The YouTube Strategy That Got Me To 40K Subscribers and $600K

I had no strategy when I got started on YouTube. In fact, it took probably about three years until I got real serious about what strategy I was doing on YouTube. Since then, in about 2019, I've been able to grow my YouTube channel to 40,000 subscribers and make over $600,000 in my business. So I want to take you back to when I got started on my channel to show you the process that I went through. So you can see my step one, because I've been doing this for. For over 500 videos, six years. And so I want to go back and share with you the mistakes and the hiccups and the embarrassment of my first videos. I saw Kathryn Manning do this recently and I thought it'd be great to share with you as well. All right, so if we look at my channel from the beginning, you can see I started way back here on March 8th. I'm getting a few views a day for a good part of two years. This was a weird anomaly right here where I had 4800 views in one day. You can see it. It's a glitch. It's been steady growth. Nothing fast, nothing spectacular, just continued steady growth. This jump right here was, as you can see, March 20, 2020. And we know what happened then. A lot of people dove into creating YouTube channels and figuring out how to do it. And a lot of YouTube educators like myself saw a huge jump in their channels during this time. But then again, I went back down and I took a dip in the fall of 2020 and going back up. And my channel is actually on a decline right now, which is that we're figuring out and restructuring for. So you can see the lifespan of my channel. So it took me over three years to hit my first 10,000 subscribers. And it took me a total of five years and 53 days to get 40,000 subscribers. And that was earlier this year. And if we look at the amount of videos, I have 111 pages of videos here. So let's go back and look at my first video on YouTube. This is a clip of me actually reacting to watching this video. Okay, so this is the first time I've watched this video when I don't even know. March 2016. Here we go. Hey guys, welcome back to Just the Tips with Trina where I give you my top business tips in one minute or less. First of all, oh my goodness, I look so young. Look at that hair. That was before. Second baby, I definitely look a lot smaller and haha, high voice, the music is really loud and my shirt is blending in with the wall. So just to point out here, this is my very first video from 2016. It has 724 views in that amount of time. It has 20 likes, one dislike and nine comments. Well two and then my responses here to them. But I just want to share this with you because this is cringy. I'm not using any text call outs. I'm not like using any fancy editing here. There it is. And let's dive in and look at the optimization that I did for this. So you can see I just titled it Snapchat tips. Nothing really outstanding, nothing really value proposed. I do have myself on there. I do have the Snapchat logo. I am using clear font. And you can see that I kind of understood the importance of not repeating the title in the thumbnail text. So I put why your business needs Snapchat and how to use for business. Interesting. And then look at the all that I wrote in the description box. Like one line. That was it. Nothing else. I actually had head over to my blog to read more. My goal at this time was to get people to my website. I did already have a email list so I was getting people to sign up for my email list and I was posting every Monday and Fridays. I was posting two days a week. When I got started I did upload a custom thumbnail, you can see and I used only about half of the amount of tags that I could use. You can see I've also used multiple ones of my name which nobody's even searching for my name. So. So we have Trina Little. Trina Little, my name backwards, my full name. So there weren't even end screens at the time. And then if we look at the lifespan of this video, it has 724 views. Not bad audience retention, but it was also only a three minute video. When I started out on YouTube I was trying to do one minute tips with Trina and that's why my channel was named Just the tips. But this just wasn't cutting it for a strategy, right? This is before they were tracking impression, click through rates and even impressions. But you can see that people were watching them for these keywords. So that is my very first video. You can see some of the average views that I'm getting. This one had 724. Like I said, this lighting one had 2,600 views. But I wasn't doing a really good job of converting those views into subscribers because it took me so long to even get my first 100. But I had over 2600 people watch this video. Here's another one with 3400 views as well, and another one with 5000 views. So I knew there was something missing because I was getting these views, but they weren't converting to subscribers and it wasn't really helping me make any money in my business at the time. So when I think about then 2016, 2017 and 2018, I was spending a heck of a lot of time keyword researching and finding the best tags to put in those videos. I was at least doing a decent job at the thumbnails. I wasn't spending a whole lot of time, as you can see, I was putting text on it. But I also wasn't really tracking which videos were getting better click through rates at the time either to find a way to improve those. You can also see the majority of all these videos are how to, how to pinterest, how to edit videos, how to make a video. There was nothing standing out. While I was niche specifically around video marketing at the time and YouTube, there was no content that was taking these people that were learning from me and converting them into subscribers and wanting to come back and learn more from me. They were watching the content and peacing out and I was posting twice a week. You can see 15, 16, 11, 8, 4, 1 twice a week videos. And yet it still took me over five years to get 40,000 subscribers. Now let's compare it to my recent videos that you actually