My YouTube Strategy For 2022 EXPOSED! How To Grow On YouTube In 2022

Spoiler alert. I'm not here on YouTube to become a YouTuber and only because we are ingrained in our heads so much that metrics are what matter. And I need to get 100k subscribers to look legitimate in this YouTube world. I have trained myself to change my mindset because what I realized I don't need 100,000 subscribers here on YouTube to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in my business, which is what I've achieved the past two years. But because there's so much talk and because so many people look at subscriber numbers your worth or as how good you are at what you teach. In fact, with under 50,000 subscribers last year I made just under half a million dollars. I have a full time employee, a part time employee and I juggled dealing with virtual school, constant shutdowns and at times trying to do mom stuff while trying to balance business stuff as well. The YouTube strategy I'm going to be sharing with you today in this video is the exact strategy that I use just last month to to help boost sales in my business by 200%. And guess what? I don't have a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube. I have less than 50k. So this strategy will work for you whether you're just getting started on YouTube or not, but it is going to help you make more sales in your business. So I want to walk you through how I'm going to break down this video. Specifically, I'm going to talk about new features that are on YouTube that I think it's important that you play around with and figure out how it could fit into your schedule and how I'm working it into kind of my content planning routine. How my strategy has changed since this video that I published a few months ago and really the driving force behind why it's changed how YouTube really changes the game when it comes to the amount of content that I need to create on a daily basis, how I promote my YouTube videos to continue to get sales to my business behind the scenes of my January stats. For this particular YouTube strategy that we put into place and then where I think you should get started, I will break it down into two different groups. Whether you're just getting started or you have some YouTube content, how I think you should start to build your strategy out here on YouTube moving forward this year, let's talk about some YouTube features that we need to be aware of first. And the most hottest one right now is YouTube shorts. And I know we kind of get wrapped up into. We've got to try the brand new things because that is what the platform wants us to do. So we did. I tested it out. I never want to give advice on it before I do it myself. We posted about 12 shorts over a six week period. So about two shorts a week. And for me personally, the audience that is either going to subscribe and keep coming back and watching my videos or the audience that's ultimately going to buy from me, just weren't attracted by reels. It wasn't driving the right audience for me. So I literally found it was a waste of time for me to upload shorts to my YouTube channel. I also hated the way it looked on my YouTube channel. So when you add shorts, it really messes up the aesthetic of your YouTube channel. And I, I don't like it. I just thought it wasn't worth it for me. So I tested it out, I tried it. Now I do have some members of my program Video Strategy Academy who have also tested out shorts and for their audience it actually worked out well. So particularly a painter or like a crafter doing those short over on YouTube definitely helped gain visibility and get more impressions on their content and ultimately to their channel. If I pull up the stats on my shorts right now, I think I gained about 4 total subscribers over about 12 shorts. So again, wasn't valuable for me, but it has been valuable for other people in specific niches. What should you do? I think if you're creating TikToks or you're creating reels, go ahead and post them on YouTube for a specific amount of time. Like I said, post about 12 maybe shorts, group the in your analytics and see if it's actually paying off. Sometimes it's not even worth uploading it. And we found that in fact with some of my clients as well, who have a very similar audience to mine, it just didn't pay off to even upload those shorts to YouTube. The next feature I want to talk about is Community tab and this actually has been something new we've been playing around with. So YouTube has a community tab that's almost like posts like Instagram, but you want to do it a little bit differently than Instagram because just posting a photo, you're not going to get that much engagement. But what you can really use the Community tab for is to get insight from your audience. So if you're ever wondering like what would my audience like, what kind of content, we did this, we posted a poll every single day almost in the month of December to really drill into my current YouTube audience mindset. What are they looking for? What kind of content and the information and the insight we got from this has been major. So what I really think that you should be using the community tab for is engaging with your audience in these poll type posts. Right now we haven't really found a great way to post on the community tab and like Instagram style, but again just coming up with posts. And also YouTube community tab allows you to schedule these out. You don't even need to pay for a scheduler. So you could literally create like a whole month's worth of polls to understand your audience, get feedback from your audience in one day and then them go out throughout the month. The next thing I want to talk about is live. When it comes to YouTube, I get a lot of questions about lives. So I did a bunch of lives. I did three months of lives last year and they were great for community building. So engaging with you one on one, having that open line of communication. But then those videos typically do nothing afterwards and so you really want to balance your time. If you want to continue to engage with your audience and have that open line of communications, absolutely. Incorporate some lives into your YouTube strategy. Again, I