ChatFBP shares five lessons from their first month on YouTube: thumbnails matter, watch time counts, playlists help, consistency works, and annotations can link viewers elsewhere.
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In this video, we're going to talk about five things that I learned in my first month using YouTube. That's me, Bjork to the right. My wife Lindsey is to the left. We have those two sites that we manage down below. But let's jump into the content. Number one, the video thumbnail is really important. I learned this pretty quick because a lot of sources that I checked, a lot of the people I talked with, it was the first thing that they said, use a really good thumbnail. So let's look at some examples. This is LauraintheKitchen, really popular cooking YouTube channel. You can see that she uploads a picture for each of these. And it's really crisp, it's really clear, and you can tell exactly what the YouTube video is all about. I'm gonna switch over to this one. This is Food Wishes. And you can see it's a similar thing where the image is really focused on what the food is or what the recipe is about. You're gonna want to make sure that it is filling up almost all of the frame, that it's really close up like this here in the tips and techniques, so people can really see what that is. Another great example is epic meal time. Not only do they include awesome pictures, but they also include text on the thumbnails. And that's really helpful to help communicate what that video is about. Now, one thing to keep in mind with these images is that you're going to want to make sure if you do include text, that it's really big. You can see the examples here because sometimes these thumbnails are going to be really small. How about number two? Let's take a look at that. Number two is watch time impacts YouTube search and suggested content. What does that mean? Well, when you have a video and you upload it to YouTube, YouTube keeps track of the average view duration. And you can see that by going to analytics and then audience retention. Then you'll have a list of all your different videos and it's going to show you the average percentage viewed. And if YouTube sees that, you have a bunch of videos that are really low in their percentage viewed. And it's going to say, hey, maybe this account isn't a great account for showing the videos right away. And that's going to impact your search results and whether YouTube shows your videos as suggested content. So let's take a look and see how we can improve that using the analytics. Right now, I'm looking at this video, how to block Spiders or How to block Bots and Spiders. From Google, and I can see that the average percentage viewed is only 40%. Now, watch this. When I click on that, it pulls up a graph that shows me when people dropped off. Now, if I hover over this, you can see it says 60% after three seconds, which is crazy. That's a lot of people dropping off. What is the reason? Well, there could be a lot of different reasons, but when I watch this video in the first three seconds, I say, hey, food bloggers. And chances are a lot of the people might not be food bloggers. So I can take away that information from this video and say, maybe I shouldn't address food bloggers right away. Maybe because there might be other types of bloggers that are watching this. Or maybe it's somebody that doesn't even have a blog at all and they just want to know how to do whatever it is I'm talking about. So make sure that you understand the average view duration and you do whatever you can to improve that. So people stick around and watch your videos, because if you do, that will help your videos to show up higher. For YouTube search and suggested content, number three, playlists are searchable and can show up as suggestions. The this is something I learned pretty quick because the first videos we created were seven awesome apps for food bloggers. Now, if you scroll down here, I searched seven awesome apps. That's pretty darn specific. But the idea here that I want to communicate is that when you create a playlist in YouTube, it will show up in search and it will also show up possibly as suggested content, which is awesome because that increases your chances of your videos being found. Number four, let's take a look at that. Consistency is key. And this was something that I learned from the creator of the Annoying Orange show. And he said when he was being interviewed about consistency, that you want your videos to be as consistent as a TV show. And I'm guessing that you've never turned on the TV to watch your favorite TV show, only to see a blank screen. And if you want a successful YouTube channel, the same should be true. It should be really consistent. So as I scroll through here, you can see just how consistently the the Annoying Orange channel is releasing content. It's on a really consistent basis, so be sure to keep that in mind as you're growing your YouTube channel. And then number five, you can include an annotation that links to an external website. Now, this is really cool, and it's something that I think a lot of people miss out on. And actually what I'm gonna do instead of showing you here in YouTube is I'm going to show you by clicking to the next page here. And this is going to include a link to Food Blogger Pro where you can sign up for email list and the reward for doing that will be getting this ebook. It's called 10 mistakes that bloggers make and how to Fix Them. And then after that we just send a once a week tip. It's mostly for food bloggers, but we also have general bloggers that sign up for that as well, so we'd love it if you check that out. Lastly, if you are interested, you can go ahead and subscribe to Food Blogger Pro channel. We're going to continue to release tips like this on a weekly basis, so we really appreciate you watching and hope you have a great day. Thanks.
