Youtube Channel Review - Common Youtube Mistakes You Are Making

You, this training is going to be for you if you have a YouTube channel or this training is going to be for you if you have a YouTube channel or you're thinking about having a YouTube channel for your business and you want to make sure it does well. You want to get views, you want to get subscribers. But how do you make sure your channel is set up right? I'm going to walk through a channel review of somebody's channel and show them what they're doing well and what they can improve on so that, that they can get more views and subscribers coming up. My name is Trina. If you are new here and I help creative business owners like you get started on YouTube so you can grow your business. And like I said, today I'm going to be doing a channel audit of one of my students to help her get better with her channel. Now, this is live and if you are watching the replay, I'm going to put in the comments section, the timestamp that you can jump to to get into the review. But for right now, I want to see who's live. Let me know in the comments section. If you are live, you should look over to like the right of your screen. There should be a comment section. I'm checking in here to say hello. I know Katrina is here. Melinda, Jennifer from Michigan. Carol from Chicago. Maddie is here. Be inspired, be motivated. From India. Hi, Rachel from Define youe Hustle. Wow, so many of you guys. I'm so excited that you are here. So go ahead and let me know you're here. Hi, Ali. I love seeing who all is here as I go ahead and walk through this channel audit. Hi, Glamorous Tree, Ohio. So many people here. So the reason why I wanted to do this training because so many people are posting to YouTube, putting their videos up and like, why is nothing happening? Why is no one watching my videos? Why is nobody subscribing? I thought this was going to help me grow my business. So in YouTube, you've got to be pretty strategic and you've got to have a brand that really tells people what you're all about. So I'm going to flip on over to the screen here and walk you through a channel audit that I typically do with my clients to help them get better and set up a game plan for them so they can go in, know what they need to fix to start growing that channel. So let me go ahead and share my screen here and go ahead. If you guys got questions, feel free to, you know, pop them into the comment section and I will be sure to answer them. So the one that I'm doing today is Libations Academy and the owner is Dani. So we're gonna go ahead and walk through her channel. She is a YouTube Bootcamp student of mine. So I have a course where I walk people through how to do this. And that's what we're going to be. That's who I'm going to be critiquing right now. So the first thing that you want to do when you're auditing your own channel is take a look at your channel homepage. It is so important to have this channel banner because this is the first impression people are going to get of your channel. And so Dani does a really good job of having her, you know, channel name right up there. Her face is on there. So people can really relate to her. Get a name to the face. And she has a little tagline. Tagline there as well. Learn your drink. I actually think Danny's channel banner is great. The only thing I would add to her channel banner is possibly an upload schedule. So people know, okay, this person posts new content every Thursday or every Monday so that they know to come back and look for more videos. And the reason why you really want to focus on your channel homepage is because most people are going to subscribe, subscribe to your channel from this button right here. That's why it is so important to make sure that you get this channel homepage right. One other thing you want to do, I'm going to go ahead and unsubscribe from her for a minute so that we can see if she has a channel trailer. Because that's the second thing you want to make sure that you have. And I don't think Danny has a channel trailer. That's something she's working on, I believe. I think we've talked about that. But your channel trailer is your second impression on people to let them know who you are and what you are all about. So a 60 second channel trailer is really all you need to really get across your value proposition and why people should subscribe to you. It should not be any longer than 60 seconds. If they're new to your channel, they obviously don't know who you are yet. So they want to know what you're going to do for them. And you've got to do it in 60 seconds. So that's the second thing that you want to think about while you're auditing your channel. Do you have a channel trailer Again, guys, pop questions in if you're Watching the replay, pop them in the comments below. If you're liking what I'm talking about, make sure you click that share button and you share with people that we're over here live doing this free training as well. So the next thing you want to look at this is the third first impression, if there's such thing as a third first impression. But the third impression you're going to get is these channel