YouTube Advice Small YouTube Channels must AVOID

Unpopular opinion. When you take the time to do a full introduction of who you are, why the viewer should subscribe to you, and also hit that stupid bell button to subscribe, your viewer is moving on to the next video. I have reviewed and audited thousands of YouTube channels and one of the first things that I look at and why a channel isn't growing is the audience retention graph of their videos. Because you see if you can't get people to watch your video, YouTube is going to bury it. Because YouTube wants to push videos people are watching. YouTube wants people to stay on the platform. If people aren't watching your video, they're not staying on the platform. That is why one of the key pieces I teach in my coaching program is how to structure your YouTube videos the right way. That is to get people to watch your video to the end. So pulling up this audience retention graph, you can see about 60% of people have already left that video in the first 60 seconds. Because we're taking too long to get to the reason. People clicked on your video because the title and the thumbnail promise them something instead of you chatting about how awesome you are and why they should subscribe. Whereas this audience retention graph, much better, right? That is because we are getting to the meat of the content or we are hooking them at the very beginning and we aren't opening with hi, welcome to my channel. People don't care. Humans have a short attention span, but if you can grab their attention immediately, they will watch content, long form content. But if you aren't grabbing them immediately to get their attention to you, forget it. So remember how I started this video? Then I just jump right into the content and here you are. So taking the time to say who you are, give a value proposition and tell people to hit subscribe is old advice that you just want to forget doing. It's more important to get people to watch your entire video. The way the algorithm works now is if people are watching your videos, they are going to keep watching your videos and the algorithm is going to recommend them. Which leads me into the second piece of advice you don't want to be listening to in 2024. Chasing subscriber count and asking people to subscribe. I know vanity metrics kind of give us not only authority but validation, right? But the thing is with YouTube, they to push videos you are actually watching, whether you're subscribed to those videos or not. Most of the channels that I am subscribed to, I haven't seen one of their videos in years because that is not what I'm typically watching on YouTube. Instead, when I log into YouTube, I'm getting the content that I'm most likely to watch that I have been watching. And I'm not subscribed to most of these channels that are showing up on my homepage, but those are the channels I'm watching pretty regularly. Seriously, here's my subscriber page, who I'm subscribed to and this is what's showing up on my homepage. Some of it overlaps, but not a lot. So thinking what to do in 2024 with your YouTube channel and growing it, I want you to think about audience retention, what we talked about as the first piece of advice, right? And how can you keep people watching your videos. So instead of telling to smash that subscribe button or ring that bell, focus on the quality of your content. Focus on getting people to watch to the end and get them to binge watch more content. When you do that, YouTube is going to continue showing those people your videos or whether they're subscribed to you. Or just know that subscriber number is not a live and die by number. I would rather focus on click through rate and audience retention instead of that number. The next big piece of advice that no Longer works in 2024 is the more content the better. Look, if you are a business owner like myself is probably going to be hard enough to be consistent on YouTube as it is. But you know YouTube is going to be a great lead generation for you because you know the longevity of these YouTube videos have more power than any other piece of content that you could create. But you need make sure that you're consistently getting videos posted and that they are good quality videos. Now I'm not meaning quality as in editing, in lighting and production. I mean the information that you're sharing is high quality information. So instead of worrying about how many videos can I get published each week, focus on how great of a quality video can I publish once a week. And then instead of focusing your time on pumping out more videos, I would focus your time on these things coming up with a great title and thumbnail combination that your audience wants to click on or they can't say no to because the way you package your video is what's going to make or break your content. If YouTube is showing your videos to people, you've got to make sure that title and the thumbnail get people to click. So instead I would try testing titles or different styles of thumbnails. Instead of pumping more content out, I would also look at My audience retention graphs of my past videos and analyze where are people leaving my videos? What am I doing during that time? How can I excel, extend watch time? What can I change to get people to the end of my video? That's going to be way more valuable for you as a business owner to get in front of more people who want to buy or work from you than putting another video up each week. This one drives me nuts. But something that's no longer going to help you in 2024 is focusing on beginner content or how to videos to show up in search. If you are a business owner, you are using YouTube to get the right people to your videos. So they get on your email list, they buy your course, they want to work with you as a coach, they want to book your services. Creating beginner content is not going to attract those people. So it doesn't matter how many views that you get, if you're creating beginner content, you're only going to attract people who are going to watch your video, get the answer that they need and bounce. I was just watching a video the other day from Vidiq and they talked about how only 20 or 30% of traffic comes from YouTube search. You want to focus on getting the majority of your traffic