Charlie from Charisma on Command was the first project that started the Frontways journey.
It was 2016 and I was at the beginning of my project. I didn’t even know then what I was going to do; however, I knew a few things:
❤️ I loved English
❤️ I loved interesting creative projects
❤️ I loved educational video content
At first, I just tried to contact interesting projects to ask permission to translate their content into Russian. Initially, the idea was to simply share interesting foreign content in the Russian-speaking market.
I wrote to Charlie to ask permission to translate one of his videos into Russian, and by a lucky coincidence, he was looking for a person who could translate his content into other languages.
I remember that I immediately fell in love with the idea of doing official projects in Russian.
This is how the Charisma on Command in Russian was born. It was the first foreign language for Charlie and now the channel has been translated into six languages.
Since I didn’t have a team then, I did all the tasks alone.
Translation, voice acting, promotion.
At that time, I was quite good at translating from English. I even worked as a freelance translator.
I knew a little about promotion on YouTube, but not much.
And I knew NOTHING about voice acting.
The voice acting for me was the most difficult test.
Usually I talk like this
Not only was my speech not very clear, but I didn’t have the right equipment yet. Not even an ordinary microphone.
I remember that I had to rent equipment or borrow it from friends and record voice at night so that I could return the equipment in the morning. And every time before recording, I had to work on my voice and pronunciation.
How I promoted the channel
1) Longtail SEO
This is a “How to” channel, so I understood that SEO was indispensable here. I understood the basics back then, but I started to learn every day in depth how SEO works, and in particular on YouTube.
Initially (out of ignorance) I just translated the original titles and published the video. Then I realized that these titles were too general.
That is, the headline “How to Be Confident” might work well for the original channel, since it already had a large audience. But for a small new channel, you need to use less competitive keywords.
In addition, some original videos weren’t SEO friendly at all. They were called something like “The Confidence Paradox” or “The Biggest Mistake People Make When Dating.” These are not bad headlines to get recommended, but again – not in the case of a new channel.
Therefore, I completely changed these types of headings and made them SEO friendly.
2) Forums, blogs and social networks
I wrote to absolutely all personal development communities that I could find in the Russian-speaking market with a request to publish a video from the channel. Some of them I offered to write a guest post, some I suggested to translate a very thematic video.
For example, at that moment, the hype around Conor McGregor worked very well for me. There were many videos about him on the channel, and there were many fan communities of Conor in the Russian-speaking community. I used this to my advantage and wrote to each of them as soon as we had a new video about Conor.
3) “Official” card
At that time there was no such phenomenon as official localization. At least in the Russian-speaking market. Of course, Hollywood movies and TV series have been officially dubbed (although not always officially). But if we talk about YouTube channels or video courses, then everything was illegal. Most simply translated content without permission.
I was kind of a pioneer.
I realized that I needed to use this to promote the project, so I began to write everywhere that this was the official channel, that we were collaborating with Charlie.
As I expected – no one believed me…😒
Some even wrote that it was very brazen of me to steal content and write that this was an official channel.
Then I asked Charlie for help and here is what we did:
- Charlie added a Russian-language channel to the channel list on the original channel.
- Charlie recorded a video message where he said that this was the official Russian-language channel, and we published this video on the Russian-language channel.
- In his original video, Charlie mentioned that he now has a Russian-language channel and left a link to it. We translated this video and also published it.
- We did a Q&A session with Charlie where he answered questions from his Russian-speaking subscribers.
After that, we managed to convince people it was real.
I think it was an important step forward, as it was new for people to subscribe to the American YouTube channel and be part of its audience officially. Not just subscribe to the channel of the voice acting studio, which translates a bunch of different videos illegally, but subscribe to the author himself on his official Russian-language channel.
This worked well, as comments like “Oh! Wow! It turns out to be an official channel, I thought you were just stealing like everyone else. Subscribed.” I am sure that it even played a viral effect, where people told each other that there is an official channel of an American blogger.
The first people on the team and new clients
Longtail SEO, community promos and the “official card” started to bear fruit. A month later, on average, up to 10 people per day began to subscribe to the channel.
Then 20-50.
Then about 100 – 300.
The channel moved into a phase of stable growth.
Gradually, my friend started to help me with translations, and people began to write to me with proposals to help this project.
In a fairly short period of time, there were so many applications from candidates that I started “filtering.” I arranged candidates for interviews, gave them a test task and then chose the best.
That is how I formed my first team.
Meanwhile, I began to write to other authors, and Charlie recommended me to some of his fellow creators.
We started working with Patrick Bet-David (Valuetainment), Thomas Frank and Evan Carmichael.
First big win
After six months of running the Charisma on Command channel, he gained about 30,000 subscribers.
It was a typical October day, and I posted a video on the channel then went away for the weekend with my girlfriend (now she is my wife💕).
When I returned home after two days and went to the channel dashboard, I saw something incredible.
The video I posted went viral.
There were 50,000 subscribers on the channel.
At that moment, we had already launched sales of Charlie’s video course in Russian, and in these two days they broke the record.
After another two days, we watched live as the channel crossed the bar of 100,000 subscribers.
It was crazy.
The same video went viral on the original channel as well, which provided me with an important lesson when working with further projects.
I realized that a popular video on the original channel is likely to become popular in another language. But such videos should be “hidden in the sleeve” until the channel has at least 30-50k subscribers.
It was an interesting adventure that continues to this day. We are still working with Charlie and during this time we have done a lot of cool things:
- The Russian-language channel has almost two million subscribers.
- After the success of the Russian-language channel, Charlie went further and launched channels in other languages.
- We translated into Russian two large video courses of Charlie.
- We hired a Russian-speaking coach who teaches courses in Russian.
- We published Charlie’s book in Russian, which is now sold in four countries.