YouTube Trends 2024: How to Stay Ahead!

Like subscribe and comment. You have got to stop this one. These trailers or intros have to stop as well. Nobody who clicks on your video wants to watch footage of you. If you want to reach more people on YouTube and not only grow your YouTube channel, but grow your audience and get more leads and sales in your business, I'm going to share with you in this video the top trends for YouTube in 2024 that will do just that. And at the end of the video, I'm going to be sharing the three cringiest things that see people do on YouTube that you should stop. And that's not including the two that I already mentioned. The biggest trend that you need to realize on YouTube is getting people to watch multiple videos, binge watching your content. This means you've got to go into YouTube with a plan. You cannot be posting one off videos like getting random ideas and then creating that on YouTube and then another random idea and creating that on YouTube. You have to create series of videos, playlists of videos that lead from video 1 to 2 to 3 to 4. Because if you want to see growth on YouTube and you want more people, people to find you and you want more people in your lead magnet or in your courses, you've got to feed YouTube what it wants. YouTube wants people watching more content. And by you creating these strategically planned playlists that easily gets people from video 1 to 2 to 3 to 4, that's how you're going to reach more people on YouTube with having to pay the algorithm to do it. Now, when you create binge sessions on YouTube, yes, you're making the algorithm happy, but what you are also doing is increasing the likelihood of conversions for you. So if somebody were to watch one video, they would be a warm lead, right? But the more videos the watch, the warmer they become and the higher chances you have of converting that viewer into a client, into a sale. On your email list, I talk about this playlist. So what does that look like? I want you to think about the domino effect in marketing. So the definition that G2M Solutions says of domino marketing is each piece of content is a domino and represents a gate your buyer must pass through before making a purchasing decision. As each domino falls, it hits over the next one. The buyer transitions into thinking from one purchasing state to another. A logical sequence of activity is triggered. So if you've ever done launch emails and you're hitting those objections or you're busting those objections that people have in your launch, it's the same thing with YouTube. So basically your YouTube playlists are these mini launch series. So you want to think about in that first video, what do you have to convince them is true. So if you look at a recent series on my YouTube channel about content marketing, the very first thing that I had to convince people to knock over that initial domino is that content marketing is important. Once I convince them content marketing is important, what is the next thing that they are going to think about? Okay, well, how do I do it? How do I make sure I create content that people will actually watch? So that second video now is create content your audience can't ignore. All right, so once they learn how to create that content, how do they make this possible? How often do they need to post? What does a content calendar look like? So the next video that I have is how to create a content calendar for all your social media needs. So you see, as I build out my playlist, every video that I put here on my channel, minus wildcard videos, which was my healthy habits video, every single video has a purpose and is a domino that I'm knocking over to get people through an entire playlist on my channel. When you think of your content in playlists, this is how you are going to see success on YouTube in 2024 and how YouTube is going to promote your videos to more people for $0. The second trend for YouTube in 2024 is having clarity on who your. Now, you've probably heard it time and time again that you need to niche down, but we've heard it a lot here on YouTube that you need to have a specific niche and focus that on YouTube. Now, this niche was generally like a topic. So for example, if you did a video about growing the best green beans and your micro garden, right, you live in a small yard, so you have this micro garden and you grew the best green beans and you did a video on that and that video went viral. In the past, what you would be told is double down on green bean videos. Green bean videos went big on your channel. Do more green beans videos. Well, you're going to get tired of creating green bean videos. I mean, how many of those can you actually create? And your audience is going to be like, enough with the green beans already. So instead of thinking about it as a topic, you want to think about your niche audience. So in the green bean example, think about the person most likely to watch that. Other people who have micro gardens who are wanting to do better, create better crops, or commit more time to their micro garden. This opens up more content for you to create and get people wanting to come back to your channel every single week. So you could create content on the equipment that you use to harvest your green beans on your micro garden, or the product stuff, soil that you use in your micro garden, or how you set up your micro garden, or how you tend to your micro garden, or your routine of your micro garden, or your favorite vegetables or your favorite seeds for your micro garden. Right? You see how you're still speaking to that niche audience, that audience that has a micro garden, but you're allowing yourself to open up to more content, more topics so that you're passionate and excited about your videos and your audience wants to come back for every single video that you create. It is important to have a niche audience, but you need to think like it's not just one thing. Another example is my channel. I help course creators and coaches use YouTube use content marketing to generate more leads and sales to their business. This allows me to create content about YouTube. I just did an entire series on metrics that affect how I get more people to my funnel. I can talk about hiring to help me do my content marketing. I could talk about Instagram, right? But I'm still speaking to those course creators and those coaches and they're wanting to hear all these different aspects of my business as well. So I'm still niched, but I niche to an audience, not specifically just a YouTube as a topic. Another trend we're going