- This guy, took a channel
from zero to a million subscribers in 28 days.
- How's that possible?
- And in this video he's gonna share with you
behind the scenes tips, secrets and strategies
he did to do that, so you can do it
on your channel, coming up.
(whooshing)
Hey guys, my name is Tim Schmoyer.
Welcome to Video Creators,
we're all about helping you grow your YouTube audience
so you can spread a message that reaches people,
changes people, changes their lives,
that is what this guy is definitely all about.
Helping you guys do the same thing.
So what do you do?
What does it look like?
- The biggest thing is,
when you truly analyze what you're gonna create.
There's a lot of people that just pick a camera,
create content, and put it out there,
and they're not really looking at the viewer in mind.
We had an idea,
we knew where an audience was located off of YouTube.
So we were like seeing, okay,
what was the highest engaged type of posts?
And we're getting really detailed on
the commenting and engagement.
We did a lot of recon and research to really identify
who our audience was going to be.
we created content then with a strategy of
really getting that title,
that thumbnail to resonate with that audience.
So we actually did a lot of preparatory things beforehand
and it was really interesting to see
what works, what didn't work and we had all this data,
and then we took it to the next step.
- How much research did you do,
even before you published a single video?
- So, take away the 28 days,
'cause that's when we actually launched the channel
and executed on plan, it was three months.
It was planning the audience, understanding the audience,
then testing with that audience and seeing what resonated.
If we didn't do that research,
we didn't know what was gonna work.
- Usually when I ask you guys, I'm like,
"Hey, what about your audience?"
It's like, "Well, it's a 18 to 65 year old woman,
"who lives in the U.S, Canada,
"Australia or U.K or like whatever."
- Sounds like my consulting called too. (laughs)
- And I'm like, "Okay, let's get way more specific.
"Who is the character?
"What do they want?
"Why can't they have what they want?
"What's at stake if they don't get what they want?"
Like, let's understand their story.
- Far too many people focus in on them
and not their audience.
And when can you start focusing in on your audience
and where you're finding the audience actually
engages with content on YouTube,
what I would do is
what we call more of an advance-collaboration
where you're no necessarily collaborating with someone,
but you might be saying,
"Hey look, I have a new channel I'd like to start.
"I'd like to see it influx.
"Let me give you some money to actually promote said video."
Do it as a community post or do it as an in-screen element,
in one of your videos, do a shout out.
Giving it to a creator that has an audience
that's similar to yours,
and doing a brand deal with them to have them push a video.
It's natural, it's organic.
Once you've done the recon and research,
it's really going through,
more recon and research on YouTube.
I think a lot of people look at outside sources.
There's a lot of YouTube channels,
there's a lot of content being uploaded to YouTube everyday.
Doing a quick search and seeing what's actually
showing up on the homepage and by subscribing.
See what's actually happening and hot right now,
can give you some indicators,
"Hey, this is something that's actually
"trending internally on this."
There's other tools that you can use like vidIQ
and TubeBuddy and Morningfame, which is fine.
I personally like to enhance it more with that viewing.
What would I actually click on as a viewer?
- Yeah.
So when you look at that content,
you're doing that recon,
what things are you especially looking for
in terms of what you're trying to learn?
- One of the biggest things I look for is
what is that title and thumbnail look like,
why are people clicking on it
and seeing the comments.
I will read comments for hours just because,
"Oh, you should have covered this."
Or, "You shoulda done this."
Or, "Oh, this was super awesome."
And you're going through that engagement,
and I know, oh, when I make a video similar to this,
or you're making it unique to you,
and then it's taking the things that you're learning
off of comments, off of other things and saying,
"Oh, this would be so much better
"if you'd actually tackle it this way."
- Yeah.
One of the things I look for when I'm doing that,
is I also wanted look at the,
how many views does the video have,
compared to the number of subscribers it has?
- Oh, yeah.
- 10 million views on a channel
with 10 million subscribers,
I'm like, "Okay that makes sense."
But if it's ten million views
on a channel with like 200 subscribers,
then I'm like.
- Then there's something going on there.
- There might be something going on there too.
- There's something you need to look at.
- But you went in there,
"Oh I wanna see that this video breakout of it's audience
"on that channel."
And that I also wanna see then like the engagement,
then I wanna see what's the title and thumbnail,
what expectations does that set?
Trying to figure out all that,
so when I go make that content I'm like
I know how to position it.
- When you find that video,
okay, that has ten million views
and only a few subscribers that are there,
see what the next up video is and the video after that,
those are great content.
What YouTube's looking at is,
what is the viewing pattern?
And what's the highest likelihood of someone
watching this video, what would be the next topic
or next video that would be there?
And I like to look at least the top four,
because YouTube will take you either down the rabbit hole,
which would be more videos
like the one that you're currently watching,
or something similar with a similar viewing pattern.
And say, "Oh, you might be interested in this as well."
I take note, see if it's the same channel,
see if it's the same type of content
and I look very deeply on that.
Before I even launched the channel,
we had like 285 different topics.
If we didn't have a thumbnail and a title idea,
we scrapped it.
If they would not click,
then you'd never get any watch time.
- Yeah.
- So it's all about that click.
- So starting with the title and thumbnail,
then creating the content to flow from that.
Which is something I think you've heard a lot about.
- Over and over again.
- At Derral's channel and here at Video Creators too.
- Always analyze and adjust.
There are amazing tools that YouTube is giving us now,
that I've been praying for for a very long time
and YouTube is like seeing fit
to give creators a lot of control
and it is yeah, seriously.
But the important thing is what you do with the data
and I would not look at the data, it doesn't matter,
I would focus in on your click-through rate
and I'd look at it through traffic sources.
So you need to understand where the traffic's coming from,
the click-through rate from there,
and then how people stay on the video,
because that's if they find you
and how you're retaining them.
I feel a lot of content creators are so thinking,
"Oh, my content's so great."
That they don't scrap it at the edit.
- Yeah.
- And that's what you need to do.
It's like, "Oh, pull out this part."
That's really off message or off brand,
you need to go from there.
- A mutual friend of ours actually knows exactly
how many seconds he can talk,
before he can talk before people leave.
How many seconds his wife can talk.
The thing I respect about that,
is he didn't just like look at a few videos
and figure that out overnight.
Two or three years of just publishing constantly,
consistently, looking at the retention graphs
and all the data on every single video
for two to three years,
before they really saw that success take off.
And so that persistence, using the data,
doing your research,
this is like all the non-sexy stuff
that goes into growing a YouTube channel.
- I think it's sexy.
- But, for a lot of us who are like
the creative type of people, we just wanna like,
make stuff that we like and makes us feel warm and fuzzy
and then hope it works out.
And what Derral is saying is,
all the work that goes in
before anyone even sees your video,
that is really sets it up to be successful.
So it's research, it's data, it's analysis,
it's tons of homework before you even press record.
- I would just challenge everyone to make better content.
Get your message out there to the world.
When you can put one person in mind,
who that viewer is and you talk to them in your video,
you engage with them,
that's when you're emotionally connecting with a viewer,
that YouTube can identify and go find you more viewers
because that's what the algorithm does. (laughs)
- It does.
It's like, "Who is this video for?
"And let's service it to more of the right people
"at the right time."
- 'Cause there's a lot of people out there.
- That's right.
After you're done all this research that gets you from
zero to a million subscribers in 28 days,
the next thing you need to do is optimize your videos
for people that keep watching and engage.
And on Derral's channel we just did a video,
you can click right over there to go check it out,
where we talk about, how do you optimize your videos
for people that really hooks and holds their attention?
So, let's go to Derral's channel,
and we'll see you guys over there.