have members inside of Video Strategy Academy, Allison who does lives every single week. Her community expects it, her community loves it. It helps her grow. Her community and lives work great for her. For me as a business owner, it's hard to get a live strategy in place with my schedule. And for me again since I have test it out, I just find that lives weren't worth it for me. But you need to figure out what's going to work for you and make YouTube manageable because I know I'm adding all of these other pieces onto just creating YouTube videos. So I'm not saying you need to do these. I'm sharing with you my insight and what I've seen and you can pick and choose. Remember at the end of this video I'm going to tell you kind of a suggested strategy that I would have for you, but I just want to get you informed on what's happening on YouTube right now. I will tell you to make sure you are subscribed to this channel because this is something I'm going to be diving into more deeper throughout the next coming weeks. I'm going to be talking about more of my experiences, sharing more of my case studies, sharing some of my clients case studies so you won't want to miss that data as it comes out. So hit subscribe. So now that you know some of the hot features on YouTube to think about that, maybe you could Start incorporating into your YouTube strategy. I want to dive into how my YouTube strategy has really changed since the last time I talked about it. So for so long I had been drilled into my head that if you don't have a subscriber number of like 100k or more, you're not worthy of being called a YouTube strategist. Fun fact, somebody actually told me that. But what I came to realize was, is the amount of money I'm making from my business using YouTube was significantly higher than people with channels at over 100,000 subscribers or more. In fact, we were just under half a million dollars last year in revenue and we barely spent much money on Facebook ads. So the entire driving force behind the revenue in my business is my strength. Small but mighty. Less than 50,000 YouTube subscriber channel. And I don't know about you, but I'd rather have more money in my bank than more subscribers on my channel. And so once I've really accepted that, guess what, your worth isn't the subscriber number. This is when I started to look at YouTube completely differently. The first thing that I did is I'm really shifting away from diving in on keyword research and like ranking on YouTube search because in my data, the traffic source YouTube search is a less valuable viewer than somebody that I'm getting from the homepage or in suggested. And I see in my data that people that find me on search tend to watch me half the amount of time than people on the browse page and people on suggested and they're less likely to subscribe. So I've shifted my strategy to really targeting homepage and suggested. How are you doing that, Trina? Well, it's a tactic that we're using called the piggyback strategy. And what I do is I'm looking at channels that I believe my current audience is watching. This takes time. Okay, and this is what sets you apart in your YouTube strategy compared to everybody else. Because if you don't take the time to do this research and do this like recon work, then you're not going to set your videos and your strategy up for success. So I dove in about two to three days, I set up a new YouTube channel like a pseudo name, and I started watching videos that my audience, I believe watches. Then after a few days, I started to see what is popping up on my homepage. What is popping up into suggested? What are those topics? And can I recreate those for myself? Because if I can create those topics that I know my audience is watching, then YouTube's going to be more likely to put my videos on the homepage of somebody that's maybe watching Vanessa Lau or maybe watching Sunny lenarduzzi, or maybe even watching Katie Steckley, who's an amazing Instagram person. What I did is I tried to figure out what are the best topics that I can talk about that I know my audience is interested in and how can I put my take on it. So YouTube recommends my videos on their homepage or on their suggested videos. Now, YouTube does give you this information. If you go into your analytics and you go to your audience, you're going to see the actual channels that your audience is also watching. So that's going to help you kind of skip this research. If you have that available data, you have to have so many views on your channel to get that data, but that really kind of speeds up that research process. And if you have enough views as well, you're going to see the actual videos that people who are watching your channel are also watching. So that can help you really figure out your best piggyback strategy, which is shifting the way. I'm thinking about niching on YouTube again. For so long, people talk about niching in a topic, right? Niching in a specific topic. You want to double down on that, go all in on that. Well, folks, the algorithm changes, people's behavior change on platforms as more and more people come on, right? We have kind of that way that early adapters, the whole marketing thing, I can't pull it out of my head right now. But I believe YouTube now, you need to be focusing on a niche audience. What I've done for so long as I have doubled down on YouTube and you hear my subscribers, if you've been here for a while, you get exhausted about me talking about the same stinking YouTube stuff all the time. You want to build this YouTube channel, you want to build your business. And so what that has done is really narrowed in my reach on people, and it's exhausted you, my audience. And so now how I think about YouTube and how we're approaching it for our agency is thinking about that specific person who's watching our content and what are their pain points about. So for me, yes, it's going to be about YouTube, yes, it's going to be about getting leads on YouTube. But you're also wondering about how to create a content plan, how to be confident on camera, how to create an Instagram strategy with your YouTube content, how to create an online course, how to launch an online