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0:00 So, you want to start a YouTube channel, specifically a Minecraft gaming YouTube channel. Well, my friend, you probably clicked on the best video on YouTube of how to start a Minecraft gaming YouTube channel. My name is Nathan, and I've been doing YouTube for about 12 years. And 12 years ago, I started YouTube with a Minecraft gaming channel. It was called Unspeakable Gaming. And I grew that channel from zero subscribers all the way past 10 million subscribers. And then I launched a second Minecraft channel called Unspeakable Plays, and I grew that all the way up to almost 8 million subscribers. So, it has been a long journey, but today I want to share with you some of my biggest tips on how you can start your very own Minecraft channel. Now, first off, let's understand the game of Minecraft and why so many people watch Minecraft on
0:46 YouTube. There is hundreds of millions of Minecraft viewers watching content on YouTube every single month. And one of the cool things is some of the biggest YouTubers on the platform like Mr. Beast and PewDiePie and myself have all started YouTube with Minecraft. We all started playing Minecraft and then eventually we graduate from Minecraft into other types of content. Obviously, Mr. Beast doesn't make Minecraft videos anymore, but that's how he started. I just think it's kind of cool that so many YouTubers start with the game of Minecraft and then evolve from there. But Minecraft, how do you start? Where do you begin? So, back in October of 2012 is when I started my first Minecraft channel. And of course, I
1:32 started with zero subscribers like everyone else. And my strategy was just to take inspiration from other creators. So, I would look around and see what all the other YouTubers were doing and I would try to replicate that. And this is honestly how a lot of YouTube channels start. You're starting a YouTube channel probably because you're taking inspiration or you're getting inspired by another creator. And that is totally okay. It might feel like you're copying someone because when I started my YouTube channel, I felt like I was copying other Minecraft YouTubers. I was copying their title ideas, their thumbnails. I was doing similar intros. Like everything was very, very similar, but I didn't have my own style. And that's one of the big things that you have to develop when you start a YouTube
2:20 channel is you have to develop your own style. But in order to do that, it takes time. It takes 100, 200, maybe 300 videos. It takes a long time to develop your own style. So the best way to start a Minecraft gaming channel is to look around at all the other Minecraft YouTubers, pick some of your favorite ones, and try to replicate their style. Try to do it yourself. It's kind of like if one day you want to become a chef at a restaurant. You don't start out at being a chef at a restaurant. You start out at being a cook at a restaurant. And a cook is going to follow a recipe. A cook is going to follow the footsteps of the chef. And eventually over time, as you get good at being a cook and you make so many meals, you eventually start
3:06 making your own recipes. That's exactly what it's like being a YouTuber, specifically a Minecraft YouTuber, because you got to get really good at a lot of different things. You got to get good at thinking of video ideas, your thumbnails, your titles, editing your videos, filming your videos, your personality inside your videos. There's so many things that you have to get good at. And all of these things just take time. And as long as you don't give up, there's no reason you can't be successful on YouTube. Another big thing that I focused on when I started my Minecraft gaming channel is I focused on ideas that were in the documenting category. And basically what that means is all of my video ideas were already created. I just needed to go document them. So I'm looking at some of my old video ideas and one of my first videos was Minecraft TNT mod. That is me
3:54 documenting something in Minecraft. Because the Minecraft TNT mod was already created. All I have to do is just go download it and film my experience and showcase it. Another thing I would document would be Minecraft updates. So, anytime there is a Minecraft update, I would try to make a video on it because that is me documenting something that people are searching for. That's the big thing is a lot of times when you make videos about documenting something in a game, people also search for those ideas. So, these videos are how-to videos, tutorial videos, playthrough videos, showcase videos, anything like that. This This was like my first 500 video ideas. I was just doing tutorials, how-to videos, walkthrough videos, telling people how
4:40 to play the game, showing people the best mods, the best texture packs to download, and eventually that would translate into some of my top five Minecraft videos. The reason I made these top five videos is because I wanted to level up my documenting. I wanted to document the top five best Minecraft parkour maps or the top five best Minecraft miniames or the top five Minecraft XP farms. I wanted to show people some of the best things in the game. And I think still today there is a huge demand for documenting videos on Minecraft and honestly on any game because people are always going to be searching for, hey, what's the best modification? What's the best texture pack? What's the best way to build a
