This is how YouTube channels REALLY grow.

I'll be honest, creating YouTube content every single week and sometimes twice a week is a lot of work. But time and time again, when I look at the numbers, I look at the traffic that I'm getting to my sales pages, my application pages, and the traffic that is converting the best that I'm getting to those pages, it is always YouTube. YouTube beats out Facebook ads. YouTube beats out Instagram. YouTube just has always been the best traffic and how I've been able to keep my business growing organically. And this is why I continue to stay with YouTube and during that time, because every single week is a lot of work. I've learned a few tips and tricks and some tools that I'm going to share with you that can speed up your YouTube process so you can get more serious on YouTube or maybe you could bump up to two videos a week to see even better results for traffic to your offers, potentially more sales for you. Now, in the last video that I will link right here, I talked more about the content creation on social media side of it. And so this video I wanted to dive into tools specifically that I use for my YouTube process. And the first tool up, which is something I did mention in the last video, but it is Asana. It allows me to create a workflow for my YouTube videos so I know where it's at every step of the way and I can keep track of everything. I keep my photos for my thumbnails in there, my scripts, my tags. It is where I can communicate with my video editor, is where I can put due dates and know which video is coming out when. Let me just walk you through what my Asana board looks like for my YouTube production. So this is my YouTube Asana board and it may look like a lot that's going on here, but it's very organized to us because of the way that we do our profitable keyword framework. I know what each video I have is coming up and I can start to set the timelines on the due dates on them as well. It's also easy for me to see, okay, what's being edited, what, what do I need to record? You see I'm recording this video right here. And then inside of each of these cards you'll see that I have my title idea. I will have a link to specifically my video game plan right here. And since this video is already shot, you will also see that within this Google Drive we have the raw footage listed as well. I also have every single step that I do. I'm not always the best at checking these off. But you can see right now we are waiting for a first round of edits for this particular video. I've sent over the thumbnail images as well so that me on my team can get them over to custom thumbnails to create my thumbnail. And we can just have that conversation back and forth right here as my video editor is editing these videos. And if you watch my last video on social media tools and how I create my marketing calendar or my social media calendar, this is where the YouTube video is linked from. So this video actually gets linked into the social media calendar as well, because everything spawns from the YouTube video. Next up, I want to talk about Vid IQ, another one I mentioned in the last video, because it helps me come up with content ideas. But Vid IQ is what allows me to build a YouTube strategy for a year's worth of content in advance. So when I sit down to film this video, I already knew what this video was going to be months ago, because I have a particular process called the profitable keyword framework that will allow you to plug in specific words into VidIQ that describe your audience. And it's going to spit out potential content ideas or topics. Because we know that YouTube loves channels that people watch video after video after video. Because the more you keep people on the platform, the more watch time you accumulate, the more ads YouTube can show, the more money YouTube makes from those ads, the more YouTube's gonna promote your content for free. And the more you can get people watching your content, the more likely they are going to want to buy from you. Right? So when I do my profitable keyword framework, I'm able to accumulate loads of content ideas. I'm talking like hundreds of lines of data based on what my ideal viewer, my ready to buy viewer, is searching. And then I'm able to start creating series of videos. My most recent series I will link right here is all about how to use YouTube in your business. And it has about six videos in there that follow a viewer's journey so that they'll want to watch video one and then two, and then three and then four. And when they get to the end of that series, that bingeable series, there is a very strong call to action to leave the platform and apply to work with me. And so Vid IQ allows me to pull all of this data specific to YouTube search so that I can create a year's worth of content ideas into a strategy for YouTube that will grow my YouTube channel, send more traffic to my offers, and make me more money in My business now this profitable keyword framework I share and work with my clients inside of my YouTube coaching experience. If you want me to help you hands on in this process, go check it out@trina little.com forward/apply. We do not accept everybody because I am so hands on with my clients inside of there. There's a lot of other benefits inside of the YouTube coaching experience as well. And if you're not sure if that's the next best step for you, if you grab a seat inside of my workshop Profit Purview, I will show you how I do the profitable keyword framework and you leave that workshop knowing exactly what I do in this process to develop a year's worth of content ideas. If that's the step you want to take next, go to trina little.com forward/ppv to get your seat in the