The 4 Phases Every YouTube Channel Must Go Through

How long does it take to scale a YouTube channel? I'm pretty sure that you've probably wondered that exact same thing if you have a channel or you're looking to start one. Now, before you go ahead and discredit anything I'm saying because this channel is small, I've been in the YouTube agency for 7 years. I have right now over 5 million subscribers under management, and everything I'm going to be going over today is things that I've learned in my agency, which which is still very much active and consumes 90% of all of my mental fortitude. But through working with clients, I have found that there are certain things that allow a channel to grow faster. And in this video, I'm going to go over exactly what those things are. And more importantly, I'm gonna go over the main one that most people never get past. There's 4 phases into scaling your YouTube channel, and this is something I call the calibration period. Now, before I go into the calibration period, I have come to a conclusion of different data that I've pulled from clients that I've worked with. And just to get the speed to value really quick, in 5 years and 1,000 uploads, every one of my clients that have done that have a multiple 7-figure, some 8-figure business built off the back end of their YouTube efforts. So with that being said, let's move into the calibration period. When you start a new channel or you pivot to an existing one, YouTube's algorithm doesn't yet know who your audience is or what your content should be recommended for. So essentially the algorithm is just asking itself, who's most likely to click this? Who's most likely to watch all the way through? And who's most likely to come back for more? So the platform enters a learning phase where it collects data points across multiple uploads to calibrate its understanding of your channel. This period is which strategists in formally call the calibration period, the time it takes for YouTube's recommendation system to find your ideal audience and start consistently servicing your videos to them. So let's talk about what the calibration period entails. Well, on a technical aspect, YouTube's AI systems, mainly the candidate generation and ranking models, rely on 3 categories of signals. The first signal is the viewer signals, Who clicked? From what country? What watch history or interest did they have? Another one under the view signals is, do they watch similar channels? For instance, if you're watching me, I would hope that you probably watch Dan Coe or Think Media because those are people that I watch on a very regular basis. Number 2 is content signals. What is your video about? What the title, description, transcript, visual embeddings, tags, and engagement comments. Another, what kind of emotion and retention curve does it produce? Historically on this channel, I'm progressively working on how well I can communicate. I've started eliminating filler words. I've started watching other people speak and studying how they speak. So in doing that, I've noticed my retention curves start to trend upwards. People are watching me longer, which is a sign I'm getting better as a speaker. One thing you need to know about YouTube is your edit does not need to be flashy for retention. Flashiness can only complement a good speaker. It can never make a bad speaker a good speaker. So if you want good content, I believe having good content starts with having a better you. Now on to the third thing in the calibration period is behavioral signals. This is things like what I just touched on. Watch time, click-through rate, average view duration, satisfaction surveys. This is when YouTube will— I don't know if you've ever experienced this— drop a thing below a video and say, how did this video do? Or did you find this video satisfying? Or it'll give you like a sad face, happy face, neutral face, and you interact with it. Those are the satisfaction surveys that your viewers are getting on your videos. So if they interact with it in a good way, obviously that's going to help you more and it's going to help the calibration period know that these groups of people like these kinds of videos, and these kinds of videos would be your videos, of course. Another thing in the behavioral signals is the return rate of viewers, typically within a 7, 14, and 30-day period. Now, this calibration period takes multiple data cycles, usually anywhere from 30 to 90 days, but I've seen it go upwards of 120 days. And the distinguishing factor in which you know that you're done through that period is when your videos start getting that thing I mentioned earlier, the predictable viewership. You're getting consistent views, consistent 5, 10, 8. You're all in the same range of views. Right now, this channel is in the same range of 50 to 100 views, so I'm in the very early phases of a calibration period. And I think it's cuz I went very broad. I really, really love psychology and I think again, good content starts with a better you. So I leaned really hard on psychology. Now I just need to learn how to bridge content