Live Channel Reviews!

Hi. If you are watching this replay, I'm going to be giving channel reviews to those that are live on my broadcast. And how this is can really help you and your channel is take the suggestions that I'm giving these individuals and see how you can incorporate them into your channel. I'm going to give a lot of helpful, actionable tips to these channels that you could definitely figure out how to fit them into your channel as well. So stick around to watch. My name is Trina. If you are new to my channel, I'm a YouTube strategist and on this channel I help online entrepreneurs like you get on YouTube to grow your business. And if you're going to use YouTube to grow your business, you got to make sure your YouTube channel is in tip top shape getting the right audience so that you can convert them into paying clients or customers. So I'm going to see who's all here today. And if you want to get a channel review today, go ahead and let me know that you volunteer in the comments section and we will go ahead and get this channel review party started. I love getting in here with all of you guys and seeing, you know, the conversations and everything that goes on in the comments section. So I'm so excited for everybody that's here. Let me know if you're watching where you're watching from as well. And I can, I can't wait to get started. So one of the first channels I'm going to do is actually somebody I owed from last week and it's the channel Hike, Oregon, Oregon. So I'm going to go ahead and pull her up. I had promised her last week to go ahead and do her channel. So we are going to review it. I'm going to pull it up here. In just one second I will be doing another channel review. So even though if I have a picture channel right now, stick around because I am doing another review right after I do Hike Oregon's channel. Okay. So why don't I go ahead and share my screen so you guys can see what I'm looking at and we can go through this fun channel review. I love doing this. It's so much fun to share with you these types of things. So I'm going to make sure that you guys all see what I'm seeing. And we have the Hike, Oregon channel, which she is doing amazing work here. She has over 6,000 subscribers. So that is fantastic. The first suggestion I'm obviously going to have for you is having an updated channel banner. Okay. So one of the things that I really talk about in my YouTube roadmap, which is a free roadmap that I have for you if you want to grab it@treanalittle.com backslash it walks you through everything you need to have on your YouTube channel to make it success for you. And the first thing that I talk about in that roadmap is your value proposition. So right now I'm not really sure what your value proposition is. Right now it's really important to have that right front and center on your channel banner because this is the first thing people see when they come to your channel is this channel banner and your value props. So they need to know when they come to your channel. Oh yeah, this channel is definitely for me. So for me, my channel is about helping you. You get Your Business on YouTube so it can grow whether your current passion is a business or not. So I know with, with the channel Hike, Oregon she doesn't necessarily have a business yet, but she would love to turn her YouTube channel and her heights into a business. So what is the value you're going to provide people to by subscribing to your channel? What's going to make it seem like your channel is for them? So that's the first thing that I would suggest doing. The next thing is I would suggest having your photo here. People will connect quicker with individuals when they can see the whites of their eyes. And it makes it seem more personable when it's an. When it's a person's face. So even when you're making comments on your videos and you're replying back to people, it just is more personable if you have a photo there. So even if you took this image right here and put it in your icon, that would be a lot better and connect a lot quicker than just this little logo right here. And I will be answering your questions in a minute. I don't have them popped up at the same time as you can see here. So that's one thing that I would suggest doing is updating that icon and that channel banner with your value proposition. The next thing is I would really customize your homepage here. So highlight your playlist. I'll show you. For example, on my YouTube channel, I have specific videos and playlists highlighted on my channel. So let me show you here what it looks like on my channel so you can get an idea of highlighting those playlists. Because these playlists are also going to let people know what your channel is about. So here's an example of my value proposition and then I Have that channel icon of me. Another thing that I do here is how to start a YouTube channel is one of my playlists and that screams to somebody what I'm going to be talking about on my channel. I also, I have a playlist on YouTube video ideas again, another thing that my channel is about. So these playlists not only are optimized to rank in search results and suggested videos and entice people to watch these playlists, but it also gives people an idea who may be brand new to my channel. As they're scrolling through here, the types of things that I talk about so they can decide whether or not they want to subscribe to me. And they're more likely to subscribe to me if these types of videos stand out to them. So that's another suggestion for you. I would also focus on your thumbnails. This text is really hard for me to read personally and I'm on my laptop. And so what is a way that you could really make this text stand out and not repeat the title? The title and the thumbnail should work in tandem together. Telling a story, teasing a story, teasing a value proposition. So what is, what is the story that's happening in this video that you can tease with just a few text, a few pieces of text and then the further that story with your title. I like that you're adding this logo right here, but it does blend in. So if you want to add this logo, either make the logo pop