Honestly, this weekend was tough for me. I experienced a type of break down of emotions regarding my career, my online footprint and everything to do with content. For context, I am a music artist who started this journey 18 months ago all by myself. I have built a fantastic and reliable team and, considering the short window, my music has done fairly well (almost 2 million streams overall). Nevertheless, I just don’t feel like my online presence is as strong as I’d like it to be.
The goal? I want to build a slow, steady and reliable community of followers. I want to produce consistent content that I’m proud of and will engage people for whatever reason they feel appropriate. I want to search my name on YouTube and find a plethora of engaging, musical and creative content.
Luckily, the breakdown of Friday evening became a breakthrough by Sunday afternoon and led me to an in depth research on how I can build a consistent and loyal following through YouTube. Why YouTube? It’s putting more funding and more algorithmic attention into its creators than TikTok. This path took me to some very interesting videos on how to maximise on YouTube, particularly since their introduction of a Shorts Creator Fund which launched only on the first of this month.
One of the intriguing videos I stumbled upon was by Thomas Garetz, an expert on social media growth and monetisation. He suggests that by posting a YouTube Short everyday for 30-60+ days, you can grow your audience by a huge amount and start monetising on that new following. The most interesting part is that this tactic utilises ChatGPT…
The video is titled “Make Money with YouTube Shorts Using ChatGPT”. After 24 hours of posting his first YouTube Short on a ghost account with only 5 followers, it received over 1.3k views using this ChatGPT tactic.
Garetz starts the video by templating an example account called ‘Psychology Arcade’. In just one year, the account amassed over 148 million views and 249,000 subscribers. However, this came from posting an average of 12-13 YouTube Shorts a day! While this target is unrealistic, Garetz stresses that these videos are so short to make, posting 1-2 per day is definitely doable and such consistency will guarantee results.
The video examples from Psychology Arcade are rather clickbaity. It encompasses facts about different topics, entitled “Girls Facts”, “Psychology Facts”, “Sad Facts” etc which see the first half of a phrase (the video hook) followed by a second half. For example “Girls who laugh a lot…” followed by “usually cry alone at night”. The phrase aims to be relatable and encourages the viewer to wait for a response.
Garetz suggests using ChatGPT to come up with these content ideas. He types into ChatGPT “write me 3 funny facts about…” and then lists a bunch of topics. He then mimics the Psychology Arcades videos and sets the captions to stock content and a viral song.
Now, as you can imagine, this will generate rather generic content. As a creator, I had a thought about how we can utilise this tactic to our own content. In my case, I make music and songs with relatable lyrics. My latest song, for example, is a bit of a sad girl anthem and questions whether good sex can ever justify staying in a toxic relationship (I told you it’s relatable…). For that reason, for the next 30 days I will be posting a YouTube Short a day, singing along to my song, completing a task (doing laundry, drinking coffee, journaling) and posting this (hopefully) aesthetic content to a caption about a ‘sad girl’ fact.
Today marked day 1 of this posting journey and I am excited to record this experience and bring the results back to you. The experiment will last 30 days but I will be updating it every week for the next 30 days.
Hopefully we find growth and a strategy for all of us to build our communities. Let’s begin!
