Welcome back. Okay, so last week I talked about the three layers really of creating content online
and leveraging them all for different reasons and that I have changed a lot when it comes to
my YouTube strategy, I'm sure that you've noticed. I've been doing this for six years, it is really
my business, it is my job and I love this platform and it's also evolved and it's changed over the
years. And over the last 12 months, really, I have gone deep into truly understanding how it ticks,
how it works and how as a content creator, you can set better expectations for yourself so the
programme doesn't drive you crazy. If you didn't relate to that, give me a like and let me know,
and if you aren't subscribed yet, it's free to subscribe. You can always change your mind later,
I talked to entrepreneurship, social media, and I do some pretty crazy giveaways for my
subscribers as well, so hit that subscribe button. In addition, a few videos ago, I talked about a
client of mine who had 13,000 subscribers, but he's on track to generate a million dollars in
revenue this year using his YouTube channel and I want to talk through how that's even possible
with a subscriber count that's not massive. So I'll touch on that as well. So over the last
couple of months, I've really dove deep into creating the YouTube code, and this is what I
truly believe and I've watched now, crack the code for so many creators on YouTube and entrepreneurs
on YouTube for really leveraging the platform for a huge benefit in return for themselves.
And not just guessing about every video that you put up. So what is the YouTube code? Okay,
so it breaks down into Content, Optimization, excuse my handwriting, Development and Expand.
Brief overview of each of these things, and this is what I've spent the last couple of
months working on. If you watched this video, you know that I took time off. This whole thing is it.
So content is creating the concepts for your videos before you ever shoot them. I often say
research before you record, this kind of takes it up another level. So I'm going to dive into
the three types of content that really are the only categories that you need to tackle
on this platform and to help organize your content creation moving forward. Optimization means when
you're putting up your content on YouTube, is it optimized to perform well across all the different
metrics? I'm going to talk about the metrics that are most important in just a second. And
is it optimized to convert for you and give you what you're looking for in terms of engagement,
like, subscribers, comments, shares, and in terms of if you have a business,
is it actually converting to clients, leads customers, et cetera? So optimization.
Development is the third step, which oftentimes this comes first and that's a huge mistake.
Development is, "Okay, I now know the kind of content I'm making. I know it's optimized
to actually really benefit me in my channel, now I'm going to actually create the content
itself." So develop the content from start to finish, make sure that it's developed in a way
that gets you high retention and subscriber growth and also just overall brand awareness.
And then Expand means, okay, off of YouTube, what can you be doing to really grow your
channel and grow your authority as the best of the best in your space? So let's dive into
actually cracking this code and the three types of content on YouTube that are necessary.
So the three categories, really, this is what it comes down to note and I recognize spot for,
are pretty simple. It's viral, which is what everybody thinks every YouTube video should be,
and it's just not true. Viral videos have a place and a time, but they aren't actually necessary for
every piece of content you put out. So viral videos, the benefits of them is it gives you
this huge surge of views, it gives you a ton of brand awareness and it gives your channel
a ton of attention and positive signals in the algorithm in a very short period of time. But
the issue with viral videos is that they don't often give you a long-term benefit. So these are
great when you to give your channel a boost and when there's a topic that you could capitalize on
to gain attention and momentum. Often times, it's very timely, it's emotional driven, it's highly
relevant to your audience, it could be something happening in your industry. That's viral content.
When it comes to viral content, your analytics will look like this. So basically it shows
you that it's reaching outside of your subscriber base and it's helping you grow
your audience in a big way. But again, virality without relevancy can actually do more harm than
good because you're getting all of these eyeballs and these views on a topic that you don't really
care about and most importantly, your viewers doesn't really care about. It's actually hurting
your channel moving forward because the rest of your content won't be relevant to the new
audience that you're bringing in and therefore that content won't perform as well. So you have to
combine virality with relevance and I'll talk about that more in a second.
Now the next piece of content category is depth. So depth content is basically a video that doesn't
follow the norm on YouTube and allows you creative freedom to talk about anything that you want to
talk about, that again is highly relevant to your ideal viewer and is something that's important to
you. You don't have to follow the rules when it comes to having the title without a keyword in it,
or look a certain way or act a certain way. This is really the benefit of this kind of content is,
it humanizes you and it really builds loyalty with your current audience and subscriber base.
