Advice From YouTube Gurus That I Don’t Follow

In today’s article, I will share the tips and advice that most YouTube gurus usually teach on the internet that I never followed at all and WHY I don’t follow them.

Are you a video-kind-of-person? Here’s the video version of this article. Otherwise, please continue reading.

1. Don’t ask your audience or viewers to subscribe to your channel.

The first thing that a lot of YouTube gurus are saying nowadays is to not ask your audience or viewers to subscribe to your channel. If you search about how to grow your YouTube channel, you will definitely see a lot of YouTube gurus who tell you that it is important to ask your subscribers to subscribe to your channel.

Nowadays, there are YouTubers who are against this. It’s possible that they just want to challenge the status quo or they just want to go against what’s popular and be different. I think that makes sense, because on YouTube, it’s beneficial for you if you do things kind-of differently so going this route may be one of the ways for some YouTubers to be seen as someone who has a fresh take on the space.

In my case, I do not follow this advice because, for one, in order for you to start growing your channel, you have to tell people that you actually have a channel and one way for you to do that is to tell them to subscribe to your channel. Right? Now, this is not to say that you’re going to force them to subscribe to your channel. You’re only inviting them to subscribe if they like the content or you’re reminding them that maybe they’re liking the content already but they haven’t subscribed yet.

Personally, I did not see anything wrong with inviting people to subscribe to every video I published. In my main channel, I have over 184K subscribers now (2024: grew to 226K+) and although, I don’t always ask for subscriptions anymore on all of my videos, I still remind my viewers from time to time to subscribe if they haven’t yet. When I was starting my channel though, I would always remind my viewers to subscribe and I’d add a SUBSCRIBE graphic to the video.

What I usually do to make it sound more genuine is to tell them that if they like the content or if the content helps them at all, then they can consider subscribing and if not or if they don’t want to subscribe, then no hard feelings at all. We can all move on.

I tell my viewers something like this: “if you like this type of content and want to be updated when new videos come out, please consider subscribing..” and that basically does it. You don’t have to force anyone. In fact, in a past video, I did mention that one of the people in my network did not realize that he did not subscribe to my channel yet. He only realized that he did not subscribe yet because I posted something on Facebook saying that if you haven’t subscribed yet and you like the content then please feel free to subscribe.

That person told me that he thought he already subscribed, but then upon seeing my message or my post on Facebook, he was reminded or prompted to subscribe. The lesson is that… maybe a lot of your viewers do not realize that they haven’t subscribed yet, so the best way for you to convert them from non-subscribers to subscribers is to invite them to subscribe to your channel apart from creating great or high-quality content for them every single week or however frequent you’re posting.

2. Follow the trend and strive to be viral.

The second advice that most YouTube gurus are telling people that I do not follow is to follow the trend and strive to be viral. If you want to grow your channel, you would want to make it sustainable. You don’t just want to strive for the next viral video because you’ll never really know when that viral video will happen.

That is so exhausting to me personally so what I do is I create evergreen content that will stay relevant for longer periods. I have two-year-old videos that are still my highest-viewed videos and they’re still earning money without me touching them at all.

The point of this is you don’t always have to strive to be viral because that is such an exhausting thing to do unless of course you have a team that constantly pumps out content and constantly brainstorms for/with you, then you don’t have to worry because all you have to do is create the content and they will do the rest.

But for people like you who are still putting it together by yourself, then it is best to create evergreen value-based content that will serve you and your audience for longer periods. If you want to know more about it, you can watch this video:

3. Build an email list.

The third advice that I haven’t really followed to a T is to build an email list which is by the way a really great advice because I also truly believe that email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to market to your audience and your viewers, only that it has not really worked that well for me yet.

Most of my viewers in my main channel are Filipinos and I find that with my audience, they are not really that into email. They’re more into social media but maybe in other countries and with other types of audiences, it would work. I haven’t seen it work for me. To be clear, I also haven’t done all the things that are needed to create a great email marketing strategy.

If you’re an email marketing strategist reading this blog post, you might say “she’s probably not doing it right”.. well maybe you’re right.

I’m probably not doing it right but it’s just that I haven’t followed it to a T because I haven’t seen it work for me just yet. In hindsight though, I know I should try doing it more religiously to see progress. Don’t get me wrong – it has worked well for some clients I’ve worked with before.

