Tips for growing a small YouTube channel | Channel Review

In today's live stream, I'm going to be looking at a few small YouTube channels and giving them some advice on what they need to do next to grow their channel for more. Oops. And I have myself going here. Sorry, you guys. I'm going to be showing them how they can get more viewers and more subscribers. So stick around if you're new to this channel. My name is Trina and I'm a YouTube strategist who helps creative and online entrepreneurs use YouTube to grow their business. And you know, I'm not super techy here. We keep things real. So I've got myself not muted in a couple places. So I said that I was going to start this week by taking requests from people in the comment section for channel reviews. So if you want a channel review, pop your name in down there. We've already had a few volunteers and if you don't have a channel yet, that's fine. Go ahead and let me know down in the comments where you are watching from. I know Jay is from the UK. We have Emily from Canada. We have Diana from St. Louis. So many people from around the world, it's actually crazy. Courtney is also here as well. Thank you guys so much for watching. So we did have a couple of people already request. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen with you and we're going to go through Jay and Diana's channel. They both have smaller channels. And don't get me wrong, my channel is small as well. The thing is, with my channel, I have have a small target audience. It's women, creative and online business owners. So I mean, I'm not going to be reaching millions and millions of people because that's not my target audience. So I'm a small channel as well. I get the problems and the struggles that small channels have. So I hope by giving you some of this advice, it helps you see how you can really strategize for your YouTube channel. Start growing it a little bit more. So let me click over here to my screen and we will get started. Started. Okay, so let's go ahead and we are going to review Jay's channel. So I haven't looked at Jay's channel before. I just pulled it up. And so my initial first impression is, what's the value of this channel? Now we've gone through here quite a few times talking about our value proposition. When somebody comes to your channel, they've got to know what are they coming from. So her channel is called the Director's Logbook, which is Great. And it may speak to her audience, but what does, what is her audience going to get out of this? J What, what are you planning to do with this channel? What do you help to bring to people who watch this channel? I'd love for you to pop it in in the comment section so we can kind of work through like really strategizing what your value proposition is going to be because you want to get that up there. Your channel banner is the first impression to get subscribers. And since the subscriber button is right here, this is where you're going to get most of your subscribers. The majority are going to come from here because they are going to see this channel banner and know if this person is for them or not. Then they're going to go ahead and click subscribe. So the first thing you need to do as a small channel is to really make sure your channel banner pops and it lets people know who this channel is for and when do you upload? So do you upload every single week, Jay? Because if you do, I mean I may need to subscribe so that I'm notified when you get a new video posted. Right. So Jay says she is an encouraging filmmakers to make films, especially people who are necessarily in the industry, aren't in the industry. So maybe your value proposition could be like helping the non film expert create movies. I. I'm not a terminology in the film industry. So what could you really say to make it pop and make somebody who is that, that target audience think you are for them? Okay, so that's the first thing you need to do to start growing your channel. The next thing is I would love to see a channel trailer here. This is again the second impression people are going to get of your channel. And you want to really highlight here, you know in 60 seconds or less who you are and what value you're going to bring to people. Because again, people really don't care who we are. When we are first growing our channel and we're small, people want to know what you're going to do for them. So I definitely add a channel trailer here. And then you do have some great sections here, filmmaking tips and tutorials. What I would suggest is making these titles of your playlist sound more enticing. Right. So filmmaking tips and tutorials. Okay. I've done the same problem on my channel as well. I've done like YouTube tips and tutorials. But what can you say here to make it pop, to make people realize what the value is. So the best way, the best tutorials to make Your videos five times better or something that's really going to make it pop. Okay. Because these you can have pop out in your videos as suggested playlist. So make them pop out again. Music. I don't know if I. That's kind of more of a category as opposed to a playlist. And again, just if you could make these playlists really stand out to entice people to click and watch them. Because this is. Is where you want people to go. You want them to watch your playlist. You want them to start binge watching your material like Netflix series. Right? So, Jay, if you've got questions as I'm going through here, please drop it in the comment section. As we go as far as thumbnails, I do see your branding, but the thing is, when this shows up in search, it's going to be kind of hard to see that text, right? I know that small. This is from 5 days ago, so it's more recent, but that text is a bit small. Your thumbnail is really what's going to send people to your channel, right? It's what's going to pop. It doesn't matter how great your content is. If your thumbnail doesn't grab people's attention, then it doesn't matter how good your content is going to be. So I see this is an original song. That's. That's cool. You also with your titles, be careful making your titles too long because you see, Here Comes the Farmer. Is that a longer title? Sometimes titles can get truncated. So I'm not sure if that's a longer title. I'm going to click on it. Nope, that is just the title. So let's take this video, for example, Making the Musical, Here Comes the Farmer to pop up in suggested videos right over here. You want to stand out. So you see how some of these people. So I know Michelle does a lot of teaching on YouTube and so does Sean. You see how their channels pop, especially