If you’ve read “Influ­ence Now,” our free guide to influ­encer mar­ket­ing, then you’ll know that you can use Tubu­lar Cre­ator Pro­files to find the YouTube influ­encers who are the best fit for a par­tic­u­lar cam­paign. You can also use Tubu­lar Leader­boards to quick­ly iden­ti­fy and even con­tact the top 10 influ­encers in 86 pop­u­lar cat­e­gories. But, how did these YouTube influ­encers become so influ­en­tial? Well, you know, it wasn’t easy.

Grace Helbig: What A Charming Idiot

For exam­ple, Grace Hel­big began in 2008 by cre­at­ing Dai­ly­Grace, a dai­ly comedic vlog, for MyDamnChannel.com. Sev­en years lat­er, she’s the host and cre­ator of her own YouTube chan­nel, Grace Hel­big, which has more than 115.6 mil­lion views and almost 2.5 mil­lion sub­scribers.

Hel­big is also host and cre­ator of The Grace Hel­big Show, a comedy/talk show on the E! tele­vi­sion net­work, and Not Too Deep With Grace Hel­big, an audio/video pod­cast. She co-pro­duced and starred in the fea­ture film, Camp Tako­ta. And she’s the author of Grace’s Guide: The Art of Pre­tend­ing to Be a Grown-Up, a New York Times best-sell­er.

Hel­big uses four key strate­gies to win friends and influ­ence peo­ple:

1. Be Authentic And Embrace Quirkiness

In Helbig’s sev­en years on YouTube, she has been known pri­mar­i­ly for her fun­ny, hon­est, and authen­tic vlogs. In these direct-address videos, shot pri­mar­i­ly in bed­rooms, cars, hotel rooms, or wher­ev­er Hel­big might find her­self, she shares a lit­tle bit of every­thing with her audi­ence.

Helbig’s token style is unre­hearsed, goofy, and relat­able. She’ll stum­ble on her words, make weird faces, mut­ter obscen­i­ties, make end­less puns, and mock her own silli­ness — her chan­nel ban­ner describes her as “a charm­ing idiot.” She makes audi­ences feel like they’re hang­ing out with their fun, awk­ward old­er sis­ter rather than watch­ing an inter­net celebri­ty.

2. Upload Consistently To Keep Viewers Watching

Since 2008, Hel­big has uploaded more than 1,000 videos, aver­ag­ing three to five videos every week for sev­en years. While her video style makes her feel like a friend, Helbig’s com­mit­ment to upload­ing on a reg­u­lar basis makes her a friend fans can count on. The reg­u­lar stream of video con­tent gives fans a rea­son to keep com­ing back.

As a result, more than 60 per­cent of her view­er­ship comes from sub­scribers who eager­ly watch each new video.

3. Foster An Active Fan Community With Interaction

Whether Helbig’s reply­ing to fan com­ments on YouTube or oth­er social media plat­forms, or cre­at­ing “Q&A” videos in which she direct­ly acknowl­edges and responds to ques­tions from her fans, she has always fos­tered her com­mu­ni­ty by direct­ly engag­ing with it.

Helbig’s com­mit­ment to com­mu­ni­ty build­ing has dri­ven incred­i­ble fan engage­ment on and off YouTube. On aver­age, her videos gen­er­ate 54 likes per thou­sand views and 3.7 com­ments for every thou­sand views, both of which are sev­er­al times greater than oth­er top YouTu­bers. In addi­tion, she has amassed near­ly a mil­lion fol­low­ers on Twit­ter and Insta­gram.

4. Take A Risk, Try New Things, And Trust Your Fans To Follow

All the ground­work that Hel­big laid to devel­op a strong and loy­al fan­base has empow­ered her to try new things. In 2014, after six years of cre­at­ing videos for MyDamnChannel.com, she decid­ed to take a big, unprece­dent­ed risk. She left Dai­ly­Grace, which had 2‑million sub­scribers, to launch her own, inde­pen­dent chan­nel on YouTube.

