BIG Mistakes SMALL YouTube Channels Still Make

When you see a title and thumbnail anywhere on YouTube, that is called an impression, even if you don't click to watch the video. And the problem that small YouTube channels have is turning those impressions into views, which then turn into more views and subscribers. But how do you get these impressions in the first place, and then how do you turn them into views? When your YouTube channel's small, your channel doesn't have any authority in the algorithm, and YouTube doesn't know who to promote your videos to. And you might even wonder if it's possible at all to grow from scratch as a small YouTuber. Well, as someone who's grown a lot of different YouTube channels and who's helped many other people do the same, I can tell you that it's definitely possible, but you need to make sure that you avoid these common mistakes that small channels frequently make. If you just avoid these mistakes, it's very likely your channel's going to do amazing. The first big mistake that small channels make is not making videos on the right subjects. You see, when you're just starting out, YouTube doesn't know what audience would be best suited for your videos. But don't worry, we can actually help speed up the process of YouTube discovering who to promote your videos to. YouTube will test your content And when they do, we need to make sure that they test it to the right audience so that it does well, not only initially, but then when YouTube pushes it to a bigger and bigger audience, it needs to continue to do well. And that all starts with choosing the right topics. One of the most common mistakes that small channels make is just making videos on random subjects or subjects they see doing well on YouTube. You need to make sure that you're doing this the right way. So how can you choose the right video topics? The way that I typically try to grow small channels in the beginning is by trying to get search traffic onto the videos by focusing the video topics on low competition and high search volume keywords. To do this, I use a tool called vidIQ, which does cost money, but you can get it for free for a month by using the code MATTPARR at checkout. And the specific tool within vidIQ that we're gonna be using is the keyword research tool. And to do this, we need to make a list of 20 different input phrases relating to our niche. Let's say that your niche is making money on YouTube, like my channel is right here. And then the input phrases would be any keywords or terms relating to the niche that I can think of off the top of my head. And don't worry, these don't need to be exact. This is just a starting place that we're gonna plug into vidIQ and they will do all the hard work for us. And for the purpose of this example, these would be phrases like make money on YouTube, earn on YouTube, grow on YouTube, make money online, how to get subscribers, or how to get more views. Make a list of 20 different terms that you think of relating to your niche. And if you ever have a hard time, just search your niche on YouTube see the videos that come up, and then use some of those as ideas when you're plugging in your 20 input phrases. And then what we do is plug each term one by one into vidIQ, and they're going to give us a list of results. Here's exactly what this looks like. For example, if we go into vidIQ right here and we start putting in some of our input phrases, for example, make money on YouTube right here, click enter, and then they're going to pull up a list of keywords relating to this. And then you go to the related keyword section right here and this is what the list of results is going to look like. The next step in this process is to sort this by the overall score by clicking overall right here. This is going to show us keywords that have a low amount of competition and a high amount of search volume, meaning a lot of people are searching for it and there's not much competition, which are prime keywords to create videos on. And then you're going to go through this list right here and mark off any ideas that you could create into a YouTube video of your own. If you ever see other channel names on here as well, feel free to skip through those because you don't want to include those in your keywords, but only make a list of actual ideas that you could create a video idea on. For my example, that would be YouTube automation right here, AdSense approval, affiliate marketing, faceless YouTube channels, and so on. From here, you can click this to copy these tags, and our goal is going to be to create a list of at least 15 different video ideas. And then when it comes to your 15 remaining video ideas that have already worked on YouTube within your niche, niche, what I recommend doing is either searching them directly within YouTube, searching terms related to your niche, seeing the top videos that come up, and then considering recreating those videos in your own way and trying to make them more valuable, whether it's entertainment or educational value. Or going to some of the top channels within your niche, installing the vidIQ extension, and then clicking trending to see the videos uploaded on said channels that are getting the highest views per hour. Ideally, we want to see videos that have been uploaded more than a month ago that have the most amount of views per hour. For example, this video right here, uploaded 3 months ago, still getting 40 views per hour. And typically, anything above around 20 views per hour is a very good sign that you could recreate these videos in your own way, try to make it more valuable so you can get a ton of views. And now the second mistake that we're about to go over that a lot of small channels make is is incredibly important because if nobody clicks to watch your videos when YouTube starts testing them, you're not going to get any views. So at this point, you already have your title as part of getting your video idea, but that's only a small part of what goes into making sure you have what is called a high click-through rate. Now, click-through rate is a percentage of people who click to watch your video when it shows up in different places on YouTube. And the most important key to having a high click-through rate is making sure you have a great thumbnail, which brings us into mistake number 2, which is having a bad thumbnail. And when it comes to thumbnails on YouTube, most people spend a ton of time creating a video, and at this point they're so exhausted they just want to get their video up, so they throw together a quick thumbnail in a couple minutes and they put it on the video. And this is really the worst way you can go about making thumbnails on YouTube. And I have a challenge for you for your next 3 videos on your channel. Number 1, find a video on YouTube that's already performed well in your niche and gotten over 100,000 views to model. Number 2, write a great title modeling what works. Don't copy it directly, but model it and use it as inspiration. And then number 3, create the thumbnail first before actually making the video. And right now, to demonstrate the importance of thumbnails, we're going to do a thumbnail test. Two thumbnails are going to appear on your screen, and you're gonna let me know which one you would rather click on. So get ready. 