sections. So these channel sections are really important to get across what it is you're sharing, what is your content revolved around? So if they come here, what can they expect from you? So Danny does a good job of, you know, highlighting Beer 101. She talks a lot about learning your beer and understanding what beer is and just the different types of beer. She also talks about wine tasting. She is a professional in her industry and so wine tasting is one of the other topics that she talks about. So for Danny, I would suggest having a playlist up top here for people who are new. So if you. So I would do a playlist. If you're new to Libations Academy, check these out and put in some of her best videos right here so people can get into a playlist. Because playlists are so important, the more you can get people watching your channel and your videos, the more YouTube's going to promote your content to their to the platform. So I would suggest to Dani to definitely add a get started here. Or if you're new here, you can also check out all of her playlists up here. And we're gonna go here because you want to have as many playlists as possible. Now, I know Dani doesn't have a lot of videos. We're just getting started and we're really building out a plan for her. And so she does have quite a few videos. So I would tell her to start breaking them up into chunks, into fun playlist chunks. So maybe holiday drink, holiday drink inspiration, so she could add her Thanksgiving beer and her wine for Thanksgiving. Those types of ideas. Anything that's going to make fun, fun, bingeable content. That's really what you want to do. So then the next branding element that I really want to look at is her thumbnails. So, you know, thumbnails is very important. That's what's going to show up in the search and that's how you're gonna get people to click on you. Oh, there. Danny does have a channel trailer. I'm sorry, Danny, if you're watching the replay, she's got it. My bad. So that's great. One thing I want to point out with her channel trailer, she has this content filled out. She lets you know where else she she is. She lets you know to subscribe. Just click that link and you can subscribe. And she has some great content here to just talk about who she is. So thumbnails, you guys, this is the most important part is having thumbnails. That's going to grab attention. I like that Danny's thumbnails do reflect her branding up here as well. So it's kind of a darker image, the yellow tint. So I think she's doing good with her thumbnails. One thing that we've been working on, though, is showing some kind of emotion instead of just smiling and pointing. So Danny's been working on that and trying to keep text to a minimal on your thumbnail. That's going to be really important as well. So I want to see if she is ranking and I can show you what I mean by search. So let me see if she's ranking for any specific phrases so we can actually see what her video looks like in the. In the search. So she is ranking for why your beer tastes like it does. So let's just look that up. Why your beer tastes like it does. Okay, so this is what Danny's competing against. And you really want to do this for your videos as well. You want to make sure if you place your thumbnail in this list of results, is it going to pop? Is it going to stand out? So this is Danny's video. And I mean, it does. It's doing a pretty good job of standing out. Would you click it? I think her audience is going to click it. But what she could do is this text is covering, you know, the image. I maybe make the image brighter. I do like the yellow because on YouTube, you've really got to have a pop of color that stands out because the background is white. So you got to have some kind of pop of color. The problem with this, there is no person on here, and people really connect with people when they see the whites of your eyes. So a lot of good thumbnails usually have people's face in them. You can usually see the whites of their eyes. Those are the ones that are getting clicked. So that's what you want to think about when creating thumbnails. I'm going to jump over here to questions real quick. I see that you're using Vidiq. Is there a reason that you use that over TubeBuddy Katrina? I actually use both, and it just helps me. There's not one over the other. I actually just use them both in conjunction with each other to help me figure out playlists and SEO and keywords. So I use both. Can you use the same video in more than one playlist? Yes, you can. You can use the same video in more than one playlist. Okay, so now that we kind of did the branding overlay of Danny's channel, I want to go into the analytics to really help you take your channel audit to that next level. So I'm going to jump over here to her analytics. This is the back end of your channel, and this is things people really don't look at a lot of. So you want to go ahead and go to analytics and the first thing that you want to check out is your traffic sources. And then the next thing you want to go to is YouTube search. So this is going to find the keywords people are finding your video on. So most people are finding