How I revived my YouTube channel from a flop era

every so often my YouTube channel goes into a flop era and I think this honestly happens to every Creator sometimes I know exactly why my videos aren't getting the views that I'm used to but other times it's more of a mystery but nonetheless every time it happens I'm always looking for a strategy I can Implement to get my videos back on the homepage back in front of my subscribers in November and December of 20123 My Views kind of Tanked they were right around 230,000 views per month which is like about 100,000 less than what my average was for the rest of 2023 so I decided that for January I was going to implement some new strategies that were hopefully going to help me revive my channel and get it out of this flop era and my friends I'm happy to report that it worked because January of 2024 was my highest month for views ever on YouTube so today I want to get really honest with you and talk about the strategies that I implemented what the results look like open up my YouTube studio so you can peek around a little bit and I'm going to bring you along for a day in my life while we talk about it so let's [Music] go so friends welcome to behind the screens the new series where I show you an unfiltered look at my current social media strategy jez what's working maybe more importantly what's not [Music] working it's not so much that the rest of the stuff on my channel is filtered or whatever it's just that for the most part I've been sharing stuff that like has worked for me I've confirmed it I share my success [Music] stories and I know that is help helpful but I think it would be more interesting to talk about stuff that is like currently in progress cuz I don't know about you but like I would love to hear about that stuff from the creators that I follow just kind of sharing what they're trying out even if it hasn't worked yet and knowing more so their thought process behind it and I'm a big believer of making the content that you want to watch so that's what we're doing and speaking of that I'm going to do it in a more personal Vlog style as you can already tell mostly because I find it fun and that's what I want to do I know my vloggy style videos don't tend to perform as well as my typical ones but I'm kind of currently in the process of trying to transition my audience slowly to being into the Vlog style content so that's already a little bit of a preview into the strategy talk so we'll get back to that more later but yeah I just wanted to introduce this new series I'm hoping to make one probably about once a month let me know in the comments if you're excited for this more behind the scenes look and if you have any specific Deep dive topics you want me to go into obviously today we're diving into my YouTube strategy and how I was able to really increase my views the last few months and how I'm going to keep trying to do that I forgot to put my sunscreen on before I put on my makeup so thank goodness for this spray stuff by the way as you have probably already noticed I'm not currently in my van or in my apartment back in Canada I'm staying at an Airbnb in Las Cabos cuz we've been hosting some friends and family visiting us down here and this is a really nice house and I'm afraid it's going to make it really difficult to move back into the van okay first thing on the agenda this morning is a meeting with Shelby from the Creator Le team and after that we're going to talk about how I got to this point on YouTube like what has went down to get me here but first I meting [Music] if you've ever tried to do the digital Nomad thing then you'll know the classic issue of like airbnbs never having proper work setups like there's never desks anywhere but thankfully this Airbnb had plastic folding table so we've got a workstation set up here so why don't we talk briefly about my YouTube goals for 2024 so you have the context for how this all happened I really did feel like the goals that I set were ambitious and I'm kind of like a little bit surprised that I was able to make such good progress towards them so quickly let's just take a look at my YouTube studio for a second because I think it'll really illustrate this so as you can see January is quite a standout month compared to my last year or so on YouTube like we're talking like 300,000 views a month is probably about the average on my best months you know we were in the High 3 00s here in like late summer early fall and then we dropped really far down to like 230,000 for November and December so look I know I know metrics don't really matter but the truth is if you want to scale your creator business the best way to do that is to scale your audience like it's just going to make the rest of your business grow so with that in mind I knew that like YouTube being the primary revenue driver of my business I wanted to focus on increasing the re of my YouTube channel in 2024 I literally don't care about my number of subscribers because that means less and less as time goes on on YouTube it's really about the regular viewership your videos are getting so with that in mind I set the following goals I wanted to get to 500,000 views per month on my channel and I wanted my videos to get 10,000 views within the first 24 hours of them being published my goal for 2023 was to get 10,000 views on every video within the first 7 Days of it being published so you can tell I'm really like scaling up these goals as we go and like also to be clear I didn't necessarily hit that goal in 2023 actually I I didn't I definitely didn't hit that goal in 2023 I manually tracked this so when my videos hit 7 days after being published I would put in a oce Tracker how many views they had gotten so based on that I can tell you that in 2023 my average views within 7 Days of publication was 8,00 , 740 so not quite 10,000 but hey you know what we we're like getting there we're getting there so of course I had to set a higher goal for myself this year so far in 2024 my average views within 24 hours of publishing is 6400 and my average views within 7 days is 16,000 so obviously I had set ambitious goals for myself but again I didn't think that I would see that movement so quickly like we went from 230,000 views views in December to 425,000 views in