A couple of months ago this small YouTuber had around 200 subscribers and then she hit YouTube gold.
One of her videos popped off and went viral. It got more than 100,000 views in the first few weeks. But even more impressive, she went from less than 300 subscribers to over 18,000 in 2 months.
When I saw her video show up in my news feed, I had to click on it and see what all the fuss was about. Her channel is called ‘Life in My 20s’ and clearly, I am not her target audience. But the YouTube search and discovery system, aka the algorithm, seemed to think it was something that I would be interested in.
Well, it was right and apparently, it thought a lot of other people would be interested in it as well because it’s had more than 200,000 views in only 2 months. It’s been getting amazing reach, amazing views, I’m sure amazing watch time, and it has grown her channel exponentially. So if you are a small YouTuber hoping to have the same kind of growth, let’s go analyze what this Creator is doing cuz she’s killing it.
Growth like this is what every YouTube Creator dreams of and some might argue that this was just luck. She stumbled across a video topic that happened to do really well and it went viral.
But I disagree. I don’t think it was luck.
I think that she had a strategy and it was a very, very good strategy at that.
Camila Ray has done so many things right and there is a lot that we can learn about from her channel. So let’s take a look. I want to begin by saying she is not an overnight success. She’s had 90 videos on her Channel and she started publishing regularly in 2020.
Now at the beginning, she made a lot of vlog style, lifestyle videos: ‘What I eat in a day’, ‘Cleaning the house’, ‘A week in my life’, ‘Let’s do my hair together’, things like that. It was a new channel and she was trying to figure out the type of content that she liked producing the most and also what would be resonating with her audience.
And this is crucial because if you only make the type of content that you want to make but you never take the time to analyze what is working and what is resonating with your audience, then you will always be chasing viewers instead of creating videos that will attract viewers to you and have the YouTube algorithm want to promote your videos on your behalf. You are just cranking out the same old videos with the same talking points, the same presentation, the same camera angles, same old, same old. Experimentation is a good thing when the channel is brand new for a lot of reasons.
Number one, nobody is watching when your channel is brand new.
If you’re going to experiment and try crazy things that might flop, now is the time to do it before you have a huge following of people watching every move that you make. Because until you try something new, you don’t know if it’s going to work and you don’t want to pigeonhole yourself into this little tiny box of content that is okay but has the potential to be great. And you don’t know that because you’ve never tried anything else.
So I love that she was trying different types of topics, different thumbnail Styles, different filming locations, different things that she was talking about in the videos. And all of these videos were usually getting a couple hundred views. Some would get a little less, some would get a little more, but I’d say, you know, a few hundred was the typical average total view count on these videos.
And then she had her first brilliant idea. She made this video called ‘I saved $20,000 in less than 2 years’ and it did very well for her channel. Instead of just talking about like ‘What’s interesting to me’ and ‘Come get ready with me’, she was talking to her peers about how they could save a lot of money. And apparently, this was very interesting to someone in their 20s who probably had just graduated from college or high school, maybe they had a mountain of student loan debt, they’re trying to figure out how to get out of the house of mom and dad and establish their own life and not eat Top Ramen for three meals a day because that’s all they had the money for.
So this was her first video that did quite well. Then she did one about procrastinating and her Channel content started to morph over time into more productivity and mindset and manifestation, entrepreneurial content, success type videos. And so little by little, we can see the growth as she started to change the things that she was talking about on her videos.
And then she made the video that changed everything.
She made this video called ‘How YouTube changed my life with less than 500 subscribers’.
And at the time when it showed up on my Newsfeed and I watched it, I think she had around 3,350 subscribers total. So I clicked on it and I watched it and it’s a great video. She is very encouraging, she’s motivating, she’s positive, her personality is adorable. She really makes you feel like you can do it.
If you are a beginning YouTuber or maybe you have Instagram and Tik Tok and Snapchat but you’ve never embraced long form content, she really makes you feel like if she can do it, you can do it. And I love that she emphasizes that getting a lot of views and a lot of subscribers is not the point.
The point is who you become in this journey of becoming a YouTuber. She does a great job of storytelling and giving you lots to look at on screen so you’re never just looking at one camera angle and b-roll for 15 seconds straight. She’s always giving you just a couple of seconds of what you’re looking at before she changes to something else. She is making her video visually entertaining as well as being inspirational and educational.
So she’s really ticking three boxes here. She’s getting educational content, she’s getting inspirational motivational content, and she’s creating entertaining content which is like the tri effect up. Now she doesn’t have fancy editing techniques and she doesn’t have an amazing filming area behind her. That’s not really the point.
The point is that this is a very real, relatable video. She’s not trying to make it look super fancy and I think that’s a lot of the reason why it works too because people see themselves in her. They can relate to her. She is not so far above them on her YouTube Journey that they’re like ‘well it’s easy for you to get a million views like I could never do that’. She looks like she’s just 10 steps in front of them and so it’s inspirational because you know that oh my gosh two months ago she had less than 500 subscribers and now she has almost 20,000.
She really makes an emotional connection with the viewer by talking about how uncomfortable it is to be on camera.
She talks about how she went to therapy and she did a lot of self-discovery and learning more about herself. And it wasn’t until she felt more comfortable in her own skin that she was even brave enough to make videos in the
first place. So she’s being vulnerable on camera, which makes you just want to hug her because haven’t we all felt that way, right? By being vulnerable and sharing all of the skeletons in her closet and all of her fears that made her not want to start video in the first place, she really opens herself up to the viewer and we can relate.
