Avoid These Mistakes when Starting Your Youtube Channel

The thumbnails, the headline, the descriptions. You have to be looking at the content that you're putting out 'cause you're investing your time. If it's not performing, go do stuff and fix these. This is an asset that we put out here. The asset's not performing well. What can we do to help it perform better? All right, so here's why most people, including myself, suck at YouTube. I am going to pull up my screen over here. I'm gonna show you some examples and basically my hypothesis for each section. We have my Marketing School YouTube pulled up here. So this is the podcast where we're approaching 100 million downloads overall. So let's just look at a video that's done really well. Relatively speaking, it got way more views than the other ones, right? So I'm gonna hit the play button and we're gonna listen in and then I'm gonna give some commentary here. A lot of stuff going on and we're gonna jump right into it. We're gonna talk about how Threads, which is Meta's new Twitter competitor. So you can see by the 1-minute mark, we've already lost 60% of our viewership and that's a lot. So we're aiming for maybe 70% retention or so at the 30-second mark. If we're not doing that, we know there's a problem. And now this, this to me in the beginning, this is just telling me that we didn't pick the best moment to hook them in the video where it's like there was a very interesting controversial take that we might have had or something that invokes curiosity. That's what I would say here. In the first 30 seconds or so, you got to keep them hooked. And then if we look at the thumbnail itself, so the end of Twitter, Twitter gets over 100 million users in 5 days. The good thing about this thumbnail here is that we're not just repeating the title in the thumbnail. This might be a little bit of a controversial take because we're saying this might be the end of Twitter. The curiosity piece is around, Oh, Threads gets over 100 million users in 5 days. Let's just take a look at the stats for this thumbnail. So the thumbnail plus the headline, 3% or so. I'd like it to be above 5%. So, you know, my subjective opinion was that was pretty decent. So keep in mind, this channel is pretty small. It's still under 7,000 subscribers. And you have to look at things from a relative standpoint when you're trying to grow a channel, right? And so we did a good job here. So before we continue, check out my ad agency, Single Grain, if you ever need help with things like marketing and things like that, because I just do These are just things that I experiment with. Now I want to pull up a counterexample to this. This video is just not doing well, right? So let's see what happened here. If you want to move ticket sales, the thing that moves it is email plus price going up. We're going to talk about the right way to market an event. Literally, guess what? That hook in the beginning, it wasn't that bad. But let's just continue on here. And I was talking to the people that run the War Room Mastermind, or it's not called War Room anymore. They got the Rise Mastermind, Traffic and Conversion.

Is that, who's that?

Deanna and team.

Is she running your next event?

Yeah, her squad's running the next event.

Oh, cool.

Yeah, so do you want, I guess I can just go into kind of what the event entails.

Yeah, I'm curious on how you're marketing it. 'Cause I've seen a big shift in your events. The first few weren't bad. The last one I was at, it's continually gotten better, but the last one I was at was really amazing. And I don't know if you remember, I wasn't necessarily hating, but you're just like, hey, we're going to do 3 events a year. You're going to come to them. And I'm like, yeah, I don't know how many of these I'm going to come to. But after the last one—

So I don't think we're doing a good enough job of holding people's attention here. At the end of the day, Marketing School is talking about marketing. So the topic is relevant. We're talking about event marketing in this situation. And so it doesn't seem very interesting to me is my point, right? So how could we have hooked them more? I could probably just pull the moment where it's like, oh, your event, like they're getting better and better. And you know, the people or whatever, like it's basically like a testimony that you lead with in the beginning. And then it goes, we're going to talk about event marketing or whatever it is. Again, it's, to me, it's about keeping people in the first 30 seconds or so, because that's a signal to the algorithm that this is worth boosting. Let's take a look now at the thumbnail here. That doesn't invoke a lot of curiosity, I would say. And there's not, it's not very controversial as well. We got to change it up a little bit and see what happens. Because my take on this one is that when you look at it, the click-through rate's not that high. So we got to think about changing the thumbnail. We got to think about changing the headline. And that's it for every single video. If we see something that's underperforming, we got to go back in time almost like clockwork. This is an asset that we put out here. The asset's not performing well. What can we do to help it perform better? Right. And so that's for the long-form videos. I showed you a good one and then I showed you a bad one. I'm going to show you a short that we had perform really well that had maybe 70,000 views on it or so. Yeah, that's a huge outlier for our channel because it's such a small channel. MrBeast's new video crushed his Squid Game video. Basically, he goes like a $1 yacht is basically sinking when they get into it. So they have to like abandon ship and it just goes like higher and higher and higher. The first 90 minutes, this yacht video got 8 million views, 10.7% click-through rate. So if you're above 5—

That's massive.