to see on YouTube in 2024 is something we can actually thank TikTok for. And it's more raw or I hate to say the word authentic content. So as you're watching TikTok, you see these people just pull up their camera on their phone and just talk to their phone, right? Makeup not done, like dir background, like dark background, you know, not set up like this. So you're going to see this trend basically bleed into YouTube. Now, I'm not saying that you should just grab your camera and shoot anywhere, but this should take off the stress or the overwhelm that you may be having to get the perfect setup to get the perfect equipment. I will say I know it's incredibly hard to not focus on everything being perfect because I have a hard time right now showing up on Instagram without everything being perfect. But people in 2024 are wanting Conn, right? We've gotten through, you know, the past four years and people want connection and they want to feel connected with real people. So why do you think TikToks and reels go so well? It's because it's more raw, right? And so when you sit down to do videos, you want that connection to feel like they are listening to a friend, they are sitting in an office with you, or they're sitting at your kitchen table or on your couch with you. So this allows you to have the permission to just create content with what you have right now and focus on the content you're sharing and the connection you're going to make with your audience instead of worrying about having the perfect setup or the perfect equipment. I know for a fact that this works because a client of mine started working with me in 2020. Her and her husband were shooting YouTube videos on a video camera in 2020, and they were shooting it in a square format, still putting it on YouTube. And in 2020, with that equipment, because of how they were connecting with their audience and the content that they were sharing, they were able to grow their YouTube channel over 50,000 subscribers with just a video camera with the WR Best for YouTube. So I know this is true. I know when you think about how you're connecting with your audience and the value of the content you're sharing, that is what's going to be way more important here on YouTube in 2024 than having, like, a studio set up in your house. I will also say this gives you permission to do minimal video editing when you're getting started on YouTube or as you're growing on YouTube and you don't have the money to outsource to a video editing agency. Just get started with doing small cuts. Cut out your mistakes, cut out your pauses, and just get started there. You can add editing layers as you go, but again, think about the connection and the content that you're sharing first. The next trend you're going to see on YouTube this year is more AB testing with thumbnails. Listen, thumbnails are your marketing package for your video. It doesn't matter how great your content is, how great your video equipment is, how great your video editing is. If your thumbnail and your title, I'll throw that in there, do not get people to click. No one's ever going to see it. And if people aren't clicking, YouTube's not going to put it in front of anyone. So you've got to be putting effort into your thumbnail. And I tell all of my clients, you have to know what your thumbnail is going to be before you even write your content. Because if you can't come up with a good thumbnail idea and a title for the content that you want to share, we've got to restructure that content in a way that the title and thumbnail is going to make people click. Now, the reason I know thumbnails are going to be so important is because YouTube keeps teasing and some people are actually have access to the beta of this. YouTube is going to be offering a B testing for thumbnails. So if YouTube's putting the time and effort into allowing us to ab test in their platform, we know it's going to be important. If you don't have the ability to ab test on YouTube, which I don't. I've been ramping up my ab testing on my thumbnails in TubeBuddy. Now, when I'm talking about ab testing, you need to test small things at a time. So let's say you put a thumbnail up and you want to test this text or this text. You want to have the same photo, just different text on those thumbnails so that you know, okay, text A or text B B did better. All right, we know text B. Now maybe you want to test that original photo. Maybe you're smiling with your mouth closed and you want to test smiling with your mouth open, but you're still using the same text as text B. Right. So then you're going to determine which photo does better. Okay, smiling with my mouth open and text B. Great. Now maybe you want to test the color of the text. So maybe you test pink in my case or dark blue and see which one of those does better. This is what's going to help you incrementally increase your click through rate and allow you to see what is the best style or basically the best framework for a thumbnail that gets the highest click through rate. This is going to help you reach more people and get you more bang for your buck out of your YouTube videos. Let's talk about a trend that I've been holding my tongue on for a very long time because I've not been sure how to talk about it. And it's YouTube Shorts. Now, since I started YouTube Shorts or heard about YouTube Shorts, I have been incredibly hesitant. But I've tested it. I've tested it with clients of mine. Clients of mine have tested it on their own and we get the same results. The views you get from shorts, the people who watch your shorts are completely different than the people who watch your long form content. Why is this a bad thing? People who watch your long form content are people that are more likely to convert. They've gone out and searched a problem that they had and they're watching your content to solve their problem. They're going to go through your series like we talked about in the first trend, and be convinced that you're the right person to work with. People who are watching shorts, which is less than 59 seconds, aren't in the mindset of problem solving. They're going to shorts for entertainment. So when you put shorts on your channel, you are basically separating to two types of audience. Short form audience and long form audience. I personally, because my goal in my YouTube channel is to attract leads and clients, I'm going to put all of my efforts into long form content. Even if it's just clipping up long form content into shorts, that still takes time. I'm going to instead of taking time and I've recommended my clients