3 Outdated YouTube Growth Tips You Should STOP Following

The first outdated YouTube growth tip is SEO or keyword research. Yep, I'm going right there. And it is all because of the YouTube algorithms. Yes, algorithms. YouTube doesn't just run on one algorithm. There are lots of algorithms running behind the scenes on YouTube. And it's really changed the way that YouTube decides what videos it's going to put in front of people. Meaning it's not just tags and SEO that is going to get your videos ranking in search or showing up where you want it to show up. Now, this doesn't mean we need to stop doing SEO research and keyword research completely, but we need to start shifting the way we are planning our videos and how we are choosing which videos or content we are going to create for YouTube. So let me tell you what you should be doing instead. But first, hi, welcome back. My name is Trena. If you are brand new to this channel, this channel is all about helping you plan, organize and create YouTube content that helps your business grow. And before I tell you what you need to be focusing on instead of keywords and the two other outdated tips, I want to personally thank one of you who has taken the time to leave a comment on one of my recent videos. Thank you my artpixie, for your sweet comment on my recent video how to turn a YouTube video into an Instagram video. And I can't wait to hear how your first batching day goes. If you want a shout out in my next video, make sure you leave a comment below letting me know what is your biggest takeaway from today's video and a quick spoiler alert. Make sure you stay to the end of this video because after I share with you all these outdated YouTube growth tips, I'm going to be sharing with you the three things you need to be focusing on YouTube right now if you want to grow your YouTube channel. Now let's get back to the SEO and keyword research and why it's a bit outdated. YouTube actually says so itself. When you upload your videos, you're going to see right above the tags feature. YouTube says tags can be useful if your content in your video is commonly misspelled. Otherwise, tags play a minimal role in helping viewers find your video. Instead, what you should be focusing on instead of spending all this time researching the perfect keyword is actually focusing on metrics that matter that will get YouTube to push your video to more people. One of those metrics is click through rate. And click through rate is a major determiner of whether YouTube is going to put your video in front of more people. Or not. Because if YouTube is showing your video with your title and your thumbnail to people and they aren't clicking on it or why would YouTube show it to even more people? People aren't even getting to the content part. And so it's really important to make sure you're spending this time on your thumbnail and your title so that people actually click on it so that YouTube will want to push it to more people. Now I've been thinking about doing a video on how to create good thumbnails. If that is a video you would like to see, hit the like button on this video. If we get this video to 100 likes, I will do that video next. Oh, one more thing I wanted to share about YouTube SEO and ranking on YouTube before we move into the second outdated YouTube growth tip search traffic. And isn't always the traffic that we see help our clients grow their YouTube channel the fastest. On our team, with our Video Strategy Academy clients and our agency clients, we see their channels really take off and YouTube really start recommending their videos to more people when they get put in browse and suggested. This is a client that is in my program Video Strategy Academy and she will hit 2 million views and over 27 million 7000 subscribers in less than 10 months. When she came to Video Strategy Academy she just had about 200 subscribers and that's how quickly she grew. And you can see right here that the main traffic sources that are driving her channel is browse and suggested only 3% of the traffic coming to her channel right now is from YouTube search. I just wanted to show you proof it's not all about the tags and the keyword outdated. Tip number two is needing to have a strategy in place before you get started. Now this is the best way you're going to see success if you're a small channel or if you are just starting a YouTube channel. Here's the thing, we all start at zero subscribers. I did way back in 2016 when I first got started and all of my clients have started there as well. But you can't get started on YouTube knowing what is going to be successful. Yes, you can kind of make an hypothesis or a guess at what may do well, but you need to do some testing because you need to create a YouTube strategy based on solid data. So what I suggest instead is your first six to eight videos. Be a little loose on that strategy. You want to really experiment with different styles of videos and different types of videos, which I'll talk about here in a minute. But you need to Be able to see what is going to work. And you won't be able to see that again unless that video is on YouTube and you have data to solidify that. In my coaching program, Video Strategy Academy, we talk about having three, three types of videos to create a strong YouTube strategy. These three types of videos are discoverable videos, the ones that are meant to be shown up when people search. So like the how to videos, the tutorial videos, we also make sure we're including community videos which are meant to make a connection with your viewer. I know when I got started this is a major mistake that I made. I just made a lot of helpful educational content. So a lot of people were coming to my channel, getting the content and then piecing out. So I was not converting them into subscribers subscribers because I wasn't creating these