Dani's videos using the keyword Libations Academy, Obviously that's her channel name, so people are doing that. But some great video ideas for Dani that's getting traffic for her this month is wine styles. So she what would really power this keyword is making an entire playlist around wine styles and then creating videos for that playlist with wine styles in the title. So red wine styles for dinner, red wine styles for pictures, picnics, red wine styles for Valentine's Day, white wine styles for summer. She wants to create a playlist around wine styles because that is the keyword people are finding her on YouTube for. And so she can make this hub of content around wine styles. It's just going to elevate her channel search friendliness, and more people are going to find her content. Another thing is wines to keep in the house or how to store wine at home. So wines to keep in the house is actually a great one because you could do red wines to keep in the house, white wines to keep in the house, celebratory wines to keep in the house, Chilling wine like, you know, Netflix and chill wines to keep in the house. Party favorite wines to keep in the house. These types of videos, if you have keywords up here, you really want to capitalize on those and create as much content as possible around those keywords. You guys let me know in the comments section. Is this making sense to you? Do you see how this works? I would love to get some feedback over here in the live chat to let me know. Trina, mind blown. I totally get this. I can't wait to do this. Give me Some feedback, you guys. Once you look at traffic sources, you can also actually see where to focus your promotion attention on. If we go back to top level here, you can go to your external sources and see. This is where I decided to quit promoting on Twitter because it wasn't bringing me a lot of traffic. So for Dani, Facebook is bringing her a lot of traffic and so is Google Search. So for her, you know, she doesn't even have Twitter on here, Instagram. So I would tell her, don't, you know, put a lot of effort in Instagram and Twitter. Right now you're getting traffic from Facebook. Keep it up. Keep pushing on that Facebook strategy. She's also getting results from Google search, so that's amazing. That means her videos are showing up in Google search. So people are saying this makes total sense. Eye opening, Netflix and chill wines. Haha, that's awesome. Yeah, just throwing ideas out. That's kind of how my brain works. So this is how you can determine, you know, where should you focus your promotion effort on? Like where should you really go all in on? So Dani should definitely be going all in here on Facebook. Not all in, but really focusing on that. So then you can also. This is a great way to find collaborators for your videos and collaboration is amazing for growing YouTube channels. So by finding a good collaborator, you can go to suggested videos and this is going to show you what videos are driving traffic to your channel. So here's one. This is Wine Speak, the channel Wine Society. Maybe that's not for Danny. Here's another one. McLean Premium Imports. Maybe not for Dani. Here's her videos driving traffic. Another one of her videos. Here we go. So Dani could possibly reach out to Shell Loves Wine and maybe they could do a collaboration together. Because her video, what's In My Wine Collection Is driving traffic to her channel. So if they can start pushing traffic to each other's channel, YouTube is going to start promoting more of their content to each other's audience. And so it just kind of boosts all of your content up. Does that make sense? Amanda says, what is her Facebook promotion strategy? So Amanda, I think she's done a lot of Facebook lives. She's also posting teaser clips on Facebook telling people to go check out our channel. I don't know exactly in depth what her Facebook strategy is, but if you go over to her Facebook page, you can totally check that out. All right. Yeah. Even if you don't have a lot of searches, you can get an idea of, you know, what is working to help you grow more. So the last Thing I really want you to check in your channel audit, which is so important is what's going to skyrocket. Your growth is your audience retention reports. And your audience retention is going to show you how much of your video people are watching. And Danny does a lot of short videos, which are great for audience retention, but it's not the best for accumulating watch time, minutes. So if you do a three minute video and say people watch two minutes, you accumulated two minutes of watch time and people watch, whatever that statistic is, 60% of your video. So that's good. But could you make a seven minute video and people watch five minutes? So instead of accumulating two minutes, you're accumulating five minutes. So that all adds up to your audience retention and your watch time. So Danny's actually done a good job with her average percentage views. So most of her videos are getting 52% of the video watch, which is great. You really want to aim for above 50%. And really good would be, you know, 60% of your audience watching that video. So