An EXCLUSIVE Peek into My YouTube Strategy Coaching Session

I want to do something totally different in this video that I've never really done on my YouTube channel. And I want to share with you a recording of a strategy build that I did in my recent challenge, kickstart your YouTube Spark challenge. And so what you're actually going to see in this video is my thought process and how I help clients build a YouTube channel strategy, how I review your current channel, things that I would change to make your channel do better, but then how to start building out a strategy by researching on YouTube, determining what videos are actually good videos for you to do, how to find niche neighbors and how to piggyback them. And like I said, this is a recording that I did inside of a free challenge. But if you want me to do this for your channel, I have strategy sessions available. So I'm going to leave the link for one hour strategy sessions that you can purchase from me down in the description box below. And so this recording is just going to give you a glimpse into what I do with my clients and what you could actually do working with me if you wanted a strategy session with me. So, so the very first thing that I'm going to do is look at a channel from like an outsider perspective. And so first thing people see when they come to your channel channel banner. What am I going to get out of this? What's in it for me? Why do I want to keep looking down this page? So I see WordPress website business, but what am I getting out of this? What is the value that I'm going to get? What are you going to be able to help me solve on this channel? So that's one thing, Nicola, that I would focus on is how can I make this pitch? The value people are going to get because this is your first impression, next thing they're going to do is they're going to start scrolling, scrolling. I would recommend having a feature video here and sometimes people are like, oh, I'm going to add a channel trailer. I personally don't think channel trailers are that important. Whatever video has grown you the most subscribers put it here because there's something about that video that is causing people to subscribe. Now there is also another option to play for returning subscribers. For returning subscribers, I would play a video that has the best audience retention. Then the next thing I'm doing is I'm trying to find content that's for me. And as like a viewer, the words on these thumbnails are very small and I'm on desktop, let alone mobile device. They're going to Be even smaller. Thumbnails should have a max of three to five words on them and otherwise it is too cluttered and people are not reading, Their eyes are glazing over and they're moving on. So like this opt in is great, but then that tiny text is incredibly hard to read on my desktop, let alone a mobile device. So what you want to be doing for your strategy is you need to be again thinking about the title and the thumbnail before the content. And this is one of the hardest parts, this initial research, because you have to be in the mind of your target audience and you have to know who your target audience is, because that is how YouTube is going to find your people. That gives you the opportunity to talk about different topics as long as it relates to who you are speaking to. And so some things we tell people to do is, you know, reach out to your target audience. If you have an email list, if you have an Instagram account, ask them some questions. What are they struggling with? This was the hardest exception. Acceptant point for me was to really understand how my audience was talking about YouTube and not how I understood YouTube. So that's what I would do here. I would also, the photos of you are way too far away. They need to be zoomed in a lot closer. People need to see your face. There's been studies done on YouTube and YouTube thumbnails that people are more likely to trust you if they can see the white of your eyes. So this is why the images that you see on YouTube are of people up close, because people feel you are more trustworthy if they can see see your eyes. The next thing that I see is these categories as well. You want to think about categories again at your target audience and what's in it for them. These sections also need to be titled just like a title value proposed title. Inside of Video Strategy Academy, we talk about my fireworks strategy where we build an entire six videos around the core strategy of getting people to buy from you, work from you. And there's a tactic between making YouTube happy and making your business happy. So how do we start finding videos and building out this firework cluster? One of the best things that I think is to not worry about Tubebuddy Vidiq doing all that, but just getting started on YouTube and what's working on YouTube. If you can find channels your audience is watching and you can create content that's doing well on their channel, but putting your own spin on it, you can start to get YouTube to think, okay, Nicola is creating this kind of content that's similar to this person. Let's try to show Nicholas content to subscribers of that channel and see if they will click on it. Since Nicola is going to do work, WordPress for beginners, we're gonna see what YouTube puts up here. Now what you can do to find channels is come here to filter by channels and see what comes up as well. Now this isn't always like the best option, but it's a way to get started if you're just getting started. Nicola's around 800. I wouldn't necessarily look at channels, you know, in the hundred thousand mark I would try to find somebody who's, you know, tens of thousands of subscribers. So this channel has 31,000 subscribers. So if I would say this is something my audience would watch, I would come here. WordPress tutorials for beginners. I mean, seems like it's lining up with people, your audience, they would be learning WordPress for beginners. I would go to videos. He has about 31,000 subscribers. What I'm looking at now is what are his average views for videos in the last three months. We're also going to sort by most popular and we're going to get some topics here. Now lean towards not going after older videos. Anything older than a year. I would try to find topics that have done well in the past year. So let's say this video was done a year ago. What this is telling me it has 173,000 views and this channel only has 31,000 subscribers. There is something about this topic that your audience is interested in knowing. So how can I tweak this in a way that is going to cause my target audience to want to watch? So I may title this as finally have a professional website with WordPress.

