- There are two big things we want to focus on today
to help you reach that next big YouTube milestone.
In the case of this video, 1000 subscribers.
But first this video's intent that is to say,
where do you want these videos to live on YouTube?
Who are they for?
The second is your analytics,
because those will hold the key
to getting your next video
that coveted 1 out of 10 spot
in your YouTube studio dashboard.
We're going to start by oversimplifying
where a video lives on YouTube
once you hit publish.
Because in my opinion,
there are three main buckets
your content could be placed.
And you as the creator actually have a lot of control
over which ones you want it to live in.
And yes, a video can live
in more than one of these at a time.
For the sake of this video,
the three main buckets are search,
the home feed, or the browse feed,
and YouTube shorts.
Search-driven videos such as how to's and guides
can introduce a lot of new people to your channel over time.
Those searchable videos may even show up
in your regular viewers home feeds,
the problem with that
is that if your regular viewers aren't looking to solve
that particular problem at that particular time,
they won't click on it
and thus it will leave the home feed for them,
probably forever.
And this is the expected behavior
when you make a video intended for search.
So I like to think of searchable videos
as ways to introduce new people to your channel.
With that in mind,
we're going to call this step one
for getting to a thousand subscribers on YouTube.
Now I understand that not every creator
is trying to target search on YouTube,
but just hear me out.
Once a new viewer clicks on one of your videos
they find in the search feed,
you obviously want them to subscribe and watch more.
Traditionally though,
people don't subscribe after just watching one
of your videos.
Once they get the answer to the question
they've been asking in search,
they typically move on
and they don't have an inherent interest
in the rest of your channel.
But that is where the home feed comes in
because you as a YouTube viewer
have probably noticed when you watch somebody's video
anywhere on YouTube,
the next day, or even later that day,
YouTube will be in your home feed
showing you other videos from that creator.
So now that you've made a searchable video,
that's getting a lot of new viewers
to check out your channel for the very first time,
the trick is to get them to check it out for a second time.
Which leads us to our next step,
which I can't get to unfortunately
without first mentioning YouTube shorts.
See shorts live in their own separate places
in the YouTube app.
One of them in particular, we talk about a lot
is the shorts shelf.
Now, depending entirely on your goals as a creator,
you can make an entire channel dedicated to YouTube shorts,
or you could make a channel that includes YouTube shorts
among your long form videos.
Either of these are great strategies, but again,
it just depends on your goals.
What I will say though,
is that if you're a creator
looking to implement shorts among your long form videos,
there's something really need to keep in mind.
It's important to remember that if you go this route
converting those short form viewers
to viewers of all of your videos
is very difficult to do.
You need to make sure the short form videos that you make
are very incredibly similar to the long form videos
that you make.
I'm going to link a card up top right now
for our shorts playlist,
because we go in depth on all kinds of different strategies
related to YouTube shorts.
But I just want you to keep that one tidbit in mind
as we move forward.
So step two, for getting to a thousand subscribers
on YouTube is to make videos that can live
amongst the browse features on YouTube,
specifically today,
we're looking at the home feed.
For video to be successful in the home feed,
it needs to be intriguing to the same type of person
who would have found one of your videos from search
or from shorts as I mentioned a minute ago.
You know how a lot of us in the YouTube education space
are always talking about how there's no secret to YouTube
and a lot of this just comes down to experience.
Yeah, that's the step we're on. That's step two.
Because for a video to become successful
in the browse and suggested features of YouTube,
you really need to understand your ideal viewer.
We have a video that I'll link right now
that goes over the steps in doing exactly that.
But the short of it is that
this is something you can research,
and this is something you can get better at over time.
It's also crucial that, you know your topic
just as well as you know your audience, if not better.
So picking a trend
just because you think it might get views,
won't cut it here.
You have to understand what is that topic that's trending?
Why is it so popular?
How are people responding to it?
These are all things you'll find
as you keep creating content on YouTube
and keep gaining experience.
So let's take a look at a channel
that has mastered making search driven content
and content that has that more emotional pull
that does very well in the home feed.
These are our friends at Think Media,
and they are about to hit 2 million subscribers
here pretty soon.
Their content is designed to help creators
find the right gear as well as grow on YouTube.