next live profit per view workshop. This is what Vidiq looks like when you have an account. And again, I use Vidiq me basically for my content planning and I only use it a big chunk of it when I create my full on content plan for the year because there's a lot of data harvesting that I will do. And then each time I'm creating a new video like today I'm creating a video on YouTube tools. So I'll look up here in YouTube tools to grow channel and what I'm looking for is what are some other words or phrases that I could associate this particular word with. I see right now that this is a great topic. That's why I did it. Because when the research I did in my profitable keyword framework told me or showed me that this was it and why I chose is to do this particular video. But when I am optimizing this and I'm writing the content specific for this video, I could potentially find some other words that I could link into this. So maybe I could also add in Vidiq for this particular tool as well. That also shows me maybe I want to do a follow up video on Vid IQ if this does well. Tubebuddy because spoiler alert I will be talking about them as well. And so it just again gives me a full on direction of for people who are searching YouTube tools to grow a channel. These are some other things that they are also searching or that they are also interested in. Now I have this video that I'm going to link up here where I go into a specific detailed process of how I do the proper keyword framework that you can watch next. Now on the flip side of Vidiq. There is also TubeBuddy, which is another tool specific for YouTube. And now I always get asked, do you recommend Vidiq or tubebuddy? I'm sorry, but I use them both. What I love about TubeBuddy is the optimization process. And one of the biggest tools that they've recently released that I really enjoy is the thumbnail analyzer. And we always have multiple thumbnail concepts when we create our YouTube videos before we even film them. And so having these multiple options when we upload the video, we can put our thumbnails into this thumbnail analyzer and for the AI to basically tell us which one it thinks it's going to do better. Same thing with the title generator. Sometimes you're just stuck on a title and you want to to find a way to make it a little bit better again. The title generator is such a huge benefit because it allows me to get out of my head and come up with a title idea that I may not have thought of before. There's also two more things that TubeBuddy does that I really enjoy too. And this is basically after you've done your video is the AB testing of your thumbnails and titles as well. I'm always looking for ways to optimize my work. I don't just put my videos on YouTube and just let them sit there. I want them to continue growing. So to be able to a B test is really important for me. And then recently in their beta, they have suggested shorts, so they will tell you what part of your video that they would suggest would be best for a short. Now, this doesn't mean I'm doing YouTube shorts, but it allows me to go to that specific place in the video to see what am I talking about. What specifically are people most interested in? Which allows me to then think about content that I may create organically in Instagram stories or reels. It's not that I'm using the suggested shorts to create shorts on YouTube yet, because I'm just not sold on shorts yet, but I'm using it to streamline and make content ideas easier for other platforms like Reels and Stories. So a lot of What I use TubeBuddy for is actually after the research phase and I'm optimizing it here. I mentioned the thumbnail analyzer. Now, this is what I love because we are able to put up multiple thumbnails and it is going to determine which one would be better for us. So this is the first initial one that the YouTube algorithm shows from our video. A screenshot and these are four that we actually created. And it told us the one that we have right now is a 26% improvement compared to just the screenshot. And you can see some of the other ones we did were even less effective than the thumbnail that YouTube chose. The other things I talked about as well is suggested shorts. And this is going to pull out parts of the video that had an retention increase. And you can see from minute marker 5 and 5 seconds to 5 and 20 seconds there was a 57% retention increase. So what I would do is I would go back into this video and figure out what specifically I was talking about here. Should I turn that into another video? Should I talk about that on social media? That's going to help me understand what my audience is interested in. And also pulls up other suggested shorts from other videos as well. To again, let me see what my audience here on YouTube is actually interested in and what increases their attention here on YouTube. This is with the A B testing that I talked about earlier. And then here is our title generator where I can say, okay, I maybe want to try a different title for this. It will generate ideas, take it with a grain of salt, do what you need to do. But it could provide me a new idea for a title that I didn't think about. So it's getting thrown off by bts, which is behind the scenes. But maybe it is behind the scenes. How to batch content for YouTube in four video sessions. That doesn't make sense. But maybe it's how to batch content for YouTube four videos in two hours. So I could change that a little bit different. Get your behind the scenes look on how to batch content for YouTube. I could change that a little bit, but again, it just helps you come up with more ideas here using TubeBuddy, another tool that has really sped up my YouTube creation process in ideation, sometimes