- Hi everybody, my name is Mark,
and I'm the founder of Invisible People.
Our YouTube channel has been seeing explosive,
dramatic growth and some people have been asking
how are you making that happen?
So I thought I'd share a little bit.
Up to a couple weeks ago, and in fact for the last
couple years I was overjoyed that we average
40,000 views every month.
Now, the topic is homelessness.
Invisible People is a non-profit that's focused on
educating the general public about homelessness,
and homelessness is not a very popular topic.
So I was just really
thought 40,000 views a month was a miracle.
Now occasionally our traffic would spike when there
was a media hit, and in fact August 22nd, 2010
YouTube gave us their homepage for a day,
and 1.6 million people had a positive interaction
with homelessness, but then it tapered off to average
around 40,000 views a month.
Until about two months ago, and now we average
4 million views every month, and growing.
But that's really, that's an amazing number,
but the number I like better is that the average duration
is almost three minutes.
Now a toggle sometimes it's two minutes and 42 seconds,
sometimes it's two minute and 39 seconds.
It's always over two and a half minutes,
and more often than not very close to three minutes,
per average duration.
That is huge, now add 4,000,000 views
a month and growing.
And the topic is homelessness.
Oh my gosh, wow, what happened?
Well, I started paying more attention to YouTube.
That came about when I started a Patreon campaign,
and I ran into a couple YouTube
channels that changed me.
Roberto Blake and Derral Eves.
Their channels really got me thinking about production,
and the mechanics behind the scenes of YouTube.
Also I have to thank Roberto for turning me on to TubeBuddy.
TubeBuddy is a browser based plugin,
it's a management solution for YouTube,
that I highly recommend, there's a link down below.
And then Sara Dietschy, just storytelling and vlogging,
and inspired me to vlog more,
which is a new format that I'm experimenting with.
Part of the new strategy of Invisible People
is to do more vlogging.
I think that's really important, because another myth
that I've gotta bust here is there's this belief
that people only have the attention span for short videos
and you should only produce short videos.
That's ridiculous, today people burst their bladders
binge watching TV, if the content is good,
people will watch it.
And if you look at major YouTubers that are having
huge success their videos average between
10 minutes and 30 minutes each.
You know think about it, YouTube is in the business of
selling ads and they want people to watch.
So longer videos are rewarded.
And that's also on Facebook too,
so get out of this thinking that short is better,
because it's not.
Sara Dietschy kind of inspired me to start vlogging more,
and that is part of the strategy to bring people along
with me as I travel and to share the other side of the story
so I'm still experimenting on that, that format.
It's a lot of work, but it's also a lot of fun,
and you know, there's a link below check out a few
of the vlogs and let me know what you think.
How'd it all happen?
Well, first I kind of gotta take a little hit here,
because you know, practice what you preach.
For a long time I've been telling non-profits
you need to pay attention to your titles, your tags,
your descriptions and your thumbnails.
Very, very important.
I've been saying that for a long time.
In fact, Invisible People, you know, I did that.
I'd really, I would write out a description,
I would take some time and use keywords in the tags.
But one thing I missed, and in my defense,
is that over the years Invisible People played off
homelessness has a name and we just used the first name.
The first Invisible People website had a flash element
that played off homeless has a name,
and used that first name, and the current website also
uses the first name in the treatment.
So that kinda hurt us because the title
just had a first name.
I didn't know how much until I started a Patreon account,
and started to really pay attention to YouTube.
Now, it's interesting because
last year I worked with
a large non-profit, produced some videos for them.
It was a challenging project, lots of work,
the videos came out really great,
and highlight the amazing work they do.
Now, when I gave 'em the videos I recommended,
you know, guys you really need to pay attention
to descriptions and tags and titles,
and here's some thumbnails.
I gave them a couple versions of thumbnails,
and they didn't use them.
They didn't put any effort into descriptions or tags,
and nobody's watching the videos.
I mean each video might have a hundred views.