Tim. Okay, look how Tim's channel, his thumbnail stands out among all of these people. Why bright colors? Okay, so really what makes stand out? Because this is white background right here. So any light background or light coloring on your thumbnail just kind of makes you blend. So you see, Jay, here's one of your videos. But it kind of blends. You know, nothing's popping. It's kind of hard to read the title right there. So another way to build your channel, especially as a small channel, is to have your thumbnail game on point. Okay. So what I do is I just kind of see what other people are doing and what's standing out again, Tim's obviously pops. Tim does really well with his thumbnails. So this is the first things that you want to do as a small channel. One other thing you could do is I'm not sure if you have it here, but so you see your branded watermark right here that says directors logbook. What I would put here is just a 600 by 600 image square that is red and it has like the play button and it says subscribe because that way it kind of blends in with YouTube tools. So this subscribe button make it look similar so people will hover over here and click. Otherwise, most people who are new to YouTube don't really know what this means and you don't need know to hover over here. So my little secret for all of you who are just growing a channel is change your watermark to a subscribe square so that looks more like an actual built in YouTube feature. So that's some of the tips that I have for you, Jay. Feel free to pop up any questions you have. The other person here is Diana. So we are doing two channel audits today. So Diana, you've got a very strong channel banner Entre entree, Woman tv. Small business development, video marketing, tech and software review. So Diana, it's not really giving me a value proposition. So what are you, what are you pitching here? What are you teaching people here? So like on my channel, I help creative entrepreneurs get on YouTube to grow their business. So I'm helping them get on YouTube specifically why? To grow their business. So small business development for whom? Video marketing for who? Why? Why do they need this development? Why do they need this video marketing? You really need to think about the who and the why when you're crafting your value proposition. I do see you have a channel trailer here right away. I want to see you as the first thing, okay? People need to connect with you. They need to see you first. It's like I like to use the analysis, not the analysis. I like to compare it with. If somebody comes to your house for the very first time, you're not going to have some random person answer the door and let them in. They need to see you, they need to meet you for the first time. Right? So it's the same way with YouTube. You need to make sure it is you that they see at the very beginning of your channel trailer. Okay then as far as your playlist, small business tips for success, I would maybe make that a little bit more enticing. One Other thing I want to share with you guys as well is one of the best playlist strategies you can have here is new to entrepreneur, Entrepreneur entree woman. Start here and then put your best videos right here. So if they're brand new and they decide to click down the rabbit hole into your playlist, you have your top featured, most popular videos here. They don't have to be your top uploads. They just need to be the videos that highlight your content the best, that really show who you are. So if they're brand new, they're getting the best content up front. Oh, Diana says helping the 9 to 5 woman start a business. So you could say, yeah, definitely use that instead. That's a great way to start building your value proposition. Now, as far as your thumbnails, again, this is getting kind of small. This is kind of hard to read the text and I'm seeing a lot of blue and this reddish pink color. But I'm not seeing it up here in your channel banner. So make sure you're connecting your branding up here with your branding down here as well. Okay, so there's a lot of this pink pop pink reddish color. But there's not any up here. So I would definitely make that stand out with some pink. But you're doing a great job and this is a great start. Do you guys have questions as I'm going through here? Maybe you can take a look at mine and get some. Yes, definitely. I do this, Shelly, every single week and people who are here live get first priority to get their channel reviewed. So I do it live at 1:00pm all the time. I mean, every single Thursday at 1:00pm but yeah, that's where I would get started for you. Let's look at one thing you're about section while we are here because I didn't talk about this with Jay. So with your about section, you really want to highlight the keywords that your target audience is using and really pitch yourself in these first couple lines. Because when people hover over Your icon in YouTube search or in the comment section, your first couple sentences here in your about section is what's going to pop out. And so you need to pitch your value, get that value proposition and get it up here. You don't really need to introduce yourself so much this way. But more like, I'm Diana and on my channel I help the 9 to 5 business figure out how she can start her own business at night or something like that. Whatever your value proposition is going to be. So if they hover over your image and they see that that entices them, pitches them more to come over to your channel to check it out. Okay, so those are some of my best tips, especially for those of you that are just getting started and who are just building a channel. Those are some of the first things that are easy to start working on. You can always go back and change your thumbnails. You can always go back and change your channel banner. Don't change titles. Leave your titles and your tags alone. Sometimes it's not really worth it to go back and fix those, especially if they're already getting traction. But you can always change your thumbnails and your channel banner. I've changed my channel banner like six times in the past six months because we've been rebranding here. And you can always change your about section. So I'm going to see what questions we have here. How do we get suggested more often? So one of the things YouTube has really been looking at and I've seen with analyzing over 25 channels every single month, is that as soon as you can hit your audience retention to 50% at the end of your video, that's when YouTube starts promoting more of your content. So it doesn't have to do with keywords, it doesn't have to do