How To Fast Forward YouTube Channel Growth
The behind-the-scenes story of how we sparked the biggest growth moment in the history of Yoga With Adriene. It started with a simple idea: 30 Days of Yoga.
This is part of a series of extended posts updating my no-longer-available YouTube Book. For the first installment, click here. Here’s an index to the series in chronological order.
2014. Things were really working for the Yoga With Adriene channel. We had surpassed 150,000 subscribers over the summer which felt like a huge milestone. Everything seemed to be growing nicely but I was looking for ways to kick things into overdrive.
And I had an idea.
At the beginning of the year, I was recovering from the REBOOT launch by taking long walks with Hilah and the dogs at some trails near our house. In typical Austin fashion, these trails also featured a food trailer park. We decided to grab lunch.
The taco truck was closed so we opted for sandwiches. While we were waiting for our order, I eavesdropped on the two hungover sandwich artists making our sandwiches. They were talking about how they had both already failed at their goal of doing “dry January.” One of them mentioned that she had also signed up for a 30-day yoga program at a local yoga studio, but she had already missed a few days and was embarrassed to return.
“30 Days of Yoga” stuck in my head. It felt like something that could work on our YouTube channel. On our last trip to YouTube, we had learned all about watch time and session time. Publishing a new video every day felt like a great way to ramp these metrics up. It was also a way to recapture some of the REBOOT experience, while making it available to many more people.
10 months later we decided to go for it.
30 Days of Yoga incorporated all of the different strategies I had been experimenting with up to that point: YouTube optimization, a launch sequence, landing pages, e-mails and even a social sharing campaign. But this time rather than dividing our energy across multiple projects, we focused it all on one thing.
It would ultimately be the biggest thing we ever did to grow our channel and our community. Between the launch in December and the completion of the series on January 31st, our channel added over 150,000 subscribers and more than 200,000 people to our email list.
It felt like we had hit a fast forward button and suddenly we were in an entirely different movie. It was life-changing.
This is how we did it.
Production
We shot the videos just before Thanksgiving of 2014. We realized pretty quickly that we might have bitten off more than we could chew. Producing 30 videos was a bigger undertaking than we had anticipated. I also had a newborn baby at home, so things were hectic and I was delirious from lack of sleep. To keep things moving smoothly, for the first time we hired an additional camera operator (the awesome Katie Graham).
We shot all the videos over the course of two weeks and then took a break for Thanksgiving. As I was importing and organizing all the footage I realized this was going to be a MASSIVE undertaking.
My original plan was to have all the videos edited before January 1st, but that didn’t happen. I only had two videos complete when we started the launch.
Pre-Launch
In addition to the 30 Daily practice videos, we included a Community Builder and 2 Call To Action videos. We also offered an optional Daily Email to provide encouragement and additional context for the videos.
This was our pre-launch strategy, devised at the last minute in November 2014. You might even call it a funnel.
This is about as simple as a launch gets. We didn’t use any paid traffic, expensive tools, or marketing tricks. The only things used were YouTube, WordPress and MailChimp. But there is a power in simplicity..
A vlog-style YouTube video that explained what this is all about and why it’s going to be awesome. The Call To Action is to visit the landing page for more information and to sign up for emails.
The landing page gave more details about the series but was primarily designed to get people to sign up for the daily emails and a downloadable calendar.
After the email has been submitted we redirect to a “Thank You” page. We ask them to check their inbox for the confirmation email and calendar. This page also provides sharable graphics and encourage them to tell their friends and to post on social with the hashtag #30daysofyoga.
Once the email address has been confirmed (double opt-in) they received an email welcoming them to the 30 Day Yoga Journey and give them the downloadable calendar. We ask one more time to tell their friends and to help us spread the word on social media.
Don’t get hung up on over-thinking or over-engineering. Keep things as simple as possible in the beginning because it will be easier to find out what’s working.
We published the announcement video in December.
The signups started to pour in.
People were telling their friends and sharing our graphics on social media.
Almost overnight, we were welcoming a lot of new people into our little online community. Our subscriber number was increasing every day. We could feel the excitement building.
I just had to finish editing 30 videos . . .
Next Week: all the details of the actual launch, how everything went down, and how it changed our business.
Until then, keep creating
PS. I’m going to start spotlighting some interesting things I see happening on YouTube. I’ve recently become intrigued by a group of vloggers with very small channels. They probably got into my feed because they talk a lot about cameras. But what’s interesting to me, is that they are using their videos to talk to each other. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.
Sidenote: I’m noticing more videos in the 4:3 rather than 16:9 aspect ratio. I like this ratio a lot. Not just for composition reasons - but because it takes up more screen area on phones and other devices. What do you think about it?
Love this backstory!
It’s interesting to know that one 30 day series was the first spark in the channel. Curious to see how it played out! The cliffhanger works too well