My COMPLETE YouTube Strategy For The Rest Of 2021

What I'm hoping to be able to offer you in the next couple of months, if you all agree, is content around creating content. Yeah, that didn't work. This is why it is so important to know your viewers and know your analytics. In this video, I'm going to share with you why my YouTube strategy for 2021 has totally changed and the current things I'm doing to course correct an experiment I tested on my channel the first half of this year that did not go as planned. If you do not have a YouTube strategy yet, this video is going to be perfect for you because I'm literally walking you through each step to creating your very own YouTube channel strategy that you can put in place now and work till the end of the year. But before we dive in, there's two quick things that I need you to do. First, let me know down in the comments if you have a YouTube strategy currently put in the comments. I have a strategy or I don't have a strategy, so I can just see where you are at. And then the second thing I need you to do is subscribe to this channel and hit that bell notification, because this is the first of a series we're kicking off here on my channel to help you level up your YouTube channel. So if you're trying to figure out how to grow your channel faster, get more subscribers, this is a series we're doing for the next couple of weeks. You're not going to want to miss a single one of these videos coming up. The first piece of creating your YouTube strategy is know your niche and double down on that. This is where I totally went wrong at the start of this year. Well, it wasn't that I went wrong. It's that I got tired of talking about YouTube and I thought I could tweak my strategy a little bit differently to talk about something new here on my channel. But YouTube has already categorized me as a certain type of channel, and you that have subscribed to me already come to me for a certain type of content. So whether you have a clear niche or not, if you have a couple videos up on YouTube, the algorithm is already figuring out where you fit in into which niche. So as you can see, all of my top videos on my channel all revolve around YouTube. YouTube's in every single title of my top videos. So when I started posting about content creation back in January, that content didn't do so well. You can see right here, each video that I created around content creation performed below average because I confused the YouTube algorithm by not putting out videos about YouTube and I confused you as my viewer. You subscribed to my channel about growing on YouTube, right? Even if we look at my keywords that are driving traffic to my channel, it all has YouTube in it, right? First YouTube video, YouTube video ideas. So when I didn't post videos about YouTube, my content wasn't shown to as many people because the algorithm knew me as a channel that created content about YouTube. Therefore, my impressions went down, which caused my views to go down and thus my growth kind of stalled or plateaued. I had initially made this decision to pivot because I had thought content creation strategies is something that you wanted to hear. And when I did some research on the keywords, I thought I could dominate that niche. But YouTube had already put me in this box, this YouTube educator box. This is why you will hear from all the YouTube educators and gurus that you need to know your niche. Because when I did post a video about YouTube in the midst of all this content creation content, the YouTube video performed above average. Proof right there that if you give YouTube that the specific content around the niche you're dominating in, you will see results. Let's have a little side chat here because I know it can be hard to pick a niche or decide to stay in a lane because maybe you're a multi passionate person or you want to talk about a lot of things, but I want you to think of your channel like a TV channel, right? There's the Golf Network and there's HGTV and there's Nickelodeon. There's certain type of programming that fit that target audience or that ideal viewer and they stay stick with that, right? The Golf Channel isn't putting content out there about redoing your backyard and the Home and Garden Network isn't putting golf matches on it. Right? You need to think of your channel like that. One thing that has helped me the past couple of weeks and getting excited about creating content around YouTube again is I talked to my assistant who doesn't come from the YouTube world and got her thoughts on video ideas and how she would approach it and the way she would look at things. And it got me excited to think about it in a different way. So I'm not saying you need to go out and get an assistant, but maybe talk to a friend or maybe talk to a fellow YouTuber or maybe talk to somebody in a Facebook group that you're in and get a different perspective to help you think outside of the box so that you can still talk about your niche and be passionate about it. Now Every single video we're doing in this series coming up, the next couple of weeks is going to have action item steps for each phase. So step one was all about know your niche and double down. So your action step here, go look at your top performing videos, the videos with the most views, instead of see what is a common thread through these videos. What topic are you talking about in these top performing videos? Also look at your top performing keywords. Again, what are those keywords and what theme are they revolving around? Next, I want you to look at the top videos driving you subscribers. Because if you're trying to grow your YouTube subscribers, you want to double down on the videos that are converting new subscribers. So go look at the topics or the videos that are gaining you the most subscribers and then double down on all of that content that you look at. Okay? That is going to be your niche. That is what YouTube is pushing you for and that's what you need to create more content content around if you want to grow your YouTube channel. This next piece of your YouTube strategy is themes. Now I took a deep dive into how I'm creating themes and what my themes look like for social media and a recent video that I did. So I will link to that video for you to watch next. So you can start to see how I'm incorporating all my YouTube content here into my social media strategy as well. And that's why I'm really trying to focus in here on YouTube creating themes for each month. Why do I want to create themes so specifically like this series? I'm doing an entire series for the next five to six weeks, I think on how to up level your YouTube channel. And so what this