Check these Off Your List to Win on YouTube
YouTube Channels are the media companies of the future. For free, you can get access to several kinds of content — educational, comedy, entertainment, religion, documentaries, (maybe not movies), … but you have a large selection to choose from.
Back in the days — and even currently — to access these kinds of content, you may need a TV subscription. Now, all you need is a good internet connection and your device. It is therefore not surprising that YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world.
However, it can be tough for new YouTubers to lay hands on the Holy Grail of featuring in the trending videos section or even get thousands of subscribers who are also dedicated to viewing their content.
Being someone who spends hours every day consuming YouTube content and an online marketer who has worked with some online brands, I’ve noticed a few things that have helped big YouTube channels win. Here are they:
Title and Thumbnails
Speaking as someone who enjoys consuming YouTube content, what gets me to click on any video is the title and the thumbnail. Those two are your marketing pitch.
You need to understand psychological triggers. Psychological triggers are statements, reactions, and pictures that make people curious about something. Some years ago — probably 5 to 6 years — the most popular psychological trigger on the internet was:
How to Make Money in Your Sleep
It no longer works, but it did sell a lot of digital products. Nowadays, people are more specific. You see something like:
How Mr. Beast Gained 7 Billion Views on YouTube in 3 Years
Then you have a picture of Mr. Beast smiling, probably a Porsche in the picture, and 7 billion views finished with two or three exclamation marks. As wacky as the thumbnail may seem, you have killed it with the title. Anybody with a YouTube channel or works in digital marketing would be interested.
Clickbaits are a form of psychological triggers, but you don’t have to trick people. You only have to tell them what you have to offer in a way that will get their attention.
You can go through a number of highly viewed YouTube videos and see how they wrote their titles. What can you replicate? The reality of online marketing is that you don’t have to create something new, you can replicate what works.
If you realized that ‘how…’ titles work, replicate them. For instance,
How I completed a Gazillion task in One Hour
How I Read 10 Books in a Month
With these, you are igniting curiosity — and that’s your first step towards winning. You have been able to successfully connect with people who aspire to do something like that.
You can take a copywriting course to learn more about titles and headlines.
Your Audience
A lot of new content creators fail to understand that not everybody is their audience. It is the reason why people have thousands of subscribers and still get less than 50 views. As an online marketing consultant, I get to listen to a lot of this. What these creators won’t tell you is that they guilt-tripped all their friends and family members to subscribe to their channels.
Who is deceiving who? At the end of the day, we’ll all see the number of views you have on a particular video, despite your 25 million subscribers.
YouTube has a practice that sanctions this. If the ratio of your views is very much lower than your subscriber count, the algorithm will think people don’t like your video and won’t recommend it to more potential viewers.
Find your niche — the aspect you feel works best for you — and focus on it.
There are a billion and one niches on the internet. And there will always be an audience for anything. People go to YouTube to just see people open toy boxes — and those YouTubers make millions from Adsense. Crazy, right? (A little confession here: I saw the unboxing video of the iPhone 12 done by my favorite tech reviewer — MKBHD. It wasn’t even a review.)
People love to have exciting experiences — always give them that.
There is an internet craze about pimple-popping videos. And these videos get millions of views. Here is one to disgust you:
And if you’re stuck on finding a niche, read this article on how to get your audience on the internet.
Thumbnails
YouTube thumbnails didn’t become a thing until about 3 years ago. Without a thumbnail, YouTube will just look for a scene in your video to put as a thumbnail. However, YouTube is not a person, you’re dealing with a computer. And technology hasn’t really gotten mastery of facial expression. It can hardly differentiate between a depressed look and one who is just a little unhappy.
You don’t want to let that computer decide for you.
More, a lot of people haven’t really gotten mastery of thumbnails. Again, go through a number of YouTube videos to see how their thumbnails look. What can you replicate? You don’t have to be an expert graphic designer whose head manufactures ideas the way China manufactures phones. Just replicate what works.
Go to Canva and check out their free templates. Get creative. See YouTube videos on how to create very attractive thumbnails. Believe me, you will learn a lot.
Grab Attention in the First 5–30 Seconds
Just like making a presentation before an audience, if you lose them in the first few seconds, it might as well be over. It’s that time they’d pick their phones to check for new messages and updates.
And you’re on YouTube, it’s just a click and that video is over for the viewer. This is why your first 30 seconds are critical. You have to grab that attention. Tell them something interesting to inspire their curiosity.
If you can hook them for the first 30 seconds, you can be sure they’d most likely stick around till the end. Many YouTubers make a promise they would fulfill at the end of the video. Evan Carmichael does this. When he first got started, he would promise viewers a bonus motivational clip at the end. That makes them view it to the end.
Nowadays, he doesn’t give you the promise at the beginning, but you know for sure that you’re getting your bonus for sticking to the end. See one of his videos here:
The Law of 100
If you want to win on YouTube, the Law of 100 is important.
This law simply means that before you give up on your YouTube channel because of low views, upload 100 videos. This law applies also in blogging — write 100 posts before you think of giving up.
Before you get to 100, you would have learned a lot of things on the way, your videos would have been better, and you’d be more focused on your niche.
Work at posting at least once every week.
You will not make money through AdSense until you get 4000 hours of views, but how do you want to do that with about 34 videos? Your consistency is what will help you grow your audience organically. And in digital marketing, the best audience is an organic audience.
However, if you get to 100 and your channel isn’t picking, then, you can safely decide that YouTube is not for you.
Collaboration
Big YouTubers leverage on collaboration. Find other YouTubers in your niche that you can partner with. It could be showing up in their videos and getting exposure to their audience. It could be interviewing someone you know who has a large social media following — like a micro-influencer. And this does not have to be on YouTube.
Influencers tend to have a loyal following and their followers tend to check out the latest about them. This is an opportunity for your channel. With that, you can get more viewers or subscribers (even both).
Lighting
This is very important. Nobody wants to see a low-quality movie. It is the same for a YouTube video. I understand you may not have the big HD cameras, but you could start with a 16-megapixel camera. That’s the trending phone camera. It is better than the webcam you’re using.
No offense to webcam users, but if it is not bright enough, it is not bright enough. Get a better phone camera. Your competitors are using HD cameras. Help your brand.
Get white lights. You can use bright white bulbs or white lamps to brighten the background and make it look great. You can also get a nice wallpaper background.
YouTube SEO
To rank any piece of content on search engines, search engine optimization is very important. And YouTube is a search engine — the second biggest on the internet.
Applying SEO to your content helps you get your share of the 5 billion videos that are watched on YouTube every day. And you wouldn’t need to start sharing links to your videos on Whatsapp or Facebook. Your traffic will be organic. Organic means that people are naturally discovering your content.
YouTube SEO is another topic on its own. However, here is one of the best content on YouTube SEO on the internet. And it’s very explanatory.
Finally…
You don’t have to get everything right at the set go. However, you have to keep making it better. With consistency and the drive to do the best you can, you can win o YouTube. Your channel is a potential media company, but it depends on how you invest in it.
Pay attention to how successful creators are doing it and replicate what works.
To your success!
