I Killed My YouTube Channel This Year...

Yes, I am a YouTube strategist and yes, my YouTube channel is still dying. But before you stamp me as some kind of a fraud, claiming I don't know what I'm talking about, if I can't grow my own YouTube channel, let me just share with you some numbers that we've accomplished this past year for our clients. We've grown over 80,000 subscribers for our clients. Most of these were channels started from scratch and We've reached almost 2 million views total for all of our clients combined in 2021. Needless to say, it's pretty clear where most of my time this past year has been spent. What I'm gonna break down in this video is exactly what I'm doing to shock life, so to speak, back in my YouTube channel. And what you can do to shock life into your channel. Or if your channel has just been kind of growing steadily and you want to increase that growth, these things you can do as well. Hey guys, Trina here. I'm going to break down the five action items that you can do that will help boost your channel or breathe life back into your channel. Now, I've been hearing in the comments recently that you all need a notebook to take notes on the videos that I've been creating. This video is definitely going to be a notebook worthy video. So grab that to start taking notes. When I started on YouTube as a mom blogger back in 2015, all the YouTube education that was out there made YouTube seem pretty simple. Literally, you just follow this SEO research process, you put videos up and somehow you magically grow on YouTube. Well, YouTube has changed a lot since 2015, and there are a lot more YouTube channels on YouTube than 2015. In fact, a study from VidIQ shows that in 2020 there are over 37 million channels on YouTube by but only 230,000 of those have over 100,000 subscribers. When you break that down into percents, that's less than 1% of YouTube channels make it to that 100K mark. But over 12 million channels fall between that 100 and 1000 subscriber mark. So the tactics I'm going to walk you through here today are going to be what sets you out on YouTube to help you get past that 1000 mark and closer to that 100k mark. Go ahead, pull up your YouTube channel analytics and let's walk through this together. So the first place you're going to want to look as to whether your channel is dying or why it's not growing, your analytics amazingly enough, and what you want to look at first is your top performing videos here in your analytics. So what I'm looking at, is there any recency? Are any of my recent videos blowing up? And this is why I know my channel is dying. Because the top five, the top eight, even 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, the top seven are over a year old. So I know that none of my current content is performing for me. These videos are going to die off because YouTube likes recency. So YouTube's going to stop recommending this content very soon and that is why my channel is dying. None of my recent videos are doing well. So let's talk about how to course correct then you need to dive into each one of these videos and figure out why or are they doing well. I highly recommend going into your audience retention graph, seeing you know, how you delivered this content, what you talked about in this content. I recommend going into your reach and looking at how this content was found. You can see for this particular video, search is pushing a lot of traffic and that's a big problem on my channel, which I'm going to talk about in a minute. Why having a search heavy base channel is key killing your channel. But this video is driving a lot of traffic from search. The next place you can go here to figure out how to create content that performs well is the comments. So going in here, looking through comments, seeing what people are asking, how they're resonating with the information, what are they enjoying, what are they asking more for? This is your market research and you need to go into your top performing videos, every single one of these. Honestly, if you want to break out and be part of that 0.6% that hit 100K, you've got to go into every single one of these videos and deeply analyze why they are doing well. Is it the content? Is it the style? Is it how you're delivering your content? Really look for trends and themes for the videos that are your top 10 videos and start implementing that in the new content that you're going to create. Now if you aren't sure, the next thing that you can do is do some polls on your YouTube channel. Try to get an idea about your audience here on YouTube. It's great to do market research with your email list and over on Instagram, but you really need to understand your audience here on YouTube because that is how you're going to grow your YouTube channel. If you can understand who's watching your content and give them the content that they need. And so this is what you see me doing. Recently I've been Posting polls on my community tab to figure out who you are that's watching and what kind of content you're looking more for. And I already see that y' all are liking some of the social media content. I just dropped this poll while we were doing this video. And you want strategies for growing YouTube. Hello. That's what I'm doing here. And I understand a little bit you are so what your pain points are. This is going to help me figure out the right kind of content that people watching my YouTube channel are going to want. If my audience, my current built in subscribers, aren't interested in my content and they're not watching it when I publish it. YouTube's not going to push it to more people, therefore I'm not going to get more views, I'm not going to get more subscribers if I can't even get you, my core audience to watch. So that's what you really need to do for first is dive into the content that's performing well. See if you can get some assumptions and then ask those assumptions on your community tab through quick polls, like two to three options on your polls to then get a clear understanding what you should do moving forward. Now let's go back to search. This is tactic number two. Stop focusing on search traffic. So that means stop spending all your time keyword researching. Stop spending all your time keyword researching. Okay, so this is not going to make your channel strong. I'm going to show you why. If we go into my analytics right here and we go into my traffic sources for let's even do the last 90 days, because this is my entire channel as a whole. The number one traffic source is YouTube search significantly. And my channel is dying. But if you look at what is the average view duration from somebody that comes from Search versus somebody who comes from Suggested? Almost