or make the thumbnail pop with some color just because this kind of blends in and it looks a little bit small and I'm not really seeing, you know, it stand out. So for scrolling through suggested videos where as my pink corner is a color that pops, even if you did like, like this green right here on this thumbnail or a really hunter green or a bright type of green that relates to, you know, hiking in the woods, I think that would be a great pop of color for you to really incorporate across your channel as a who whole. And then I would, yeah, definitely suggest filling out those playlists. We can see. Do you have. So you have playlists? All you have to do is when you go to your home, there should be a little button down here that says add a section and then you can start adding single sections. One last thing I want to look at for you and give you suggestions on is playlists. Because playlists are kind of the secret sleeper strategy to growing a YouTube channel. So because the more watch time minutes you can accumulate on your channel, the more YouTube is going to Recommend your videos. So I definitely suggest only having about six to eight videos in a playlist. So for you, with this hiking vlogs playlist, I would break these up into specific hikes. Like if you're in Mount Rainer hiking, maybe you have a specific playlist for Mount Rainer or maybe you have a specific playlist for another mountain out there. That's all I got for Oregon is Mount Rayner. So breaking these up and really pitching a value, a specific type of story that you're telling in those videos. Again, I would break this playlist up again into multiple playlists and really pitch a value in that all these titles should have some type of keyword, but also having a really catching headline or title that makes people want to watch. Like, what can you tease? What value can you tease to really get people to watch? Because if you can get people into your playlist watching video after video like Netflix, that's when your channel is really going to start to take off. I'm going to go ahead and see what questions you have for me here. Let me go ahead and pull it up here. Give me one second. And I will be picking another channel to review. Let's see. I'm looking awesome. I'll make a new channel banner. I've actually been thinking ideas. That's fantastic. Did you have any other questions as well about your channel before we move on to the next channel? So many of you in here. Hi, Christine. Hi, Courtney. Hi, Sarah. This is awesome. Maddie's daddy. Yeah. So value proposition can be one of the hardest things to do. Actually, if you download my YouTube roadmap@trinalittle.com roadmap, I actually walk through creating a proposition. You can also go to Google and type in like value proposition template. And there's a couple articles there in Google that help you with a template to really break down who it is you're targeting. You really want to think about that niche that you have. And I'm currently reading Expert Secrets by Russell Bronson. He really talks about having a blue water strategy. So for me, I'm teaching business owners. But targeting just business owners is like a red water market, meaning it's really filtered. It's a lot of competition. So there's a lot of blood in the water. Right. So you want to find a blue water market where there's not so much competition like attacking each other. So that next level for me would be creative business owners. I'd be like social media managers, business coaches, hikers, like the creative business that are turning their passion into a Business, but that's still a little bit busy, still a little bit competitive as well. So then the next step for me, my Blue Water strategy is finding those creative business owners who are really busy because they're either a mom or they have a daytime job. And they're really trying to turn their passion into their full time job. But they got all these other things going on. So that's kind of my Blue Water strategy, the niche that I'm going after. So once you can get to that blue Water strategy, that's where it can really help you figure out that value proposition. Okay, I'm gonna go pick another channel and I am going to do a Sarah Johanna. I hope that's how you say your name right because I did see you at another one, another live as well. So I'm gonna go ahead and pull up your channel and we are going to review your channel next. Continue to ask me any questions that you have as we go through here. And this is Sarah's channel. So Sarah, again we're going to talk to you about similar things here. So your value proposition, yes, you're a home. This is all about work at home, mom life. But, but what is different? I know with your channel you've talked about like postpartum depression and anxiety. And so maybe you incorporate that into your channel as well. Maybe you figure out what specific moms you're speaking to. Moms with new babies, moms with toddlers. Instead of just having a work at home mom life. Like again, that's a red Water strategy. There's a lot of people doing mom stuff, mom vlogs. There's even. I don't think I have it on this channel, but I have my own channel full of mom channels that I watch. So what could be your particular value proposition? Your particular niche, Your colors? I love your colors. I love this, this peach color. I think that is great. I would keep incorporating that throughout your thumbnails. I think your title does really well here. Maybe you could tell a little bit more of your, more of your story. So when we are crafting titles, you want to craft titles that have that keyword in there, but also pitch a value. It's not so much optimizing your titles anymore for robots. You've got to really grab people's attention. So let's say I'm trying to think of an example here for how to not fall back into postpartum depression. Then what is it? Let me just go here. Five helpful tips to avoid relapse. And Sarah, I think this is a Great topic to talk about. I too suffered from anxiety postpartum as well. So I think this is a great topic to talk about and more people need to talk about it as well. So I think maybe for this particular video it's really