instead of taking the time to worry about shorts, put that time you would put into shorts into your long form videos. Whether it's adding layers to your editing, maybe adding a new video a week, maybe improving your content. Because I personally don't see business owners using YouTube getting added value from shorts. And don't worry if you don't use shorts, it doesn't mean YouTube is going to bury you and you're not going to be successful on YouTube. Focus on your long form content, focus on your click through, rate your audience retention. And I promise this, you'll still see results from YouTube and growth on YouTube. The next trend is something we saw in 2023 and we are going to continue to see it grow. And it's podcasting here on YouTube. Now I want to be clear about podcasting here on YouTube. YouTube is going to be competing with all the other podcasting platforms and realize like it needs a piece of the pie. But my best advice is to put your podcast on another channel. Again, just like with shorts, people who are watching shorts are coming to watch shorts. They're not coming to to watch long form content. People who are coming to watch podcasts are coming to watch podcasts and not kind of your long form content videos. You want to keep these separate. I would recommend keeping them separate. And if you are going to do a podcast, it has got to be you on video talking to a camera. It cannot just be the audio of your podcast slapped with a graphic because that is not going to do you any good on YouTube. YouTube is a video podcast. People want to connect with a person and it's got to be you on video. The other reason why I say to put these on separate channels is because if somebody watches your podcast, that's the type of content they're going to expect. From your channel. So when you drop something that's not a podcast, they become confused and not sure, like what did I subscribe to this channel for? The same thing with long form content and then all of a sudden they see a podcast from you. Again, that's not what they subscribe to. You need to be creating a consistency with your viewers and the experience that they're having on your channel. So that's again why I would recommend having a podcast channel and then your regular YouTube channel. Another trend that will be important and has been important for a while is consistency on YouTube. YouTube is a long term game. You can grow on YouTube, but your expectations need to be set in reality. It is going to be a slow grow, but if you are even getting 100 views on your video, that's 100 people. Would you be able to stand on a stage and speak to 100 people? Would you be able to work with half of those people, 50 people as clients? So as you're getting started on, on YouTube, you need to think about these vanity metrics as real life people, actual people, to keep you going. Because consistency is where you will see results. Now. Consistency needs to be what works for you. Consistency can be a video a week, consistency can be a video a month, two videos a week, every other week. But when you're starting on YouTube, you need to determine what your consistency is going to be so that your audience can expect you. Because if they are finding you on YouTube, if they want to hit that, that subscribe button, if they want to commit to you as somebody that they're going to watch, they need to be ensured that you're going to keep showing up in serving them. And they need to know when you are showing up and serving them. So you've got to determine this is the consistency I'm going to do and then put time into your schedule to make those videos and show up consistently. How many times can I say consistently here on YouTube? Now let's talk about the three cringiest things that you can do here on YouTube. Don't worry if you're currently doing these. Are you? You've done these before. Because I've absolutely done these and I've learned from my mistakes. I'm not calling anybody out. I would just like for you moving forward to learn from your mistakes. The first one is keyword stuffing your titles. Like if you're just trying to get SEO words into your title, no one's going to click on your video. You have got to think about the human on the other side of the screen that is clicking on your video. Are they going to watch some boring ass title that you just tried to shove as many keywords into? Or are they going to watch a title that that sparks their interest, their curiosity, or maybe even gives them FOMO if they don't watch this instead of shoving keywords into your title? You've got to think human first when coming up with your titles. Skimping on your thumbnails is huge and I cringe when I just see these random thumbnails and they make no sense. They put the same text on the thumbnail as the title so they don't do anything working together and it shows that they did no real research and what type of thumbnail is going to perform well in their niche. Listen, your thumbnail will make or break your YouTube channel and you've got to take the time to do thumbnails, right? I've been using custom thumbnails. I'll link them down below for over the last year and a half. I use my agency clients when I have my agency with custom thumbnails. And if you can't do these thumbnails on your own, they are definitely an affordable option to get you good thumbnails. The next cringy thing is too many calls to action. Listen, if you're telling people to do do five different things in your video, they are not going to do any of them. If you're telling them to get on your email list and then five minutes later you're telling them to download this freebie and then a minute later you're telling them to subscribe to your podcast. And then my favorite like I mentioned at the beginning, like subscribe and comment, no action is going to be taken. That's why each video in your playlist needs to have a strategic goal. If you're wondering how to formulate this playlist and what these strategic goals look like, I deep dive in how to do this in my Live Workshop Profit purchase. If you want to see how to do this on YouTube, go to treanalittle.com forward/ppv to save your seat in the next Live Workshop. I want you to know that using YouTube will look different in every single business. So I want to make sure that you set up a plan that's going to work for you, your business, and the time you have available to commit to YouTube. So watch the video that's on your screen right now where I show you how to start making YouTube possible and what probably already feels like an overloaded schedule for you. See you there.