January and my average views within the first week going from 8,700 to 16,000 now obviously we're just comparing January to the entirety of 2023 and there's definitely going to be fluctuation this year but I take this as a really good indication that the strategies that I'm implementing are starting to yield results which is always [Music] encouraging [Music] I never really did my hair after my run this morning and I felt like I needed it okay now that you've seen the results let's talk about the method in the ciest chair ever okay so as I was analyzing my insights and looking back on the past month of content creation I really found four key themes of what I think I did differently or kind kind of emphasized more in the past month on YouTube that really led to this increase in views one major factor my thumbnails my strategy for my thumbnails on YouTube lately has really just been repeating what works I feel like I've hit my stride with like a few key parts of my thumbnail design that I know that if I hit on it every time then it's likely to help me get a lot of views and I think to do this for yourself like it really just comes down to experimentation and watching your audience's behavior like keeping track of your clickthrough rate and seeing which videos pop off and which don't and a lot of that is just creating a lot and posting a lot because then you can start to see Trends where it's like oh these two videos actually talk about a really similar topic but this one did way better it must be because that thumbnail was better so it's through these observations over posting many many videos that I've landed on a thumbnail style that I really think works for me and so going into January I was like let's just double down on this as you may have noticed that thumbnail style always includes a white background with some Greenery when I'm at home in Canada in my apartment I just use the background that I literally film in front of like it's just the exact screenshot that I took when I shot my thumbnail when I'm traveling like this though I do Photoshop myself onto a plain background like I took a photo of my wall my background from home and I put myself on that for my thumbnails when I'm traveling I find that's the perfect balance of like a consistent brand but it's also minimal enough so it's not distracting but it's not too boring cuz it's not just a plain white wall and I like to think that I'm building up that brand recognition so when you see that white background with the green plants you're like oh that's Katie another major thing I find the shorter the text the better text on thumbnails is crucial for me I don't think I'd ever just post a thumbnail where the entire thing is visual storytelling like I find it impressive when people can do that but I always want to have text but like really three or four words that's going to be a ideal so I find phrases like it's not too late start from scratch full-time Creator even when I use the word niche in my thumbnails I find that those videos tend to do better and finally I find the thumbnails where it's me holding a camera tend to do better as well so really I came to these conclusions based on many many months of experimentation but I've kind of realized those are the key factors so now I'm just trying to include them in every single thumbnail and it seems to be working the second key factor that I think really helped me increase my views was hyp focusing on engaging intros seriously I feel like maybe like a third of the amount of time that I spend editing is focused on the intro of the video because that's how important it is not only do you need your script writing to be really effective like you need to make sure that you're being succinct you've got a good hook you're like creating that Curiosity but then you need to double down on that in the editing so I like to include lots of b-roll and something that I have experimented with just starting in January is actually having almost reals or like Tik Tock style Dynamic captions in the first 30 seconds of the video the reason why I do this is because you may have noticed when you're scrolling on the homepage or through your subscriptions feed both on the app and on desktop YouTube videos now start autop playing like where the thumbnail is and so if your video starts Auto playing it's helpful if you have captions because people don't hear the audio when the video is autop playing on the homepage so this can just be an effective way for you to draw your viewer in and get them more interested in what you're talking about because they'll actually be able to read what you're talking about cuz they can't hear you the video that I made about my Ultimate Guide to vlogging with your phone I think is like the best example of how I implemented this for the past month I've been filming weekly Vlogs for my van lifee Channel with pretty much exclusively my iPhone and honestly it's been awesome Okay the third determining factor is honestly the hardest one to like tangible implement but I think it's also like the most impactful and that is creating videos on topics that you're just genuinely very curious and passionate about something that I found over my years of creating YouTube videos every single week is the videos that tend to perform the best are almost always the videos that I felt most excited to write the script for to research the information for to film to edit these are the ones that get views the ones that I just like genuinely love making I love making all my videos don't get me wrong but every so often I come up with an idea that I'm just like this is a banger idea I felt that way about my brand ambassador scam video I felt that way about the ugc video and I also felt that way about my video in January about the lie that you've been told about YouTube growth it's kind of hard to describe but these tend to be the ideas that I'm just like kind of turning over in my head I end up like talking to people in my life about them just because I think it's interesting and that just always makes for the best video because I think that genuine excitement and curiosity translates on camera but it also means that you kind of have that extra spark of energy to really put in the effort to make sure that the video is well