course, right? You are a business owner, probably, and you are wondering how to start making consistent income each month in your business. And YouTube is an important part of it, but it's not the entire part of it. So my YouTube content strategy is going to start broadening, but it's still going to be thinking about that particular viewer, you on the other end, where you're at and what you need to help achieve, achieve your goals in your business. Does that make sense? Let me know if you like the way we are approaching this new niching idea down in the comments by saying, love the new niche idea because I really do think we need to think about our channel as more of a well rounded channel, not just a YouTube education or an Instagram education or a desserts cooking channel. Right. We want to think about what would our audience also want to see from us. Because if they're committed to watching our content, they want to see other things as well. So then once you clearly can understand your YouTube niche audience, then you can start getting them to buy what you have or getting them to work with you if you're like a business coach or a wellness coach. Okay. So the strategy that we use in January where we increased our sales by 200% without a single Facebook ad dollar spent, was what we called our firework approach. And the way this works is we have one core video that went into really big detail about how I do something. And this was my content planning video. It was 25 minutes long. I gave you great information and showed you exactly how I did this. And then I told you you can actually have this entire template if you just go to this sales page. Right. Obviously it sounded much more sexier than that, but that was the gist. That core video was to send people to the sales page. Then I came out with five more videos talking about different aspects of that. So at the end of each of those five videos, it made sense for the viewer to go watch that core video. So anybody who happened to find those five videos then went to that core video and they heard about my prep system again. So we were able to have a consistent stream of sales to my prep system, which led to a 200% increase in sales in January thanks to this firework strategy. So the way we're thinking about YouTube content moving forward is thinking about these firework clusters. What is our core video going to be every six videos and what are our spark videos going to be around it? So this really has changed the game for me and how I'm going to drive revenue to my business and how we're helping our clients drive revenue to their business as well. Because guess what, folks? Subscribers aren't paying you. Your subscribers here on YouTube aren't paying you anything. You need to find a way to get them off of YouTube and actually pay you. That's what a successful business owner looks like. Not a hundred thousand YouTube subscribers. Moving on, I now want to talk about how YouTube fits into my marketing strategy. And something that I talk about here all the time is something that I kind of was dropping the ball doing and really not maximizing the use of these YouTube videos. And I want you to understand everything that I talk about here is something you can aspire to do, but doesn't mean you have to do it. All right? Now, I've been in business six years now, and I'm just getting to the point where I can stack all of these things on top of each other. So again, at the end of this video, I'm going to share, like, what is kind of the best formula I think you should be doing based on where you're at in your journey. How I'm using this marketing strategy is every Monday, my YouTube video goes out. I have a newsletter that is around that topic as well. And then I pitch my newsletter people to go watch that YouTube video that gives my email newsletter more value. They're reminded about this video, and it helps that YouTube video reach more people. Because if YouTube sees people coming to watch that video within the first 24 hours, it's going to recommend it to more people. Then I take the key points of this YouTube video and I put it into a carousel post. And the way we made this easier is we made a template. And so all we need to do is switch out the text when we're done with this video to post on Instagram. Now, we're also using some of the content that we use for that newsletter and our blog as content we're using as our Instagram post, like our caption. So we're trying to repurpose as much as the video, as much as the text as possible, because not everybody's seeing everything that we're posting, and not everybody's going to read everything and see everything. And so we're really trying to maximize video and text the most we can. We're also looking at what is my core promotion each month. So we're in February right now, and my core promotion is the doors are open to my program Video Strategy Academy. So all of my content for the past couple of weeks really focused around YouTube and how to use YouTube. And we got a lot of people over into our challenge that we did. And so that was the. Our primary promotion piece for February and a lot of January as well. As we move into March, we're looking at our primary promotional piece is going to be our prep system. Again, we're going to do another cluster of videos around the prep system and that is going to be what we are promoting in March. Then we're going to move to April. We already know what we're going to promote in April. We already know what we're going to promote in May. And that's as far as I got because I don't like to get too far out. But if I understand what I am promoting each month, that helps me structure what my content is going to be. And then using my YouTube content to repurpose the other platforms really just beefs out my marketing plan, beats up my content plan. I will also tell you right here that my marketing plan, kind of like my content plan, consists solely right now on YouTube and Instagram. I'm not doing it all, folks. I am not doing it all. I can't do it all. I've tried to do it all. It just gets messy. I dropped the ball. And so what we've done is in a recent video, I talked about hiring Latasha of Uncanny Content. Her