How to Get Monetized Fast! (5 Tips for Getting 4000 Watch Time Hours on YouTube)

one of the biggest opportunities on youtube is the fact that you can monetize your content through the adsense program of course to do that you've got to get your first 1000 subscribers and your first 4 000 hours of watch time which is of course easier said than done so stick with me because in this deep dive training i have rob wilson from vidiq who's going to be sharing five strategies a bunch of case studies and nuances for actually how to get your first 4 000 hours of watch time and so i'm super fired up smash like if you're ready for today and i'm gonna welcome rob to the stream rob how's it going hello everybody it's sean first of all thank you very very much for inviting me on to the think media stage i mean we're all uh sort of youtube educators and there are a few people i look up to in this industry but you are certainly one of them not only your inspiration to all of your community uh but myself and many others included so i just want to say what a wonderful job you do for his ireland yeah hello everybody hello i'm gonna call you all think media rights i don't know if that's the official title of the community but i thought it had quite a nice ring to it we're coming in like a meteorite about to crash down with some serious strategies but uh i'm fired up i'm going to hand it over to you you've got uh five points and throughout it we'll also take some questions and so uh let's dive in take it away yeah absolutely so hello everybody um what i want to talk to you today about are many of the i guess concepts and strategies that can be used by all creators but i think these are really key as you're starting your youtube journey and you're thinking about that first real important goal which is you know when you start your channel you want to start earning some revenue and returning your your investment and let's be honest about this 1 000 subscribers and 4 000 hours of watch time is a a lofty target for a lot of creators and just thinking about that goal can be pretty daunting and that can almost sometimes lead to uh creative paralysis so the first thing i want to encourage everybody to do and this is somewhat of a a personal opinion here and uh i'm more than welcome to sort of discuss this in the chat and we've shown in a few minutes but i personally think that when you start your youtube journey and you just want to get stuck in there and start to make content i think that there's a certain element of quantity leading to quality and sean if you can just bring up my i slide down i'm gonna describe this in somewhat of a unique fashion because i'm gonna do this by the medium of juggling now let me just explain about 15 years ago i decided i wanted to juggle and i knew that when i was going to learn how to juggle that no matter how many books i read and how many videos i watched when i first threw those balls up in the air i was going to drop them and i was going to drop them many many times and that went on and on because juggling has a really steep learning curve your hands your eyes your brain you just can't figure it out all at once and it takes time for that coordination to come together and i think it must have taken about three or four hours of total frustration getting nowhere and then all of a sudden it started to click and i was able to catch the balls more often and i was be more successful with it to the point now where i can not juggle for months but because i have that innate muscle memory it comes back to me and i can i can do it very easily and i say you know in a metaphorical sense when it comes to youtube you've just got to start throwing the balls up in the air and and get practice and sean whenever i watch one of your think media videos you know that two-second intro that you that's mentioned is you've just gotta press record and so when i think about the whole youtube process there are many things that you just gotta do when you first jump into your youtube journey i think that includes you just gotta make mistakes and lots of them you will find out in their very first video that if you're miles away from your microphone it sounds awful so remember on the second video to place a microphone as close to your voice you know that's one mistake that you're gonna learn and pick up on very quickly learn the process it's not just about pressing record you've got to learn how to plan content think up of ideas you've got to learn how to record five hours worth of worth of footage and then edit out 50 of it because it was total rubbish you've also got to think about how when you make content and the more content you make you give youtu youtube lots and lots of data and then you can start to make data driven decisions because ultimately what youtube's data actually is as a manifestation of your audience and how they are reacting to your content and the more you do this the more repetition of content creation the more muscle memory you learn so that when you think about how to set up your recording studio on how you're editing something it comes to you instinctively and you're more efficient and you're quicker and you're better at making all of all of this content and so that's why i believe today's quantity leads to tomorrow's quality and i think also a lot of creators are always worried about if they make a mistake on on their channel that youtube's going to punish them and i'm here to tell you that your youtube channel is not made of glass if you make one mistake it's not going to shatter into a million pieces all over the floor and you have to start all over again i mean sean i know um i think right now you're doing a challenge of getting to 1 000 subscribers and you're encouraging people to make a you know as many videos as possible in that 30-day period as opposed to just making that one perfect video which you don't know whether or not it's going to work with your audience 100 and i love this tip because i think what can happen is we can fall into the comparison trap and we are watching so much youtube content in fact shout me out