WARNING: Watch This Before You Reply to Another Comment

If you're replying to YouTube comments the way that 99% of channels do, you're missing out on a lot of potential growth and possibly a lot of income as well, because there's a hidden gold mine sitting in your comments section that most creators completely ignore. And the way that you handle comments could be the difference between making your channel into an actual business or not from the same exact audience. Now, my name is Matt Parr. I've been doing YouTube over the past decade. I've gotten millions of subscribers across my channel. I've made over $10 million from YouTube and everything else, but more More importantly, I've analyzed hundreds of different channels and I've discovered something shocking. The way that most creators reply to comments is actually hurting their algorithm performance, missing massive opportunities, and leaving money on the table. And look, I know that sounds hyperbolic. You're thinking, how is replying to a comment going to impact my views or anything else? But if you're not seeing growth on your channel, you think that your comments are just this little inconsequential thing that's not playing any role at all, you might be surprised to learn what I'm about to share with you in this video. I'm gonna give you a little bit of a different perspective perspective than you might have heard out there before, because the mistake that's costing creators potentially thousands of dollars per month is that the moment somebody leaves a comment, most creators immediately reply with a generic response like, thanks for watching, glad you enjoyed, or subscribe for more content. Now, this seems polite, right? You want to show appreciation for your audience. You want to be responsive and build your community and be nice to everybody. And it feels natural to acknowledge the people who took the time to engage in your content. But what most creators don't understand is that every single comment is actually worth hundreds of dollars that you're just throwing away. And the way you reply could either generate you 10 more comments and then result in you making money, or it could kill the conversation completely. Let me show you exactly why traditional comment replies are destroying your growth potential. And trust me, once you understand the data behind this, you will never reply to a comment the same way again on your channel. And before I explain the right way of handling comments, you have to understand what comments actually represent from a business perspective. Every comment is essentially a free focus group response. Businesses will pay thousands of dollars to get valuable feedback from their customers. You get that for free every single time somebody comments. So that's awesome. They're giving you direct insight into what people are actually thinking when they watch your videos. And sometimes they'll even give you video ideas and they'll make a funny joke that you want to include in a future video. There's so much great stuff in comment sections that most creators completely ignore, but more importantly, comments represent the most engaged segment in your audience. We're not just talking about people who watched your video, but about people who are engaged enough to actually type something out. These are your potential customers, your super fans, and the people who are most likely to buy whatever you're selling. Now, it's no secret that content with higher engagement does get pushed out more by the YouTube algorithm. Now, there is some debate as to how influential that engagement and comments and everything else are for getting pushed out by the algorithm, I'm of the personal belief that it doesn't matter that much. So you might be saying, Matt, if you're saying comments don't matter that much, yet you're also saying there's potentially thousands of dollars in them, and you're also saying that I need to make sure I'm replying to comments the right way, and you're also saying that the way that most people reply to comments is completely wrong, why are you putting this much thought into them then? And let me break down what's actually sitting in your comments section that most creators completely miss. You have the obvious, like content ideas. There could also be a question that you didn't address in your original video that you could then make an updated version of a future video addressing something that somebody left in the comments. That's a great use of them. Or better yet, you find a product to promote from something that somebody wanted to see more in a comment that then solves whatever they're looking to solve. But let me show you how to reply to comments the right way using something I like to call engagement multipliers. If you reply to comments the right way, you can turn one comment into a 10-comment thread that has people coming back to your videos, watching them more and more, which dramatically boosts your video's engagement metrics, and it signals to YouTube that your content is worth promoting. The comments themselves don't matter that much, but what does matter is getting people back to your videos and back to YouTube and back to watching your channel. So I'm personally of the belief that if you can keep people on YouTube for a long period of time you're gonna get all the views and all the subscribers that you want because YouTube is a business. And if you keep people on the platform, it means more ad revenue for YouTube and it means more money for them as well as more money for yourself. So they're gonna reward content that keeps people on the platform. Now my entire YouTube strategy is basically built around this. And the strategy that I teach on this channel is to make a super long video on your channel and then direct all of your traffic to that long video therefore keeping people on the platform, therefore boosting your session time. But what if you could also do that with comments? Here's how. Let me give you a concrete example of how this mathematically works. Let's say you uploaded a video about how to start a YouTube channel and you got 50 comments on that video. If you reply with generic responses like, "Thanks for watching," here's what'll happen. You might get 5 follow-up comments from those 50 people, giving you a 10% comment-to-reply ratio. Your total engagement will stay then at around 55 interactions, and YouTube sees this as moderate