That's a huge click-through rate. Average view duration, 8 minutes, 40 seconds. And the main sponsor was Feastables, which is his own product.

Yeah.

At the very end of the video, he's like, by the way, I have a secret video, but if you want to get access to the video, you got to go buy a Feastables because the code is in the Feastables.

And that video should help him generate much more revenue as well.

And that video is outpacing. So a couple of interesting points here. Shorts is a little different because when you look at Shorts, there's a couple of things you want to look at. You want to look at how many chose to actually view it versus swipe away. And whenever you're above 50% or so, I think it's pretty good. So average percentage viewed, okay, 80%. That's a huge signal because most Shorts aren't going to do that well. And then the other thing too is if we look at the title itself, MrBeast is reinventing business with this. Okay, there's definitely curiosity. But from a reach standpoint, I will tell you that the reason this video performed well to keep retention there was because there was good storytelling. The pacing was good. The editing was good. All right. And we also shared some insights too on, hey, there's actually an important point. He's probably going to make way more revenue for this because he put Feastables in there, which is MrBeast's brand, right? So we're trying to pull our business insights, adding our unique knowledge there. And so people get, get some value from that. at the end of the day. And you can see people are kind of— when you have retention that's above 100%, people are repeating the beginning over here, right? And so that's what's really happening. So that's when this one got 70,000. I'm going to go back and take a look at another good performer here. This one got 91% average percentage viewed. And when you look at the percentage viewed, 71% chose to watch it versus swipe it away. I would say performance-wise, this one did better. You can see this one took off. I believe that the way Shorts work is like it'll give you some credit, it'll take off, and then give you some more credit again. And I'll see if it takes off. takes off, and then that's that. So here we go. You know, in Japan they have the sushi conveyor belts where you can just grab the sushi. There's these TikToks of these people that will take the food and lick it and put it back on the conveyor belt, right? And what ended up happening was one of the companies in Japan, I think they lost out on like $144 million in sales because people just stopped going because these TikToks would get 22 million plus views or so. That person's now getting sued for, I think, like $500 grand or something like that. But point is, That's an example of a de-influencer where they are causing negative influence. So it's a negative viral effect. All right. So same deal again, it comes down to storytelling. If I'm telling a story, sometimes there's going to be a lot of fluff in there. You got to be able to kind of make it really tight and keep it interesting for people at the end of the day. And that's what I would say did well here, because again, it was telling a story. It's interesting. It's definitely controversial as well because of the type of story that I'm telling. And there's curiosity too, because people are like, what? Well, what are, what are de-influencers, right? Like, how does that make any sense? De-influencers are destroying businesses. So you got curiosity and controversy in here. That's a winning formula. And you can apply this not just for Shorts, but your long-form videos as well with the thumbnails, the headlines that you have, the descriptions that you have as well. That's important too. And so I can't emphasize this enough. Your team, or if it's you, you have to be looking at the content assets that you're putting out because you're investing your time. Like, I'm investing time into making this video. If you're going to invest time into it, you can't just throw it out there and then let it sit. Like, if it's not performing, go do stuff and go back in time and fix these. Like, I'm going to have my team go back and look at the low performers, the ones that have less than 100 views or that are atypical in terms of performance. Go and fix those. Let's see what the before and after was, and then let's report back because then I can make more videos on this type of stuff. And that's what it ultimately comes down to. So we need to look at all the assets and we need to be tracking them perhaps in a spreadsheet or an Airtable or something like that. Hopefully you enjoyed this and hopefully got a thing or two. Don't forget to hit the subscribe and the like button if you're watching this on YouTube. It helps us grow. And let me know what you think. If you want me to do more case studies like this, drop it in the comments below because I actually enjoyed doing it. So let me know what you think. And I got another video for you to watch. It is on how to grow a site from 0 to 750,000 visits using programmatic SEO. Check that out over here. See you in that video.