think media in the comments like who are some of the creators you watch and let me know if you ever fall into that trap of comparison like oh they're just like a better communicator they're such a great editor they have a better camera and wow how did they get so good on camera but what ends up happening is when my friend john says we compare our beginning to other people's middle absolutely and they've clocked rob like they might have clocked on a thousand hours 5 000 hours 10 000 hours of mess-ups mistakes you know practicing sometimes the channel they've started today is their third youtube channel you know absolutely and and we're yeah we're comparing thinking the fact we've only been doing this for like 100 hours uh or not even that we're literally just starting that we should be getting the same results and so you're absolutely right that quantity and that repetition is super powerful especially um just getting to that first 1 000 subscribers and 4 000 watch hours absolutely and so i i think this is that that's almost like a general recommendation wherever you are but it's so crucial when you're wanting to start to meet those first milestones as you're working to a thousand subscribers and four thousand hours uh let's move into a little more of a strategic mindset now as opposed to uh you know work ethic and that sort of thing identifying opportunities uh can sometimes be the biggest struggle for a uh creator because they're just not sure what type of content to create and again i want to give you a a bit of a theoretical case study here but i was blown away by the results i found after just a few minutes of research i've got back into building lego uh i am of a particular age now uh where maybe um lego wasn't part of my life but now with a disposable income uh and uh lots of time on my hands uh i can now start to build uh some really interesting pieces of lego uh whenever i go on vacation i buy a big lego set and i build it so i built the millennium falcon and there's also the avengers helicarrier here and then this last one which i built a couple of weeks ago was the space shuttle discovery and the hubble telescope and this has some sentimental value to me because i was actually at cape canaveral when i saw that shuttle launch i think back it was back in 1990 um and i just loved building that it brought back some memories and so i love building lego and you know if i was a lego builder and i wanted to create a youtube channel i mean obviously when you're starting to do your research you will find that lego is already a huge topic on youtube and so we have channels here of hundreds of thousands of subscribers building huge sets and you know how are you going to compete with these creators well hopefully if you're passionate about building lego you'll start to learn so many things about the lego universe and just as i was doing a bit of research yesterday i came across this fascinating app called brickit and what this apparently does is through ai you can just scan a collection of lego bricks and then it will suggest something for you to create you know from your spare bits and pieces i thought it was really fascinating i know i want to know more about this and obviously if you want to know more about something where do you naturally go and that is to youtube so i did a search for brickit the app and the results here were absolutely astonishing we have lots of vid iq tools here and we're seeing the keyword score down in the bottom right hand corner which is showing us the search volume which is average but competition is low and that is really shown in the results because one of the telltale signs of where there is incredible search opportunity is when first of all there are small channels ranking at this top of the search terms as we can see here you know a channel at the very top of the search terms here with 760 subscribers as a video with 25 000 views and it was published only three weeks ago that to me suggests there is an incredible opportunity in this niche of talking about an app that's going to help you build lego and if i wanted to do some further i guess research on this to try and understand the the language you know or the the common tongue of the briquette app then again through vid iq we have the enable inline keywords tool you turn it on and then bang pretty much all of the keyword research here has been done for you through video tags i could click on one of these go into the keyword research and not only do you have all of the words that people are using within this keyword topic but you've also got the language that you may want to use now i just want to add as well that there is a lot of talk here about how valuable video tags are these days and youtube is telling us that they're they're not very important and i would personally agree with that to a certain extent but what i will say is that just to have all of these different keywords and phrases can be so crucial in building the foundations of your content be it the language that you use in your videos you know how you the words that you speak in the titles in the descriptions in the thumbnails even the text in the videos because we're seeing youtube use more and more technology to help viewers find the right content and i don't know if you've heard about this sean recently there is a new tool that's just been released by youtube called automatic chapters whereby it will automatically try and segment different parts of a youtube video based on its content so you know that youtube is using lots of ai all over the place to help viewers find content and so you as a creator should really understand you know your keyword universe yeah i i have heard about that and to me rob what that shows is the importance of structure the importance of starting with the end in mind we always say research before you press record and that's why we love vid iq because the creator who understands the viewer best wins understands the language they're using what they're looking for and especially if like for example maybe understanding the questions people are asking about briquette