Can you not just say professional WordPress website? Right now my videos are attracting a male audience and I want to attract the female audience and so pretty would do it. Whereas I think if I made it like professional, it would just continue with the male audience.

Yeah, I would say pretty. You would also want to adjust it with your marketing of your thumbnail, making your thumbnail more feminine as well. Finally, get a pretty website with WordPress. And then I would put like in parentheses WordPress tutorial for beginners so that if they're interested in that title, they're going to look at it and they want to make sure it's for beginners. So that's something that we add in our titles as well. I try to keep my characters on my titles less than 60, but sometimes just to get the Click. I may add a little bit extra. That's how I start figuring out content ideas. This one, I would also probably recommend this. So when I'm creating firework videos, my firework cluster, and I start with my core, this needs to be like the value video, like very valuable. Making people think, wow, let's go back to piggybacking because like I said, if you're not sure who your neighbor niches are, that's kind of the process we would go through. It will take you a lot more time than that. But I think another great example that you could piggyback off of is Luis Henry, and she does Squarespace. But you could do very similar videos. But for WordPress, this is a very similar one that we just walked through in the last example. Squarespace tutorial. How to get started on Squarespace. What we do as well is we dive into these comments. These comments are a gold mine to dig into and see where people are getting stuck, see what pain point they're having, see what they're asking you about. And then not only could you make sure you address that in your video, or it could help you create another video. From the comments I'm already seeing here, how to get started with Squarespace SEO, that could be a spark video for you. You could start talking about WordPress SEO. And at the end of that WordPress SEO video, you say, okay, now you understand SEO, but let's get your WordPress site looking pretty. Watch this video next. Right, so that sending from the spark video to the core video, it really gets down to understanding their need in their pain point. Why are they here? Why are they in YouTube searching WordPress and how to get started on YouTube. Where is their pain point that you can help them address?

I think sometimes though, a lot of my ideal clients, they don't know that they need WordPress. So it's more about like, you've got a business, why do you need a website? And then I don't know if that's kind of a spark video. So at the end it kind of goes into, well, you know, I kind of recommend WordPress and I've got a, you know, that core video.

Yep. So let's do that as well, because these make sense then for them to go to your core video as well. Okay, let's try. Do I need a website for my business? Not bad. Maybe that's a different way. Do I need a website for my business? As opposed to how to create a website for your business? Maybe that's what people are searching for.

Instead of this Harry actually has written in the chat. I recently searched for WordPress landing pages, WordPress landing page.

So already these top ones are being viewed more and they're more recently since could be a good test video and I always recommend test videos to try and see does it open up your audience or you know, it could go great and it could go bad and with a test video you just let it test.

Just some more comments here. Carrie says she searched for best simple, fast WordPress theme to start with.

That may be your second cluster. We're talking to people who know WordPress already and so that would build on it, right? If you did a first cluster for the DIY people like we just talked about, where you're introducing them and why WordPress, you're taking that cluster to that next part of the journey. Now you're talking about WordPress and you're diving in a little bit deeper with WordPress but you're getting those new people in too. And so yeah, this is how you can really start spider webbing and making these clusters that continue to drive new audience and new people to your channel while still serving your current audience. Because you never want to alienate your current audience. You never want to go like so far advanced, but your current audience is like, wait, what I don't even understand, like this is way too advanced for me. And so that's going to do a good job of really taking them on the journey. And then you start setting up your channel homepage, brand new to website building. Watch this first and so then they know they're going to watch that and then they're going to be able to follow that journey. It's really thinking about your customer journey and your business. But creating your Viewer Journey on YouTube Was this helpful?

Very helpful. I feel like I know exactly what to create now.

And don't overthink it. This goes for everybody listening. Don't overthink it. Before you can really start to get strategic on YouTube, we need data. Your first full cluster may just be, you know, a test. You don't even need to start with a firework cluster. We actually don't teach that in Video Strategy Academy. We don't suggest you even do that until you've got six to eight videos out because you get your jitters out, you've got your tech issues out and then you focus on your clusters. And so it doesn't need to be perfectly strategized from the get go. You just need to make sure we are picking videos that is going to get in front of your target audience and that YouTube can understand this video is similar to these people's content. So let's put that video in front of their subscribers and see how it does. And since you know who you're piggybacking off of, you're even looking at how are they creating thumbnails? What are some trends you see? Because while you need your thumbnail to stand out, it also needs to feel familiar in a way, because they will click on something familiar as well. But it needs to also stand out with you. So those are things that you need to be looking at as well when you're starting to build out what video you're going to do. And then sometimes just like rip the band aid off and get some videos up there and then we can really dive into the data. So like I said, you can go ahead and book an hour with me. I will leave that link for you right here. And if you still want to learn more about the secret to really growing a YouTube channel, and you want to learn for free here on my YouTube channel, watch the video that you see right now, because it's really going to dive you into a detailed process for the secret of growing a YouTube channel this year.