- If you've been trying to grow your YouTube channel,
and you're just not getting traction,
you got some maybe initial success,
but now you just feel stuck,
Sean Cannell and I are gonna give you guys
some ideas and tips for how you can move forward
and find success on your channel.
Hey guys, welcome to Video Creators,
man name is Tim Schmoyer,
and this is Sean Cannell from Think Media,
as well as Video Influencers channel.
And both of us are here
because we love helping you guys find more success
and get more results with your online video efforts,
specially here on YouTube.
And sometimes it's just super frustrating.
You've been trying really hard,
you get a little bit of traction,
and then you're like why am I
not getting more growth than before?
So in your experience with working with creators
and training them, what is the first thing
they should think about
to get unstuck and move to being unstoppable?
- Yeah I mean I think the first thing
that you gotta think about is do you need to pivot
or do you need to just keep going longer and persevere?
Think Media recently hit one million subscribers.
But that was a 10-year journey.
And still major results,
but if you look at the growth curve
of Think Media, back in 2010 I started it,
and it was flat for pretty much five years.
Flat in comparison too,
'cause you're getting some views,
but it didn't really register.
Year six it started to pick up.
Year seven it started to climb,
and then eight, nine and 10
it was like this wall of growth.
And so I like to think about what
would have happened if I would have given up
in year three or year five,
or even in year six,
before the breakthrough, before the breakout,
or before that even season of life.
So maybe you need to pivot,
or maybe you just need to keep going.
You know on Video Influencers we'll get comments,
people go man, I just am stuck Sean,
I don't know why I'm not growing.
So what I'll do is I'll click through
on their channel
and I'll see okay they've been doing it for three months,
they upload three videos a month,
two some months about all kinds
of random topics and random directions,
and it's like well this,
the reason you're not breaking out
is you're not being consistent,
there's no cohesive strategy there.
And you probably haven't even
made enough videos to get comfortable on camera
and find your voice.
- Right.
- You probably need to make 50 to 100 bad videos
before you get to your good videos.
- Yeah.
Mr. Beast made like videos for seven years
before he started having a successful channel.
You know I started YouTube in 2006,
and didn't go full time until 2013.
And now it's nine people who work here,
we got employees and everything and everything.
Now it's grown significantly in the past few years,
but it was a long journey to get there
'cause you got a lot
of mistakes you gotta make,
and a lot of things you gotta learn.
- Yep, 100%.
- If that's you, you just need to keep going.
How should they move forward?
- Yeah, well I think the second tip
would be maybe try something new.
You know what can happen is we can get in a rut
of maybe the style of content that we do.
Maybe you shoot your videos on a webcam
and they're always talking head.
Grab your phone, go outside
and try a vlog style video.
Maybe all you're doing is vlogging,
and hoping to become a famous daily blogger
and it's not working.
What if you change your content format or approach?
You could really get into lots
of different content formats.
I think just giving it,
getting out of that rut
and trying something different
gives us a chance to have a breakout video,
and it very well could lead to your,
the thing that works
or to the content format
that really resonates with your audience
and triggers massive growth.
- I think what also happens
is you're trying new things,
you're then learning new things,
and as you're learning new things
that triggers ideas
where that's gonna make
oh I see now why the thing I was trying,
I'm really passionate about that,
I don't wanna change it,
but now I see why it wasn't working
because I branched off
and tried to tell a story
instead of just giving three tips.
Or I tried to learn how to do better thumb nail design
or something like that.
It unlocks oh I see why that's not working.
- I think we can get so kind of romantic
about the way we do things.
And almost scared of breaking out of that.
Recently we've radically started trying
all kinds of different thumb nails.
And for a while I was almost like you know what
people are gonna stop watching,
they're not gonna click through on this even.
Not only is this maybe not gonna work,
it's gonna destroy our channel
because we just got so used to
doing things in a certain way.
But now we're doing no text on thumbnails,
text on thumbnails.
Objects in thumbnails.
And if you never experiment,
then you never really have an opportunity to grow.
This is true also if you're a seasoned creator,
that it's easy to get in ruts.
- Oh yeah, absolutely.
- And I think that experimenting
is where you an see a lot of magic happen.
- Also consider that you might have some blind spots
that you're not even aware of what you don't know.
- Yeah, I totally agree.