community videos where I shared more about my story, where I made more of a connection. So the discoverable videos are meant to bring people to your channel and then the community videos are really meant to make these viewers subscribers and really build your fan club, basically. And then you also need to have different styles of videos as well, because you've got to keep your audience engaged. If you just keep doing how to, how to, how to, how to videos just predominantly on YouTube. Like again, another mistake that I've made, your audience is going to get tired of watching the same videos over and over and over from you. So some different types of videos you want to make sure you're incorporating in your YouTube strategy are obviously the talking head videos, screen tutorials, maybe some unboxing videos. So for me, unboxing video equipment reviews, reviewing certain tools that I'm using, and even branching out into some different topics. So I talk a lot about YouTube, but the predominant reason I have a YouTube channel is to help me build my email list and grow my business and so branching out into some business content as well as to keep my current audience you engaged with the content that I'm creating every week. So you will Notice on my YouTube channel, I've been recently experimenting with new types of videos like vlogs, and I recently put podcast interviews on this channel as well just to see if either one of those would hit if you as the viewer would enjoy them or not. I would love to know if you watched one of my vlogs and if you actually liked watching them. Leave a comment below. More vlogs. Because again, I want to ensure I'm creating the right content that you want to see and that has helped. So let me know your feedback on the Recent vlogs I've been posting. Overall, don't put so much stress on the very first videos that you put out on your YouTube channel. You do not need to have a perfect strategy in place for your channel before you get started. In fact, when we work with our clients in our agency, we give them six videos upfront. These are test videos. And once we get those videos on their channel, then we can really craft the strategy based on the data that we have once those videos are live. Because again, I will say it another time, you need have the data to create a strong strategy. All right, moving on to outdated tip number three. And it's creating one type of content. So I touched a little bit briefly about this, but I want to talk about niching as your 1 type of content because we hear this a lot on YouTube, right? You need to niche down. You need to niche down. And that is very true. Because you really need to be able to understand the niche that you are speaking to. The audience, the target audience that you are trying to attract. That is your niche. Because the better you can understand those people, the better you can create the right types of videos for them. They will want to watch them. And YouTube will be able to figure out who your audience is to send your video out to more people. That's the key here. If you can clearly understand what your audience wants and you create those videos and they watch them and they like them, YouTube understands that that's the type of person who's watching your content. And the algorithms can find more people like that. Again, as I mentioned in tip number two, though, you need to be creating different types of video that have different goals in mind. So for example, every single video that I create, before I even start scripting it or creating my video game plan, I decide what is the goal of this video, why am I creating this video? And that could be a couple different things. One could be purely views. I just want to get as many views as possible on this video. One could be subscribers. I really want to convert viewers into subscribers. One could be to get people on my email list. Last week I did a video all about how I write my video game plan. And I talked about the challenge that you can join me in, where I go into deeper detail of planning all of my videos. So the pure purpose of last week's video was getting you to sign up for my challenge. Because like I said, one of the biggest mistakes that I had made in the beginning of my channel for the first couple of years was just making educational content. Educational, educational. Educational and not really letting down the walls of who I am so that you could connect with me as a human. People were coming to my channel, getting great content, but I didn't give them a purpose or a reason to want to subscribe and come back and hear more from me. So if I were to break these down into types, if your goal is to get views, you're going to be creating discoverable videos, those how to educational videos that people can search for and find. And if your goal is to get subscribers, you need to make sure you're including those community type videos. And that's what I've been doing with my recent vlogs, allowing you to learn a little bit more about me, see a little bit more more about how I manage this all so we can make a personal connection. I mean, think about the teachers that you can remember from like elementary school or maybe even high school. Why can you remember those teachers? You probably had some type of connection with them and that's why you can remember those teachers as opposed to all the teachers that you had growing up. Right? And then I don't know why you started your YouTube channel, but the primary reason I started my YouTube channel was to help me grow my business so I could, quote, quit the day job that I hated. I just wanted to be able to do something that I liked, that I enjoyed getting out of bed for that. I didn't want to figure out how I could be sick today and have another sick day. But now as a business owner, to keep this business going, I've got to make money. So