engagement and your video gets standard treatment in the algorithm. But now let's compare it to what happens if you reply strategically. Instead of saying some generic response like, "Thanks for watching," to someone who comments, you could reply with something like, "Thanks for watching. What about this video did you really like? And is there anything that I could help you with further?" Now that person is almost guaranteed to reply with more details about their specific problem, but here's where it gets interesting. Other viewers who have the same questions will also jump into that conversation, which means that one strategic reply could generate 5 or 10 additional comments. And if you do this across all 50 comments, instead of 55 total interactions, you might get 200, 300 interactions. That's a 400% increase in engagement, which signals to YouTube that your content's incredibly valuable. Now, like I said, I'm of the belief that comments themselves don't matter that much. But what does matter is the fact that they're coming back to that video. They're gonna watch a bit more of that video. They're gonna be like, wow, this person really cares. I'm gonna actually watch some more of their content and see what they're doing. And this really drives up the engagement. And then YouTube sees this massive engagement and they think this video is generating a lot of serious discussion. Plus you can then go ahead and link in some of the replies that you're doing to people to your really long pillar video saying, hey, if you wanna learn how to do this more in depth, check out this video right here. It actually answers your question in the second secret in this video. then you link to that video, then you're keeping people on YouTube even longer because you're sending them a YouTube link directly on there. So YouTube's gonna see this and they're gonna think, we need to show this to as many people as possible who fit the audience demographic for this. But the engagement boost is just the beginning. Let me tell you the exact moment when comment replies become a business strategy, because every detailed response you get from strategic comment replies is basically free market research. And like we mentioned, companies will pay untold amounts of money for market research. So say you do a YouTube growth video and somebody comments on it saying, I've been stuck at 500 subscribers for months. Instead of replying something like, keep going, you got this, you can reply with, what type of content are you making? Are you making something in a specific niche or trying to cover multiple topics? I'm curious because subscriber stagnation usually has 2 to 3 specific causes. Now you're ending your reply with a cliffhanger saying 2 to 3 specific causes. People want to know what are those causes, so then they'll reply with detailed information about their channel their niche, their upload schedule, their biggest challenges, and they'll probably ask you, what are those 2 to 3 specific causes so I can avoid them? And this gave you a complete case study potentially that you could use in a future video. It gives you specific language your audience uses to describe their problems, validation for multiple different video topics, and a potential customer who's clearly struggling with something that you can solve. And if you multiply this across dozens of different comments, you essentially have a complete market research report that would cost thousands of dollars if you hired something like a consulting firm to do this for you. Now, at this point, you might be saying, okay, Matt, that sounds great. I'm sure that would definitely work, but doesn't this take a bunch of time? I don't really have time to be sitting down and replying to every single comment on my channel. Isn't a better use of my time actually just making new videos for my channel? And I would say yes, your time is better spent making new videos for the channel. However, my recommendation is every time you go and you upload a new video, anytime on your channel, spend 5 or 10 minutes just replying to comments in the way that I'm showing you right now. Now, am I perfect with this? No, not at all. I don't reply to every single comment like this. Sometimes if I'm on the go, if I'm just on my phone or something, I'll go in and I'll just reply thanks or just do a generic reply to some comments. However, for some of them, I do this process even to this day, and I get so many emails and DMs from people saying, wow, you actually took the time to reply to my comment. I really appreciate it. And some of these turn into people joining my program Tube Accelerator, all because I replied to a comment. And also, as your channel gets bigger as well, this does definitely matter less. But in the beginning of your channel, if you're looking for every single thing that you can possibly do, and if you're looking for a strategy that will get you extra views and extra subscribers and potentially make you a lot more money, this is that strategy for you. And another thing as well, if you're scared about this taking too much time, my recommendation is to take the links of all of your different YouTube videos put them into TubeMagic, go to our micro tool section within TubeMagic, and then you can drop in those video links and then get a formatted transcript of every single one of your videos. Save those as TXT files directly on your computer and then go ahead and upload those to Claude AI. Now Claude is the best AI for writing human-like responses. So then what you can do, you can actually create a Claude project where you ask it to do this exact strategy that I'm giving you right now. In fact, feel free to copy the link of this video, put it into TubeMagic as well, and then download the transcript of it. So you can also even then upload this to Claude and then ask it, take the best information from this to give me some frameworks for replying to comments. And then take those frameworks, go into your project that you set up with all of your own transcripts, and then say, write it in the same style that I go through on this using all the information from all of these different video transcripts, or reply to comments using these frameworks. And then you drop the frameworks from this video you're watching right now. Then every single time somebody comments, You copy that comment, you paste it into Claude. It'll give you an incredible reply that you can