produced and well written but like genuinely I think this is the hardest part about the content creation process like coming up with really solid ideas that is so difficult like I can film b-roll I can talk to the camera I can edit all day long but coming up with an idea that I think is really fascinating and that will translate well to viewers like that's the hardest part and I just don't think that it's reasonable unfortunately for every single video to be like one of these like spark ideas so sometimes you just need to focus on consistency and delivering good value even if it's not an idea that really like lights you up so as much as it's frustrating because there's not really a clear way to like implement this I don't think you can discount the fact that that is part of the success that I saw at the beginning of this year on you YouTube I had a couple ideas that I was just genuinely like really excited about and that helped me get more views okay final point that I wanted to make let's talk about YouTube shorts because that is also something that's changed for me I have been pretty hesitant and hit and miss around YouTube shorts since they were released there's been times where I've gone all in and I've posted a bunch of shorts and then I will like go silent on shorts for months at a time the reason that I've been iffy about it is because I was always concerned that if I started posting shorts and they didn't perform very well that that would then impact the performance of my long form content like as if I had a few shorts that were really flops then the YouTube algorithm would be like okay we're not recommending Katie's long form stuff anymore either and I was terrified of that because I'm like the long form stuff is what pays the bills so I don't want to screw it up with these shorts however what I've come to realize is that that's not a real concern because actually your shorts audience and your long form audience are like pretty completely different audiences after posting short consistently for a while I feel like I can pretty confidently say that the performance of your shorts doesn't impact the performance of your long form content and vice versa and so I've started posting shorts more consistently and what I do is I I literally just create like about three reels per week and then I cross post them to Tik Tok and the ones that are short enough I put them on shorts as well and I've actually had a few shorts like do really well which is exciting like this one that was like the tour of my like van work remotely setups perform like unexpectedly well so no doubt this is a contribution to my increase in views I think it's helpful to look at the actual numbers here so let's take a peek in YouTube studio if I go over to my content tab for whatever reason I don't know I think YouTube is trying to subconsciously get us more invested in shorts because when I open the content tab it's always default to shorts interesting okay if we go to all then we can see a little bit more info okay this viewers across format I think is really fascinating you can see of everybody who watched any content from me on YouTube 82% of them watched only my long form videos 11% of them watched only my shorts content and only 7% watched both only 7% of my audience is consuming both long form content and shorts content from me I think that really goes to show that like these genuinely are two separate audiences it'll be interesting to see the long-term implications of that but for now I just think it's important to know that the people who see your shorts aren't necessarily the people who see your long form videos and vice versa and again you can see in total here how people found my videos we have about 40% coming in from browse features 23% coming in from YouTube search and then if we look down here only 6% are coming from the shorts feed and in terms of the full breakdown of the views that we're talking about here the long form videos accounted for 357,000 shorts accounted for 68,000 000 and I don't fully know what the implications of this are yet either but I find it so interesting how almost well yeah like 36% of my shorts views came from people finding them through YouTube search so obviously I'm very happy with the results like I said January is like my best month for views ever on YouTube and I really think all these things the thumbnails the intros making videos I'm excited about and also introducing shorts have all played a big role in making that happen now it's not all sunshine and rainbows I don't think I've just like completely achieved you know YouTube strategy Perfection there's still a number of things that I want to improve upon and stuff that I want to try to like keep this momentum going cuz there's a part of me that worries like okay January was great but now we're about to drop off again so I want to talk about my plans on how I can maintain this moving forward and like continue to optimize it and also some stuff that like didn't go as well that I'm going to try to improve but if we're going to get into all of that I'm going to need some caffeine so why don't we go grab a coffee y'all I literally Thrive with this amount of sunshine I can't even tell you how happy I am that this is my walk to good an afternoon coffee when it comes to goals for moving forward with my YouTube strategy at the moment there's really two main things that I'm focused on one is on getting my returning View viers to increase in particular what's always kind of caught my eye on YouTube studio is this little chart where it talks about each of your videos and basically how good they were at like converting viewers into returning viewers I don't fully understand like how this is calculated or like what it's even compared to because mine has only ever said low for like all of them so if you understand like the data behind this particular chart let me know in the comments because it's always like pulled on my heartstrings a little bit so I would love to be able to like take advantage more so of all of the new viewers that I am getting right now and turn them into returning viewers whether or not they actually subscribe doesn't matter to me it's just like getting them to watch more of my videos if you have started watching my videos recently