Hello! Right now you’re reading “The Creator Confidential”, a blog where famous YouTubers share their stories and tips they have for growing a YouTube channel. Over the past week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Annie, and here is the finished result. Enjoy!
Annie Dube started YouTube just 2 years ago. Since then, her channel has been rapidly growing and now has over 34,000 subscribers and 1.3 million views. She is best known for her YouTube advice videos that help smaller channels grow. In this blog post, she opens up about topics like hate, motivation, and her top 3 tips she has for small channels!
"My favourite part about now having a much larger audience is having my channel be a community for start-up YouTubers. A place for them to learn and grow TOGETHER."
What inspired you to create your channel?
I had wanted to try YouTube since high school and finally found the time to between semesters in college summer 2018. I started off as a lifestyle channel, then very quickly realized I was lacking originality and uniqueness.
I later realized my most popular videos were ones giving YouTube start-up advice. Which got me to thinking about how little help I got with my channel when I was first starting out. So, I decided to rebrand, and turn my channel into a YouTube growth advice channel, helping beginning YouTubers and giving them the advice I lacked when I first started.
Do you think your family or background/where you grew up influenced your content? Can you talk about how your parents affected your YouTube channel?
I don’t think my family background had much to do with the initial launch or interest in my YouTube channel. But with having so many entrepreneurs in my family, it wasn’t as difficult as it might for others to convince my family to let me run with trying to make YouTube a full-time job. I’ve had my family and friends’ support since day one which I’m not sure I could have survived without.
Top 3 tips you would give to small YouTubers trying to start a successful YouTube channel?
Learn what the YouTube algorithm is, how it works, what it targets, and learn how to manipulate it to pick up your channel and your videos.
Find your tribe! YouTube is a very lonely thing to do if you don’t make friends and other connections along the way and lack the community vibe on your own channel.
If your growth slows down, don’t just sit there and complain about it. Read your analytics, run tests, play around with some trial and error until you realize what’s working and what isn’t. Even the big guys need to change things up every now and again.
How do you find new opportunities with brands? What is one of the best opportunities you've gotten from your YouTube channel?
I think one very big mistake a lot of creators make, especially beginner creators, is treating brand deals like a badge of honour and something that makes you look cool rather than what it’s supposed to be, which is a business venture between brands. Brand deals and sponsorships should only ever be done with brands you are truly passionate about and whose products/services you think your audience would benefit from hearing about.
My opportunities come from a pretty even blend of my reaching out to brands and brands reaching out to me. Though, honestly, I would say I turn down about 90% of offers made to me because they just don’t align with my brand. One of the most amazing opportunities I’ve gotten from my YouTube career is my work with Tubebuddy. It’s an extension tool for YouTubers that has completely changed the way I manage and grow my channel, so it was an obvious brand I felt compelled to share with my audience.
I never imagined that I would bring Tubebuddy over 2000 new customers, which is exactly what I went and did. And in turn, Tubebuddy upgraded my license for life for free, and set up a 50% affiliate relationship, so I get paid 50% of every new customer’s payment that I bring them. That’s a brand relationship I’m proud of having grown because it’s one I’m passionate about and one that benefits all parties involved.
Can you share your process of getting monetized?
Sure! I started my channel in June 2018 and became a YouTube partner in October 2019. I reached the requirements in July 2019, just about a year after starting my channel. However, I unfortunately got a copyright strike on my channel from a stupid rookie mistake I made. So, I had to wait three months for the strike to expire, even though I had all the requirements. The strike was lifted October 25th 2019, so I immediately applied for the program and was approved two days later. I’ve heard all sorts of horror stories of people waiting weeks or even months on end to be approved so I feel very blessed that it was a fairly easy and painless process to being approved.
Have you ever become unmotivated to post on your channel? If so, why and how did you get past that?
I think that just like anyone else in any other job, there are days that you wake up a little more tired than other days or there are some weeks that you’ve been really punching that card to the point of being drained by Friday. And one of the best parts about being a YouTuber, not having a boss and being your own boss is that you CAN give yourself the day off or dial back your workload. It’s normal to have off-days or days where you just feel like being productive. You just put the camera aside for the day and pick it back up tomorrow!
What do you think is one of the biggest turning points for your channel?
It’s no secret to my subscribers at this point that I am a very strong believer and user of the law of attraction (the practice of manifesting things you want to come into your life). I studied manifestation for a few months until I got a real grasp for how to make it a part of your normal day-to-day life, which included the use of angel numbers.
As of the beginning of March 2020, I began seeing the number 11:11 daily, sometimes multiple times daily. 11:11 is an angel number which signifies a major change coming into your life that will come about rather suddenly and bring to you all you’ve been dreaming about. This made me think of only one thing: my YouTube channel. In April 2020, a month later, a video of mine took off. It was a video I had uploaded in January 2020, “1000 SUBSCRIBERS IN 30 DAYS!” It went from 5,000 views to over 75,000 views in just a few days. Views turned into subscribers just as fast, and within a month, by early May 2020, my channel had grown from 15,000 subscribers to over 25,000 and growing about 500-1000 daily.
