My YouTube strategy has changed…A LOT.

Last week I talked about the three layers really of creating content online and leveraging them all for different reasons and that I have changed a lot when it comes to my YouTube strategy, I’m sure that you’ve noticed. I’ve been doing this for six years, it is really my business, it is my job and I love this platform and it’s also evolved and it’s changed over the years. And over the last 12 months, really, I have gone deep into truly understanding how it ticks, how it works and how as a content creator, you can set better expectations for yourself so the programme doesn’t drive you crazy. If you didn’t relate to that, give me a like and let me know, and if you aren’t subscribed yet, it’s free to subscribe. You can always change your mind later, I talked to entrepreneurship, social media, and I do some pretty crazy giveaways for my subscribers as well, so hit that subscribe button.

In addition, a few videos ago, I talked about a client of mine who had 13,000 subscribers, but he’s on track to generate a million dollars in revenue this year using his YouTube channel and I want to talk through how that’s even possible with a subscriber count that’s not massive. So I’ll touch on that as well. So over the last couple of months, I’ve really dove deep into creating the YouTube code, and this is what I truly believe and I’ve watched now, crack the code for so many creators on YouTube and entrepreneurs on YouTube for really leveraging the platform for a huge benefit in return for themselves. And not just guessing about every video that you put up. So what is the YouTube code? Okay, so it breaks down into Content, Optimization, excuse my handwriting, Development and Expand.

Brief overview of each of these things, and this is what I’ve spent the last couple of months working on. If you watched this video, you know that I took time off. This whole thing is it. So content is creating the concepts for your videos before you ever shoot them. I often say research before you record, this kind of takes it up another level. So I’m going to dive into the three types of content that really are the only categories that you need to tackle on this platform and to help organize your content creation moving forward. Optimization means when you’re putting up your content on YouTube, is it optimized to perform well across all the different metrics? I’m going to talk about the metrics that are most important in just a second. And is it optimized to convert for you and give you what you’re looking for in terms of engagement, like, subscribers, comments, shares, and in terms of if you have a business, is it actually converting to clients, leads customers, et cetera? So optimization.

Development is the third step, which oftentimes this comes first and that’s a huge mistake. Development is, “Okay, I now know the kind of content I’m making. I know it’s optimized to actually really benefit me in my channel, now I’m going to actually create the content itself.” So develop the content from start to finish, make sure that it’s developed in a way that gets you high retention and subscriber growth and also just overall brand awareness. And then Expand means, okay, off of YouTube, what can you be doing to really grow your channel and grow your authority as the best of the best in your space? So let’s dive into actually cracking this code and the three types of content on YouTube that are necessary.

So the three categories, really, this is what it comes down to note and I recognize spot for, are pretty simple. It’s viral, which is what everybody thinks every YouTube video should be, and it’s just not true. Viral videos have a place and a time, but they aren’t actually necessary for every piece of content you put out. So viral videos, the benefits of them is it gives you this huge surge of views, it gives you a ton of brand awareness and it gives your channel a ton of attention and positive signals in the algorithm in a very short period of time. But the issue with viral videos is that they don’t often give you a long-term benefit. So these are great when you to give your channel a boost and when there’s a topic that you could capitalize on to gain attention and momentum. Often times, it’s very timely, it’s emotional driven, it’s highly relevant to your audience, it could be something happening in your industry. That’s viral content.

When it comes to viral content, your analytics will look like this. So basically it shows you that it’s reaching outside of your subscriber base and it’s helping you grow your audience in a big way. But again, virality without relevancy can actually do more harm than good because you’re getting all of these eyeballs and these views on a topic that you don’t really care about and most importantly, your viewers doesn’t really care about. It’s actually hurting your channel moving forward because the rest of your content won’t be relevant to the new audience that you’re bringing in and therefore that content won’t perform as well. So you have to combine virality with relevance and I’ll talk about that more in a second.

