any money from those viewers…)

You can market research on YouTube by using the search engine and typing in related keywords to your niche. Take note of the number of results and even view counts for these results. Are these videos being liked? Do they have a high engagement level with a lot of comments? Do these videos belong to channels that focus on this niche or did these videos gain popularity from loyal viewers that will watch anything from these channels regardless of topic and niche?

Go through this process and keep asking yourself these questions to get a better idea on whether your niche is a popular one that people want to watch. The niche I’m in is highly sought after for. There’s a big market for it and I managed to approach the market with a unique offer to satisfy their viewing needs. The fact that I know my niche is highly searched for and the target audience is hungry for content is KEY to reaching 10,000 views on YouTube with 100% organic traffic.

• Keyword Research

Once you have confirmed your niche is highly sought out for with a ready supply of hungry viewers, you need to do some keyword research. Start brainstorming search terms people may use to find their wanted content. You should already have a good list from looking at niches. Expand it and narrow down niche specific terms that only die-hard fans would ever use.

There’s a reason why you want these “cult-like keywords”. Viewers clicking in from these keywords are the ones that will make or break you. These are the people who will happily watch every video of yours if your content meet their needs or go on an internet frenzy of dislikes and bad comments.

Make this group of viewers happy and you instantly get the building blocks to YouTube SEO domination. Your videos will rise up to the first page easily with these loyal subscribers and the ocean of casual browsers will easily follow from being on page 1.

• YouTube Tags

YouTube tags use to be visible for everyone to see, but sometime ago they just suddenly disappeared. Instead now they are purely used for SEO purposes and content creators type them in during upload. Your tags are pretty much going to be the keywords you want to rank for. There aren’t any defined limitations to how long your tags can be or how many tags you can have.

I haven’t exactly experimented with the tags systematically, however I do know the following:

• There IS some sort of limit to the number of tags. I don’t know if it’s the sum total of characters used in all tags or the actual number of tags you use, but I was asked to remove some tags once when I went on a tag frenzy.
• Tag order doesn’t seem to have any effect on SEO weight. This means the first tag you type in will not receive extra attention from YouTube’s algorithm when they rank your video.
• Tags that are related to the content of your video gets better SEO. Don’t try to fool YouTube by putting in every popular keyword you can find. YouTube judges the relevance of your video by user engagement.

• Riding off other people

This is a little trick I used a lot and I still use to guarantee my videos don’t die off after 48 hours. Depending on your niche, you may have famous names that people search for. Names that are well known within the sphere and attract a lot of attention.

I put these names in my tags and titles BUT only if my video is actually relevant or directly connected to the said person. Find some people in your niche that have a sizeable audience, and then think of ways to create content that’ll be of interest to their viewers. This is a super easy way to gain new viewers.

• Encouraging

Encourage your viewer to interact with your content. Ask for a like and share in the video, or even ask them to subscribe at the end of the video. A lot of people don’t do this, but you’ll notice many of the big names do. Why? Because it works.

It seems so obvious when I write it out, but this simple technique just isn’t done frequently enough. A lot of people have no problems creating their content, but have a problem with self-promoting it in such a direct unashamed way. I don’t really get it to be honest, isn’t the whole reason to upload YouTube videos is for as many people as possible see them?

Try it, ask your viewers to give you a thumbs up and subscribe to you. You’ll be amazed how many more you’ll get by just simply asking.

• Uploading like it’s clockwork

A search engine is a computer at the end of the day. And all computers like predictability, their biggest aim is to be able to accurately predict what viewers want to watch and what they don’t want to watch based on your search terms. The more data you feed into the computer, the more accurately they can predict, which brings me to the last point in my post. Uploading schedule.

Each time you upload, you are feeding the computer data. Every additional interaction the computer has with you, your content or viewers have with your content makes the computer smarter in assessing. This is a good thing, we want as many interactions as possible, because the computer will confidently promote a video from a “known” channel compared to a complete question mark in the system.

Imagine you’re the computer and you have two channels, each with 5 videos. One channel has uploaded every other day without fail and has grown at a steady pace. The other has uploaded erratically over the past few months with one video going viral. Which channel’s videos are you going to promote to your site visitors if your aim it to make your visitors watch as many videos and ads as possible? 

The answer is the channel who uploaded consistently. Even without a viral video, this channel will be promoted more by YouTube because they know a person who watches their videos will be more likely to come back to YouTube again and again from the consistent uploads.

So how do you become a “known” channel. 

Upload like clockwork. 

Follow a schedule on when you’ll upload and make your content niche focused. All of this makes you predictable to the computer, which in turn makes you more favourable to rank high and get extra exposure from YouTube. My biggest source of traffic is “Suggested videos” at 47%. This means YouTube has been actively pushing my videos to certain people who watch content in my niche. 

This just wouldn’t be happening if YouTube wasn’t 100% confident they can predict what my content is. Remember, YouTube doesn’t have eyes, they don’t watch every video being uploaded onto the platform, they can only make guesses and their guesses get more accurate as you feed the computer more data.

Did you enjoy this post? If you did, please take a moment to use the social media buttons at the bottom to share this with friends, family, colleagues, anyone with access to the internet… Thanks!

Other resources you should check out:

• Join Making Sense of Cents affiliate course to learn how to monetise your channel better. There’s a lot of information you can apply to YouTube affiliate marketing. Note: It does put more focus on blogging, but all the strategies are transferable to apply to YouTube as well.
• Increase viewer loyalty by creating an e-mail list. 
• Make your channel look professional by hiring a designer for $5.
• Free your time to focus on filming by hiring a virtual assistant on Freelancer to do the editing and uploading. 
• The importance of having the right mindset if you want to make it big on YouTube.
• Learn how to get more done in a day with these simple to follow tips.