then paste back into YouTube. Don't rely on this 100%, but it'll start to train you of the best way of replying to comments the right way. Now, another thing is that comments can actually make you a lot of money if you sell something from your replies to those comments. And one of the best ways of doing this is that if somebody comments a super complex, super in-depth problem, you don't have to go through and reply to every single detailed aspect of that problem and basically give them a free coaching session. As we discussed, that would take way too much time. Your time is much better spent on other things. But what you can do is you answer a very small part of that question and then you say, if you want to learn this completely in-depth, check out this video here on my channel where you link to that super long video, which I like to call your money video, which covers the topic you're talking about super in-depth. And this is a video you only have to make once for your channel. This keeps people on YouTube. And then at the end of that money video, you sell your solution to it. So therefore it can also make you a lot of money. You can also drop hints in your comments section where you say, hey, I have a program that helps people more in depth where I'll actually answer your questions personally if that's something you're interested in. But otherwise I would just do this and give them a very brief answer to their comment. You might be saying, Matt, that's great, but what about negative comments? It's not like every single comment on your video is just going to be super positive or asking questions or interested in what you're selling. What about people who just leave absolutely awful comments? Should I also be replying strategically to them too? Now, my personal approach is is that either number one, you ignore obvious trolls or you just reply something funny back to them, like just say, "Thanks so much for the support," if somebody's just obviously trolling. But if there is a legitimate criticism or a disagreement about something that might have some validity or even something that you disagree with, I say definitely reply because it shows that you're not scared of disagreement. So you could reply something like, "That's an interesting perspective. What's your experience been with this strategy?" Therefore, it's giving them the option to reply, getting them back to your video, and showing that you're open to starting dialogues with people. Oftentimes these conversations will provide the most valuable insights because they highlight potential weaknesses in your content or blind spots you haven't considered. And even though I'm pretty experienced with YouTube, I've been doing it for the past 10 years, I can still sometimes make mistakes or miss out on an important point that somebody covers in the comments. And because of that, I don't recommend being arrogant against critics and just saying anybody who leaves anything negative automatically should dismiss. You should actually appreciate them because it opens up several opportunities for you. Number 1, you can either learn something from them, or number 2, you can teach them something. And plus, the added benefit is that when other viewers see you handling criticism professionally and extracting value from it, it actually helps build more trust and authority than if you just responded to positive comments. To really drive this home as well, you can see my video I did several years ago where I made a video responding to a bunch of different scam allegations of people saying that my play buttons were fake, that I'm actually not I literally shared screenshots within all my different channels, refresh the analytics. I showed me redeeming play buttons so you can see that they're actually real and actually from YouTube. And you should go back and look at the comments section on that video. It is the most supportive, the best comment section that I've ever had on any video that I've ever done. And I can tell you that that video alone has resulted probably in millions of dollars for my business just because I took the time to reply to something that was negative. So when it comes to the time that's required for replying to comments, think about the fact that if you spend 5 or 10 minutes replying to comments in a day, that could save you 3 hours of research when it comes to content planning or market research. So you're actually saving a lot of time as well by doing this. Plus your comment section becomes more engaged. Other community members start answering you. It creates a self-sustaining ecosystem as well where other people might jump in and start answering on your behalf, or you might get mega fans who reply to other people for you on your behalf. Now there is one exception to this approach, and I want to be perfectly clear about it. Which is that sometimes a simple thank you or a heart emoji is exactly the right response. If somebody leaves a super long, thoughtful comment sharing their success story, thank you for help, you don't have to go ahead and turn that into a business opportunity or turn it into more engagement. Show genuine appreciation first, and then if it's appropriate, ask follow-up questions about their process and everything else. The key is reading the room, understanding when somebody wants acknowledgment versus when they're open to a deeper conversation. But here's what I've learned. Most creators default to simple acknowledgments when their audience is actually craving deeper engagement and more detailed guidance. Don't be that guy or gal either. So don't treat your comments like an afterthought. Remember, there are real people leaving those comments, and doing these strategies will help you, especially if you're in the beginning stage of building your YouTube channel. Now, if you want to work with my team and I personally for helping you grow your channel, you can check out the link down in the description to book a call with my team for my program Tube Accelerator. You can also check out this video right here, which is essentially a free course. Like I said earlier as well, I was going to talk about this video also, which is basically a very long video that lives on my channel, which helps you super in-depth. It's basically a free course for doing YouTube. Feel free to check it out. You'll get tons of value from it regardless. My name is Matt Parr and I will see you there.