the different angles and things they want to learn you might structure a video that has you know five tips in it and then the time stamps the chapters to your point are clearly understood because of understanding the tags understanding the topics understanding what it is people want to learn about that including that in your content and then the result on the other side is the growth is the views is viewer satisfaction which youtube has told us that's what that they're looking for the signal viewer satisfaction being average view duration people people's attention hanging on the video so i actually love tags the way they're happening in our culture and even among some of our peers some people are throwing the baby out with the bathwater and i know we're on the same page their people go to extremes and of course it's like just tags alone are not going to be the magic code to rank a bad video however some people are annoying them so much there's massive opportunity for the think media community to lean in to the smart way of using tags so i get excited about of course topic research and i still think they're a big deal because they provide insights that will influence your content i think if if you do you the the keyword research right it should be a case of literally i've got all of these keywords in a list or or somewhere i'm going to just copy them and then place them in my video tags and then you know remove the ones i don't need add the ones i need and it holistically it should be like a two or three minute job uh as part of your upload process uh and i i wanted to investigate this channel a little bit further the the one that was ranking number one for the briquette app and uh if we look here you know their value proposition or one of their value propositions is they're an adult fan of lego brilliant uh this video has 26 000 views you know i'd be thinking right now for this creator i need to make a series about this this app because you know coming into the the the holiday season and you know people are going to be buying and buying lego and all sorts of things if this app explodes imagine if you had a series of videos five to ten videos and when people search on youtube you just dominate the search terms and you that could become your own you know lego niche so to speak in in terms of uh where you are the um the ambassador the authority uh on youtube for lego so that would be an example of identifying opportunities within uh your video topic next i want you all to play a little game here uh and this is going to help us research the competition so i'm going to show you two thumbnails and i just want you to very quickly tell me in the chat do you prefer the left thumbnail or the right thumbnail so is everybody ready okay here are the two thumbnails and that's it that's all you get that's the amount of time the potential viewer is going to pay attention to a thumbnail so with that the thumbnail needs to pack a big punch you don't almost need to reach out and slap you in the face and tell you hey this is this is the general idea of this thumbnail are you going to click on it now fingers crossed i hope that most of you said the left thumbnail because that's one of my thumbnails and the one on the right is just one that i picked up from youtube that was published very recently and hopefully there are maybe subconscious reasons why you picked that and what i want to try and encourage you to start doing is asking the question why did i pick this thumbnail over that thumbnail because when you start to answer the questions of why you can convert those answers into your own content i just want to give you another example of this um here's a uh search for 1 000 subscribers and uh hey sean it looks like you think media is doing very well in this space and they are dominating it so to speak and so my question would be here is if i was going to do a video about 1000 subscribers research the competition and try to understand why why uh are all of these thumbnails using the word 1000 i think it's because it's to try and identify the tiger audience as quickly as possible why are all of the videos 10 minutes or more because i think viewers want to you know get into the meat of the content why is one thumbnail red rather than blue maybe it's because it stands out why is there a face on all of these thumbnails so all of these questions you should be asking as i guess a viewer trying to convert those ideas into content creation and so with this information this is something that you can do with another really cool uh vid iq tool let's say i've just made a video about 1 000 subscribers you know how to get it and this particular video is about how to get a thousand subscribers with a single video in a single week i don't know how this is going to look on youtube right now because it's not been published and i don't know how that title and this thumbnail is gonna compare versus my competition but one of the tools that we have here at vidiq is called the thumbnail preview tool which is on the right hand side here on the video editor page so let's say i want to rank for how to get 1000 subscribers i'm going to click this button and what it's going to do even though the video hasn't yet been published is insert my thumbnail and title into the search results and say hey this is how your video would compare against the competition so i don't know sean if you want to um run the risk of comparing comparing one of your thumbnails against mine but you know does mine stand out do you think it has has potential i i think it looks doesn't look too bad but you know you're the viewer what's your opinion well i think there's some really smart things happening here i think um different is better than better so using this vid iq tool you know matt's videos number one it's red predominantly and then i'm rank three here and it's blue and so also your green pops because at least it's distinct and all all three thumbnails are really quite good because they just come through with a solid punch of of color it'd be interesting to talk because there's so much psychology and