and you have recently become a returning viewer let me know in the comments what convince you to do that cuz maybe that'll help me [Music] out oh [Music] the second thing that I'm continuing to work on with my channel is working towards that goal that I mentioned before of hitting the 10,000 views within the first 24 hours of posting I think that continues to be like like pretty ambitious because I've pretty much just been hitting that when I have like a one out of 10 so essentially the goal is to take what is my current 1 out of 10 standard and turn that into my like you know more average like 5 out of 10 standard and that's just going to take time and effort that time and effort mostly being continuing to pay attention to what performs well trying to make more videos on those Topics in those formats in that style writing better titles writing better thumbnails and hopefully giving myself more time to really brainstorm those Concepts and come up with those ideas that like really get me excited and energized because I I really think that is the biggest Factor when it comes to growth on YouTube honestly I do think it's better to focus on the factors that you can truly control and when it comes down to it your metrics are just not something that you can directly control you can't just turn up a dial and make the views go up yes there are lots of different things you can do that will impact act that but it's kind of indirect and that's why I think it's better to focus on what you can do the stuff that you can actually control is the quality of your scripts how Dynamic your b-roll is how good your ideas are the lighting the audio all of these different things and you can learn how to improve all of those things by taking a class on skillshare the sponsor of today's video skillshare is the largest online learning community for creatives and their classes truly cover everything that you need to know to be successful as a content creator if you're not sure where to start skillshare's learning paths are specifically curated to take you through the necessary steps to hone a specific skill when you take the classes in order on a learning path then the classes build on the skills and knowledge that you acquired in the previous class so that you can really level up I'm personally excited about trying out this learning path that I just found called discover Da Vinci resolve for video and sound editing I've slowly been teaching myself resolves since I downloaded it for free a few months ago but I know that there is still so much for me to learn especially when it comes to like sound design and also color grading and the animations that you can do and resolve so I know this learning path is going to be super helpful for that whatever new skill you want to learn as a content creator skillshare has got you covered and the best part is you can try it out for free the first 500 people that use the link in my description will get a free month of skillshare so try out skillshare today click the link below [Music] I feel like that really sums up where I'm at with YouTube right now in terms of my successes and my goals that are continuing I guess if I were to share one more goal or like Improvement that I'm trying to make it's honestly probably summed up in like the style of this video I've talked about this a lot anybody who watches my channel regularly this is no secret to them but I just love Vlogs I'm really drawn to the Vlog style of Storytelling like that's the kind of stuff that I love to watch on YouTube is people who just tell stories about their lives and bring you in a more personal way like I really honestly do not watch like tutorials or like informational like advice videos I spend enough time making those kinds of videos so it's just not what I watch for fun but yeah I want to continue to bring you in more to my day-to-day life make these videos more in the style of something that I would want to watch cuz I think that just ties into that feeling of like when you're excited about something when you're passionate about something it really comes across in the content so I hope you liked the style of video cuz I like making it even though I always feel a little bit hesitant about posting this style of video cuz I'm not confident in how it's going to perform I know that for my own like creativity and my own like satisfaction with my work I need to keep including it and I also think that some of youall like it so even though I have gotten comments to the effect of some people are Educators and some people are storytellers basically implying that I should like stay in my own lane or whatever you know what people can evolve I believe that you should always go after what you want to be and not feel stuck in how you feel others think you should be so maybe that's a little bit of a goal for YouTube as [Music] well so those are my goals for my next few months here on YouTube you'll have to stick around to keep me accountable to them let me know in the comments what your behind the screens report is for the first couple months of 2024 how's it been going for you and what are your goals for next month let's check in and have a little chat in the comment section I'm really excited for this new series and I plan to bring it back hopefully on a monthly basis so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it if you like this style of video and like a little bit more of a personal touch for me then you'll probably like this video where I showed you my daily productive routine so make sure you go check out this one next and as always thank you so much for watching if you made it to the end of this video seriously you're an MVP I really appreciate you watching my new series I hope you're having adventures and following your dreams and I'll catch you in the next video bye

Channel: Katie Steckly

Views: 14,840

Keywords: katie steckly, instagram hacks, how to grow youtube channel, how to grow on youtube, how to revive a dead youtube channel, how to get more views on youtube, how to grow a dead youtube channel, how to grow your dead youtube channel, how to grow youtube channel 2024, how to grow youtube channel with shorts

Id: CH97PhdZTGc

Length: 25min 21sec (1521 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2024