does is it gets you excited to want to come back to the next video and the next video, right? Because if you can create bingeable content that your viewers want to come back for, then YouTube is going to push your content to more people. It's also going to allow me to have a strong end screen strategy as well. Because if I have all these videos that make sense, that go together, if I recommend you to watch another video at the end, it's going to help increase my end screen click through rates. Because it's all going to make sense here when the playlist and the series comes together, which leads me into playlists. If I am creating an entire theme for the whole month and I'm creating about four or five or six videos around a theme, I can then put it into a playlist. And playlists are so important to create that binge session on your YouTube channel, right? So playlists are basically like videos too. And those playlists can show up in YouTube search the homepage suggested. And this could get people into a massive binge session on your channel because once they finish one video in a playlist, they go to the next automatically and the next and the next. The more views you can accumulate on your channel and the more watch time, the more valuable your channel is to YouTube. Thus YouTube will push your content out to more people. And a third reason why it's important to focus on these themes. I'm also going to take all the videos around this theme and put into one video. So I'm going to edit these videos all into one large compilation video. We've been seeing a lot of success recently with compilation videos, not only here on my channel, but on clients channels and our agency as well. And so what that does is it generally takes, you know, like a 10 or 15 minute video that you're doing. If people are watching about 50% of it, that's about five to seven and a half minutes, right? But if you put out a 40 or a 50 minute video and people only watch half of it, that's like 20 minutes or 25 minutes, right? Quick math. So that helps increase your minutes. Watch on your channel again. Sending signals to YouTube that you have good contents that they should push to more people. Anything that you can do to make your content bingeable, to make people want to watch video after video after video, is what you need to focus on in your YouTube strategy right now. So your action step here is to think about a series you could do or a theme, right? What types of videos would make sense for people to come back week after week after week for like four weeks? Go ahead and write those ideas down. The third piece here is don't get complacent. Many of you who have watched me for a while know I have this repeatable process or workflow for creating, planning and filming YouTube videos. But what I'm realizing is I got complacent, I got comfortable. I just did the same thing over and over and I wasn't seeing the results that I wanted. I wasn't seeing my audience retention get better. So I had to stop phoning it in and figure out what I can do differently. Kind of like that definition of insanity, right? Expecting something different if you're doing the same thing over and over, I probably don't have that. Right, but you know what I'm saying? But again, you don't want to get comfortable. So a few Weeks ago I did an entire video just shot on my cell phone. And I shot it basically vlog style, not set up on a tripod or anything. And that particular video has some of my best audience retention numbers of any video I've ever created. So that goes to show I've been getting too complacent and I've got to switch things up a bit. The second thing you need to think about when it comes to complacency as well is titles and thumbnails. Look, it doesn't matter how great your content is, if you can't get people to click on your video because of your title and thumbnail, nobody's ever going to watch it. And so you need to be tracking your click through rates. You need to be figuring out what thumbnails and titles do better in which do worse. Obviously do more of the better and do less of the worse. I really love using the TubeBuddy AB testing for thumbnails and it's something that we're actively doing on my channel as well. We're trying to figure out what kind of thumbnails cause our audience to click more. Is it thumbnails with text, thumbnails without text, thumbnails with solid backgrounds, thumbnail with this particular background? But if you aren't finding ways to improve your click through rate is going to be incredibly, incredibly hard to grow a YouTube channel. And I get asked all the time, what is a good click through rate? So YouTube says a good click through rate is between 2 to 10%. Annie Dube has actually said she sees videos that do well for her getting about a 4 to 5% and I agree to that number as well. So I would shoot for about a 5%. But you also need to be looking at your average click through rate. So what do you get on average per video and then improve that? Compete with yourself because every niche is different when it comes to click through rate. And you need to know what your average is and do better. Alright? So your action step here is to go look at your audience retention graphs and figure out what you can do better. Where are people leaving and what can you do to keep them staying? Is it to add more B roll? Is it to get to the point faster? Is to add text on the screen. Study those audience retention graphs. And the second action step is to try a new thumbnail. I would start with a thumbnail first before I would try titles because thumbnails are easier to test and they're generally the first thing people see and then they'll look at the title I would start thinking about how can you change up your thumbnails or even start testing your current thumbnails that you already have on your videos? Your next part of your strategy is community engagement, and there are three parts to this community engagement piece. The Community tab, if you have access to it, YouTube stories, if you have access to it, and comments. Look, YouTube loves it when you use features that they've created for you, thus stories and Community tab. And they won't say it, but you can tend to see your videos actually start reaching more people if you start to use these features. And knowing this, the YouTube community tab has now become a piece of our social media marketing plan. So when we're planning out our social media for the month for Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, we're also including the YouTube community tab in that as well. What makes it really easy is you can repurpose, because a lot of the times people aren't following you