with optimization. It really is getting your audience retention 50% at the end of the video, not the overall average audience retention, end of video retention. So I've been trying to work really hard on this, and that's what you want to focus on, especially when you're getting started, is creating quality content, because that's when YouTube's going to start recommending more of your content. So because if you can hit 50%, YouTube sees all this is good content. They're keeping people watching for like five minutes. It's quality content because they're watching the entire video. So that's what I'd focus on first to start getting suggested in suggested videos, I noticed that Diana's playlists are listed horizontally and J's are mixed up. Is there a preference? There's not necessarily a preference, but you want to make it stand out. Okay, I do a combination of both so that it doesn't look like all stacked up on top of each other, just so that it kind of breaks up the eye a little bit so that it doesn't look all, you know, the same. What else? Thanks for answering that. You are. 50% is very difficult. And like I said, you just got to the biggest thing that I would spend my time on, and it's not tags and it's not finding the Perfect keywords because YouTube is a competitive market right now and people who tell you to do this, these steps to rank. It's hard. I'm not going to lie. It's hard to rank your videos in this day and age. But it's not hard to get showed in suggested videos if you can hit that 50%. So the number that you want to be tracking and keeping an eye on and working on what you want to be spending your time on is your audience retention graphs. And hitting that 50%, that is when we typically see YouTube channels take off is when they can hit that 50% audience retention. YouTube suggests that more in the homepage browse features suggested videos. So that is definitely where I would focus. I wouldn't worry about, you know, finding the perfect tag or the perfect keyword. Use tags as if you're describing the video. You know, small YouTube channel problems may be a tag for me or getting started with a small channel or just starting a YouTube channel. Use tags that make sense for your video, but don't stress over like needing to have all of this metadata. Focus on creating quality content that your audience wants to see and getting them watch for the entire video. Also, Emily is in the process of rebranding as well. Jay says, I feel like I have two strands to my channel. The feature film we're making, which I'm documenting because it encourages, helps other filmmakers and the stuff I started out with, which are tutorials. So Jay, what I would do is like split them into days so each it's a series. So if you're doing two videos a week, I'm not sure if you're doing two videos a week or one video a week. Do like Mondays as a documentation of doing this film. And then Thursdays are your tips and tutorials. I've been working on this a little bit on my channel. So if you notice, Mondays revolve around YouTube tips. Tuesday is more around business tips. Wednesdays are more around lifestyles and staying healthy as an entrepreneur. Thursdays are lives and Fridays are vlogs. So it's kind of more like behind the scenes and what my life looks like behind the scenes. So each day has a different series to it. When. When I am going to be able to add thumbnails to my videos because now apparently my channel is too small for that. It's not too small. You need to go in and validate your channel. So you need to go into your channel settings and set that up and you be able to add your custom thumbnails Right now I'm in an office but watching this video with risk from my manager. I'm sorry, say Hype. Please tell me which app I should download to edit my video. So I started with Imovie. I'm now on Final Cut. Those are all Apple for Apple products like your iPhone and your Macs. I've heard Camtasia works really well for PC users. Any free editors you can recommend? I'm not 100% sure I know what is the one. I always forget what this one is called. It comes on most computers. I'm going to try to pull it up. QuickTime. I think you can edit videos in QuickTime. I'm not 100% sure but I've heard some people use that. What else do we have any other questions today, you guys? This was a great group. It was fun answering your questions. It's free and it's really good. The oh so Jay says a good free editor is DaVinci Code Light. Thank you guys so much. Thank you Jay for that. I also want to let you guys know that I do have a free roadmap to launching your channel and make sure that you have everything that you need. I just released this brand new roadmap this week and you can get it@trinalittle.com backslash roadmap so it walks you through like the 10 steps that you should take to make sure your channel is set up for success so you can start growing your channel. Whether your channel is already set up or it's not set up yet, it's still going to help you figure out each step that you need to do. Maybe you need to go back on and improve. So if you want to grab that roadmap is@trina little.com backslash roadmap. I'll also link it down in the description box when I finish this so you can just easily click down there and grab it. Trina, how do we prevent a steep drop in audience retention at the very beginning? This is a good question. So you need to make sure your title and your thumbnail connect to the beginning of that video. So if you're doing clickbait or you're pitching some type of value with your thumbnail and your title and then they click to the video and you aren't solidifying to them that this is what this video is about, that's where you're going to see that huge steep drop. Or if you're repurposing content from like Facebook Live. I've seen that happen a lot too. People take Facebook lives, pop it on face YouTube and it just doesn't work. So you really need to focus on making sure that your thumbnail and your title really connect with the hook of that video. Okay. So that's really what I would focus on first. Set it on your live stream. The free app to edit is Pocket Video. Cool. Thank you, Courtney. All right, any other questions here today? Thank you so much for being here. That was a lot of fun. I will be back here again. Don't forget to click subscribe so you don't miss when I go live and hit that bell notification because it'll let you know when I am live. Drop me a comment if you want to be selected next time for a channel audit and I will see you again on Thursday live and tomorrow I have a new vlog coming out. So thank you so much for being here and see you soon. Bye.