1, 2, 3. Go. Now I know the thumbnails weren't shown for very long, but it was probably enough time for you to instinctively choose which one you would rather click on. Thumbnail number 1 got 246,000 views in a month. Meanwhile, thumbnail number 2 got only 776 views in just over 6 months. Now obviously the quality of the video and how well optimized it was plays a huge factor in the video's performance as well. But I truly believe that with these two video examples right here, that the thumbnail played a giant factor in the outcome in terms of performance of these videos. Now, what exactly makes thumbnail number 1 better than thumbnail number 2? Well, I believe it's a couple things. Number 1, the text in thumbnail number 1 is kept to a minimum. The text is big and easy to read, and there's contrast in between the text and background so you can easily read the text. The primary elements are kept to a minimum, and really it's just easy to understand when you look at it. Meanwhile, thumbnail number 2 takes a second to really grasp what it's about and understand what it's trying to portray. And that's really the biggest key with thumbnails, making them easy to understand within a second or two of looking at them. And let's, for example, search the term "top 10 tech" on YouTube and take a look at some of the first videos that come up. As you can tell, each thumbnail is simple, it's easy to understand, and it focuses on one primary thing. And right now I'm going to give you a check— checklist that you can use when you're creating your thumbnails, and feel free to refer back to this whenever you're creating a thumbnail to make sure that you're making them as good as possible so you can get a high click-through rate and a ton of views and grow your channel. Number 1: Make everything big and take up most of the thumbnail if possible. Keep blank space to a minimum unless it's to highlight the object. Use 3 or less primary elements, and primary elements might be the main objects shown in a thumbnail, whether it's people or an object like a piece of technology or something else. And if you use text, keep the amount of words to a minimum and make it big and easy to read. And part of making text easy to read means having a high amount of contrast in between the text and the background. You want them to be very different colors so you can read it easily. Now, if there's not enough contrast, what you can also do is put a border around the text, therefore making it easy to read. Feel free to use bright colors whenever you can and model thumbnails that have already worked in your niche very well. Every niche is going to have exceptions to certain best practices, which is why it's important to see what's working within your particular niche. And how can you know if you're doing good with your titles and thumbnails for click-through rate? Well, there isn't a magic number for click-through rate as it's going to depend on the particular niche and the specific video that you're creating, but we wanna make sure that we're getting incrementally better over time on our channel. And that's why I recommend checking in on this panel right here within your YouTube dashboard after uploading new videos, and it'll show if your titles and thumbnails are improving And our goal is to get our impressions by click-through rate to increase over time and try to do better than our channel's average. Now let's say you upload some great videos following what has worked within your niche, you make some great title and thumbnail combinations, and you upload them to YouTube. At this point, you're probably feeling pretty good about your progress until you notice that you aren't getting as many views or subscribers as you hoped for. Then you watch a video talking about something called audience retention. And how it's super important to your video success over time, which is true. So then you go into your YouTube Analytics and you see an audience retention graph that looks like this. And what this basically shows is that a ton of people clicked off of your video in the first few seconds. This is not ideal. We want people staying on our video for as long as possible. Now, why does this happen? Now, it's usually because of mistake number 3, which is having an intro in your video. Even intros as short as a couple seconds can really hurt your video, which a lot of people don't know about, and a lot of new YouTube channels make this mistake. And also, I don't even recommend verbally introducing yourself, telling what your channel's about, asking people to subscribe right at the beginning of your video. Instead, what I recommend doing is trying to deliver on what was promised in your title and thumbnail as soon as possible in the video to affirm to people who click the video why they should continue watching. You want to deliver as soon as possible. And then later in the video, if you want to introduce yourself and ask people to subscribe, that's a way better time to do it because at that point you've already provided a ton of value and they're more likely to actually hit the subscribe button and hear what you have to say. And for example, with this video that you're watching right now, we're into the video a little bit. My goal was to at least have given you some value by this point. And if you've gotten value from this video so far, my name is Matt Parr, I help people with YouTube, and make sure to hit that subscribe button so that I can help you with YouTube regularly. And the channel Top 15s is a great example of a channel that gets straight into their videos with no long introduction. Now the other alternative is doing what's called a hook intro. This is saying something along the lines of promising the viewer that you're going to show them what you promised to show them within your title and thumbnail combination. Later in the video. So for example, if you're making a video about how to get more views on YouTube, you might say something along the lines of, you probably clicked on this video because you're struggling to get views and subscribers on your channel. Don't worry, I've been there as well, but I've implemented this simple 3-step process in order to get hundreds of millions of views across my channel, and here's how you can potentially do it too. So basically, you try to come up with a hook that convinces the viewer to keep watching throughout the video. And this is going to differ for every channel. For example, my faceless channels have different hooks than my personal channel right here, but you wanna tailor it to the specific video that you're doing. Now here's 3 giant bonus mistakes that you are probably making on your channel. Bonus mistake number 1 is not being consistent. I recommend uploading at least once a week on your channel, but ideally 3 times a week or more, especially in the beginning. And I recommend setting a consistent schedule and trying your best to stick to it. And to set a schedule that you can actually produce more videos than you upload according to your schedule. For example, let's say you can create a video every single day, but you choose to upload only 3 videos per week. This way you're building a giant backlog so that if you ever want to take a break with YouTube for whatever reason, you have a big backlog of videos that you can schedule to continue going out on your channel to keep growing your channel for you on autopilot. Mistake number 2 is giving up too early. Most people quit YouTube before uploading 30 videos, yet most of the channels with over 100,000 subscribers have uploaded over 1,000 videos. And I actually have a video down in the description of this video where I talk about how many videos it typically takes to succeed on YouTube if you're wondering about how long it could take. And for the third bonus mistake, check out this video right here, which will show you what you might be doing right now that could get your channel deleted. So make sure you watch this video right here. This might actually save your channel, and I really hope that it'll provide you a ton of value. I'm sure it will, and I will see you there.