The person watching thinks, ‘Oh my gosh, yes, yes, this is exactly how I feel right now. I want to have this kind of visibility to promote myself, but at the same time, I’m afraid of being visible. I’m afraid of being seen because I’m afraid of being criticized. I’m afraid of the trolls in the comments. I’m afraid that people will think I’m stupid and they’ll make fun of me,’ and all of those things that we tell ourselves. And because she is so transparent about all of this, you really feel drawn to her story.
At least I did. It really resonated with me because, man, have I been there before and had all of those same feelings.
It is so uplifting and encouraging. She has such a great message. I love it when I see this happen to my fellow creators. I don’t know Camila Ray at all, but I am rooting for her because this is a perfect example of how it only takes one video to change everything for you, change your channel, change your business, change your whole life.
Because what she did next was complete genius.
So many people would have thought, ‘It’s a fluke. It’s a one-off. It just happened. Yay me! And it’ll probably never happen again.’ But that’s not what she did. I’ve been coaching on YouTube as a business strategy for five years now, and I can tell you firsthand from my own channel and from the channel of so many of my students, one video can change everything for you.
It will change your life, your channel, your business. You go from being broke and stressed out to making more money than you ever had in your entire life. And I’m not just talking about AdSense Revenue. That’s amazing. Who doesn’t love getting free money every single month from Google? Thank you, Google!
But I’m talking about driving clients to your business, driving customers to your online store, people who then leave your channel and they go take action some other way. They become a customer or client of yours. Because if your goal is to have your YouTube channel drive awareness of you and your products or services, then the more views you get on every single video, the more people become aware of you, and the more people will actually buy from you. If only 300 people know your name, you’ll have a very limited business.
But if 3 million people know who you are, even if a small portion of those people actually do business with you and buy one of your products, your services, your programs, that could set you up for major, major success in your business.
In one of my recent videos, I made a comment about riding the wave when this happens to you. You got to ride that wave, which means the video that you make next after this one takes off. And Camila did this beautifully, in my opinion. Because as soon as she saw that that video got 10,000 views in a very short period of time, she was like, ‘Oh, I need to do something about this. I need to capitalize on this momentum.’
So she made this follow-up video, ‘I gained 10,000 subscribers in 2 weeks.’
This is a brilliant strategy because her original video was getting so much more reach. It was getting so many more Impressions than almost any of her other videos. I dare say all of her videos combined up until that point were probably not getting that kind of reach from the algorithm. It was being promoted to people in browse and suggested, not just her current followers.
But she didn’t know that when she made this video. You always have a feeling like, ‘Oh, this is going to be a really good video. I think people are going to enjoy this one a lot.’ But then you post it and you’re just like, ‘Please let this work,’ and you’re just kind of hoping that it will. But you don’t know. You don’t know what the algorithm is going to deem exciting and want to promote to everybody. You just don’t know until it happens.
But the viewers who saw this one were clearly loving it and giving it a ton of positive engagement. They probably clicked on it and then they watched it, if not all the way through, a good portion of the way through. They probably gave it a thumbs up and they liked it, and then they subscribed to her channel. All of which says to YouTube, ‘Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. This is a good video. We need to show this to more people.’
As soon as she saw that it was doing well, she made a follow-up video.
And it was about how to start and grow a YouTube channel. So if this happens to you, be thinking, ‘This was the video that did really, really well. What is the next logical step in this progression? Now that they know A, they need to know B.’ So B is the next video that I should make.
Now it’s funny because the next couple of videos that she published were not along these topics at all. I suspect they were videos that she had already filmed and was in the process of editing. And when she checked her analytics and said, ‘Are you kidding me?’, she probably dropped what she was doing and went to make a follow-up video, which was brilliant because this one now has 100,000 views as well.
Even the thumbnail was genius in its simplicity. It’s a very candid photo of her, front and center, with her before and her after stats on either side. And her facial expression even has a little bit of like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m in shock. I still can’t believe that this actually happened.’ It’s not a crazy, exaggerated facial expression like what I typically make in my videos. But come on, I’ve been told on more than one occasion that I am the female Jim Carrey, and I’m okay with that. I embrace my silliness. But her face was kind of just like, ‘What is happening?’.
And it worked. The video got views. The video clearly got clicks. The video clearly is bringing her a lot of subscribers.
These videos have not only massively grown her channel, but they’re going to raise the baseline now.
So every time she puts out a video on a similar sort of subject, they’re going to get a lot of views right at the very beginning. I would venture to say it’s probably helping grow her Instagram and TikTok as well because she does link to these other platforms on her YouTube channel. This is helping her not only grow her YouTube channel but all of her social media platforms and really establish a brand, a bonafide brand. And I think this girl is 23 years old. So, Camila Ray, bravo, girl!
It really tells the YouTube algorithm that you like valuable content like this that is positive and uplifting and motivational and not the horrible, awful things that we read in the news every day that shows up all over my news feed. I don’t know about you.
And if you are an online coach or digital course creator, I am looking for a small group of people who want to be founding members of a brand new program that I am putting together specifically for coaches who want to establish a brand on YouTube to grow their coaching business. It’s going to be a very small, intimate group, probably 20 people or so. It’s going to be live with me, and I’m not quite ready to announce all the details yet, but if you want to be the first to be notified when I go live with all of the specifics, click this link and go put your name on the waiting list.
I will be in touch, telling you all of the details as soon as it’s ready.
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