on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook. So while you think they may be seeing the same thing on every single platform, not everybody is following you on all of those. And if they are, they're not always seeing every single post that you put up. So I definitely recommend repurposing as much as possible on these social media platforms to make it simpler and quicker for you. I also recommend thinking about different things you can do on different days. So for example, maybe on Mondays you post a poll on the Community tab. Maybe on Tuesday you share a selfie and you share a little bit about yourself. Maybe on Wednesday you promote your YouTube video. On Thursday you promote an old YouTube video. On Friday you ask a question to get engagement. Right. If you can kind of know what you need to post each day, it makes it a lot easier to actually post the same thing. With YouTube stories, we're actually trying to just repurpose our Instagram stories. Because a lot of the times when I do Instagram stories, I'm filming them in advance. Yeah, secrets out. I'm not shooting a lot of my Instagram stories real time because we're thinking about the story or the lesson that I to share in Instagram stories and not just posting on stories on a whim. There are certain days where I share more on a whim on Instagram, but the majority is prerecorded. And so what we do is we save those as well and then put them on YouTube stories as well. Remember, you want to work smarter, not harder when it comes to social media. And that last piece is comments and hear me out. I am guilty of neglecting my comments section 100%. Because what happened was I just got busy running a business, having students, onboarding clients, taking care of kids and responding to comments just didn't fall on a priority list. And that was very bad on my part because all of you that comment on my videos are taking time out of your day to not only watch my video, but post a comment. And I respect that and I appreciate that so much and I need to show it more to you. Even if you're just getting one comment on your video, respond to that person. It takes a lot, it means a lot for that person to post on your video. And what's great is when you respond, respond. That's another piece of engagement on your video. And have conversation with your viewer on the comment section, right? Ask them a question, see if they respond back and go back and forth because it is going to help you understand what kind of content your audience wants so you can focus on the content that you should be doubling down on to grow faster. So your action step here is to think about your social media plan and start incorporating YouTube into it and adding to your calendar time to respond to comments on YouTube. For us, that means every time I publish a video, I try to respond to every single comment I get within 24 hours. So that first 24 hours I try to respond to everybody. I have a content library of over 400 videos, so it's hard to keep up with the older videos. But all new videos, I will respond to all comments in 24 hours and most of the community tab comments as well. The fifth piece of your YouTube strategy is promotion. I know sometimes we can just put our video up on YouTube and just hope for the best, right? It takes a lot of energy to not only research, plan, record, edit and upload that video, we just want to be done with it. But we can't. We have to do some self promotion. Our promotion plan for all of our videos that go live looks something like this. Wednesday, our YouTube video goes live. We send out a newsletter. We publish a blog post with five Pinterest pins. Three of those are images, two of those are video pins. And I publish YouTube media social stories. I have about four to five stories that promote the video for that day and ask people if they want the link to go watch. And we will put a carousel post on Instagram so people can swipe through and see the highlighted key takeaways of that video to push them to go watch it. Now, the reason why we are focusing heavily on Instagram because we've been doing this for a while and we are actually seeing an increase in traffic to our YouTube channel from Instagram. So we know this is working. And so we are spending a little bit more time getting people from Instagram over to YouTube. But that second day after our video goes live on Thursday, we publish our full video to Facebook. We know we cannot typically get people from Facebook over to YouTube for us. We've studied our analytics, we looked at our traffic sources and we just can't get people over there. So instead we put our full YouTube video up on Facebook so that we can grow our reach on Facebook, because Facebook loves native video and Facebook is not going to post or push links to YouTube videos. So this allows us to grow our reach on Facebook, but it also allows us to use those videos if we want as a Facebook ad to warm up our audience. That second day, we're also publishing a third of our YouTube video on IGTV. And so we let people get excited and start watching it and get into the video and then I say to watch the full video, go over to my YouTube channel. Really there's more to it. If you want to check it out, check out my Instagram account and check out our stories and see how I'm pitching people over to Instagram. But that has been working for us, just getting people a little, you know, three to five minute clip of the video and telling them to watch the rest over on YouTube. We also do LinkedIn posts, we also do reels and we have multiple different posts on Instagram like quotes and clips. You really need to think about a promotional plan to get as many views to your content as possible. I was thinking about adding a video to the series we're doing here about leveling up your YouTube channel all around creating a promotional and a marketing plan for your YouTube channel and videos. Comment below. Promotion plan if that's a video you would like me to see incorporating into this series. Now your two action steps here. Go grab my free YouTube roadmap to success. It's got 15 pages of how to's and tutorials to make sure your channel looks professional. Right? Do you have your channel banner done properly? Do you have your homepage set up? Have you written the right things in your about section? Grab that free 15 page resource because it is going to take your channel to that next level super quick. And the second thing is stop being complacent with your YouTube videos and watch the video I have on your screen right now all about the process that I go through for planning my videos. So they are better. And I'll see you next week for another video on how to uplevel your YouTube strategy.