How to Start & Grow a Youtube Channel using Evergreen Videos

Evergreen YouTube videos. Everyone has heard about them and everyone wants the benefit of the consistent traffic that it sends to our business. I've spent thousands of hours building YouTube channels, and in this video I'm going to show you what I have seen work the most consistently. Howdy, howdy everyone. Nate here. I was approached by HubSpot to make this video because they saw that I knew a thing or two about this. There are three types of videos that consistently get evergreen traffic for channels like yours. First type of video for your channel is this. Guides. Now, at its core, a guide on YouTube is a video made for a specific audience looking to accomplish a specific outcome. They have a specific goal, a certain thing that they're trying to accomplish. Think how to pressure wash my driveway or have a consistently green lawn year round. The concept of guide videos is not new by any means. And I'm willing to bet that you watching this, have watched at least one guide video in your lifetime. I would be very surprised if you hadn't done that yet. But the thing to know here is how you approach that guide video can determine how successful it will provide long term as an evergreen video. When you're thinking of a potential guide video that you're going to produce for your business, I want you to think of it this way. We've got a pyramid here that represent the type of questions that your potential clients might have related to the niche that you're serving with your products. Okay, so we've got high level questions, mid level and low level questions. High level questions are the types of questions that a lot of people are asking and therefore the competition on these types of questions might be a bit high. Higher. Now with these mid level questions, these are the types of questions that they might want to know. If they're a little bit further into being your ideal client, maybe they've been educated a bit more, maybe they're further along and exploring how to accomplish this outcome that your business helps them accomplish. And therefore it goes to say that these low level questions will have fewer people looking for them, therefore a smaller audience for a guide style of video. But there are also the types of questions that tend to have less competition and therefore can be more niche or perhaps an even better fit for your audience. Here's how I want you to look at it. Play in this space. If you have a brand that is well known already and you want to own the space on YouTube to create those evergreen videos. So for here, because the competition is higher, the more well known you are before you make that video, the More likely it is that you will win that evergreen spot. So here we're looking for this. If you're just starting off with making these evergreen videos, I want you to play more here. In fact, as a general rule of thumb, if you're wondering where to place your guide videos on this spectrum, I would spend the most time in this space, the mid level, which leads us to this low level right here. You can make videos here. Just know that they probably will not spread as much as videos up here. Now, there are advantages to playing in this low level space here because it might be easier to win search, which we're going to get to here in a bit. So again, to make this point land of the difference between these high level and low level, it could look like this. If you are a lawn care channel, a high level would be how to get my lawn to be green. Anyone who has a lawn is wondering, how do I get my lawn to be green? A low level question would be how to aerate your lawn in the Pacific Northwest. You can see the differences between those two questions. The low level is much more targeted. But if your ideal clients are wondering how to aerate their lawn in the Pacific Northwest and you provide a service for them in that area, boom. Your video could win that space and establish that authority you're looking for with that specific targeted audience. All right, and it's time to move on to the next type of evergreen video here. I'm calling these the raw, originality type of evergreen video. This type is the type that we most often think about when we think viral video or videos that we watch and we say, dang, that was a good video. I'm going to go ahead and share that with my friend. This might not work for all business types and it might not be worth the effort for all business types, but when it's done correctly, can be extremely successful. Let me give you some examples. Red Bull, if you've ever watched any of their videos, they have been absolutely crushing it on YouTube recently. And the crazy part about these Red Bull video is it's often not immediately obvious that it is Red Bull. If you take a step back and look at what they're actually doing with these videos, they're making it about people doing cool stunts that happen to have Red Bull branding. It's not the other way around. And that is a very important distinction with what Red Bull is doing. Because you almost don't realize that it's a business esque video until partway through. Because the enthusiasm for the stunts is what comes first, another example, Duolingo. I don't know who is in charge of their marketing department on YouTube, but I just want to meet them and shake their hand. Duolingo has done everything from memes to musicals. They're completely owning that brand because spread and originality is their game plan here. So here I've diagrammed how the evergreen traffic looks like on YouTube. A person will become aware of your raw originality YouTube video. They'll watch it, and if it's good, they will tell someone else about it who will then hopefully go and watch the same video. And what this cycle does is very important for the YouTube algorithm. It does this authority is a word that I loosely use to describe what happens when the algorithm sees that a video is a good video for a certain audience. And if it consistently performs well for that audience, they will consistently promote that video, creating the evergreen cycle effect. Because the bonus here is if this original person, or if a new person decides to then watch a another one of your videos, you have created the coveted space of an evergreen channel because you've shown to the algorithm that you create the behavior where a person watches your video, they like it, they share it, someone else watches the video, and then those two people in this example watch another one of your videos and another and another. So the big strategy for this evergreen video style is this brand association. If you make videos that have an idea or something that's very original and spreadable first, that is associated with your brand, and it's a great way to spread awareness. All right, and we've got the next evergreen style of video here. But first, go ahead and like this video. If it is being helpful to you, that allows this video to spread and potentially be more evergreen to other people that need to learn this. So thank you for doing that. Yes, we have come to search. If you have spent any amount of time on YouTube, you are aware that search is huge on the platform. The YouTube traffic engineers go through iterations of how they classify search. And this isn't an SEO or search engine optimization video. We could talk about that in another video. But what this is is talking about the behavior of searchable videos for evergreen traffic. Let me show you what I mean here. There are three types of audience spread behavior that I see within videos. A fast burn is if you publish a video, let's say you publish right here, you publish, and it gets an initial big spike, and then it kind of peters off, and then maybe it drops down to a very low here. A slow burn is the type of video that it can start however it wants to, with spikes, etc. But afterwards you start to see this happening with your views. The third type, again, can start however it wants to, but it will often look like this and then a spike and then a flat. All three of these cases can be successful for your business, but the most evergreen of them is this one. And one of the best ways to accomplish this type of viewer behavior, where it's consistently sending traffic to your video and thus to your business, is through search is by winning specific search, meaning they're going to watch your video and they want an outcome so you can offer them something within that very same video. Which means if you're going for the slow burn style of Evergreen video, you want to include a lead magnet of some type in every single one of those videos. In fact, if you need a little boost on how to best create the packaging to win Search, I've included this array of HubSpot templates where they've essentially done most of the legwork of getting that foundation down for the packaging on your searchable videos. So if you want most of that legwork done for you, I'm going to put a link in the description on this video. Now here's where we get to the bonus extra super secret sauce of this section here. If you're looking to win Evergreen Search here, I want you to do two things with the packaging of your videos. First is with the thumbnail. Include the text of the title of your video in the thumbnail again. Or include a major benefit of watching your video for the audience in the thumbnail. The second thing is with the title of your video. Format it this way. First, what the video is. And second, the major benefit of watching that video for your audience that comes from observing and testing thousands of YouTube videos and seeing that those are the types that tend to win search the most often. In fact, the next time you search for something on YouTube, why don't you check and see if they aren't formatted that way. So again, like I mentioned, if you want that massive array of HubSpot templates where they put in most of the legwork of producing this starting point for you, you can get it with a link below this video. It's totally free. And also, if this video has been helpful to you, you can watch this video next where I explain another very important concept.