One thing led to another, one video taking off began to make other videos take off all at once. And what felt like overnight, my channel had what many people refer to as a ‘channel blow up’. Getting explosive views, subscribers and watch time, my income blowing up to a full-time job status and essentially every one of my dreams coming true. Now I’m here, two months later, just short of 35,000 subscribers when I’m writing this, almost 1.5 million channel views and an audience I never imagined having that is growing literally by the minute.
On a scale of 1-10, how important do you think interacting with your subscribers is? Why?
11/10! It is THE most important part of growing any platform and I will NEVER stop preaching that important. Your viewers, subscribers, followers… they don’t owe you a thing. Not a single one of them HAS to follow you, or watch your videos or sit through ads to help you make money… These are all things you get when your followers or subscribers become your friends. And that all begins with growing a loyal subscriber base which you will not have as long as you treat your audience like a number that goes up and down.
My favourite part about now having a much larger audience is having my channel be a community for start-up YouTubers. A place for them to learn and grow TOGETHER. That is why I do so many livestreams and premieres, and why I made two facebook groups for YouTuber supporting and helping each other grow. That’s why I spend so much time answering DMs, talking to my subscribers like friends and sharing their successes on my Instagram story. Every single one of them IS just like a friend. And that’s the basis of a successful follower base. You give more than you take. Because if you’re not willing to give them anything, why should they give you the time of day? The entire purpose of my videos is to give beginner YouTubers the advice and help I lacked when I first started and to help them succeed much faster than I did. And every little thing I do to grow that relationship with my subscribers is to make sure I give them every tool in my own arsenal to strengthen theirs.
Finally, what is your experience with hate and do you have any advice on how to deal with it? I saw the hate video that a certain person made against you. What was your first reaction to it?
For so long I looked to this experience as a point of defeat. Something that was going to seal my fate negatively as a YouTuber and forever keep my career as a YouTuber from growing.
But I’ve since learned that it might just be one of the greatest things to happen to me on this journey, no matter how insane I sound saying that someone making a hate video about me was a positive thing to go through. In high school I let every bad thing said about me knock me down. I believed every word they said and took it personally, which contributed very heavily to negative self-talk, pointing out every insecurity to myself and struggling with body image issues for years and years to come.
I remember the morning I first found out about this video. I woke up, pulled out my phone and went into the ‘Women of YouTube’ Facebook group that I run to check on things. I saw that I was tagged in a post that had something like 200 comments on it. And it was one of the girls in our group who’d landed on this video and shared it in the group in hopes of enough girls reporting it to get it taken down.
It didn’t. Even with the video being reported over 300 times, YouTube made no effort to remove the video from its platform. For the sake of my mental health one of my best friends wouldn’t let me watch the video, she watched it for me and gave me the cliff notes of what was said. It became very obvious very quickly that all these claims, all these fabrications and lies said about me in this video came from one very sad, very desperate individual who had so much time on his hands and so little value in his own life, that he felt compelled to make this video full of half-truths and assumptions made about it, post it on YouTube’s platform and put my name in the title so that anytime someone would search up my name, the video came up as a search result.
That video now has over 2,000 views and is full of comments from more people who, just like him, don’t know me, don’t know my story, don’t know a thing about me, but felt it was their place to make assumptions or very harmful comments. Initially, seeing this video and these comments, I thought my YouTube career was over. This was all I’d ever be known for or tied to. And I did initially lose a handful of subscribers when this video came about. But I realized that if these ‘subscribers’ ditched me off the word of some internet hater, they weren’t subscribers I wanted nor valued.
How I’ve dealt with it, what I’ve taught myself and what I preach to my subscribers who ask about how to handle hater and hate comments is to ask yourself who this is coming from and what their opinion matters to you. I’ll take constructive criticism from my friends and family, they only want what’s best for me. This miserable low-life wanted nothing but attention, a way to be heard which he up till then lacked, and an attempt to publicly humiliate me. His opinion means nothing to me, his words mean nothing to me and so his video means nothing to me.
I had a few thousand subscribers and only a handful of viewers when that video was first made. I’ve had an entire channel blow up and explosive growth since, DESPITE that video’s existence. People have seen that video and continue to. But I get more DMs and comments about how disgusting and untrue it is than people expressing a belief in this disturbed man’s allegations and lies. And that to me will always win out and will always mean more to me. Honestly, until someone mentions the video to me or asks me questions about it like you did for this interview, that video is the furthest thing from my mind. Because while his video paints me as a horrible person, I think it paints a bigger picture that his most viewed video is a video he created to hate on someone, and at that point it speaks more volumes about who he is than who I am.
Creating and growing this channel has been one of the most amazing journeys of my life and I look forward to every new day on this journey still to come.
Thanks for reading! A huge thanks to Annie for taking the time to answer all the questions. Here are the links to all her socials:
Instagram: @annemariedube https://www.instagram.com/annemariedube/?hl=en
YouTube: Annie Dube https://www.youtube.com/c/annemariedube/
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