5:26 house in Minecraft? What's the new Minecraft update? And what do all the features cover? I want to know the features and I want to know what the new items are. So, there's so many ideas. And the great thing, like I mentioned, about documenting is people are searching for these ideas. When a new Minecraft update comes out, a lot of people are typing it into YouTube because they want to see what this new Minecraft update is, and that gives your video a chance to get seen. So, a lot of people will ask me, "Hey, Nathan, hey, Unspeakable, how do you actually get good at YouTube? Like, how did you get good at editing? How did you get good at filming? How did you make your thumbnails so good?" And the answer that I tell them is not an answer they want to hear, but it's the fact that there is no secret. I have no secret to how I got good at filming. I have no secret to how
6:12 I got good at editing my videos. I have no secret to how I made good YouTube thumbnails. I just made a ton of them, hundreds of them, thousands of them. And a lot of people don't like to hear that because it means they have to put in a lot more work. But a lot of the times when a creator comes to me and they ask like, "Hey, how do I get good at filming?" And then I look at their channel and they've only filmed 80 videos, that's not a lot of videos for you to get good at filming when you've made only 80 videos. I would say that I didn't get good at editing, filming, and thumbnails and all of these things till I made probably around 4 to 500 videos. That's when I started to get good. Everything before that was just testing things, failing, trial and error, um trying to figure out how to film a good
6:58 intro, all of these things. And again, I know that's not the answer you want to hear, but it's the truth. It's the reality. No one wants to say this, but you have to post hundreds of videos to get good at YouTube. There's just no way around it. And it doesn't matter what type of content you make. It doesn't matter if you make Minecraft videos, Roblox videos, Fortnite videos, tech videos. It really doesn't matter. You have to get good at being a creator and that just takes time. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. But you being able to understand that this takes time is going to make the journey a little bit easier because when I started YouTube, I thought that I could get good at YouTube very quickly. I thought I was like, "Okay, I'm going to film 30 videos and then I'm going to be good at YouTube and my videos are going to be crushing
7:43 it. I'm going to get 10,000 views. I'm going to 100,000 subscribers." I mean, I was very motivated and that just did not happen at all. The reality is that it took me 574 videos to get my first video to hit a million views and that took about 3 and 1/2 years of uploading videos. So, I think if you can push through 575 videos for 3 and 1/2 to 4 years and you still don't have a video that gets a million views, then you probably need to change some things up. But also, everyone's success level is different. Like, I know some creators that hit a million views on a video with only 300 uploads, but I know some creators that hit a million views on their first video when they had 800 videos posted. So,
8:30 everyone grows at different levels. I'm just telling you what happened to my YouTube channel. And one of the crazy things about that is that video that got a million views, my 5th 175th upload, I actually made that same video 23 times. The video was top 20 Minecraft mods. And before that, I made 23 other top 10 and top 20 Minecraft videos hoping that they would go viral because I thought they were really good video ideas. And obviously, they didn't. I had to make that video 23 different times with 23 different ideas, 23 different thumbnails, 23 different filming sets, and and all these different things. So, so my point is is like you might have a Minecraft video on your channel that
9:17 will go viral. You might just have to make it 23 more times in 23 different ways. So, now we're just diving into more highlevel strategy stuff, but I think this is super important stuff to understand if you want to start a Minecraft channel. And one of the things that I did over time, and again, this took years to do. This wasn't like something I did just in a week or a month, but my YouTube channel started as documenting. I was documenting Minecraft updates, Minecraft mods, Minecraft texture packs, and all these things. And over time, I evolved my channel to creating videos, creating ideas from scratch. And that's when I really started going viral on YouTube. So, an example of some of these creating videos would be like the safest Minecraft house
10:06 or surviving with ASWD. That video has 70 million views. Minecraft, but you only get one block. for steel bunker versus 1,000 diamond zombies in Minecraft. Here's another one. World's biggest Minecraft treehouse. We actually got away with this. Minecraft trolling. Here's another one. 500 fans versus world's biggest rainbow dropper. Or this one right here. This is one of my favorite ones. Breaking into noob pro and hacker Minecraft houses. So all of these ideas, I am creating these ideas. I am no longer documenting things in Minecraft. I am now creating ideas from scratch. And that's really where the
10:52 views are. But the biggest thing is you go from a channel that documents things to a channel that entertains people and really really builds an audience. And that's how some of the biggest channels on YouTube go viral because YouTube is all about entertainment. Yes, the documenting videos can get a lot of views and they can also be your stepping stones to growth in your YouTube journey. But if you want to get mega views like 10 million, 20 million, 30 million views, you got to create video ideas from scratch. You got to add your own style to videos. You got to carve your own path. And like I mentioned in the beginning, you have to become a chef that can make your own recipes instead of following the footsteps of other creators. And that is how I got to 10