and her team are helping me create the blog posts every single week. And so that has been a huge lifesaver because I do need to get back to blogging because I do notice more traffic when I am blogging. So while I'm focusing on YouTube and Instagram on my own, I did outsource my blogging. She's amazing. Her team also writes the newsletter stuff, but she's focusing all that content. She wouldn't be able to write that content without my YouTube videos. So she takes my YouTube videos and puts them into beautiful words, which I don't do. I don't do words well. But I wanted you to hear clearly that my content marketing strategy plan is just focusing on YouTube and Instagram on my own. And then I've hired help to do my blogging. All right? So again, I'm not doing it all right now. I'm trying to work to that. But even me with a full time employee and a part time employee, I'm not there yet either. And that is okay. So I guess this kind of ties into the section where I want to talk to you about how I promote my YouTube videos because I really want to give my YouTube videos as much light as possible because I know I can reach more people on YouTube. If I can get more people watching my videos on YouTube, and you need to hear this loud and clear. If you are starting on YouTube and you want to see faster results, you need to use the audience that you currently have and get them to watch YouTube. Because if those are your people and you can get them from like, Instagram, your newsletter, LinkedIn, wherever you're hanging out at, you can get those people over to your YouTube video. YouTube's going to be able to better understand the type of people who are going to watch your videos and find more of them on YouTube. YouTube. So you've got to promote your YouTube videos. You can't just set it on YouTube and expect it magic to happen. So this is kind of the breakdown of what we do. For every single YouTube video I post Mondays and Thursdays, and this is what we do Monday, the video goes live at 8:30. Our newsletter goes out at 9. We generally have a blog post out within the day. We have two Pinterest pins that go out as well. We then do a carousel post that day on Instagram when I can get to it by noon, hopefully. I also have Instagram stories that go out and talk about my video as well. And that's kind of the key, key promotions that I do. Then I also have a Facebook version that I try to get uploaded to Facebook, and I use some of the content that Latasha and her team has written for me. I'm gonna tell you right now, Facebook has not been a priority of mine. I'm trying to get there, but I haven't. Then I will try on Tuesday or Wednesday to get the Instagram TV up. Now it's not Instagram TV anymore, it's Instagram video, but I still see traction from Instagram video when I publish it. So my video editor makes me a vertical version and we publish it on Instagram video just to get some traction. The goal here, moving into March, is to turn those videos into reels. But not clipping up the YouTube video like this right here, but literally picking up my phone and finding a way to deliver some of the content that I talked about in that video. In 15 seconds or less of a reel, I can dive a little bit more deeper in how I'm kind of strategizing my reels. If you want to hear more about my Instagram strategy moving forward, leave me a comment below. Interested in Instagram, and we'll see. I'm not an Instagram expert, but I play around on it enough and. And so I can tell you kind of What I've been playing around with, if you're interested in it. But that's kind of how we're promoting these videos. Knowing that as I post on Pinterest, it's going to be a longer term game. Those pins are going to be floating around for a while. Knowing that Instagram is going to be like 24 hours and dead. So I'm balancing the short form content with my long form content. Let's go to my computer and look at the stats that I have based on this new YouTube strategy that I've only put into place one month. So you're literally getting a look into what happened in January. You can see that obviously we had a bump in views, 56,000 views. But more importantly, when we go over here to reach, you can see Our reach increase 42%. You can see our views increased. We can also see that subscribers went up 50% almost. When we look at December, you can see I had gained about 600 subscribers. And when we come back to January, I've gotten almost 1,000 subscribers. So if we pull this even out in the last 90 days, we can see a little bit more trajectory as well. I was getting around 200 and some returning viewers, but I'm getting more and more as we shifted this strategy into really thinking about the viewer and to using this firework approach. One thing that's also changed in January is structure of these videos and editing. And you can see some of my top videos above average. The intros above average were my January videos. You can see this particular one did really well above average. And so did this one too. So you guys are really liking these styles of videos. And so again, this is my new approach to YouTube. How we are really figuring out how to make YouTube a key piece and building not only my following here, but growing my business revenue too. The basic idea of my YouTube strategy moving forward is to maximize the YouTube strategy that I have because it's long form content with short form content as well. Making sure you're picking what is doable for you don't think that you need to go out and repurpose for every single platform. Because even though you're repurposing for every single platform, you've got to engage on that platform. You've got to create content specifically for that platform as well. Well, like I said, reels just isn't going to work. If you just take this YouTube video and mash it up, it's just a waste of time. The same with posting reels and TikToks to shorts or doing YouTube shorts. You need to make sure it's something that you can manage because you can be fine. You can grow a successful business just on one or two platforms. That's what I've been doing for the past six months. So what do I think that you should do? So if you're just getting started here on