to figure out like what videos specifically you can go down here. And so this is one of her most popular ones, why you should drink beer from a glass. So we're going to click on that one and you're going to see that her audience starts here at 100%. And then we go eight seconds into the video and she's down to just 67% of people watching. Now, this spike means people keep watching it. And so if we go here, that's Danny just drinking beer and coughing. But what you want to do, we're going to pick another video because this one is not Danny's favorite because it wasn't the right audience watching. But if we do how to like beer, you can also see here. So you'll see by 34 seconds, almost 50% of people are gone. So what you want to do is what can you do in these 30 seconds to keep people watching so you can play your video and see what's happening to cause people to leave? So for Danny, maybe she wants to test out a new intro. Maybe she wants to try getting a different hook to get people watching instead of saying, what's up, beer tasters? Maybe she wants to say, so this video is how to like beer. Do you go to. So think about a pain point of somebody in your hook. So for me, I would think, have you ever gone to a party and all that was there is beer? And you don't really like beer. In today's video, I'm Going to show you how you can start liking beer so you can have a beer at the next party you attend or whatever that. Whatever that hooks going to be. So you get their pain point and you let them know this is what you're going to talk about in this video. And another thing that's important is address people as you don't think it as, hey, everybody, I am guilty of this as well. But you want to think about like, address it as one person. Think you're speaking to one person. So that is my audit for Danny. I'm gonna go ahead and pop over here to the screen so we can talk and answer some questions and see what you guys have to say. So that's my audit of Danny's video. And working with Danny, like we, we figure out, you know, what's working, what doesn't work. I do a lot of that in YouTube Bootcamp on the group calls if you have specific questions. So Danny was in bootcamp in July. She has a full time job. So she's doing her full time job with YouTube on the side. And so it's a little slower to implement things, but it's totally doable. You can see she's almost at 100 subscribers. So that's amaz. Do you guys have any specific questions that you want me to answer for you? Yikes. Some of my videos have really low audience retention. Don't know, don't remove them. But what you don't want to do is take Facebook Lives and repurpose them on YouTube. They will do horrible in audience retention. And Katrina, I think that might be what it seems like you're doing. There are ones I moved over from Facebook Lives so I definitely would not take Facebook lives over to YouTube. I had a client who we did that. It was like 86% of audience retention was gone in the first five seconds of her video. And so what that does is it kind of sends a red flag to YouTube saying, hey, this person's not really creating good content because 86% of people are gone in six seconds. So they're not going to really push your videos and suggested or in search because they don't think you're creating good content. And why would they send people your way if you aren't keeping people on your video to watch it? And so that's what YouTube Facebook lives really do is it doesn't really connect on YouTube. People are like, hey, this person's like talking to people. This, this is like, this is a Facebook video. This isn't what I wanted. So I would not, would not suggest repurposing Facebook lives. YouTube bootcamp is amazing. Thank you, Ali. Maddie, do you think you should brand each thumbnail? And if so, why brand each thumbnail? I'm not sure what you mean. One thing I've been doing is adding like a little thing in the corner. So if I show up a couple times on the suggested side of videos, people can start to see that repetitive branding. So. Oh, that's Trina's video. That's Trina's video. And it's just kind of like a gray triangle on the side with my logo. And so it just gets people's eyes custom to that pattern so that when they see that pattern they're like, oh, that's Trina's video. So that's how I brand my, my thumbnails. I also always have the same typography, the same coloring as on brand for my thumbnail. So let me know if that makes sense. Maddie's daddy, Katrina. Yeah, I just use them as filler when I started to have some. Yeah, so yeah, just don't do it again. You could always use it as unlisted and use it in your email funnels and send people directly to the link and not have it public. Ali, what about YouTube Live? Should you keep those up? Yeah. So if you watch this live, I actually started it the way I normally would with a hook jumped into my intro and then I let people who were watching the replay where they can skip forward to. And so when I'm done with this live, I'm going to put a little time stamp in the description box below so people who are watching the replay can just click that and get right into the audit so that they don't drop