double. I mean, not technically, but people watching from Search are watching less than three minutes and people coming from suggested are watching over four minutes. This is the type of viewer that's better for me. This is a much more valuable viewer than search. And this is why my channel isn't growing. Because people are finding me on search, they're watching it and they're piecing out. They're not even making it through the bulk of my content. Whereas those of you that are subscribers right here, notifications, or more importantly, those of you that are watching from end screens, if I get you watching one video and then you click on another, that is my huge audience retention, right? They're watching over seven minutes of my video when I Get people watching from end screens. These are the tactics that I need to double down on, making sure I'm recommending videos on my end screenshot that my audience wants to watch because that's getting me a lot of watch time, which tells YouTube to recommend more of those videos if I'm creating this binge session. So if you're looking here in your analytics and you're wondering how can I get more browse traffic or more suggested traffic? Well, one of the biggest metrics you want to look at here is your click through rate. So you can see that my YouTube search on average has a 5.7% click through rate. So it does decent search. But when we go down here to the browse feature, 2.3% of people are clicking on my video suggested 3.1. So I need to figure out what people are clicking on when it comes to browse in search. I need to go through my most recent videos and look at click through rates for browse and search traffic because I'm doing well in search. But like I said, my search traffic isn't as valuable. So what you're going to want to do is let's go back to an individual video and again, this is going to take time. Why? Less than 1% of people hit 100K. They're not willing to put in the work. So I'm going to go to this most recent video. I'm going to go to see more. It's not performing that great. I'm going to go to traffic sources and I'm going to look at where is it suggested 1%. Not very good. Let me go to another video that I'm going to do one of the social media ones because this performed really well. I'm going to go in here to the analytics, see more. We're going to look at traffic sources and again, let's look at the click through rate search. It's pretty high suggested low again. So again, I need to take time, find the trends in my thumbnails, in my titles that have higher click through rates on the browse and suggested because I know I can get people watching more of my content. People who watch more of my content is going to be more likely to subscribe and YouTube's going to push that content to more people, thus creating the circle. Right now I have a request. Hit that like button right now. If you're going to vow right now to stop focusing on so much keyword research and take that time and look at your analytics here, go ahead, hit that like button. Show Me that you commit to putting that keyword research aside for a little bit and focus on what's really going to grow your channel. Did you do it? All right, the third tactic, if you're doing this or if you're thinking about doing this, stop posting podcasts onto your YouTube channel. Now, if you want your YouTube channel to just be a podcast channel, that is fine. Just post podcasts on a YouTube channel. But if you want to grow organically and you want to have a YouTube channel where you're creating evergreen content like I'm doing post, putting a podcast on your YouTube channel will kill it. This is another leading factor to my YouTube channel dying because I wanted to test this all out for you. I get asked all the time, can I put my podcast on my YouTube channel? And I say no. But then they ask why? And so I needed to have the data to prove this. So I'm going to go back into my analytics again. I'm going to go here to see more and I'm going to go up here to my groups because I put podcasts up here, I put them all in groups and I'm going to show you what it looks like. First of all, these podcasts were around 15 to 20 minutes. They hardly got any watch time, they hardly got any click through rates. If we look at subscribers, we've got negative subscribers, right? Negative four, negative one. But more importantly, if we go to the analytics and we look at this, podcasts are going to send negative signals to the algorithm because your audience retention isn't just there. And when you put content on YouTube that people aren't watching, you're telling YouTube you're not creating good content. If your channel is not built to be a podcast specific channel, this is what it's going to look like. Because your audience does not expect podcast recordings. This is why audience retention is terrible. And it's not just for this video. We even took another video. We took multiple videos and we edited them to make them the best that we could for YouTube. So if we go into this particular video, we edited up, we added graphics, we did everything we would normally do for YouTube and it was still below average. Now, it did get me six subscribers, but how much did it limit my reach? If we look at reach here, I had about 18,000 impressions. If we look at a typical video, so I'm going to look at one around the same time. So that was that video. Let's go to this one and look at the impressions. We got 34,000 impressions. That's what happens when you put podcasts on your YouTube channel, you're not reaching people, they're not watching, and it's pretty much just going to kill your channel like it has done for mine. Now, I do want to do a case study here real quick. Let me know in the comments if you watch podcasts on YouTube or you don't just say watch podcasts on YouTube or. Or don't watch podcasts on YouTube just so I can get a sense of you as my viewer, what you do on YouTube. Because I could be wrong. Now let's talk shorts. I did shorts. You saw it there on my channel. Honestly, I have no opinion on shorts. Do them if you want, don't do them if you don't want to. We did shorts. It had zero effect on my channel. In fact, I can show you the analytics. Over 17 shorts, 11,000 views. If we look at subscribers, got me 14 subscribers, 17 shorts. So I don't think shorts are bad. I just don't think you need to focus on shorts if you want to grow a YouTube channel. I think you should focus on good content and spending time diving into your analytics like this. The fourth thing that I'm focusing on moving forward, and you should too, is getting strategic about your content. So what I'm going to be focusing on and what you should is really understanding your audience. We talked a little bit