So your analytics for this kind of video are going to look more like this, where
you see that it's really being seen just by your subscriber base, not really expanding beyond that,
but you're getting super high retention and people are actually really invested in the content. So
you're getting pretty in depth comments and really qualitative engagement, which means
that your viewers and your ideal base loves it and it builds real loyalty for them to come back every
single time you make a video. So you shouldn't expect a surge of virality with these videos,
but you should expect a surge of loyalty with your audience and it allows you to just have some fun
and talk about things that are important to you. Now, the next category where the money is at is
evergreen. So evergreen content basically is super targeted content and the huge benefit of evergreen
content is that you make it once and it brings in subscribers, views, leads for your business
everything you need for the rest of time. There is no shelf life on this, it lasts forever. So
evergreen content, if you're an entrepreneur or an expert, this is the easiest kind of content
to create because you can batch record, meaning film a bunch of videos at once, put them up on
your channel and then not think about it again. And they'll just continue to work for you.
This creates an evergreen machine for your business to bring in all the things that you need.
So are you going to get a huge surge of use on these videos? No, not necessarily. You're just
going to continue to see the views rack up over time, and that's a huge benefit because again,
they work for you when you're not working. The example that I gave with Geoffrey
and his channel, his 13,000 subscribers, and he's on track to do a million dollars this year, his
channel very much so focuses on evergreen content. So he's not trying to go after a viral audience,
he wants a hyper relevant audience and the size of the views is not as important, the target of
the views is really important. Is he attracting his ideal customers and clients on his channel?
So to give you some real world examples, this video right here, the ugly truth
of entrepreneurship, is a viral video. It is something that can appeal to a lot of people,
it's very driven by emotion and it's super relatable and it's very timely because a lot
of people are experiencing burnout and they're tired and they're exhausted in their business. So
that's a viral video that brought in eyeballs, that brought in a lot of attention. A depth
video is a video like this, where the title really doesn't tell you much, so if someone's clicking on
that video, they're clicking on it because they're invested in me and my channel and they're super,
super loyal to the channel. And it builds a lot of depth with my audience. Deep, not wide. And then
evergreen content, How to Talk on Camera. There you go. So pretty simple in how you differentiate
these and it's important to play around with all of these types of content to make sure that you're
not just reaching the big audience that doesn't really care about you. This is surface level.
You're not just talking to your subscriber base and not reaching more people and you're not just
making videos on topics that people come to learn from you on and then they forget about you. So
the combination of all three of these is vital to success on YouTube and really cracking that code.
So now let's talk about using these categories to actually grow. So, down here this is what I
call hockey stick growth, Canadian, and so you start with, you have to start on YouTube because
the algorithm needs to know where to categorize you. You have to start with evergreen content.
So evergreen content is literally telling the algorithm, "This is who I am, who I'm trying
to target and what my channel is all about." So this is really where you niche down to blow up,
and if you start on YouTube or even if you have an existing channel and you're posting random content
with no real strategy and you're not seeing any growth, it's because you haven't told the
algorithm what you're about, and honestly, the viewer you're trying to attract. It doesn't know
what to do with your content or your channel. So you start with evergreen. I'd say, use about
eight videos to do as evergreen in the beginning, and if you have an existing use those eight videos
to establish yourself in the algorithm. And then from there, you want to have your depth
content because that depth content is going to make these subscribers that subscribed because
of evergreen come back for more, relate to you as a human and become super loyal as a subscriber on
your channel so that every time you put out a piece of content, they're going to be invested
in what you're saying and they're going to be the first ones to show up, which gives you this surge
in the algorithm to then have the algorithm use the traffic sources to reach more people. And from
there, you go into viral. So you built a base, they're engaged, they're going to help you support
every video that you put out and then viral content is going to help you reach more eyeballs.
And that creates this big spike and growth on your channel. And every month, if you're creating
content consistently, you can use a variation of these three and use them in combination together
to really achieve this huge amount of growth. So all in all, there is a fly wheel to
YouTube and to creating growth and it looks like this. First and foremost, you have to
know your viewer. Who are you actually trying to target? If you're trying to reach everybody,
you're going to reach nobody and you're going to think to the bottom of the sea on YouTube.
