In the last four months, I've learned a lot about growing a YouTube Shorts channel. When I started my channel 100 days ago, my goal was to reach 100,000 subscribers by the end of the year. To my surprise, my channel has already reached 230,000 subscribers and now earns more than $400 a week. In this post, I'll share with you the six principles I've learned so you can apply them to your channel and start seeing similar results.
Principle One: Choose a Topic That Interests You
The first principle I've learned is to make sure you're interested in your channel's topic. If you're not interested, you'll lose motivation and give up. I know this from experience because I've created three YouTube Shorts channels, but I only continued to post on the Nutmeg Channel. This is because I'm interested in the channel topic, which is football. One channel I gave up on was focused on basketball content, and I gained 300 subscribers and reached over 120,000 views after posting for just 19 days consistently. Despite this channel starting to gain traction, I just couldn't bear to create another short on a topic I just didn't care for. If I had spent this time on the Nutmeg Channel, who knows how large it could be right now? So learn from my mistakes and pick a channel topic you're actually interested in.
Principle Two: Study Your Performance
Principle two is that you are in control of how quickly success comes to your channel. If you take the time to publish one short per day and study the performance of every single short you upload, success will come to your channel much faster. I posted 39 shorts before I realized I needed to go back and study the performance of my only viral short at the time. The difference between my viral short and all the other shorts on my channel was that it had high retention, and retention is the most important YouTube metric behind any short going viral on YouTube. I identified two techniques that I accidentally applied to the short to make it have high retention, and ever since learning these techniques, they have been responsible for all of the viral shorts on my channel.
Principle Three: Edit Your Shorts
If you want to make money from YouTube shorts and it's not your original content, you have to edit your shorts. For my channel, it's obvious I didn't create the original content because it's famous soccer players from games and interviews. And to prove you can make money from this, we can look at the YouTube monetization rules for reused content. If you edit your shorts, you will meet this approved criteria of creating a funny or thoughtful revision of content you didn't originally create. And if your content doesn't fall with any of these don'ts, you will be making money from YouTube shorts. My channel was once flagged for reused content and momentarily removed from the YouTube Partner Program, but since I knew I was following the rules, I appealed the claim by submitting a video where I showed my video editing files. One day later, I was added back to the YouTube Partner Program.
Principle Four: Aim for High Retention
Principle four is to aim for high retention in your shorts because, as I mentioned, retention is a key metric behind any short going viral. After studying my first viral short, I noticed within the first second, I already had one text edit, one highlighted circle, and two sounds. These types of edits appeared every two seconds throughout the entire short to keep the viewer engaged both visually and auditorily. This constantly feeds the viewer with new content and gives them less reason to swipe away. To do this, you will need to know
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