science around color and what uh it might draw different people's eyes and even different genders and perspectives um but uh your your energy is is greater than our energy and um i i i mean i think all three are are pretty good um amazing it's an incredible thumbnail and i love this vid iq tool because seeing researching the competition what's ranking and then throwing your thumbnail up there you might go okay cool maybe the thumbnail is good but you could change the hue um of the the green and that green could become yellow or that green code become blue and maybe you're going to make some tweaks to your thumbnail because you're like i really want to pop out and be different on that feed um compared to all the other thumbnails so i don't just get lost in the sea of sameness you're exactly right i think when i use this tool before um when i was making this video i think i had a red background and i just thought it's maybe a little too samey uh let's let's try something radical and new and i did that and uh yeah i think in the end i think this video did about a hundred thousand views not quite a one million you have there congratulations on another uh mega star video but you know i think this video did okay and this tool just allows you to get that you know step ahead to to try and evaluate your contents before it's published and there are multiple ways you can use this tool you can even use it to compare how the video would look on the home page i mean this would be against a a random collection of videos and now i think oh look i'm comparing against this live stream right now sean oh wow wow that's pretty cool but i i think it does a a fairly decent job so researching the competition and then uh applying what you've made versus your competition can be really really powerful super powerful so we're going through five tips if you're just joining smash the like button and super grateful to be partnering with rob at vidiq today um if you haven't gotten uh vid iq installed yet you i mean if you don't have the free version installed on on your computer like what are you even thinking like it's a tool that of course we've been using for almost a decade now um and you can check everything out at vidiq.com forward slash think and links in the description down below but if you also want to grab a trial of one of the paid plans you can use that link on screen right now and some of these more powered up features can really make a big difference especially in getting an edge over the competition researching the competition identifying opportunities and so check out vidiq.com forward slash think the uh recap of the tips so far because we got five tips number one quantity leads to quality and so just be posting videos done is better than perfect right punch fear in the face and start your first videos are going to be your worst videos but over time doing the reps you build up those skills the second tip was identify opportunities and the third tip was research the competition specifically look at the other thumbnails that are ranking the other videos that are performing well and think about how you can maybe come with an alternative cover a different style of thumbnail because different is better than better but uh rob what is tip number four sean i love the way you're able to just condense my ramblings into like 10 seconds of knowledge bombs it's perfect thank you very much there was just a a couple more things i wanted to add about the research in the competition just to reinforce what i mentioned earlier you know if you ask yourself why you know why is this video performing better why am i watching it five minutes through why did i click on this you know because the thumbnail is so good the answers become your next one in improving your own content i mean a recent example of this for me was um i have filmed my videos for so long in automatic on on my camera and i just got to a point where i was seeing other creators and thinking why do my videos not look that good why is the colour science not quite right on my content and so i just decided to to say okay it's probably because i'm using automatic so i went into manual and you know it took me a couple of hours to work out a decent look and now i think hopefully i look a little better you know it's not there's not as much light splashing onto the background and my skin tones look a lot better and then some very simple tips that i always uh suggest to new creators in terms of thumbnails especially you know to win that click however long you're spending on your thumbnails right now spend twice as long and however complicated they currently are you know with faces colors objects make them half as complicated because those are the common mistakes of new creators that they don't spend too enough time on their thumbnails and they try and fit everything into a thumbnail and explain the entire video and it gets lost in translation so on to the next tip here sean what we're looking at here is uh building momentum through content consistency and what i mean by that is once you've won the click and you have people watching your content you know we class these as new viewers but the real key to any youtube channel to start growing is to convert those new viewers into return viewers now i don't know if any of you've seen on my uh on the vid iq channel but i am running a personal crusade against the concept of subscribers right now i'm starting to think that beyond the point that they're important to reaching milestones including subscribe including monetization absolutely a subscription represents a single moment in time when somebody pressed a red button and it leaves a permanent mark on your channel but the real strength of a channel is when those people irrespective of whether they subscribed or not return to your content and i wanna actually go into the youtube studio here for a phenomenal tool that youtube um released uh i'd say about six months ago now and it's new viewers versus return viewers so hopefully as you're pushing out content all of the time you're getting new viewers but the worry is if