The next piece of content category is depth. So depth content is basically a video that doesn’t follow the norm on YouTube and allows you creative freedom to talk about anything that you want to talk about, that again is highly relevant to your ideal viewer and is something that’s important to you. You don’t have to follow the rules when it comes to having the title without a keyword in it, or look a certain way or act a certain way. This is really the benefit of this kind of content is, it humanizes you and it really builds loyalty with your current audience and subscriber base. So your analytics for this kind of video are going to look more like this, where you see that it’s really being seen just by your subscriber base, not really expanding beyond that, but you’re getting super high retention and people are actually really invested in the content. So you’re getting pretty in depth comments and really qualitative engagement, which means that your viewers and your ideal base loves it and it builds real loyalty for them to come back every single time you make a video. So you shouldn’t expect a surge of virality with these videos, but you should expect a surge of loyalty with your audience and it allows you to just have some fun and talk about things that are important to you.

The next category where the money is at is evergreen. So evergreen content basically is super targeted content and the huge benefit of evergreen content is that you make it once and it brings in subscribers, views, leads for your business everything you need for the rest of time. There is no shelf life on this, it lasts forever. So evergreen content, if you’re an entrepreneur or an expert, this is the easiest kind of content to create because you can batch record, meaning film a bunch of videos at once, put them up on your channel and then not think about it again. And they’ll just continue to work for you. This creates an evergreen machine for your business to bring in all the things that you need.

So are you going to get a huge surge of use on these videos? No, not necessarily. You’re just going to continue to see the views rack up over time, and that’s a huge benefit because again, they work for you when you’re not working. The example that I gave with Geoffrey and his channel, his 13,000 subscribers, and he’s on track to do a million dollars this year, his channel very much so focuses on evergreen content. So he’s not trying to go after a viral audience, he wants a hyper relevant audience and the size of the views is not as important, the target of the views is really important. Is he attracting his ideal customers and clients on his channel?

So to give you some real world examples, this video right here, the ugly truth of entrepreneurship, is a viral video. It is something that can appeal to a lot of people, it’s very driven by emotion and it’s super relatable and it’s very timely because a lot of people are experiencing burnout and they’re tired and they’re exhausted in their business. So that’s a viral video that brought in eyeballs, that brought in a lot of attention. A depth video is a video like this, where the title really doesn’t tell you much, so if someone’s clicking on that video, they’re clicking on it because they’re invested in me and my channel and they’re super, super loyal to the channel. And it builds a lot of depth with my audience. Deep, not wide. And then evergreen content, How to Talk on Camera. There you go. So pretty simple in how you differentiate these and it’s important to play around with all of these types of content to make sure that you’re not just reaching the big audience that doesn’t really care about you. This is surface level. You’re not just talking to your subscriber base and not reaching more people and you’re not just making videos on topics that people come to learn from you on and then they forget about you. So the combination of all three of these is vital to success on YouTube and really cracking that code.

Now let’s talk about using these categories to actually grow. You have to start with evergreen content. So evergreen content is literally telling the algorithm, “This is who I am, who I’m trying to target and what my channel is all about.” So this is really where you niche down to blow up, and if you start on YouTube or even if you have an existing channel and you’re posting random content with no real strategy and you’re not seeing any growth, it’s because you haven’t told the algorithm what you’re about, and honestly, the viewer you’re trying to attract. It doesn’t know what to do with your content or your channel.

So you start with evergreen. I’d say, use about eight videos to do as evergreen in the beginning, and if you have an existing use those eight videos to establish yourself in the algorithm. And then from there, you want to have your depth content because that depth content is going to make these subscribers that subscribed because of evergreen come back for more, relate to you as a human and become super loyal as a subscriber on your channel so that every time you put out a piece of content, they’re going to be invested in what you’re saying and they’re going to be the first ones to show up, which gives you this surge in the algorithm to then have the algorithm use the traffic sources to reach more people. And from there, you go into viral. So you built a base, they’re engaged, they’re going to help you support every video that you put out and then viral content is going to help you reach more eyeballs. And that creates this big spike and growth on your channel. And every month, if you’re creating content consistently, you can use a variation of these three and use them in combination together to really achieve this huge amount of growth.