got to scream out the story. The story. Right? You really want to connect. So something like how I'm avoiding falling back into postpartum depression. How I'm avoiding how you can avoid getting out of postpartum depression. When you use that word you in your titles, it really stands out and it has that connection with people. So if there's any ways you can incorporate you into the title. This title is a bit long because like I showed you back here, it really truncates so people aren't going to see the five tips. So if that's something you want to really highlight the five tips, I would get that to the top. So maybe I would do for a title 55 Helpful Tips for you to avoid falling back into postpartum depression or something like that as well. I think you do pretty good here with your tags. Since we talked more on the branding stuff on Hike Oregon's channel, let's talk a little more on the optimization stuff for you. So what I can see here with Vid iq, which is just a Google Plug Google Chrome plugin that I use, I can see you're getting.4 views per hour. Your video is 17 minutes, which is great. But what you want to keep an eye on is your audience retention. How long are people watching your videos? Until you have a really strong audience that's going to sit through 17 minutes, I would see what your audience really will sit through. Okay, some other things that I'm looking at here is just looking at your tags. So if you, if you do Google Chrome, you can get a tubebuddy plugin or a Vidiq plugin to easily see the tags that people are using. So you can see right here, Sarah's tags. I think these are all great tags. You want to use a combination of long tail keywords and general keywords. So you're doing that great with postpartum help overcoming anxiety. Plus can you fall back into postpartum? So those are all great. I just think that you need to maybe focus on your titles and your thumbnails because again, like I said, those thumbnails are really what's going to get people's attention. Let me see if you're wearing for anything specific. So you're can you fall back into postpartum depression so you're ranking for that specific keyword. So I would go here and see what other channels are doing similar videos and how are they titling their videos. So official Janae, she has. So this is a great video. If you are researching videos to go after, this would be a great video to potentially create. Because you see, here's the secret. She has 1617 subscribers, but this video has over 68,000 views. That means either the thumbnail is connecting with people or the title is connecting with people. And so more people are watching it by finding it in suggested videos and in search. So that is a sample that I would use. And then you could always go to this video. If you have like a Google Chrome plugin, you can see how many views this video is still getting. And it's still getting three views per hour. And it's from last year. So what you would want to do is by creating a similar video, you show up over here in suggested videos like Julie is doing here or Life as King is doing here, and then you can start to see like what thumbnails people are doing for this type of video content and what's standing out. So I know this stands out right now I'm going to tell you that thumbnail stands out because it really pops. Those are the types of thumbnails. I think you could do great with this type of thumbnail with your peach color. And so that's kind of like the best strategies I would have for you is really focusing on your strategy of that title. I'm going to go ahead. I think your icon is great. I just wanted to say that as well. I'm going to flip the camera back around here so I can talk to you guys. What I really want you to focus on is thinking about your content before you create it. So what's important for me is really coming up with my video title before I even turn the camera on. So I filmed 16 videos yesterday, but before I even filmed, I had all those videos titled. So I knew exactly the strategy I was going for those videos. So I'm going to see what questions you guys potentially had. Just took up my mom channel again. Okay. Yep. Trying to catch up with you guys on the comments. I've actually been wondering about using more me or my in the titles. Thanks for clarifying that. Yeah, I would definitely use more you. It makes you connect more with it. Should I focus on making shorter videos until my audience is stronger? It's not necessarily focusing on shorter videos. You want to look at your audience retention. So if you go into your analytics and you Go into your videos. You want to look at that audience retention graph and see where people are dropping off. If they're dropping off. Dropping off in the first two minutes, Yes. I would suggest maybe shortening up a bit, but the more watch time you can accumulate, the more valuable you are to YouTube. So it's really trying to find that happy medium of a short video, long video and that audience retention. Right. It gets kind of tricky. You can always test it doing some shorter videos, doing some longer videos until you can really find that sweet spot for your audience. Do you recommend changing the SEO for the video or the thumbnail? Never change the SEO. Don't change the title, change the tags, don't change the description box. You can change thumbnails. You can definitely go back and change thumbnails. That doesn't do anything to affect your search ranking because you were ranking for some keywords. So I definitely wouldn't change any search engine optimization because that could affect where you rank. How long is the analytic after how long is the analytics relevant? I wouldn't really change anything at all. I would just really move forward. So the videos that you have learned from and then move forward with those, I wouldn't really focus on changing analytics. What you can do is create playlists and put those videos into playlists and share those playlists. But I wouldn't really change any titles or any metadata on any old videos. The only thing that I would suggest if you wanted to change would be thumbnails. Are you going to be at Video Marketing World in Dallas in