see. This one is only been live for two weeks, but it hasn't even hit a thousand views yet. Here are some podcast episodes that I did that haven't even hit 400 views. The views are kind of staying the same, but I am gaining more subscribers at the moment. What I'm doing differently now is I'm really thinking through the title and the thumbnail and making these thumbnails more dimensional like 2D, 3D so they're not so flat. That's what's doing really well on YouTube. You can see I have this equipment written behind me so it looks like I'm standing out in front of that word. I'm also doing value proposed titles. So minimal YouTube equipment to get a channel started. So it's not just video equipment, it's the minimal equipment to get started. So it's really honing in on that target audience that I want watching this video. We also have more write up here on what this video is about so that I'm incorporating, incorporating keywords and SEO so that Google can understand what my video is about. We are also adding chapters These are really, really important for YouTube right now. We're also putting in here different ways for people to watch my videos because the more you can get people to binge watch, the more YouTube is going to recommend your content. Plus, the more people watch your content, the more likely they're going to be to subscribe to your channel. I also have in here multiple ways to get stuff from me. So not just go to my blog, that's kind of vague, but you know, get my prep system, get some free tr, my roadmap. Oh, you want to work with me, right? Here's how you can work with me. Here are some of my favorite tools and services. And then I make affiliate money from that. Every video that I put on YouTube is sending people potentially to my business revenue ecosystem, right? Because if they get my freebie, they're in a funnel. If they watch my webinar, they're in a funnel. If they buy my prep system, they're in a funnel. The length of the video has changed as well. Those first videos were two minute tips or one minute tips with Trina. I can't remember. This one is over 13 minutes long. Length of video isn't something that's really affected my strategy, but I just know that I want to get across more information than just two minutes. Also, YouTube likes a little bit longer videos. You want to make sure you're accumulating watch time from YouTube. Because if you think of YouTube as a game of Mario Brothers, I use this analogy a lot. You want to try to collect as many gold coins from YouTube as possible. And while you need to get people to watch the end of your video audience retention, you also need to accumulate watch time as well. So many minute watched on your video too. Each one of those is more gold coins in your pocket. It makes your channel more valuable to YouTube, thus YouTube will push it to more people. Obviously I am also using end screens now. So every single video that I create has a clear call to action on what to do next. Whether that is in this particular video. To watch another video or in this particular video is to get people to join my challenge. So this is a paid for challenge. So not only does this get people on my email list, but it gets me $10 a person to jo this challenge. Thus contributing again to my business revenue and how I've got to $600,000 from using YouTube. So just a little bit of backstory with my revenue gen. In 2019, I made about $150,000 in my business and then I jumped to almost $250,000 a year in 2020. And 2020 was a rough year for a lot of businesses and I still grew my business by a hundred thousand dollars. Using YouTube and using the things that I'm about to share with you here. I did just a few more things before I share with you how this strategy took me from 150k a year to 250k a year. And at this moment, we're already well past 250k a year. Background in video equipment so the whole length of my YouTube journey, I was using this Canon G7X. I bought it probably shortly after I started my YouTube channel and this is what I use for five years until the end of 2020. And then I upgraded to a Canon M50. So I wasn't using super fancy equipment. I was only using a ring light. You can look at past videos. There was a evolution of not only backgrounds, but hairstyles as well. You can tell the darker my hair is is when I was dealing with postpartum depression and as my hair got lighter, the better I started to feel. So it's really interesting to watch that. The only reason that my background has changed is because we've moved and since I have this space that I can customize, I changed the color to make my skin look better. Since I have such pale skin, this blue color just really made my complexion look look better. All things that don't need to be done. But here's what needs to be done if you want to make more money using YouTube. And I will tell you when I got started, for a good couple of years, four years, I could not record my videos with my husband at home, my kids at home with my mom who was watching kids. I just, I could not film any videos with anybody in the house after 2020, obviously I had to get over that and now I'm more comfortable. If you watch my older videos, you can see, see the more I do, the better I get on camera, the more comfortable I get. Not easy getting started. And I didn't start out as a wiz like you saw in that first video. Kind of cringy for me, this is a starting point and understand we all have to start here to get to here. Now let's talk about the strategy to getting the subscribers and getting the money. Well, first of all, like I said earlier, you have to incorporate more than just how to videos. I talked more about this in a video where I shared the three YouTube growth tips that you want to stop following right now. And I walk through the different styles and Types of videos. I will link to that up here so you can watch it after this video. But you really need to have in your strategy more than just discoverable videos, videos that will be found in search. You need to have community videos kind of similar to