it's hard to come up with a thumbnail concept or a title idea to get started with your video. And so chat GTP has been huge. ChatGPT can also do a great job of creating your description box content. I don't necessarily take the title that ChatGPT gives me, but I'm able to use kind of the ideas it generates to formulate a new idea. And I talked more about it in last week's video as well. But the more information that you can provide to ChatGPT about your person, the better results that you're going to get. If you are wanting me to dive in a little bit more about how I use ChatGPT specifically in my content creation workflow. Let me know in the comments below what specifically you would like me to talk about in Chat gtp. Like how to get started, what to ask it, how to know what to ask it. Pop it down in the comments because I know this is a huge thing that people are talking about and using more. In fact, when I was in Vid Summit in October, AI was a huge topic and there's going to be a few more AI tools I'm going to share with you here in this video. And so I'm just curious if you want me to talk a little bit more about AI here on my channel, let me know below. The best way to use ChatGPT for YouTube videos is again, make sure you're accumulating a lot of information for ChatGPT. So anytime I'm talking about my audience, particularly business owners using YouTube, I will always be within this chat right here because it's accumulated a lot of information and the more information that Chat GTP can get from you, the better results it can provide you. So if you're getting very generic or vague results when you use Chat gtp, you're not giving it enough information. So this is the video I'm talking about. YouTube Tools to Grow your channel. So what I'm going to do is type this in a chat gdp. Alright, so again, I'm giving in a lot of information. I said provide me five title ideas for a video where I'm sharing the top tools to use to grow a YouTube channel for business owners. The best viewer for this video would be a course creator or an online coach who is wanting to learn how to use YouTube, ways to speed up their process, and tips on how to make sure that they are attracting their ideal viewer. This title needs to increase the likelihood this person would click on my video. So then we will do click on it. Let Chat TTP do its thing and it's going to give you a good starting point. I don't always love the titles because we are creating content for humans and this is being spit out by AI, but it does give you a good starting point. So streamline your YouTube workflow tools for coaches and educators. That could be something, but I could change it to course creators and educators. Maximize your YouTube impact. I don't love that. I can also say, you know, I don't like any of these. Try again and it will spit out some more ideas as well. But it's not going to give you better results if you don't give it all the information that it needs. So input in will affect input out. Just as an example. Next up is how I'm able to create good thumbnails, and that is through custom thumbnails. Now, this is an editing agency ran by Justin and his wife. And I have used this agency for all my thumbnails for the last at least year. When we ran our YouTube agency for clients, we had them create their thumbnails as well. I really like this because this is what they specialize on. They understand thumbnails, they know what's going to work best on thumbnails. And as long as you give them a direction and feedback on what you really want, they're able to create some amazing thumbnails. And again, it's not something that I have to think about doing anymore. We just upload my photo that I take and we get those thumbnails that we love. They are pretty affordable. The prices are on their website, and if you're only doing four videos a month, it's pretty affordable. This is custom thumbnails homepage, and you can see Justin and Cassie here. You can also get a little bit more information about what they do as far as pricing. If you just need four designs a month, it's $127 a month. I can go in and show you my particular account and how we get our thumbnails created. So this is a thumbnail that we have coming up. And what I do is I provide descriptions of what I'm looking for. I give my thumbnail to them, and then any additional assets that I want. If I have examples of what I want the thumbnail to look like as well. And then I can provide feedback and say, I don't like the way that where that green arrow is. So if we make this a little bit bigger, I can say, I don't like where that green arrow is. I don't like this. And then they will provide the edits back. So it makes it really quick and really easy to create these thumbnails. And it also allows you to have consistency in your thumbnails in here as well. All right, next up is my camera that I use. And I am using my phone to show you my camera since I'm recording, recording on it. So we're kind of doing back and forth because I also think your phone is a great tool as well for YouTube production. I recently did a video that I will link right here where I vlogged this process of filming in a day. And I use parts of it with my phone. So you can see the difference between this particular camera, the Sony ZV1 and my cell phone. Now, the reason why I do Enjoy my Sony ZV1 is because there is a nice little subtle filter that is on it. And I can have a microphone plugged right in to the camera as well. So my video and my audio file are all one. And I can plug in a dummy battery, which is what I have plugged in right now. So I don't have to worry about my batteries dying. Because if you do watch that vlog where I mentioned earlier, I use my cell