about this at the beginning, where you dive into those videos that are performing well and figuring out why. But you could also do a competitor analysis. So one of the places that you can go to that YouTube can help you out if you have the information. If you go to the audience tab and you go right here to other channels your audience watches, you know what group of channels you're being associated with. The key here is, is this content right? Are these the right channels? Is this the right viewer? So, for example, think media is great for me, we definitely marry up with the right audience. Vidiq. Probably not, because I'm here talking about why keyword research isn't important. And for me, I talk more about business tactics than necessarily YouTube research. The same here with Annie. Annie is a great channel if you want to grow a YouTube channel, but she's not talking specifically to business owners. She does a lot speaking to YouTube hobbyists, like vloggers and who want to really monetize YouTube specifically and not so much build that business off of YouTube. A lot of my audience is either getting started on YouTube to drive traffic to their business or trying to grow their YouTube channel to send more traffic to their business. Vanessa is a great example of who I do want to be lumped together with, like think media. Vanessa targets a lot of coaches, a lot of course creators, very similar to my audience. So you need to go in here and see where YouTube is clustering you and figure out who you want to be clustered with and what kind of content is performing well. So what I do is I go to Vanessa's channel. I'm not copying any content. That's key here. We're not copying content. We're just looking at content her audience is resonating with because she has the same audience as I do. She's talking about Instagram. She has an Instagram program. I Talk more about YouTube and so what I would do is I go to her videos and and I would see are there any specific videos in the last three to four months that broke out more views than normal? So for her, looks like her average views are around 20k. This one was 145,000 views. So I know her audience likes to hear tactics about her strategy. So maybe that's something that you all want to hear about. Building my strategy, another breakout video. Maybe I messed up my YouTube channel. She's sharing her story about how her YouTube channel died. And that's really where I got inspiration here. I didn't copy this. I did watch it because it's always interesting to hear the backstory. But I knew her audience was interested in it. So I know you guys would be interested in it as well. So that's what I would do to get started with really doing some competitor analysis, looking at channels you want to be associated with. This is also going to help you fall into their suggested and the people that are watching these videos are, are going to be more likely to have your videos on the homepage. If you can make sure YouTube is associating you with the right channels. Leave me a comment below letting me know if you've ever heard of this tactic before. Is this new information to you or have you heard this before? Let me know in the comments. Because this is a different way of thinking about YouTube. Something we've been working with more in our agency. With our agency clients. I just literally wrote a 15 page SOP for how we develop these strategies for our agency. So using some of these tactics. So again, I'm just wondering. Let me know in the comments. Another tactic that I'm using that you should use as well is thinking about your community. I've literally ran out of time in the day to engage and communicate here on YouTube and that's wrong. YouTube is just as much a social media platform as Instagram as Twitter and I'm not utilizing the community tab. I'm not utilizing the comments and that's wrong. You all are here watching my videos, engaging in my videos and I'm not taking the time to engage with you. And so if that's some mistake that you're doing, set aside time every single day to get engaged in your community. Get engaged on YouTube. Create polls on your community tab. Share with your audience here. And the other thing that I've had a hard time here on YouTube is being too professional or too produced. And as a person who really struggles with not being professional, I have a hard time just being me here on YouTube. I don't know if it's me being scared to show up as myself. So I'm taking little steps to share more about me. Last week I did a video sharing my entire process on doing a YouTube video. This week I'm trying to not be as produced and literally wear what I wear on a day to day basis, which is sweatshirts and leggings just to connect with you all. And if you are not sure if you are connecting with your audience, what you can do is come into your analytics and go to your audience and look at your new viewers versus returning viewers. Do you have a core of returning viewers and I don't? Those of you that come here and watch my videos, thank you. But it's a small number of you and I need to do a better job connecting with you all and making you feel like we are friends and creating exciting content and good content that you want to come back and watch every single week. And if you aren't doing that like me, that could be hard because again, YouTube's going to decide if it's pushing your content out to more people. If your current audience likes you, and with a subscriber base of almost 50,000 subscribers here on YouTube and only having about 130 people watch my content every day, that shows I've done a bad job connecting with all of you and I'm definitely working on doing more of that in my content strategy. Now there are two key strategies that I will also be implementing into my YouTube channel and what we've been doing for our clients as well. It's called the firework approach and the piggyback strategy. I'm going to be going into more detail for those tactics in the workshop that I'm hosting called YouTube to profit on December 15th. If you want to join me, it's a paid for workshop. It's two hours of teaching, one with me live. And it's not like a pitch webinar. It's not that tacky, cheesy stuff. It's a literal work. Along with me, I'm going to teach you how to do something. We're going to work on it. You're going to ask me questions. We're going to move on. If you're interested in joining that workshop, head to trinalittle.comworkshop to get your seat now. Now, while you wait for that workshop to start, watch this video that's on your screen right now. Because I break down my entire process for shooting videos, from putting makeup on to literally posting it. So click the video on your screen right now and check that out.