you lack consistency or you're just making videos that you want to make those viewers are not going to return and so you're just going to churn through viewers without building any momentum so how i'm going to explain this uh analytic is as follows the purple line return represents return viewers so those are people who've watched your content once and have returned to your content and that starts to build loyalty again irrespective of whether they've subscribed i always call these you know my active subscribers and so the purple line here is running about average you know we released a video here there was a little spike as you would expect you know as you publish videos you won't view his return but look at what happened here huge spike why did that happen people who've watched my content have returned for this particular video what was it and ironically enough it was a video about reaching 1 000 subscribers okay really interesting i made a mental note of that we'll move on and make some more content you know that purple line is is dipping a little bit you know how am i gonna bring those viewers back and we see another spike um would you believe it it's that video we talked about a little earlier how to get 1 000 subscribers so now is the light bulb going off in my head my audience reacts really well to content i make about that goal of reaching a thousand subscribers and then at the end here another huge jump and we have another video about being under a thousand subscribers and this is how to get there so when we talk about building consistency and getting new viewers to convert into return viewers that's the important thing i know we have approaching a million subscribers but these are the viewers who are actually watching our content on a regular basis and i need to continue to help them with their content uh and another aspect of this is people start to worry about alienating their existing audience in terms of i've already made a video about this topic i'm i don't want to make it again because that's gonna frustrate my current audience just remember that when you're making content for a target audience you're probably only connecting with three four five percent of that potential audience when there is a huge untapped target audience that you haven't yet reached uh i mean sean you you you play a fine line between youtube education but also uh camera and tech reason i'm just i'm curious to know like how you decide what the balance is there to make sure that you you're keeping your subscribers and your return viewers happy but also bringing in a new audience yeah 100 and so um first of all that was a serious money tip look at the spikes uh look at the spikes of return viewers because that's an indication that uh you're going deeper regardless if they're subscribers or not so i you had me over here studying uh some of our themes and um i mean the biggest thing for us rob is we're really doing two big strategies one we our focus on our niche here on think media is everything is through the lens of youtube so we recognize when we um review a niche video editing software or niche camera inevitably it's going to miss a lot of people because if you're not a sony person you're probably never going to watch a sony video if you already use final cut 10 you don't care about the imovie or premiere videos we're doing but because of being a resource and a library for all that different kinds of education we're committed to building up that library in the long tail of these videos performing well in the algorithm aware that there's a level of a dilution of audience because one of the things we teach is never upload a video your subscribers didn't subscribe for but like at the same time we know the rule and we violate it intentionally because uh we're covering lots of different video editing softwares or whatever but the big theme is that it's through youtube and what uh lately we've been thinking meaning it's cameras if you want to create youtube content video editing software if you want to create youtube content tips for how to get more views on your youtube content and we are uploading five a week right now and we talk about this at the think media team now we want at least two of those videos to apply to a wide audience it can't be a niche software it needs to just say could this video apply to everybody and typically that's the more when i do the tax update on youtube i mean everyone wants information like that or when it is broader strategy videos potentially even like this one it's kind of like youtube tips in general and so we've got the two videos we're trying to have applied to the widest audience possible and then the other three might be very niche search based content because we're covering a feature of software the best lenses for a particular camera and so you know just like all of us we're just trying to figure it out i mean there's there's so many different it's so important to understand how youtube works and study the data um and we're always trying to pivot and adapt our strategy but that's a tension that we manage it's not really something black or white there's some things are black and white it's like a gray area for us it's more of a tension to be managed rather than a problem to be solved uh here at think media yeah and it goes back to the point of like your youtube channel is not made of glass you know as long as you know that the foundations of your channel and you know um what's going to bring in your return viewers on a regular basis well hey that allows you to experiment 20 of the time a lot of channels reach a a point of success through experimentation and then they're terrified to do it again because the they're afraid of losing what they won whereas if they experiment a little bit more you know they could see even more success so i love that idea of i think that you use a word of tension there just finding the right balance pulling uh one way or another but not being afraid to do it so that was uh building momentum through content consistency and the final uh one that i wanted to talk about uh which i'm sure