from the homepage or the browse feature because that that's how you know the right audience is watching your videos. And what do I mean by the right audience? Well, in my coaching program I call these your ready to buy viewers. You aren't trying to go massive on YouTube, right? If you can get 10, 20, 30, maybe 100 sales a month from YouTube, that's successful, right? So we want to create the videos which again aren't going to go out to the masses and get millions of views. You want to create the videos that will attract those 100 people that will actually buy from you. That is way more valuable than getting more views on your video. And when you continue to focus on how to or tutorial videos, what happens is you get kind of categorized in the algorithm as a how to channel. And trust me, this happened to me in summer of 2023. I had a how to video from years ago all of a sudden go viral and within about a month it totally changed the trajectory of my YouTube channel in a bad way because it was a beginner's tutorial. My videos continued to be shown to those types of people and the leads and the traffic that my business from YouTube just dwindled because the algorithm was like, oh, these type of people are interested in her content. So it kept pushing my videos to beginners, to YouTube, beginners who aren't interested in using YouTube for business. And so while my channel continued to die, the traffic that I was getting consistently from YouTube died as well. So I had to delete all of those beginner videos. That was like 15 videos with almost a million views to readjust the algorithm. Because I don't want more views on my channel. I want quality views. People who are going to want to work with me one on one. People who are going to want to be interested in my workshop that I host every other week, not the masses. Another example is, let's say, a copywriter. So let's break this down in another example real quick. Let's say there's a viewer out there looking for someone to help them grow their freelance copywriting business. They aren't looking for the video best freelancing jobs out there, or how to start a freelancing business, or how to start copywriting, they're already past that. And if you are a copywriter coach, you teach copywriters how to grow their business or you have a course on that, those people that are going to buy that from you are not searching those topics. So if you're creating videos around that topic, you're never going to attract them to your channel. Therefore, you're never going to see sales from YouTube or leads from YouTube. Instead, you may get more views, but these are going to be people who watch your video, taking all the free content and balance and not even really care about what you have to offer. Instead, you want to be focusing on those people who already have their business set up and they're wanting to take it to the next step. So something like how to streamline my freelancing copywriting onboarding system or how to book more copywriting clients, because they already have copywriting clients, right? They need more. They don't need that beginner content that you think is going to be good to create because it May rank on YouTube. You want to create the content that the people who are going to buy from you are searching for. Now, if you're wondering specifically who a ready to buy audience would be for your channel and what those types of videos would be, I actually go into way more detail in my workshop, Profit products. Plus, I have an entire open Q and A at the end of the workshop, so you can get your specific questions answered from me as well. If you're ready to make sure every single video that you create here on YouTube attracts your ready to buy audience, grab a seat in my next live workshop, profit per view, it's about two hours and it is not fluff. I'm literally showing you this step by step process. To build out a content strategy on YouTube for your Ready to Buy viewer, go to trina little.com forward/ppv or the link will be down below to get your seat and learn how to do this and stop wasting your time on the Wrong content on YouTube. This also kind of leads me into the next bad advice for 2024 when it comes to YouTube. And it's just picking whatever video idea that you have so people will tell you. YouTube experts out there will say create a list of video ideas or go into YouTube, search and type in an idea and see what comes up. Or go to your competitors or your niche neighbors and see what they're creating. But every time you sit down to create a video, you got to go to that list and pick a video out, right? Wouldn't it be much easier if every time you sat down to do a video, you already knew what you were creating, you knew those videos was for your ready to buy viewer and you knew those videos were going to create a binge session for that viewer. That's again why I talk about in my workshop profit review, how to build this content strategy on YouTube that creates series of videos. Binge watch videos, because that gives the algorithm what it wants. If you're getting people to watch multiple videos and staying on the platform longer, but you're also warming that viewer up, if you can get that viewer to watch multiple videos of you, the likelihood that they are going to want to work with you or buy from you goes up as well. And the added bonus of having this content strategy mapped out in advance and not having to sit down and come up with a video idea every time you sit down, you can streamline your workflow. So, like today I have an entire series that was mapped out four months ago. Yesterday I sat down and I scripted these five videos that I want to film because I already knew what the topics were. And now today I can film them and get them done. I think it's important to understand creating one off videos has a place in your content. In fact, recently I did two Wild card videos on my channel, My Healthy Habits video, and also a vlog where I share how I batch these videos. But in 2024 and beyond here on YouTube, you really need to create content for the binge. Now, there are four other trends that you really need to be focused here on YouTube in 2024, if you want to see results. I talk about those other four trends in this video right here. So click there to watch those now.