That's kinda sad, and I'm not really picking on that
non-profit because a lot of non-profits will spend
huge money in producing a video,
but when it goes online, they don't put any effort
into titles, descriptions, tags.
And what I've learned now that's really important,
is commenting, is commenting on YouTube,
it just increases the engagement.
After I started paying attention to YouTube a little more
I typed in the keyword homeless,
and what came up in YouTube is actually I think a problem,
it's kind of disturbing if you ask me.
All these prank videos and you know,
just content that's fake and just misleading
about homeless people and they're really tricking
the people that watch it moreso than they're pranking
anybody else and it's, it's like I said, disturbing.
So when I typed in homeless and none of the Invisible People
videos came up I went oh my gosh this is a problem.
I would bet that I had more videos on homelessness
than any other content creator.
Yet, after page and page of going through YouTube,
my videos weren't coming up in search.
So that's a problem, and that's when I really started
looking at the titles and saying oh gosh,
just the first name isn't enough.
What I did, because I have over 800 videos, that's a lot,
every morning when I was having my coffee,
I would update 20,
maybe more depending on how much time I had,
I would go in and write a new title,
add more to the description, use TubeBuddy to really do
tags that related to other content,
and the results were dramatic.
Literally you could almost immediately see more engagement.
Now it takes YouTube's algorithm a little while
to catch up to changes, but two months ago
our channel averaged 40,000 views a month,
and now we, 4,000,000 views.
That's not all, the donations to Invisible People
as a non-profit have increased.
We saw more online donations come in,
in the month of June,
than in the last couple years combined.
So, the results of putting some effort
into YouTube are dramatic.
Make sure your content is compelling.
You want video that people are gonna actually watch.
That's the first thing.
Take the time, write a good title.
Create or select a thumbnail that is attractive,
and engaging, and you know, understand that many people
are consuming video now from a phone, a mobile device,
so that thumbnail really has a huge role
in the amount of engagement that that video's gonna see.
Write at least a paragraph or two,
or more in the description.
Now what I started to do, and I've been doing this for
a long time actually is that I type my original blog post
in the description and I'm always thinking keywords.
Then do a little research and find the right tags,
again I recommend TubeBuddy.
If you don't use TubeBuddy use, you know, Google keyword
search in different ways that you can figure out.
Videos, look at other videos that might relate
to your content, there's a lot of different ways
of figuring out tags.
But, what I have to strongly recommend
is putting some effort into titles,
thumbnails, descriptions and tags, it's huge.
Then, once your video is up,
and I know there's a lot of pushback on this,
a lot of non-profits don't like controversy,
they think it's bad,
and controversy can actually play a big part
in something going viral.
Now viral is relative, but I can tell you that
one of my first videos that actually saw a lot of traction
was Natasha, and the reason was it originally started off
with people arguing in the comments section,
whether she was homeless or not.
And you just wait for a little bit,
a healthy community will police itself.
The conversation eventually changed
to welfare reform in the UK, which is gorgeous.
But if I hadn't allowed those comments to happen,
that some might view as negative,
the video might never have seen the hundreds of thousands
of views that it did, and that conversation about welfare
reform might never of happened.
I know there's a lot of conversation between YouTube
and Facebook video right now,
and I've been doing a little bit of comparison.
YouTube is a powerful platform, and there's a community.
Facebook is a powerful platform,
and there's also a huge community.
When I post a video on Facebook,
I have to put money into paid advertising,
or nobody sees it.
And as soon as that advertising runs out,
and I don't have a lot of money to put into paid advertising
nobody sees it.
On YouTube, if I put a little effort into titles,
thumbnail, description, tag and respond to a few comments,
lots of people see the video,
and it doesn't cost me anything besides the effort
that I put into it.
Today for-profit, non-profit, doesn't matter,
you need to be producing video content.
You're putting time, money and effort,
creating these great stories.
Well don't let the effort stop
after you upload on YouTube.
If you have any questions please comment below.
My social media feeds I respond great.
At me @hardlynormal on Twitter, be happy to help.
(light electronic music)