August? No, I don't think I'm making that. But I am going to be at Video Marketing. No, not video Marketing. I'm going to Daryl Eve. It's not Vidcon, I'm totally blanking on it. But that's in LA in October. So I will be at Daryl E's event in October. Will you be there? Maddie's Daddy? What's the recommended length video should be? So I'm hoping that explained it. There's no recommended length. You really got to find that sweet spot. Okay, what type of video you want to hit 50% of audience retention at end of your video. That's where us as YouTube strategists and analytics digging into the analytics tendency channels take off when that channel can consistently hit 50% audience retention at the end of the video. That's when YouTube starts suggesting more of their videos and those channels start taking off. So if you could create, if you can create a 20 minute video that keeps people watching, that's fantastic. You create a five minute video and it keeps people's attention. That's fantastic. So there's no sweet spot, so to speak. It's really studying your analytics and your audience retention and seeing how long you can keep your audience watching your videos. Maybe Vid summit. That's right. Maddie Saddy. I totally, I kept Vidcon kept coming to mind and I knew it wasn't Vidcon because I'm not going to Vidcon. But yeah. Are there niches that don't work here or everything is good. As long as you have a niche and your audience is out there, YouTube can work for you. I'm just making sure I didn't miss I have a generic list of tags I use in most videos. You recommend taking out tags that don't specifically apply to each video. So I wouldn't suggest changing them. But moving forward, only add tags that are relevant to your video. So if I do a video on YouTube tags, I'm not going to add tags like how to add end screens or YouTube end screens that it just doesn't match. You want to keep your tags relevant to what you're speaking about in your video. Because if by chance my video would rank for something about end screens and people click on it and they realize I'm talking about cards, they're like this isn't the video that I clicked on and then they leave and that affects my audience retention. So you really got to add tags that describe what your video is about. You don't want to add other channels names in your tags. You don't want to add popular tags just to help you trend. You've got to focus on tags that really summarize what your video is about. I'm just making sure you guys that I don't haven't missed any of your questions. Should we add our channel name to our tags? So I've been told that YouTube is smart enough to know that you're your channel is related to your video. I haven't been adding tips with Trina in all of my videos recently I've been adding my name just so if somebody searches my name on YouTube that I come up. So if you have a business name that's not say your name or say your channel name, I would suggest adding that. But it's not really super important. If you want to add it, it's not going to make or break your channel. I hope that helps. If you have old videos that are not performing very well, do you recommend deleting them? Does this affect your overall channel retention do not delete old videos because when you delete old videos you delete those views. So say even though those old videos have like a hundred views on them, all those videos total you're going to be deleting like 100 views. So don't delete old videos. You can unlist them if you don't want to use them, but don't delete. Should you use other similar channel names in your tags? No. Do not use other similar channels names in your tags. The only way you should use that is if that person is collaborating with you, that person is in that video or you're talking about that person. Don't just put channel tags in your video to hope that you know you show up when people search them or you show up and suggest videos you do not want it to to add people's other people's channels if that's not what your video is about. Ashley Herrera I'm so excited. I'm so excited you just joined my Facebook group. I do this every Thursday, so hopefully you can be here next Thursday and I can pick your channel to review. Courtney Trina Are you going to do any challenges? So little sneak peek? I will be hosting a challenge in July so you're thinking about really getting serious with YouTube and building your camera confidence. I will be having a challenge just for you in July and if you want to be one of the first to hear about it, make sure you go ahead and get started with my YouTube roadmap. It's@trinalittle.com backslash roadmap it's really going to walk you through a lot of the things that I talked about here today so that you can follow it step by step. And throughout that roadmap I give you examples and ways to incorporate it into your channel. So if you want to grab that trinalo.com roadmap I get tons of views when I upload a new video, but crap views on old videos. Is it just the niche I'm in? How do you recommend getting more views on older videos? Playlists, cards, end screens on your newer videos. Maybe suggest an older video in your end screen, maybe suggest it in your card. Make sure your cards have like teasable clickable titles in them so people watch older videos and that's how you can start to get more traction to those older videos. I don't know how to share my channel with you. YouTube won't let me share a link so you can share a link. I can go to your channel by clicking on your name here in comments, but thanks Christine. I will be doing more channel reviews next week at 1:00pm Eastern Standard Time on Thursday, so I want to thank you all so much for being here. If you found this helpful, make sure you subscribe down below and you share this video with anybody else that is trying to grow a channel. And don't forget, you can grab my Roadmap that really walks you through all these steps that I talk to so you can start incorporating it into your channel as well. It's@trinalittle.com roadmap I hope I get to see you guys here again next Thursday and I hope you all have a great weekend. Bye. We gotta find the off button here. Bye guys.