11:39 million subscribers. I hope this video is being valuable for you guys so far. I know some of this is higher level strategies, but honestly, if I'm watching this video right now and I wanted to start a Minecraft channel, I want someone telling me the highlevel strategies. I don't want the low-level stuff like, oh, here's how to edit your first video. If you want to learn how to edit your first video, literally just go on YouTube and type in how to edit a YouTube video and there is tons of tutorials you can learn just like that. That's one of the things that really helped me when I started my YouTube channel is anything that I didn't know how to do, I would just search it up on YouTube. If I didn't know how to install a certain modification, I would search it up on YouTube. Once I started uh growing my channel a little bit, I wanted to build my very own custom gaming computer. So, what did I do? I
12:26 searched up on YouTube how to build a gaming computer and I ended up doing a couple days of research and I built my very own custom gaming computer so I could record better videos. So, anything that you want to learn how to do, it's most likely on YouTube. If you want to learn how to film, how to set up OBS for your recordings, how to set up your facecam, all of these different things, it's all on YouTube and it's completely free. You just got to take the time to learn it and implement it. But the last thing here that I want to talk about is probably one of the most important things and it's one of the things that I focused on that really allowed me to level up my channel over time. And it's a very simple strategy, simple to understand, difficult to achieve, but it's making your last video your competition. And this is something that
13:11 I explain to creators all the time that want to know how to grow. And they understand it, but it's so difficult to do it because you have to do it for months and years. You can't just do it for a week and expect results. But basically, what you do is you make your last video that you posted your competition. And this is what I did with my Minecraft channel. So, I was always trying to make my next video that I posted better and better and better and better. And just because you make a better video does not mean it's a bigger video. A lot of people get this confused. They think in order to make a better video, I have to make my video bigger and I got to spend more money and I got to get a a better camera and I got to film better. That doesn't mean it's a better video. Just because you spend more money and put more effort into it
13:57 doesn't make the video better. What I want you to do is I want you to look at the last video that you posted and I want you to jot down three things that you want to improve. Maybe you say, "Hey, I think I want to improve the music on this video. I think the music was kind of boring." Maybe you say, "Oh, I want to improve the thumbnail of this video. The thumbnail of the video was terrible and I don't even know what this is." And then maybe the third thing is you say, "Hey, I want to improve the intro of this video. I want the intro to be snappy and nice and I want people to very easily understand what this video is about. So there you go. You have three things. Now I want you to take those three things and I want you to apply them to your next video. And then I want you to repeat that process over
14:42 and over and over and over again. And you're going to do that for a 100red videos. And you're going to look back and you're going to be like, "Wow, look at how terrible video number 32 was. And look at how good video 93 was. You're going to see a world of a difference in growth. And this is exactly what I did on my YouTube channel. But I did it for hundreds of videos, thousands of videos, right? You can't just do this for a week or a month and expect results. It takes years. Honestly, I'm just being honest. It takes years to grow. Like I mentioned, it took me 3 and 1/2 years to get my first video to hit a million views. But one of the things that people don't understand about YouTube is the growth is very slow in the beginning, but it really picks up and builds
15:27 momentum over time. So, for example, it took me about 5 and 1/2 years to finally hit a million uh subscribers. 5 1/2 years of work. I think it was like 8 or 900 videos posted on my channel. But it took me only 6 months to go from 1 million to 2 million subscribers. Only 6 months because I was building so much momentum and my growth was getting faster every single month. So that's one of the big things that people uh don't understand about YouTube is yeah it it is a slow start but once you start growing the ball rolls faster and faster and faster. So hopefully you guys enjoyed this video and hopefully this helped you understand how to build a Minecraft YouTube channel. Again, a lot
16:13 of this stuff is highle strategy stuff obviously, but if I'm going to give you guys a video on how to build a Minecraft channel, I'm going to give you the best video I can. I'm going to give you the highle strategy stuff. I'm going to give you the stuff that you really need to think about. I'm going to give you like the stuff in this video. This is your next two, three, four year game plan. This is it. Everything that I just explained. Now you just got to go out and execute. you got to go out and think of good video ideas. Um, learn how to edit, learn how to film, uh, learn how to make good intros, thumbnails, titles, all of these things and just constantly improve them. So, thank you guys so much for watching. Also, definitely be sure to subscribe to the Blueprint channel cuz every single week we pump out videos like this. Um, and they're only going to get better and they're completely free. So, it's free YouTube advice right into your subscription box. And I'll see y'all next week.
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