this, where I'm sharing with you a little bit more about my journey and what it was like and how I got started. You're not just coming here for like how to create a channel banner. You're learning more about me as a human and we're connecting on a different level. So you need to have those discoverable videos as a part of your strategy. But if you're missing the community videos like this, you're never going to turn those views into subscribers. Like those first videos that I had had thousands of views on it. It didn't convert to subscribers. It's because I wasn't thinking about my community. You also want to make sure you have sales videos. Look, you're not going to make money off of YouTube AdSense. In fact, if we pull up my YouTube revenue even for we can even do this year, specifically if we look at 2021, I haven't even made $5,000 on you yet. I have made well past the multiple six figure number in my business with products and services. So what you need to be having with your YouTube strategy is a couple different ways for people to enter your business ecosystem. You need to have a free way for them to get in. So for me, I have a YouTube roadmap. I also have an equipment checklist which kind of works both ways. You can get my entire list of my equipment if you give me your email address, I then send you that list. And if you buy from that list, I'm actually making commission on it from Amazon. So you want to have something free that's really good that they want. So you can get them on your email list and then you can put them in a funnel or you can launch something new and try to sell something to them like a digital product or a course or a service. The other thing that you want to think about is a small ticket item. So recently I did a video on my social media calendar and how I set that up and the whole purpose of that video was to make sales at the end. So I walked through my entire calendar, how I set it up and then I let people know that you could buy mine $47 product and the entire purpose of the video. The goal at the end of the video was to send people to it. So in 24 hours I made over $1,000 just from that one video because people were watching it and then wanting that calendar that I created. And now that video lives out into YouTube world constantly driving me new sales. And we're using YouTube which is as free traffic and not having to rely so heavily on Facebook ads. You need a small ticket item for people to get into your ecosystem also because the hardest dollar you're going to get from somebody to spend with you is that first dollar. So you need to really make it an easy yes for them. So whether you do something that's $9, $17, $27, make it immensely value packed and worth every single dollar. You either want to have like a signature program, maybe like a course or a coaching program or a service. For me, I'm an overachiever. I'm an enneagram 3. I have an agency that we started growing in 2021 and so I have clients that watch me on YouTube, mention the agency a few times and we filled up our entire agency roster in less than eight months. We decided to stop accepting new clients back in August because we had to hit our goal for the year. And I never even promoted the agency with Facebook ads. I didn't even mention all my email. It just took a few times that I mentioned it here on YouTube and people reached out and we were booked up. And so that is generating us a lot of revenue in our agency side. But then we also have my group coaching program which is Video Strategy Academy that we live launch a few times a year. We also have that program running in a behind the scenes funnel. So at any time that you sign up in my email list, you may go through a funnel where I send you a few emails, I send you to a free training and you are pitched my Video Strategy Academy program. And at the moment that program is 997. It is going up in the next couple of weeks. The pricing because we've shifted that model and what we do in there so the pricing is going up. The people that are coming into my business, the majority are coming from YouTube because I only spent around $30,000 last year on Facebook ads and we made over $250,000. So I'm not this person that's throwing a butt ton of money at Facebook ads to actually make money. I am very hesitant about Facebook ads and I don't Facebook ads. I feel like it's a gamble. But I can create free YouTube videos and I can continue to grow my email list and I continue to make sales because of YouTube, because of content that I'M creating that. I'm driving you to my channel with discoverable content. I'm getting you to know like and trust me with community videos like this one where I share more about me as a person. And then I'm getting you to buy with those sales videos because I let you see what you could have done with this program. Now if you're interested in working with me to help you map out the strategy for you, to help you figure out your discoverable videos, your sales videos, your community videos, and then the business structure side, that is my bread and butter. I'm not just here to create YouTube stars here. I am helping business owners get leads from YouTube and making sure that their business structure is working to drive revenue. That program, Video Strategy Academy, is currently enrolling new students right now at the that special price point. This price point is going to last forever and so I wanted to let you know that is available if you want to work with me, get my feedback, get my system, get all of my training in video strategy academy, plus weekly group calls. You can join me now. Trina little.comvsa the link will be on your screen and it'll be down in the description box as well. And I will tell you, YouTube is the only platform that I have focused on over the last six years and it's because of YouTube I've been able to make over $600,000 the past three years without dumping loads of money in Facebook ads. If you're ready to start a YouTube channel, grow your channel and your business with me. Join us Trinalittle. Com VSA.