in a recent video that I did about how I create a social media calendar, the whole purpose of that video was to get you to check out my system that I have, my program, the prep system. And that one video in just 24 hours made me over a thousand dollars, which is a $47 product. So this is a different type of video that you need to be having as well as part as your YouTube growth tactics. Because you're not going to make money here on just YouTube AdSense. You need to make sure you're pulling people into your channel. You want to make sure you're building that trust and getting people to have that connection with you. And then you want to make sure you're making money in your business with these sales type videos. Because that video that made $1,000 in 24 hours for me continues to drive me sales every single single day. Because it is a discoverable video technically, but it is also a sales video and is getting people to My prep system. All right, I want to move into a couple more bonus outdated YouTube growth tips that are really quick to get through. So the first bonus one is asking people to subscribe at the beginning of your video. The thing is, most people aren't going to subscribe to you at the beginning of the video anyways. They're trying to figure out, do they like you? Do they like your style? And what could be happening is you're actually turning people away. So check out your audience retention if you are asking people to subscribe at the beginning of your video, because you could actually be causing people to click off of your video just by asking to subscribe. Another outdated YouTube growth tip is naming your video file your keyword. So this was something that went viral a few years ago that if you named the video file that you uploaded to YouTube the keyword you wanted to rank for that would help you? Absolutely not. True. You can name your video file whatever you want. Mine tends to be just like my initials, T.L. aug. 23, or whatever the date is, and my videos do just fine. And the Third bonus outdated YouTube growth tip is needing to have a professional setup or even professional equipment to grow a channel. Thanks to the trends in 2020, more people are looking for raw content, less polished content, less produced content. And recently, I've been shooting videos on my phone. So if you watch my vlogs, all of those are shot on my phone, and people are really making a connection with those videos. So don't think that you need to go out and buy the fancy camera or a fancy microphone. You can really just get started with your cell phone. All right, so you've been waiting for it. What is working on YouTube right now? What can you do with your YouTube channel right now to grow it? Well, first up is creating bingeable content. How can you create videos that make people want to watch one after another after another? And the way that I do this is when I sit down to plan my content. So I plan my content for this batch day. I'm actually shooting four videos today. Yesterday, I thought about each video that I was creating and how could I take you from this video to another video or this video? This video. And so you heard me mention throughout this particular video, different videos. How many times can I say video here that I would recommend that you watch next or ones to check out after this? So I'm creating this binge session with you. So you possibly watch this one, you watch another one, you watch another one, and that's how you're going to grow on YouTube right now. The second way to grow on YouTube right now is using YouTube features like the Community tab, if you have access to that. Also YouTube Stories, it used to be called YouTube Reels, now it's YouTube Stories. But when you are using these features that YouTube has created, YouTube will quote unquote reward you because they need people using these features. They put the time and the money into creating these features and if people aren't using them, it's a waste of money. So they will tend to push your content more when you use those features. So with the Community tab, you can actually schedule those out. So I have posts going out every single week for the next two weeks on that community tab and I've recently been just repurposing my Instagram stories on YouTube Reels as well. The third tip on what is working on YouTube right now is knowing and studying your audience retention. Look, if you can get people to watch as much as your video as possible, that's what's going to help your videos get pushed to more people. Yes, we talked about the click through rate, but just as important as the click through rate is your audience retention. So how can you figure out how to keep people watching your videos longer? This is when YouTube will really reward you. If you can get people watching 50%, 60% of your video, that is right now what's expected. Exploding YouTube channel growth. And if audience retention is something that you need help with or you need to figure out how to make it better, I'm actually hosting a five day challenge starting on Monday, September 25th where I'm going to help you do that. I'm going to show you exactly how to plan your videos for better audience retention. This is something like I said I do with every single one of my videos and I do with our client videos as well. You're going to get access to me and a private Facebook group, plus my feedback on your YouTube game plan, your YouTube strategy for 10 full days. Once you sign up for the YouTube video game plan, which will be linked here on your screen. Watch this video Next, I'm going to walk you through the minimal equipment that you need to get started with on YouTube right now. Remember, there's no need for fancy these days and this video will show you what you need. Thanks for watching and if this was helpful, make sure you hit subscribe and I'll see you next week.