YouTube, I would focus on one video a week and setting up a system that is manageable for you. I think it's very important to get consistent once a week here on YouTube. How can you start using that content on YouTube with your newsletter? Because I'm going to tell you, email marketing is really crucial. That is how I make sales in my launch, every single time I launch. And that email marketing, that email list that you have is critical. And you want to keep them warm. You want to keep giving them this free information so they're going to want to buy from you later on. So I highly recommend having a YouTube video every single week as your primary piece of content. If you can, I would recommend blogging it. Maybe you could get an assistant or outsource it for somebody. Just take your YouTube videos and literally put what you're saying in nice blog format. I believe blogging is going to see some heights this year. I think in 2022 we're going to see blogging coming back to the peak of popularity again. It took a backseat for so long because Facebook ads were so hot. But as Facebook ads tend to have some problems at the moment, that organic marketing is going to be critical in 2022. And I see blogging really having a hot year this year. So I would like. I said YouTube. Send it to your email list, try to do a blog and embed that video on that blog and pick one other platform, Instagram, maybe. Maybe you just post it on the feed, maybe you just post about it on stories. But make Instagram manageable. Now, if you've been posting on YouTube for a while and you're ready to see more, you're ready to do more, I would highly encourage you to try to post two videos a week on YouTube. I know it seems like a lot. I. I am seeing the boost by posting two videos a week on YouTube. It does add more editing, more filming. But I think if you can find a video editor to outsource to, you can find people on upwork. I have some recommendations as well from people that I work with. I do think it is possible to get to two videos a week and see more leads coming in from YouTube. This is what we've Seen specifically in January. And again, if you've been posting new YouTube for a while, I would see how can you maximize more of that content Content. Can you create some templates on ins for Instagram? Can you piece up that content that you're doing on YouTube and maybe post a little bit more on Instagram? Maybe you pick up LinkedIn if you think your audience is on LinkedIn, maybe pick up one more platform if you can. Otherwise, I would recommend bringing somebody, maybe an assistant on board to help you duplicate that kind of information. I know it's scary hiring somebody, but it could help you hit that next milestone in your business that you can focus on the content creation that's driving the money and somebody else can do the distribution because it's going to allow you, like I said, to create more content to get more people to your stuff your work with me page your digital products and somebody else can do the distribution for you. And lastly, if you want my help in creating a YouTube strategy that drives sustainable, consistent sales to your business, along with accountability, feedback, advice, My program, Video Strategy CAD is currently open until Friday, February 18th. This program is partially course content as well as calls with me, group calls with me every single week. This round that we are opening Video Strategy Academy version 3. So VSA 3.0, we are going to be going through the content live with you. I'm going to be releasing new content every single week starting February 28th and the following seven weeks to really help you solidify not only your YouTube YouTube strategy, but your YouTube workflow. Figure out where you can get help, how you can get that help and how you can start generating more sales to your business every single day so that you can hire a video editor so that you can get an assistant to help you distribute that content. I'm going to help you figure out your piggyback strategy like we talked about here in this video and your best firework approach and getting those sales to your products immediately. My goal in this program is to have you created YouTube videos and the right structure with the right strategy within 30 days of starting and within six months seeing an increase in sales to your business. By following the VSA 3.0 framework. We have a community of over 300 members inside. People who are at beginning phase, people who have been going through VSA for a while and the OG members that have done it, who have gone from making zero money on YouTube to over $22,000 in less than a year, who've gone from zero subscribers to 20,000, who's now at 40,000 subscribers who have been through the journey, who have been through the hurdles and can help you really see how it can work and where you may be getting stuck. Remember, this program is open until Friday, February 18th because we're going through this round live. It's brand new content recently up to date it based on what my strategy is as of right now. That's why we are opening and closing the doors for this particular launch because all the brand new content is going to be dropped and I'm going to be working with you live through this. If this sounds like something that you need, you're ready to get an organic traffic strategy using YouTube so you can see your email list grow every day. You can see your bank account grow every day. Head to trinalittle.com vsa to get inside before we close those doors and if you've got any questions about vsa, drop them down in the comments. I'm going to be in there all day today making sure you get your questions answered and I hope I get a chance to work with you inside of Video Strategy Academy. One of the biggest metrics that I see so many business owners want to hit is that first six figure year and for me I never really understood how to do it until I figured out the math. Simple math because I'm not a math person, actually break down all the numbers and kind of what is the best recipe to help you get to your first six figure year and the video that is on your screen right now. So check it out and see how you could get to six figures fast.