phone, I had a problem with these freaking batteries. And the dummy battery allows me to just record infinitely without running out of batteries and without it getting hot. So I can batch these videos in one day. As far as lighting, I have my ring light that shoots directly on me and then I have a softbox light right here as well. I do turn on my overhead light in my room as well. And then I get a lot of natural light over here from this window. So that is how I'm getting kind of this brighter look. Because I have so much light in this particular room and it's also a small, small office space. That's all I really need to do to create lighting. I would honestly recommend, if you need one piece of lighting investment, I would do a ring light because that's going to give you the best overall balanced lighting for your videos. Another thing you could do if you're using your phone is this guy right here. I've used it multiple times. It lights up just like this and it has a couple different colors. But I've used this for reels and stories. You can slide it right over your phone. Now you have like a little selfie ring light right here and it just gives you better lighting on your camera. And so those are the tools that I recommend when it comes to lighting. You do want to have decent lighting in your videos. For YouTube, what you don't want to do is I'm going to show you, for example, have the light behind you. So if I move this camera back here and it's so bright, I start to get a little bit off balance, right? I get a little bit darker. Now because the Sony ZV1 camera is so good, it will will balance this light to look better. But generally what happens is when the lights behind you, your face becomes darker. So you always want to have some type of light source in front of you to make your YouTube videos look better. And you don't have to do post video editing on that color correction. Next is Google Drive and this is where I store all my footage. Basically one of the big assets to my videos is the B roll that I've created. And I probably owe my video editor more B roll footage. But it allows me to add B roll to that are me instead of getting stuck B roll. And so I one day a year will record myself doing different things that I normally do in my business. So I can show you my action of doing it instead of just talking about it. If I tell you how I film my videos, I can show you B roll over top of it. Or if I'm telling you about how I journal or plan, I can show you B roll of that. Right? And it just makes the videos more engaging. And again, it's reflection of you and your brand and not necessarily a stock image or videos. Now I also use Google Drive to share my raw footage with my video editor and then how my video editor is then able to share our final video completely edited so we can upload it to YouTube. I will tell you I have at least 2 terabytes of storage on my Google Drive. It might be more than that, but we were a video agency for a while and so our clients were sharing a lot of video footage with us. We were sharing it with our video editors and so we needed that amount amount of storage on Google Drive. I will also say if you are doing a lot of video editing, I've bought lacy hard drives and when I use Final Cut Pro or I use Imovie, I make sure it's saving to the Lacie external hard drive. Because video editing does take up a lot of space on your computer as well. So I try to keep as much video stuff off of my computer and on the external hard drive so it doesn't slow down my computer. Because like I'm seeing right now on my computer, it says save space by optimizing storage. I haven't been good with this recently and my computer is not liking me right now. The other thing I use Google for is my video game plan. How I plan these videos. I talk more about how I plan my videos in my video game plan in this particular video. But every single video you see of me, I've used a Google Doc with specific points in this video that come from that Google Doc template. This is an example of one of my Google Drive folders. You can see I have my Google Doc for the script or the game plan for this video and the RAW footage. If we go back to all my social content, you can see that I have this broken up by each date. The Video is meant to go live. And I mentioned my B roll library. I have all of these clips right here and I also have some explanation of what they are on most of these. Some of them are newer, but I put, you know, office side angle. I put office behind office, overhead, bedroom, living room. So that we can easily access this B roll library and use it in our video content time and time again to again show what we're talking about instead of just telling it. And without me needing to get B roll clips every time I film a video. As we're talking about editing, I want to move into the next tool and tools for editing. I use Final Cut Pro. Now that is a Mac specific tool software. You can't get that on a PC. But there is a recent app or software that I've been hearing more people talk about and use and I have a client inside of my YouTube coaching experience who uses it as well. It's called Cap Cut. Now I, when I do vertical video, have been on Video Leap for a long time and I've been playing around with Cap Cut because it creates such great captions. And captions on vertical video are so important. And while I'm not necessarily 100%, 100% proficient yet on Capcut, this is definitely an editing software that I would look at. If you're trying to figure out a way to streamline your editing, you can use it on PC or on Mac. And the other one that I will look at as well, because while I was at VidSummit, there was a lot of talk about Camtasia and more of the AI features