And when I think about, you know, tip number one
was maybe you need to keep going.
And you talked about years
that it took for you to go full time.
I talked about years for Think Media
to really start to grow.
But I believe we could have shortened our learning curve
if we would have gotten help
from somebody that was further down the road.
So I know you've got some incredible resources.
This is also like just getting in a Facebook group,
getting in community.
Getting someone else's perspective on your content.
Probably the worst thing you can do
that'll keep you stuck is just stay stuck in your own world.
You gotta be open to somebody else
speaking into your content,
and I think humble enough
to be willing to say maybe you have some blind spots,
and some of the just small tweaks in your content
could actually lead to giant peaks.
- You can be looking at your content
and your data all day every day,
and if you don't know what to look for,
I don't know what all this means.
I don't even know how to use this information
to improve to move forward.
So that's where something like
YouTube Creator Academy could be an excellent,
it's free, it's made by YouTube themselves.
And that will help you reveal a lot
of things that you didn't even know to look for
or even consider.
I know Sean has a course,
Video Ranking Academy.
I have a course called 30 Days to a Better YouTube Channel.
Both of those are great places to start
of how do you just start to unlock the blind spots
you have so you can see oh that's where I went wrong,
or that's what I'm missing
so you can help improve those things and move forward.
- Lifelong leaders are lifelong learners.
And by getting information from people
that are getting results,
watching videos like this,
you're already doing it
so we're preaching to the choir,
but I found too that my fastest acceleration
is when I've invested in my channel,
in myself, in learning, in going,
we're at an event, Social Media Marketing World,
learning from others.
And there could be that one unlock,
one conversation, one module in your course,
one video, you're like that's the thing.
And when you pair that with perseverance,
that's the magic combo because
that breakthrough moment can come,
whether it's next month,
next year or even five years from now.
It's not necessarily gonna be easy,
but it's gonna be worth it
because the impact that you can make
with a growing YouTube channel.
- One thing that you might be totally under utilizing
that you should absolutely be using
to help you get unstuck is
your YouTube analytics.
And I know as soon as I say that
a lot of creators glaze over,
they're like oh I'm just like the creative type
of person who just likes to make what I feel.
Guys the numbers don't lie.
Your commenters will,
they'll tell you they love your video,
and then abandon it.
But the data does not lie.
It tells you exactly what's going on.
And it's one of the best ways
you can find opportunity for growth.
So if you just wanna get started,
one of the things I would recommend
is going straight to looking at your impressions,
your click through rates,
what did that lead towards in watch time,
and looking at those three measures tougher
can help you improve your thumbnails
and your titles,
which is impressions and click through rates.
And then how did that lead to holding someone's attention,
your actual content,
using your audience retention graphs
to see what's causing abandonment.
And then even looking at your end screen
click through rates to see
are people actually going on
and watching another video after this?
Is this video extending the viewing session?
Or are people gone even before they get there?
- Yeah, I love it.
And even simpler than that,
YouTube Studio has been
very user friendly I feel lately
with the landing page dashboard
of your recent 10 videos,
so you at least know how your video did
compared to your last 10.
And then with these cool sentence
or two about hey, this video is doing better
because more subscribers are interested in it
and we're sharing it with more people.
They're kind of just trying to tell us.
Or they're saying your subscribers
weren't that interested in it
so that's why the views are down.
You know what gets measured gets improved.
You start noticing trends.
You start noticing patterns.
And you start, even with your own content
you go oh this is the kind of content that resonates.
Obviously there's breakouts
and there's exceptions to the rule,
but it's like I almost know
what's gonna happen with a video
before I post it nowadays.
- And you know that because you've been watching
the data for so long
so that when a video's underperforming
you're like oh I tried it differently
and it's not working,
flip it back on the next video.
But if you're not watching it's all haphazard changes,
kind of random.
And you don't really know
what's moving the needle
and what's not.
Unless you're in your data
and you're learning it,
like how does your content perform?
After you've implemented all these things,
and you're starting to see traction again,
the next thing you want to do
is learn how do I now get massive momentum
on this channel to really move forward?
Sean and I talked about that over on his channel.
So you can click that video you see on your screen right now
to go over to Sean's channel,
and learn more about how to take your channel
to the next level.
We'll see you guys over there.