Don't major in minors when it comes to YouTube...

James Dean

May '23 in Audience Growth📈

I initially posted this as a reply to

@Ali Alqaraghuli

on this thread but felt it would help a few more people here too.

The conversation was around where you should place your focus when it comes to YouTube.

After coaching 1000's of YouTube channel owners on this I have been able to see the common patterns and mistakes most of them make.

One of the biggest is spending time, energy, money, focus, attention on things that don't really matter.

aka 'Majoring in the minors'.

Let me explain.

A lot of content creators worry about their editing, their audio, their tags, descriptions, about section, branding etc.

All of this stuff is important. I'm not denying that. You need that shit dialled in but it's not THE most important.

When it comes to YouTube it doesn't matter what's in the video if nobody clicks on it in the first place 🤷‍♂️

Obviously, if the product (video) isn't great then the algorithm won't push the video anyway but I do think far too many people major in the minors when it comes to what's actually important to get your content out there.

I have spoken with many individuals who have fairly average editing but their videos exploded on YouTube simply because they nailed the following 3 keys to 'virality' on YouTube:

Video title
Thumbnail
I'll cover number 3 in a minute, keep reading.

There's a shit tonne of psychology that goes into writing a solid title & hook and creating a thumbnail that makes people want to click.

When I discovered this I switched my thumbnail designer from $5 per tn to $50 and it's made a massive difference in terms of impressions/views/revenue.

I want to share an analogy that I use with students....

I want you to think of your YouTube channel as a shop on a high street (that's if you still shop on high streets lol maybe you order 100% of everything you need on amazon prime 🤪)

If you were walking down a high street and you saw a banged up broken shop with smashed windows and a door hanging off it's hinges, would you go inside to have a look around?

Probably not.

They could be selling the brand new iPhone for $100 but it wouldn't matter because you'd never see it.

Same with YT. The title and thumbnail is the shop front. Make it enticing for people to come in and have a look around.

One caveat to all of this though...

Here's the third 🔑

Without a good IDEA none of this matters.

I have personally seen videos explode (250k-1m views) with a terrible thumbnail, awful title and a mediocre edit simply because they absolutely nailed the idea.

Your video has to be something that people WANT to watch.

Respectfully, YouTube doesn't really care about what you or I think is a good idea. It will push the videos that resonate most with your viewers (at least when you have built a solid audience - yes at the start the algorithm with use more of the metadata).

Too often I see individuals trying to recreate the wheel when it comes to YouTube by coming up with some crazy new idea that's never been tried before.

At least when you're relatively new or building an audience it pays to spend time analysing what content is working on YT already and reverse engineering it so you can apply it to your own channel.

Spend some time reviewing your competitors channels and figuring out what ideas are trending right now on the algorithm.

Model them.

Not copying. Nobody want's to be a second-rate imitation or copycat. That's not good.

Look for commonalities. Look for patterns. Look for principles.

Apply them to your own content and watch it explode.

To your success 🚀

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