So all in all, there is a fly wheel to YouTube and to creating growth and it looks like this. First and foremost, you have to know your viewer. Who are you actually trying to target? If you’re trying to reach everybody, you’re going to reach nobody and you’re going to think to the bottom of the sea on YouTube. So in order to crack the code, you have to identify who is the viewer you’re trying to reach, and often times they’re a mirror for you.

And so who are you? What would you be described as in terms of demographic? Really important to understand that before you even get started or if you’re trying to revamp and get a resurgence on your channel, focus on this. Who is your ideal viewer? And then from there, making relevant content to that beamer, because if you’re making relevant content, these viewers are going to be engaged, they’re going to basically help the algorithm understand where to put you, and then it’s going to be able to help you grow without you having to put as much effort into making it work for you. So viewer, making relevant content for the viewer, that creates, like I said, algorithm categorization, so that way the algorithm knows who you’re trying to reach and what your channel is all about.

They’re robots. The algorithm is a bunch of robots and so it’s not a bunch of humans going, “Oh, I see the nuances in your content, I understand where I’m supposed to put you.” The robots have to work to figure out what are you actually saying in your videos and who do you want us to reach? Once it understands that, then it uses the traffic sources within YouTube; search, suggested, browse, to push your content to more ideal viewers, because it actually knows who to put your content in front of. So that’s how the algorithm starts to work for you and starts to push your content. Ideal viewer, making relevant content for the viewer, algorithm categorization, using the traffic sources and the algorithm to push your content to more viewers, and then it just starts to move with more momentum to grow your channel even faster and to attract even more ideal subscribers and viewers.

And when you understand cracking the YouTube code like this, it’s important to know that views are not only metric, subscribers are not the only metric, because here’s the thing. Your subscriber base could grow by a ton if you make much viral content, but are they the right subscribers for you? It’s really important to know that you don’t want just any subscriber, you want the right subscriber. You don’t want just any viewer, you want the right viewer because that builds longevity on the platform and it allows you to have high performance with every video you create, not just a few of them. So what it looks like with the metrics that you need to pay attention to is what audience are you reaching? Are they the ideal viewer and audience that you’re trying to target? You have the most control over this. When you do depth and evergreen content.

The next step is your CTR. This is important because if your CTR is bad, nobody’s going to be able to watch your video. So your CTR is your clickthrough rate. It really comes down to four factors of your title, comes back down to your thumbnail, really important, it comes down to the relevancy of the topic to your ideal audience. If it’s not relevant, they’re not going to click on it. And then the first line of your description. So CTR is vitally important because it basically is the basis for every other metric to do well on your video. And then watch time. Are your viewers actually watching more than one video on your channel? That’s really important, and are they just staying on YouTube? Because YouTube is run by ads, they want people to watch more videos so they make more money. Retention, this actually for me is probably my favorite metric, because if people are actually watching my videos through the whole thing, it tells me I’m making good content.

I really don’t care about views that much, I care about if people are paying attention, because that ultimately is going to lead to overall longterm growth. Obviously they’re subscribers and not just any subscriber, are they the right subscribers, viewers? And then the final metric is algorithm categorization. Is the algorithm categorizing you with other channels, you can actually see this in the backend, that are similar to the audience that you want to attract? And if it is, it’s doing its job and it’s working for you. So algorithm categorization. The great thing about looking at all of these metrics all in all, is that it doesn’t make it you feel like you’re losing your mind on YouTube. So if you just focus on views and subscribers, it’s a really frustrating game and you’re not going to last long, to be honest. I’ve seen a lot of people give up because that’s their only metric of success.

That’s why looking at all of these is so much more beneficial to you as the creator. So make sure that you’re focusing on all three categories of content, and I know this is a lot of information and this is something I’ve been studying for a long time and I’ve actually just put together a brand new free training to go even deeper on this with you. So you can check that out in the link below, but I think the moral of the story is, as I’ve been saying, go deep, not wide, and you’ll feel like you’re a lot more successful and at peace with your channel on YouTube.

Are you with me? Be sure to share this with somebody who needs to hear it! I’ll see you in the next one.