So in order to crack the code, you have to identify who is the viewer you're trying to reach,
and often times they're a mirror for you. And so who are you? What would you be
described as in terms of demographic? Really important to understand that before you even
get started or if you're trying to revamp and get a resurgence on your channel, focus
on this. Who is your ideal viewer? And then from there, making relevant content to that beamer,
because if you're making relevant content, these viewers are going to be engaged, they're going to
basically help the algorithm understand where to put you, and then it's going to be able to
help you grow without you having to put as much effort into making it work for you. So viewer,
making relevant content for the viewer, that creates, like I said, algorithm categorization,
so that way the algorithm knows who you're trying to reach and what your channel is all about.
They're robots. The algorithm is a bunch of robots and so it's not a bunch of humans going,
"Oh, I see the nuances in your content, I understand where I'm supposed to put you."
The robots have to work to figure out what are you actually saying in your videos and who do
you want us to reach? Once it understands that, then it uses the traffic sources within YouTube;
search, suggested, browse, to push your content to more ideal viewers, because it actually knows
who to put your content in front of. So that's how the algorithm starts to work for you and starts to
push your content. Ideal viewer, making relevant content for the viewer, algorithm categorization,
using the traffic sources and the algorithm to push your content to more viewers,
and then it just starts to move with more momentum to grow your channel even faster and to attract
even more ideal subscribers and viewers. And when you understand cracking the YouTube
code like this, it's important to know that views are not only metric, subscribers are not the only
metric, because here's the thing. Your subscriber base could grow by a ton if you make much viral
content, but are they the right subscribers for you? It's really important to know that
you don't want just any subscriber, you want the right subscriber. You don't want just any viewer,
you want the right viewer because that builds longevity on the platform and it allows you to
have high performance with every video you create, not just a few of them.
So what it looks like with the metrics that you need to pay attention to is what audience
are you reaching? Are they the ideal viewer and audience that you're trying to target?
You have the most control over this. When you do depth and evergreen content.
The next step is your CTR. This is important because if your CTR is bad,
nobody's going to be able to watch your video. So your CTR is your clickthrough rate. It really
comes down to four factors of your title, comes back down to your thumbnail, really important,
it comes down to the relevancy of the topic to your ideal audience. If it's not relevant,
they're not going to click on it. And then the first line of your description. So CTR is vitally
important because it basically is the basis for every other metric to do well on your video.
And then watch time. Are your viewers actually watching more than one video on your channel?
That's really important, and are they just staying on YouTube? Because YouTube is run by ads,
they want people to watch more videos so they make more money. Retention, this actually for
me is probably my favorite metric, because if people are actually watching my videos through the
whole thing, it tells me I'm making good content. I really don't care about views that much, I care
about if people are paying attention, because that ultimately is going to lead to overall longterm
growth. Obviously they're subscribers and not just any subscriber, are they the right subscribers,
viewers? And then the final metric is algorithm categorization. Is the algorithm categorizing you
with other channels, you can actually see this in the backend, that are similar to the audience that
you want to attract? And if it is, it's doing its job and it's working for you. So algorithm
categorization. The great thing about looking at all of these metrics all in all, is that
it doesn't make it you feel like you're losing your mind on YouTube. So if you just focus on
views and subscribers, it's a really frustrating game and you're not going to last long,
to be honest. I've seen a lot of people give up because that's their only metric of success.
That's why looking at all of these is so much more beneficial to you as the creator. So make sure
that you're focusing on all three categories of content, and I know this is a lot of information
and this is something I've been studying for a long time and I've actually just put together
a brand new free training to go even deeper on this with you. So you can check that out
in the link below, but I think the moral of the story is, as I've been saying,
go deep, not wide, and you'll feel like you're a lot more successful and at peace with your channel
on YouTube. Are you with me? Be sure to hit that subscribe button, the like button if this
resonated, share this with somebody who needs to hear it and you can watch this video next on how
making videos online might made me a millionaire. Crazy, right? I'll see you in the next one. Bye.