creation with psychology cuz those are my two favorite things. My livelihood is built off content and my interests are built off psychology. As I move upward from that 50 to 100 viewership average and I go into, let's say the 500 to 1,000 average, I know I'm in a different calibration period. And as I move through, I know I'm getting more calibrated and dialed because now YouTube knows who to serve my videos to, which is only going to aid me in my growth. And again, the 30, 90, or 100-day period really, really depends on your posting frequency. I always tell people, when you're starting YouTube, have a 100-video journey. You haven't started until you hit the 101-video mark. The 100 video journey is the most important journey. Now, I tried to conceptualize what the calibration period would look like as a chart, and maybe it's not the best chart, but it's a chart nonetheless, and I'm a visual learner, so the way I can interpret visuals helps me speak better about them. Maybe you'll watch more. So I put this chart together. This is the calibration timeline, and I broke it down into 4 different phases followed by duration what happens and your goal, the main thing that you should be focusing on at that moment. So phase 1 is the 1 to 4 week period. At this period, you want at least 20 uploads, and ideally you don't want to lean too heavy on long-form uploads or short-form uploads. You want to pick one. In the most appropriate world where you could potentially see the most success, you would lean on the long-form uploads. Short-form has a much lower payout when it comes to really monetizing a backend offer. And this is again, speaking from experience. Short-form is great for virality and getting reach, but not so much for conversion. So phase 1, try to focus that on long-form uploads. Of course, you can use short-form to offset that amount. 20 uploads could be a bit more, much, especially in a 4-week period. If you do 2 long forms a week, that will help, and then you offset that difference with the short form uploads. This will help speed up that calibration timeline. So now what happens next? YouTube tests your videos across random audiences just so they can collect data. Your goal during this period is focus on click-through and retention. You want to, of course, optimize your titles, your thumbnail copy. Of course, the visual is important, but the thumbnail copy is super important, and your hooks. Those 3 things are the most important thing that you can put most of your energy and effort into during that 4-week window. And of course, the 4-week window is a rough estimate. Sometimes it could be 6 weeks. It really depends on that frequency upload. So 20 uploads, I put it in a month. Sometimes 20 uploads could take someone 6 weeks, it could take them a month and a half. It doesn't matter as long as we hit that 20 upload mark. So now Phase 2 is that 6 to 8 week mark. During this period, you'll have about 20 to 50 uploads. Again, the more inputs you could do in the earlier phases during a calibration period, the faster the algorithm will know how to weigh and feed your content to your ideal audience. I call this the recognition period. What happens during this time is YouTube starts identifying patterns. Who watches the longest? What topics correlate with watch time? During this period, your main goal should be to double down on certain formats or topics that outperform. Follow me now. If you look at my channel, you'll notice I've done 3 to 4 different formats, and that's by design. I'm trying to see which ones have the greatest retention. So far, the greatest retention is the iPhone ones. These studio ones haven't done the best so far, but it's still so early. I know I'm in the calibration period, so I'm not going to beat myself up and say, damn it, I really like my studio. I don't want to do iPhone ones. I'm still testing. But what I'm doing here, since I'm trying to make it the main focus of the recognition phase, which is the phase 2, I'm doing iPhone, I'm doing studio, I'm doing screen share, and I'm doing a weird hybrid. If you've seen my last video, this one, I did partial selfie style mixed with studio. I'm just split testing different ones and I'm studying who's watching, how long they're watching, and based off that I will eventually have my answer after 50 uploads. Now let's move on to phase 3. This is the audience calibration period. I like to call this where you actually get to start YouTube. Reason being, this typically happens at the 50 to 100 upload mark. And again, I said on this video and I say to people that I meet, if you're going to start YouTube, your first video starts at 101. If you don't have a 100-video count outlook, then you're not even going to make it. Don't even try, there's no point. YouTube is the hardest platform to master, it's the slowest growing, but it is also the most rewarding. So during this period, what happens? Your videos begin showing to consistent viewers. This is the period in which, in the beginning of the video, I started talking about you get these batches. Right now I'm at the 50 to 100 view count, then