In terms of the titles of the videos that they produce,
you can tell that most of them,
if you take a look are designed to be discovered
in search over the course of a long period of time.
While most of their videos do target YouTube search,
there are a number of them
that actually have more of that emotional pull.
Specifically, this video right here,
Stop it Using this YouTube Feature.
This video got 18,000 views just four weeks ago
at the time of recording this video.
And what you'll notice about it is that we don't really know
what feature is being discussed.
This video in particular
is designed to create suspense and intrigue.
You as a YouTube creator,
need to know what this feature is.
Is this something that you've been using
and why should you stop using?
The purpose in showing you Think Media's channel
is to help you understand that it is a choice.
Do you want your video to live in search
or do you want it to live more
in the browse and suggested features?
It's also possible that videos like these
can do well in browse and in search.
It really just depends on the viewer, okay.
Take this video you're watching right now for example.
If you are a regular viewer of this channel,
it likely showed up in your home feed first
and now you've clicked it,
even though I am trying to target search.
However, your as a regular viewer,
likely clicking on this video,
because you understand that everything we upload
on vidIQ has some kind of inherent value to you.
And if I'm right, if that's the case for you,
then it's fair to say that vidIQ has likely earned
a bit of your trust.
You even may already have a thousand subscribers,
but you know, as a regular viewer of this channel,
every single video we produce
will have something for everybody in it,
even if it's titled something like
How to Start a Gaming Channel.
Even travel channels can benefit
from some of the advice in that video.
So this video will get some strong browse views
when we first publish it.
But over time, we expect it to do a lot better in search.
And you might be asking, how do you even know that?
Well that's because this video is actually a remake
of one, just like it.
At the time of recording,
this video is about to hit 1.3 million views on YouTube,
and it is titled
How to Get Your First 1000 Subscribers on YouTube in 2021.
In the last 48 hours,
60% of the views on this video
have exclusively come from YouTube search.
However, if we look at this video success
in its first 24 hours on YouTube,
we'll notice that it has under 10,000 views.
And if we go over to the reach tab
and check out traffic source types in the first 24 hours,
we'll see that over half of the views came from browse.
As I said, earlier,
videos can live in multiple buckets at one time.
And I expect this one to do the same, at least at first.
But let me show you an example of a video we made
that was basically only designed to live in browse
for a short period of time.
I titled this video,
Millions of Channels Just Unlocked This.
And as you can see today, it's not really doing much.
But when it was first published,
it was one of our top performing videos at the time
with over 22,000 views in its first 24 hours.
The story behind that video
is that YouTube announced the YouTube community tab
was going to be unlocked for creators
at 500 subscribers rather than a 1000.
It was a very exciting announcement,
but what I knew people wouldn't really be searching for.
So I immediately went for the emotional pull
when I created that video.
I had two goals when I made the YouTube video.
One was to update people
about a breaking YouTube news story.
And the other was to get them excited about a new feature
that I know a lot of people
don't really appreciate enough on YouTube.
So to quickly recap,
before getting into step three,
search-driven videos are helpful
for people finding you for the very first time,
videos with that more emotional pull
help people who found you for that first time
have some sort of interest in other types of videos
you make on your channel,
thus watching you for a second, third and fourth time.
Step three for getting a 1000 subscribers on YouTube
is going to be about getting people to watch more
than one of your videos in one sitting.
Let's create some binge sessions
and we're going to do this by leveraging end screens
and pinned comments in your video.
This is probably the easiest step
we're going to cover today
and if you've already been making videos
and you have a whole library of them,
after you watch this,
you can go in and start setting this up for yourself.
When recording videos,
what I want you to get in the habit of doing from now on
is instead of having a boring outro screen,
I want you to invite people to watch the next video.
Specifically the next video,
that's going to be relevant to them.
How do I know if a video is relevant
to the audience that is watching the current video?
Great question.
If they're watching the current video,
they're going to want to watch something similar next.
So to do this at peak efficiency,
what you want to do is know exactly which video
you're going to push people to
before you start recording.
If you want to see an example of how this has done,
just stay tuned to the end of this video.
But the most important thing to remember
about this technique
is that the next video you push people
to needs to be relevant to the interests
of the person watching the current video.
