Graham Stephan is crushing YouTube. And he’s not shy about sharing his strategy, which is awesome. If you’re looking at growing a YouTube channel, you really ought to watch this video. Seriously. It’s jam-packed with value.

In this video, Graham talks about his strategy, including going into his titles and thumbnails.

Titles

Start with the title. I keep hearing this from content creators.

If I can’t get a good title for a video, I don’t make the video.

Graham Stephan

Graham spends hours a day thinking of topics, going through subreddits, watching YouTube videos, then, once he has a topic idea, he thinks about the title. Then he makes the video.

Thumbnails

Graham works as hard on the thumbnails as he does on titles and topics. Again, this is something I keep hearing.

The thumbnail is probably the thing that we spend the most amount of time on. We know that if we miss the mark on the thumbnail, all the work is going to be for nothing.

This is where I am falling down in a big way. What I should do is look at successful channels and see what they are doing with the thumbnails.

One bad thumbnail is like you made a bad chess move and they take one of your pieces.

Oh man. That’s an awesome way to think of it. But I still don’t know how to make good thumbnails of my own content!

Without uploading it’s going to be impossible to grow. Thats’ why I keep uploading consistently. I don’t want to miss an upload.

Now this I can do. That’s one thing I can control.

Sponsors

I’m very selective about the sponsors I do. Every time I do a sponsor, it takes my video down from a 10 to like an 8.5.

Graham talks about revenue. It’s like 50% Adsense, 25% affiliate income and 25% sponsors. He gets into this at around the 1h mark.

I’m blown away by how generous Graham is with his information, particularly where the numbers are concerned.