I go to the 500, 1,000 count, then I go to the 10,000, 20,000 count. Once you get batched up into a consistent viewer, or rather returning audience camp, that's when you really can start running with YouTube. This is where the engine of monetization is really going to start kicking on. And again, not about AdSense, about your backend offer. So make sure if you start at YouTube, you have a backend offer, because if you you're just trying to rely on AdSense, chances are not going to be so worth it because you need a lot of views or a super high CPM to make a significant amount of money. And for me, anything less than $40,000 a month is not worth it. So I'm not going to rely on AdSense for this video. It's sales to my backend offer or any new offers that I develop. Your goal during this period is to build series. You want recurring concepts. You also want to encourage subscriptions. In the phase 3 era, this is when you have people that look forward to certain videos. My other clients, Carlton Dennis is very known for his LLC videos. People always ask for them. Heresy Financial is always known for his Federal Reserve outlooks because he's in the finance world and people always look for that. There's a recurring theme with all of my clients that I work with that they know they need to produce for their recurring viewers. I also made a short talking about why you'll always have infinite content ideas, and that's because you will never run out of ideas if you just have one good one, because that one good one can be broken down into so many and redone so many different times that you'll forever be able to feed the channel. And to that note, that's exactly what all of my clients do inside of their YouTube brands. Now let's move on. Phase 4. This is the algorithmic lock-in. This is the most rewarding period. While Phase 3 might feel a bit euphoric because now you're getting some predictability in the engagement and viewership, Phase 4 is really where you start hitting that hockey puck because now you know all the things that work and you could directly impact how fast you grow if you do it right. If I find out this format does the best, this topic does the best, this style of editing does the best, these titles, this thumbnail style. Once I get all of that through all the different phases, I can now manipulate the outcome. In phase 4, you're completely locked in and so is the algorithm. You can only put out the best of the best. Only put out what has always worked. So the duration— this is after the 100-video upload. This is where I mentioned earlier in the video, all my clients got to that 1,000-video count, and that's because they were operating in phase 4. It was so rewarding to be here that they didn't even know time was passing, and they made YouTube a habit rather than a must. They made YouTube a part of their identity rather than something that they have to do. It's something that they want to do because they're getting the rewards here. Phase 1, 2, and even a little bit of 3 are not rewarding on YouTube. A lot of people don't make it that far and they back out. They never finish. Even right now, myself, obviously I'm not discouraged cuz I've been on YouTube for many years and I understand how the game works, so I'm not going to back out. But if I was somebody else looking from the outside in, it's like, why is this guy even still doing it? Why is he even trying? He should just stop. No one's watching. But I understand I'm only in phase 1. I'm not even in phase 2 yet. It's going to suck a lot longer, but eventually it's going to get really good. Now, what happens during this period? YouTube now knows your audience, which allows you to scale and get predictable traffic. This is why I said you can start manipulating how well you do because you could just duplicate the best, which is obviously the goal. And in this phase, you really, really just want to focus on maintaining consistency. And maybe eventually you can expand to greater and broader reached topics. But the main focus here, if you're in phase 4, is just lock in, keep going, double down. I know it's maybe boring. I know it's maybe repetitive. I know you already made that video before. Make it again. Do it again. When you go to the gym, you can't do a bicep curl different. A bicep curl is a bicep curl. Just like a video. A video is a video. I know you could maybe change how you do the curl and now it changes it, but it's still a curl. Same thing with your videos. Do the same video, just change the angle. This is where a lot of people maybe feel that it could be redundant, but I promise you it won't be redundant when you're having a jam-packed calendar and everyone on your sales team is just just picking up the phone with the warmest leads, because we all know YouTube brings in the warmest leads. So when creators complain that their early videos underperform, it's not always their quality, it's their lack of calibration and knowing where they're at in that phase. YouTube literally hasn't figured out who to show your videos to yet, but I promise you, when that happens, you're gonna start