that Camtasia is implementing into their software to speed up your process. So like going through your footage and cutting out mistakes and spaces a lot quicker. So those are two softwares that I would look at to streamline your YouTube process as well if you're not using something already. And again, I don't recommend you start to use a new software. There's always a learning curve. That's why I've always kind of stayed with Final Cut Pro. I learned how to use it and I don't want to take the extra time to learn another software. So that is some key advice. This is what Cap Cut looks like on the inside. I have not edited a YouTube video yet in here, but you can absolutely do that. I have used this to create Facebook ads because they're vertical video and because they need to have captions on them because a lot of people don't have the volume on. And this was super easy to make. I Just asked it to create the captions on this button right over here. I did auto captions and it spit it all right out. And then I can also edit these captions by choosing what text that I want. Do I want it background? Do I want to highlight it? I can also color the background that I want. What I needed to say. So if it's misspelled or YouTube doesn't have a capital Y, capital T, my color or my font as well. So I do think Cap Cut is a good thing to test out if you want to try a different editing software and especially if you want to make sure you have captions on your vertical videos. Now, I build all my content straight from YouTube like YouTube is my number one piece of content and then I disperse it from that YouTube video. One tool that I've been looking at playing around with is Get Munch. And what this does is when you upload your YouTube video to this tool, it will actually pull out your best clips and turn them into vertical videos. So if you don't have the time to create original content for reels or shorts or TikTok, you could use Get Munch to create these vertical videos with captions already embedded. Now, now, this isn't something I have tried yet. I am wanting to try it in the next couple of weeks as we get things kind of streamlined in our business. Because if you watch the video where I talk about what I spend in my business and the pivot we recently made, I will link it up here. That was what that arrow was for. If you want to watch that next, but I told you earlier, TubeBuddy does the recommended shorts feature. So it's kind of similar, only it doesn't edit those videos out. So again, if you're wanting to really make maximize your YouTube videos and repurpose clips for shorts, even Pinterest stories, they're still a thing. I think it's been a minute since I've been on Pinterest. That would be a great option to look at to find a way to spice up your YouTube videos faster. Like I said, I haven't used Get Munch yet, but I've seen a lot of great things. This is the page for Get Munch and you can see what they offer. You can see some examples that they are able to do as well when they take long form content and splice it up into these short form videos. So just something to think about if you're wanting to really repurpose and maximize the repurpose of your YouTube videos. Now there's this one tool that I heard about in VidSummit that is very interesting. I've also had my friend Brittany Long of the AI Copy Club using this recently and it's Mid Journey. And this is basically chat GTP for images. So one of the speakers that I heard @VIDSummit literally uses mid Journey for every single thumbnail that he creates. He creates his thumbnail through AI. And this has made me so interested in learning more about it and playing more with it. And as I look forward to 2024, I'm going to be clocking in more time in my calendar to play around with AI because as much as we may not want to accept it, or we are accepting it, AI is going to allow you to to speed up so many things in your workflow if you're using it wisely. And I think Mid Journey has such a huge opportunity for anybody who's wanting to speed up their YouTube process, their YouTube production process, if they hate taking videos of themselves, if they hate doing thumbnails, this is definitely a tool that I think that I would recommend looking into and I'm going to continue playing around with it and figuring out ways that I can use it in my YouTube content as well. This is Mid Journey. I don't have a lot of experience in Mid Journey, but it is a goal of mine to play around with it more. And when you see these kind of AI type images, this is Mid Journey and they look real, but none of these are actual photos of people. These are all AI generated. And so this is why this is a potential for thumbnails in the future that you may be able to use. Because who I actually heard this more from is Matt Wolf. And all of his thumbnails here are AI generated. He generates all of his photos through Mid Journey. And as you're thinking about ways to streamline and get more efficient with your YouTube process, I wanted to bring up Mid Journey because it could be an option for you when it comes to this images, maybe B roll, maybe even thumbnails that you want to create for your YouTube channel in addition to AI. Because I'm really leaning into finding ways to systematize and streamline a lot of of the things that I'm doing in my business and using things like AI and different programs to do that. One of the biggest things that I have automated in 2023 is a lot of my marketing efforts and I want to share with you in the next video some of the best marketing automations that I have set up and share with you how I did that. So watch this video next where I will break down what I'm doing to automate a lot of my marketing and how I did that.