And doing this also helps keep
your entire channel very focused.
It causes you to put your content into categories
and then hopefully those categories into playlist.
So if you're a travel channel,
those categories might be the different places you visit.
If you're an art channel,
maybe you have a whole category for painting
and a whole category for sculpting.
So someone who's watching a sculpting video,
probably isn't going to want to watch a painting video next.
So you invite them to watch the next sculpture video
that you did.
By now I think you're starting to catch on
to my strategy for getting to a thousand subscribers
on YouTube.
A lot of it just comes down to preparation and consistency
in the type of content you make.
Another thing you can do to prepare
for getting more views and subscribers,
titles and thumbnails,
and that brings us to step four.
You need to conceive these
before you ever record your video.
Knowing your title and thumbnail beforehand
helps keep your video focused throughout
and has a lot of other benefits too.
Because it also helps you do your research
on that title and thumbnail
to make sure that it is as clickable as possible.
That research may reveal a whole new direction
you need to take that content
in order for it to be discoverable.
And there's nothing worse than trying to figure that out
after you finished recording and editing,
I do understand that this isn't always possible
depending on the type of content you make,
but I would encourage you to do this as often as possible.
Additionally,
your titles and thumbnails should work together.
You don't want people having to try and guess
what your video's about.
The less thinking somebody has to do,
the more likely they are to click.
There's no one bit of advice I can give you
for having the best title and thumbnail.
It really comes back to video intent.
Are you making videos for entertainment purposes
or are you making videos for educational purposes?
Because as you can see,
the two styles of title and thumbnail together
will be vastly different
depending on what you're doing on YouTube.
Of course, at vidIQ, we have my favorite tool
for doing this type of research
and we call it preview and search results.
All you need to do is type in the title
or search term you want to rank for on YouTube
and click preview and search results.
Now you can do this before you ever publish your video,
but once you click this button,
it's going to show you what your video
would potentially look like
amongst the top ranking videos
for that very same search term.
Do the title and the thumbnail
that you made for this video
stand out amongst the crowd?
If it happened to rank in the number one spots on YouTube,
is it going to be enough to have people click on?
Now earlier I said,
experience on YouTube is everything.
Learning from your past videos
will help improve your strategies going forward
and of course help you along your way
to a thousand subscribers.
Welcome to step five, analytics.
Now YouTube analytics can be rather overwhelming,
which is why we have some of our vidIQ tools
in the first place.
But today we're just going to look at a few
of YouTube's own analytical tools,
that I would encourage you to keep up with
on a regular basis.
When you click on YouTube analytics
from your YouTube studio,
you are likely familiar with the overview tab.
Now this is great at a glance,
but it doesn't really paint a complete picture.
Clicking on see more allows you to dive incredibly deep
into your YouTube analytics.
But we can save this sort of lesson for another time.
Instead, we've talked a lot today
about where your videos can show up on YouTube.
So I'm going to go into the reach tab
and scroll down to traffic source types.
For our channel in the last 28 days,
it looks like 25% of our views have come from browse
and 24% have come from search.
Our videos have received 20 million impressions
in the last month,
which has equated to a 4.6% click through rate overall.
And we've gotten 920,000,
almost 921,000 views from those impressions.
This is showing us a nice report card
for traffic sources and views and impressions
for our entire channel.
But you can even get the same data
on a video by video basis.
But there's a new tool YouTube recently rolled out
that I really want to show you.
If you go into your audience tab
and scroll down to videos, growing your audience,
you get some very revealing information.
These videos are specifically being called out
for helping new viewers return to our channel.
I would encourage you to check this out for yourself
because these videos are the ones
that you need to be doubling down on.
Speaking of returning viewers, though,
if you scroll up from here,
this is probably the best graph you can find on YouTube
to understand just how many people
are watching your channel on a regular basis.
Putting your cursor on any given day,
will show you exactly how many people watched your videos,
who returned to your channel
and how many watched your videos who were brand new
to your channel.
Later in the series though,
we're going to be diving a lot deeper into all of this,
so that's your cue to subscribe.
So that was step five,
but we're not even done
because this video is going to show you
exactly what you need to do to grow even more
on YouTube.
Remember I told you, I'd show you how it's done.