seeing a lot of fun things happen to your business. Now let's talk about how to calibrate faster. You can shorten this phase dramatically the more you upload because you're doing more inputs. You start putting out inputs. The more inputs you do, the faster this thing can calibrate, which is why right now my cadence on this channel is one upload per day, two long forms a week. Something you must remember. Number one, keep consistent topics. The algorithm learns through consistency. Changing topics or tones too early, scrambles the data and actually prolongs you in a certain phase that you're at and potentially even pushes you back because now the algorithm may assume that, oh, this is not his audience, he's going for this audience. So every time you're doing a different video, and I know when you're starting out you want to do everything because you have all these passions, but I promise you one thing is enough. Do the one thing long enough and eventually that one thing will be able to be the reason. You could talk about many things, but if you try to talk about everything, you'll talk about nothing. The second thing to help calibrate faster is the reinforce metadata clarity, is what I call it. You want to align titles, thumbnails, intro hooks, and transcripts around the core topic, around the same emphasis, same core topic. YouTube's NLP systems like DeepMinds, Museo cluster videos based on semantic similarity. You also want very consistent phrasing. This is super important. What I mean by that, for me, it would be content creation, mindset, creative energy, focus, philosophy. So if those are my things, make sure that they're always my things. Don't do nutrition, vlog, new car reveal, house tour. That is the worst thing, and I will keep you in the calibration era of your YouTube channel way longer than you should. So make sure even your copy and the things that you use are very consistent and they're always the same because this tells YouTube exactly where to file you. Number 3 to help calibrate faster is drive returning viewers early. A returning viewer signal is like an anchor point in the model. It tells YouTube these videos belong to together, encouraging binge watching. For example, saying something like, if this helped you, watch my next video on creative burnout. It's the exact complementary piece to this video I just made. Saying things like that, getting people to watch the other videos on your channel will help that binge era inside of the speeding up of the calibration period. Number 4, this is probably the most important. Keep a stable upload cadence. I can't stress that enough. The algorithm models use upload frequency as confidence factors. YouTube wants to know that if you showed up today, you're going to show up next week, same day. The faster it can predict that you're going to continuously show up, the more confident it becomes in showing your content. So with that being said, if you decide to vanish for a week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, the model decays and then recalibration has to start again. It's like resetting with training weights. It's like going to the gym. If you bench 225 pounds and all of a sudden you stop benching 225 pounds for 4 weeks and then you come back, you might not be able to go to the 225. You might have to go to the 205s first and then eventually go back up to 225. Same thing with the algorithm and your YouTube channel. Now another thing, again, maybe this is me giving up too much sauce, this is what I'm doing, this is what a lot of my clients have done. You want to upload a lot of Shorts. This will excel the calibration period really fast. So number 5 is use Shorts as data accelerators, 'cause Shorts can hit huge impressions really quick, which will eventually get you the right viewers. 'Cause what are impressions? It's people coming past your content. So we want a lot of impressions because in the beginning, the more impressions we get, the better. Better because now we're able to basically be that lighthouse shining a gigantic light trying to get as much people that wanna watch our stuff in. If several Shorts consistently retain 60% and convert to long-form watch time, the model calibrates faster around those signals. So if you make short-form content and you attach your long-form link inside of there and you start driving traffic back to your long-form, you might just expedite this whole calibration period. So in short, the calibration period is very much real. It's the invisible machine learning warmup your channel must go through, and also you must go through, because there's going to be a lot of mental fortitude on debating, do I continue or do I stop? Is it worth it or is it not? YouTube is effectively training a model about you in the same way that AI trains on data, and your job is to give it clean, consistent inputs so it can learn. Now, if you found this insightful and you're serious about scaling your YouTube channel or maybe even starting one, my next video might be better than this one. Not subscribing would be an injustice to your progress. Thanks for watching.