- Growing an online presence today can be a bit intimidating
as there are just so many platforms you can choose from.
You have YouTube, TikTok, Instagram,
and it can be a struggle to figure out
which one you should concentrate on the most.
And what a lot of creators seem to end up doing
is buying into the FOMO and just starting accounts
on every single social platform they can think of,
and then trying to produce all the content
on all the platforms all at once,
which leads to massive burnout very quickly.
So today, I'm here to really sell you on the idea
of starting on YouTube because not only can you grow,
in my opinion, the fastest on YouTube,
but you can also have that content
distributed onto other platforms
without a lot of extra effort.
Going into 2023,
I personally believe that YouTube is going to be the place
to become a content creator,
but let me know in the comments before we get started,
which platform you are kind of leaning towards at this time.
The first reason I would like you to focus on YouTube
is because YouTube focuses on individual videos.
What I mean by this is that YouTube
isn't looking at the number of subscribers you have
to determine the success of any one video that you put out.
Similar to TikTok,
YouTube is going to judge each of your uploads individually.
This means that you get to focus less on gimmicks
to get people to subscribe to grow your reach or influence
and more on the quality of your content.
Having high quality content
is going to lead to better average view duration,
which is going to tell YouTube
that this content is worth sharing.
Additionally,
working on your CTR or click-through rate
is going to help people
click on that content more frequently.
So if you have a really good title
and a really nice looking thumbnail,
that's gonna give you the best opportunity
to get your videos seen,
even if you're just uploading for the first time.
And those first time videos
can actually lead to views well into the future
because YouTube does a fantastic job
of letting content age on the platform.
On some of these other platforms,
content can be very disposable, whereas on YouTube,
you can choose to make your content more evergreen
and it can get seen years and years into the future.
This is because Google and YouTube
are two of the largest search platforms
on the entire internet,
and even Google is going out of its way
to surface more and more video results
to help answer people's most asked questions.
There are plenty of ways to get discovered
outside of YouTube search,
but this is why you should have search
as part of your strategy,
it's almost like running two channels in one.
Some of your videos will be more optimized for SEO,
search and discovery,
and some of your videos will be more browse focused,
they'll have really emotional titles and thumbnails
and they'll get shared on other areas of YouTube.
And once you post all of these videos,
you are going to get a ton of data.
YouTube's gonna give you an insane amount of data
on each and every video, and once you understand that data,
you can go in and make decisions for your next videos.
Take the retention graph, for example.
A lot of us on YouTube have this issue,
and we've had it for a long time,
where we start a video and right from jump,
a whole bunch of people just leave.
Seeing that data in your retention graph is very valuable
because you can go into specific parts of your video,
see where people kind of dipped,
and then decide for yourself
if there's things you can do to improve
for the next video that you record.
Some of the biggest YouTubers on this platform
have made it basically a game
to see if they can get the retention graph
to be as high as possible at the beginning of the video,
and to get the overall average view duration percentage
to be as high as possible as well.
And if you get overwhelmed
by all this data you're gonna receive,
I highly recommend you install our extension vidIQ
on your Edge, Firefox, or Chrome browser.
Our tool has way too many features to list here right now,
including daily ideas and title generators
and all kinds of things,
but we also do a really good job of taking that data
and trying to present it to you in a different way
that's a little bit easier to approach.
At this time,
Instagram and TikTok don't provide it nearly as much data
as you're going to get on YouTube,
and that's gonna help inform decisions
that ultimately grow your reach.
Now, earlier I mentioned
that YouTube content can be easily repurposed
in a number of ways.
Remember that retention graph I mentioned earlier?
Well, you can actually leverage that in a different way.
If you go into your videos
and you see certain parts of your videos
being replayed more than others,
this might be a great opportunity
to take that clip from a video
and turn it into an Instagram Reel or a TikTok.
In addition to TikTok,
YouTube now has YouTube Shorts,
and you can even use that same vertical clip on TikTok
and on YouTube on your channel
once again as a YouTube Short.
And you can repurpose this content
in other creative ways too, such as an Instagram carousel
or maybe a Twitter thread that features the key points.
If you're willing to spend the time,
one video can go a really long way,
and even if you're not willing to spend that time,
YouTube itself is viewable everywhere
on all kinds of devices.
Not only is YouTube dominant on phones
and tablets and desktops,
but the YouTube TV app is incredibly powerful.
And if you are a TV viewer of YouTube,
I want you to ask yourself this question,
when was the last time you loaded TikTok
or Instagram from your television set?
Personally, I think this is a huge advantage
that YouTube has over all of its competition,
and that's just one of many advantage,
we haven't even talked about
the money you can make on YouTube.
If you make it into the YouTube Partnership Program,
with a thousand subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time,
you can enable ads across all of your content.
For regular videos,
YouTube gives creators more than half of the revenue
that these videos generate.
Pretty soon, YouTube Shorts will also
be able to bring creators ad revenue,
but that's a separate topic
for a bunch of separate videos
that we've actually been making here on the channel.
But aside from ads, there's a number of ways
that viewers who watch your content can support you,
such as supers or even memberships.
Additionally, you have merch shelves
built right into YouTube,
and channels that have a lot of reach
and a lot of success can set up brand deals with companies
who are willing to sponsor their content for a lot of money.
These brands understand that YouTube videos
can live a very long time if optimized properly.
So sponsorship deals can be a huge source of income for you
in the future, thus helping you grow your business.
One thing about this platform
that I think a lot of us creators
who've been here while take for granted
is the description section.
You might be thinking, that's a really weird call out
but hear me out for a second.
In the description of our YouTube videos,
we're allowed to put as many links
to as many things as we want.
This means that any creators on YouTube
who haven't even gotten into the monetization programs yet
on the platform are able to leverage their descriptions
to put things like affiliate links in their videos.
A lot of these other platforms only allow you
to just post one link in your bio,
but YouTube not only has this description section,
which we can use for whatever we need to,
but people across the website
are used to opening that description section
to get additional information.
With so many opportunities
to become an affiliate of all kinds of brands
and with an audience conditioned
to actually click those links,
YouTube is once again on top when it comes to making money,
or at the very least
just providing a little bit of additional context.
Those are a lot of the benefits we have
that are on the surface of YouTube,
but we haven't even touched on copyright,
which largely exists in the backend.
While YouTube's copyright system is far from perfect,
it does a really good job of helping you keep your content
from getting stolen.
If somebody takes your videos
and puts them somewhere else on YouTube,
YouTube systems will automatically find that content
and notify you.
From there, you can choose
what actions you wanna take, if any.
YouTube is great because you as the creator
have the ability to build authority
over a long period of time.
Having a platform that saves your long-form content
and continues to service it well into the future
just helps you build your credibility and expertise.
If you're an expert in your topic
and you're teaching people something
they don't already know,
then you're going to build these relationships,
not only with your audience,
but with the the industry that you're focused on at large.
In this way, YouTube can open a lot of doors
and it certainly did for me.
So if I've convinced you to start a YouTube channel,
then this is the video you're gonna wanna watch next
if you want a successful launch to that channel.
And don't forget to subscribe
because we're gonna be helping you
throughout your entire YouTube journey.