Despite not following this advice to a T, I still strongly suggest that if you have the ability and resources to do it, nurture your audience through email sequencing or email marketing strategy. Go ahead and do so. I think it’s one of the best strategies out there that has ever worked for a lot of content marketers. I’ll report back with an update once I see progress on my end. 🙂

4. Host a giveaway to grow your subscriber base.

The fourth advice that I’m not following is to host a giveaway to grow my subscriber base. This is very common and very frequently done by a lot of creators. In my case, I do not really want to spend on something that does not have any value to my viewers. A lot of content creators are offering product giveaways or any giveaways that are not really valuable and not related to the niche of the channel.

Mine is an educational channel and although I can perhaps give away a grocery package or a GCash load or anything like that, I feel that those are not aligned to what my channel is about even though they are, for sure, helpful in general. I would have a giveaway if I have the budget and resources or maybe a sponsor for it just for the sole reason that I want to give away free stuff that can help my community, but again, NOT to grow my subscriber base.

I never really resorted to hosting giveaways just to amass subscribers and that’s because a lot of people would just subscribe to your channel because they want to win the giveaway and who knows if they do not win the giveaway, they would leave and either unsubscribe or unfollow you because they’re not even remotely interested to your channel. (Gosh, that’s a long sentence!) They’re just there because of the giveaway, so for me it’s not really an effective way to grow.

Then again, giveaways might have worked for other creators maybe because their giveaways are really related to what they offer on their channel. For example, one of the best channels about YouTube growth is Think Media by Sean Cannell and team, and they usually give away a grand YouTube setup to their viewers (camera gears, music subscriptions, or studio setup). That’s a good one and definitely a great way to attract new subscribers and reward loyal ones.

All that being said, I do have some giveaways on my main channel but I would always give away an educational resource like a free eBook, and most importantly and again (haha), it’s NOT to grow my subscriber base because I don’t require participants to subscribe. I just ask them to leave a meaningful comment.

5. Fame Jacking

The last advice I don’t follow is fame jacking. It’s when YouTubers or creators use famous people and incorporate whatever those famous people do into their video to gain views and subscribers. For example, reaction videos – reacting to a famous person’s Instagram account, reacting to a famous person’s video or putting a photo of a famous person on the thumbnail to attract viewers or maybe adding the name of the famous person in the title even though it does not really directly relate to whatever is on the video.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s actually a great strategy BUT some people are overusing it to the point that their entire channel is just based on other people’s content. I mean, to each his own. If that’s their preference, then okay. 🙂 But if you’re an educational creator, take some time to create content that is truly valuable to your audience.

A lot of content creators do this strategy and you can see a lot of these videos have worked too but that’s something that I did not follow just because it doesn’t make sense to me. It’s good content especially if you have something really important and valuable to say, but if it’s just a clickbait kind-of video, then I don’t see the value at all.

Bonus

I have seen some YouTube gurus teach this on YouTube and that is to use other people’s videos to earn money on the platform. YUP! There are people teaching other creators and would-be YouTubers to earn money on YouTube without creating their own videos.

There are two licenses on YouTube. The first one is Creative Commons and the second one is the Standard YouTube License. If you’re using the Creative Commons License, you essentially allow your videos to be re-shared, downloaded, or edited to be uploaded to another person’s channel or adjusted for their own benefit.

*You have an option to set up your license in every video you have. Just go to your YouTube Studio, select your video then go to Video Details. Scroll towards the end of the page to see the dropdown for the License and Distribution section.

There are YouTube gurus who say that you can easily earn money by downloading those Creative Commons videos and then upload them on your channel. No sweat. All you have to do is look for those videos and re-upload them. I’m not giving you an idea to do that, but now that you’ve heard it, yes it’s possible. But it’s very risky because there are terms and conditions for every Creative Commons video and a lot of people don’t read the fine print.

Another thing is that I really think that people should create more original content on YouTube and NOT just copy from anyone else and leech off of other people’s hard work. And by original, I meant content that you yourself made even though the topic or the format of the video is inspired by someone else’s or other videos.

If you want to know more about this topic, you can read the support article from Google itself about YouTube Fair Use and Creative Commons and Standard YouTube License.

Alrighty, so these are the top pieces of advice that most YouTubers are teaching other creators or viewers that I did not follow at all. It is ultimately your decision to follow these things or not. It depends on what makes sense to you, and most importantly, the right thing to do.