off. That's how I am utilizing YouTube live and hopefully to keep audience retention longer. Yes, Maddie, you answered what I was looking for, what I was wanting. Okay, awesome. So you guys, any other questions? I've got things on my to do list here today. I actually sent my children and my husband to my mother in law's because I don't typically work on Fridays. I usually use it as family time, but I got a lot going on this week at a client project and my own stuff. So gotta get to that. And if you guys have any questions, let me know. I know I talked a little bit about Bootcamp. I want to let you know that is coming back out very soon. I let my Facebook audience know. If you want to be on my Facebook, check in the description box below. There should be a link to my Facebook group. I let them know that it is coming out. So if it's something, something you're thinking about investing in, you can start saving now. It's not a huge price point, but it is an investment. And anybody that's in YouTube Bootcamp will tell you how valuable it's been for them. And I also want you to know that you don't need hundreds. You don't even need hundreds of subscribers to make money on YouTube. One of my bootcamp students doesn't even have a hundred subscribers. She posted a video last week and made $200 just on affiliate links. So she talked about some tools that she uses, some affiliates she's a part of, and she made $200 and she has under 100 subscribers on YouTube. So I'm not pushing YouTube as, like, the place where you make Money. I'm using YouTube as a platform. You can grow. So you can grow, you know, your email list or your client list or your course or even your affiliate income. And so you don't need to have this giant YouTube channel. You just need to be strategic and know what your business plan is. So I don't want the numbers to scare you. I don't even have 5,000 subscribers, and I'm making a living off of my YouTube channel by creating videos to help people on YouTube. So I just wanted to put that out there that you don't have to worry about getting 100 subscribers or these people don't even have that many subscribers. How are they making money? They're being very strategic in doing it. What do you think the single most thing is for converting viewers to subscribers on YouTube? Maddie. So that. Maddie's daddy. So that is asking people. You need to always have a call to action to subscribe. You also need to be sharing valuable content. Is your audience responding to it? Check out your audience retention. Are people watching it? Are people relating to it? Check the comments. You know, engage in comments to create that community. That's how I would really suggest growing your subscriber base on YouTube. A lot of my views are not subscribers. How can I change that? So that's the same for me. Glamorous tree. I about 70% of my views are not subscribers. And that's kind of a good thing because if you just count on your subscriber base, YouTube doesn't always send out those notification emails that you go that you have. A new video or people's email box is just like inundated with emails. And so you don't really, necessarily, necessarily want to rely on your Subscribers to be the only views you want to really, you want to rely on that search too. So something were to happen with the notification system, you know, your channel is not down and out. You're growing by subscribers. So I really wouldn't get too worried about your audience not being subscribers. That's just mean people are finding you in search. And like I said, the more you ask people to subscribe, you know, you add those end screen elements that say click here to subscribe. Those types of things will make more subscribers come. Let's see. My channel is demonetized, but I don't know the reason. So YouTube just changed some rules where you need to have a thousand subscribers. And you guys, I keep forgetting if it's 4,000 watch time minutes or 4,000 watch time hours. I'm sorry. But yes, YouTube's gone through and demonetized a lot of channels, but I have yet to bring a single paycheck home from YouTube and I'm still making a living on my business. I'm just using YouTube as my platform to get people into my business. So don't worry about demonetization. The monetization is not directly connected to searchability. There are two separate things, so I would not worry about that. Being demonetized isn't really going to affect you. So I wouldn't worry about demonetization. All right, you guys, nice to see fellow YouTube. Thank you, Rachel. I 4000 hours. Thank you Maddie's daddy. I need to get that right. I just numbers and I'm still Mumbai eating it with a one year old and a two year old. So that statistic always just goes from me. There's so many other things going on in life that. Thank you Maddie's daddy for popping that out there. Okay guys, so that's what I got for you today. Don't forget to click subscribe. If you aren't subscribed, jump over to my Facebook group for more inside information. Tips first to find out when YouTube Boot Camp will open again. So thank you. I hope you guys have a great weekend. Thanks for coming and I will see you next week. Bye.