- Are you a smaller YouTube creator
hoping to one day reach 1,000 subscribers,
maybe get monetized, (coins clang)
and turn this into an actual job one day?
If you answered yes to that, stop right there.
Today is the day you are no longer
going to consider yourself a small channel.
If you want to one day be a larger channel on YouTube,
then there are some things
that you can do right now to make that happen.
And one of those things is to stop treating yourself
as if you are a smaller creator,
insinuating that you almost don't deserve
to have some level of success.
- I hope you have at least,
a year, what do I...
50K subs?
Aw, that seems kind of high, ugh.
- Today we're gonna start focusing on treating your channel
like it's a business, and we're gonna look
at using a simple method that Apple, IBM, and Ford use
to actually grow their businesses.
This approach that these companies use
is called design thinking,
and it actually relates to YouTube quite a lot.
It's a human-centered approach to problem solving
that involves understanding your audience,
generating ideas, prototyping and testing,
and they're all steps that you should already be applying
to your YouTube channel if you're not already.
Let us know in the comments if you would like to one day
make YouTube your job.
And then let's get into the first principle
of design thinking, and that's empathy.
In the context of YouTube,
that's simply stepping into the shoes
of the people who watch your videos.
We wanna ask ourselves here, what are their interests?
What challenges do they have,
and how can we be making content
that entertains, informs, or helps them in some way?
When factoring empathy into your channel,
research is your best friend.
You wanna start with the kind of niche
that you're covering on YouTube.
Within that niche,
what are the topics that interest your viewers the most?
What kind of hooks will get them to stop what they're doing
and watch the rest of your video?
This research will help your content
when it comes to scripting and planning each video you do.
I don't care what kind of content you make on YouTube.
The goal of every video you make going forward
is to get some kind of emotional response from the viewer.
You want them to learn, you wanna make them smile,
you wanna make them feel entertained.
One of the things that can help you with this process,
by the way, is asking yourself,
what kind of comments would I like to receive
after I publish this video?
We uploaded a video recently where we asked our video editor
to share his story on our channel,
and his goal was to make it so that the audience
could not click away and that they really noticed
all of the time and effort he put into that video.
The comments we got on that video
matched the expectations we had for it going in.
People heard the message we were trying to convey
and they appreciated it,
and once you have that type of video,
those comments become even more valuable
because they can inspire future videos that you make.
Posting that video taught us so much about our audience
and the things that they value
beyond just "I want to get 1,000 subscribers".
The more you know about your audience,
the better you can serve them.
If you're not doing it already,
taking that more empathetic approach to content creation
is going to be something that'll take some practice,
so don't pressure yourself to do this
all within the course of making your next video.
Look at what you're doing now, take some notes,
and keep this in your back pocket
as you look to make improvements.
I say that because it's time to move on
to the second phase of design thinking,
and that is to define.
You're going to use this time
to define the specific problems and opportunities that arose
while you were gathering research during the empathy phase,
essentially defining that niche
that I mentioned a little while ago.
Choosing a niche is akin to defining a problem
and coming up with a solution for a specific type of viewer.
People should be able to look at your channel
and get a sense of the overall value that you provide
on a day-to-day basis, because here's the thing.
The biggest problem that people face on YouTube
is all of the competition of everyone else on YouTube.
It could be almost impossible to stand out,
so a lot of channels start out
by picking a very specific focus and driving towards that
throughout the course of their YouTube journey.
It takes a while, but you wanna find that sweet spot
between things you are interested in
and things that an audience would also be interested in,
and you also wanna find the sweet spot
between things that a lot of people would be interested in,
and at the same time,
this thing that you've decided to dedicate your channel to
had better have some kind of decently sized audience
so that you can realistically grow
from covering that type of content.
Take Jeff's channel, "El Jefe Reviews".
It is a channel that is actually a niche
within a niche within a niche.
Jeff has the go-to channel
for reviews on wireless headphones.
He took the time to define his niche,
and now he stands out amongst the crowd
in this specific category on YouTube.
All right, the next phase we need to look at is ideate.
It's essentially a brainstorming phase.
We're gonna look at a whole bunch of ideas
and then we're going to try and find potential solutions.
As a channel that's just starting out,
this could also be looked at as a really good opportunity
for you to experiment
if you're still trying to find that niche.
What do you currently have a lot of knowledge about?
Can you solve problems for viewers
who were once in a position that you might have been in
when you didn't have the answers?
At this stage, it's kinda the opposite advice
of what you would expect.
It's quantity over quality.
Don't be afraid to think outside the box
and experiment a whole lot.
If you have vidIQ and you're a Boost member,
you have up to 50 daily ideas every single day.
You can use this tool to just take a whole slew of ideas
that you want to try out on your channel.
Doing this type of exercise is going to help you
narrow down that niche and eventually focus on something
really specific that you can do on your channel.
A great example
of this is gonna be a channel called "Food Fusion".
When they started their channel, they initially experimented
with various content styles and formats
to find the right fit for their audience.
They were in the food niche,
but they were trying various types of content,
recipe tutorials, food vlogs, cooking challenges,
a bunch of different things,
but all under the umbrella of food channel.
Their journey, though, exemplifies the power
of experimentation and iteration.
This experience helped them find the right type of content
that resonated with their audience.
It also highlights the importance of staying flexible
as a YouTube creator.
I know a lot of you out there can get into the habit
of watching videos like this
and trying to follow the advice to a T,
forgetting that you're still a person
who has a lot of different interests
and we're all still trying to just kind of figure this out.
So all of those steps equate to a whole lot of research
and brainstorming, but don't get stuck there forever.
It's really easy to do all of that work
and literally never record a video.
So now we're gonna talk
about the next phase of design thinking,
which is prototyping and testing.
Sit down, come up with three to five videos,
plan them out however you're going to, and film them.
Edit those videos.
Make good titles and thumbnails to the best of your ability
and post them.
I don't care if these are three to five videos
that are completely different from one another
'cause you just have all these different interests,
or they're three to five videos of exactly the same type
'cause you just want to go in on one topic for a bit
to see how it does.
It doesn't matter. Don't overthink it.
Post your videos.
You can test and refine as you go,
but first you need to post videos
and you need to get data around what you've posted.
You're gonna closely monitor that audience engagement,
that viewer feedback.
You're gonna look at your channel analytics,
which videos have the best click-through rate,
which videos have the best levels of engagement,
which videos got the most views?
Listen to what your viewers have to say.
You can use things on your community tab like polls
and just asking questions
and trying to receive as much feedback as possible,
but also, don't let one person's comment
dictate the entire direction
for the future of your channel.
At the end of the day, it's your channel.
You need to make sure
you're still enjoying what you're doing,
and sometimes viewers have different opinions
about what kind of content you can make,
and if you listen to them too much,
it could kind of make your head spin a little bit.
So take their feedback to heart
but understand that not everyone you reach with your content
is going to be maybe the ideal fit for your channel
and be willing to let those viewers move on.
The moral behind that story is you can't please everybody.
The final phase is implementation.
Keep brainstorming, keep planning, keep posting new videos.
Take everything you've learned
and implement a content strategy.
Maybe something really took off
during all of your experimentation
and you want to double down on that type of video.
Maybe you went really, really hard and posted
like one video every single day and you burnt yourself out.
Well, maybe you wanna change your schedule a little bit.
The implementation stage
is all about continuous improvement and growth.
Even when you reach 10,000 subscribers,
there's going to be something that you need to improve on
every single day.
If you found that helpful
and you're ready to try this for yourself for real,
then I urge you to watch this video right here.
It's going to give you a deeper look
into what we're actually doing on our own channel.