Hel­big uploaded a teas­er to her new chan­nel on Jan­u­ary 6, 2014, and before post­ing a full vlog, she’d already attract­ed 275,000 sub­scribers. Thanks to the help of her fans, as well as oth­er YouTube cre­ators who helped dri­ve peo­ple to her chan­nel, 1.6 mil­lion peo­ple, or 70 per­cent of her exist­ing fan base, had sub­scribed to the new chan­nel with­in two months of her channel’s launch.

Slo Mo Guys: Take On The World In Slow Motion!

The Slow Mo Guys pro­vide anoth­er exam­ple of how hard it is to become a YouTube influ­encer. It took five years and mul­ti­ple burns/scars for Gavin Free and Daniel Gruchy to grow their chan­nel to more than 556.2 mil­lion views and over 5.4 mil­lion sub­scribers. Mix­ing sci­ence and com­e­dy with their pow­er­ful high-frame rate cam­eras, they’ve shown every­thing from slow motion airbags to mouse­traps.

The Slow Mo Guys is just one project for the duo, with Free busy as an employ­ee of Roost­er Teeth, a U.S. pro­duc­tion stu­dio, and Gruchy as a Lance Cor­po­ral in the British Army. How have they built such a huge fol­low­ing with such con­straints on their time, while liv­ing on dif­fer­ent con­ti­nents?

Here are four key strate­gies that drove The Slow Mo Guys to their cur­rent lev­el of suc­cess:

1. Consistently Deliver The Goods

The Slow Mo Guys are unusu­al YouTube cre­ators in that their con­tent strat­e­gy has remained main­ly unchanged from the first video. This con­sis­ten­cy means you know exact­ly what you’ll get when you sub­scribe. The Slow Mo Guys deliv­er noth­ing oth­er than slow-motion videos!

Although their uploads are much less fre­quent than those of oth­er YouTu­bers with a sim­i­lar size fol­low­ing, this con­sis­ten­cy has served them well every time they upload a new video. The ever­green nature of their con­tent means that when they upload a video, their back cat­a­log receives a bump in views as peo­ple get hooked into watch­ing more.

2. Tell The Full Story

Beau­ti­ful high-frame rate, slow-motion footage is includ­ed in every video, and it usu­al­ly makes up around 30 to 60 sec­onds of videos that are on aver­age 3.7 min­utes long. How­ev­er, their engag­ing per­son­al­i­ties mean that the sto­ry of how they get the high-speed footage itself is also huge­ly com­pelling.

The stress, per­sis­tence and some­times phys­i­cal pain that for Free and Gruchy (usu­al­ly Gruchy) go through to make the videos are just as big of an attrac­tion as the stun­ning slow-motion visu­als.

3. Create Shareable Content

With 5.3 per­cent of their views com­ing from exter­nal web­sites and embed­ded play­ers, this is con­tent that peo­ple like to share and dis­cuss.

Their first video to go viral was “Giant Six Foot Water Bal­loon.” The video was fun­ny and sci­en­tif­ic but also inher­ent­ly tech­ni­cal by the nature of the high-speed footage. This meant that the video was shared on a wide range of blogs and web­sites, from howstuffworks.com to Giz­mo­do and Buz­zFeed, and it drove a large amount of traf­fic from social media sites such as Face­book and Red­dit.

4. Respond To Audience Demand

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, liv­ing in dif­fer­ent coun­tries has a huge impact on the num­ber of videos that Free and Gruchy can cre­ate togeth­er. To com­bat this, they often block shoot videos to ensure they have enough con­tent to upload on the chan­nel dur­ing the months they are apart. How­ev­er, they are active in the con­ver­sa­tion and engaged with their audi­ence, some­times let­ting them guide the edi­to­r­i­al.

Fea­tur­ing con­tent that their super­fans love as well as videos that appeal to a wide range of audi­ences has helped spread the word and cul­ti­vate a loy­al fol­low­ing.

Conclusion

It’s also worth not­ing that Hel­big has shot com­mer­cials for Mar­riott and St. Ives, while The Slow Mo Guys have demon­strat­ed “cold spray” for GE and cel­e­brat­ed the release of EA’s “Bat­tle­field 4″ game. So, it appears that a wide vari­ety of brands have start­ed to har­ness the pow­er of YouTube influ­encers.