many uh youtube educators have talked about it it's managing your youtube goals because let's be real about this you know 1 000 subscribers is a a ru it's a whole you know you go into a music gig and that's a whole full of people 4 000 hours of watch time i think if my maths are still right on this is 240 000 minutes or a single person watching your videos for 166 days or something along that lines and so i think that if you make this your first goal then when you're two months into your youtube journey and you have 80 subscribers and 400 hours of watch time you're gonna be a little demotivated and you're gonna think wow there's such a long slog to go here because you all you're thinking about is that target as opposed to the successes you've already had and the audience you've already built up and you know the skills that you've learned for your content so i want to try and break this down a little bit um i've used i've used the my calculator in here and hopefully these numbers are right i think i did double check them so over the course of a year because let's say the target might be to monetize your channel in a year or less because you need 4 000 hours over 12 months that actually accounts to 2.7 subscribers per day or 19.2 subscribers per week or 83 subscribers per month and you know to begin with you might not be hitting those targets you might be getting one subscriber a day or you know half a subscriber a day but hopefully as you build that momentum of content consistency you'll start to have five subscribers six subscribers a day so you'll easily catch yourself up and then the really interesting one is watch time so i've tried to break it down into something that's digestible here to reach four thousand hours of watch time over the course of a year that's 10 hours 57 minutes of watch time per day which still sounds like a monumental task but if you put it into the world of youtube that could be 200 views per day which sounds a lot more digestible and of those 200 views it's each viewer watching your content for 3 minutes 17 seconds or you know if you've got 300 views per day you know that would reduce the audience view duration and i think when you start to look at it in terms of the small goals and reaching those targets then it feels a lot more manageable but we have so many um comments on our channel about you know i i've i've tried all of the things that you you've suggested and it still hasn't worked you know and you look at their channel and there's still so many things that they could improve and they just need to have patience and apply the the strategies and tactics that both you sean and i and everyone else are encouraging at all times so it's yeah it's that classic one manage your youtube goals but i'm you know i'd be fascinated to know if anybody's seen the numbers uh divided in such a weird and wonderful way no it's really powerful for you to break it down like that um because kind of what gets measured gets improved and it makes things practical when we really see those numerical goals um if we're trying to get out of debt we need to know how far in debt we are uh then we need to know what's coming in and how much we can potentially save and commit towards that debt and maybe it's only a little a month but little by little a little can become a lot how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time how do you get your first 1 000 subscribers one subscriber at a time and i like to encourage people that you're also always one video away from like changing your life and your youtube channel indeed yeah a lot of times it happens out of the grind of the quantity and learning and sharpening your skills but sometimes you don't know which which video was gonna pop off or blow up and especially sometimes if it's a longer video maybe you do a live stream or a longer video about a trending topic um and maybe it gets a little bit higher average view duration and watch time minutes uh one video can get to 4 000 hours i mean it's that's challenging but we see that happen when a video breaks out maybe over a couple months if it keeps being viewed if it ranks in search if it's being suggested by the youtube algorithm and so i love that she made that practical um and i'd love to hear uh hey if you're getting value out of this video smash the like button uh b are you looking at your clock in the back end of your youtube channel how many watch time hours do you have so far and where are you on your journey to getting 4 000 so that you become eligible for monetization um i'm sure you have some tips and i want to answer a question that came in from super chat and if you've got a question throw four question marks before and after we'll be able to take a couple but rob anything else on uh this point about managing your youtube goals i would say that your first goals well your goal should always be something that are attainable in you know roughly a month so let's say for example you start your youtube channel i would say that it it's realistic to reach you know 25 subscribers in that first month if you make 10 or 15 videos and from the watch time hours perspective you may be looking at 50 hours of watch time and although that's not you don't think you're gonna reach your targets um in the next year you know you're building momentum you know once you hit 25 then you're thinking about 50 subscribers then 100 subscribers then 250 subscribers and it's so small incremental steps that if you continuous continually hit you know it's like that little adrenaline rush yeah i've got to that one you know that now i'm getting three subscribers a day i'm on course but i'm not going to stop there i'm not i'm not going to sit on these analytics i'm going to review them i'm going to continue to research my content and then pump out even better content because as you say um sean in terms of i call this putting depositing and time effort and content into the youtube bank sometimes you just don't know when that dividend is going to pay out but when it does you know when youtube finally recognizes your content um it'll it will pay you back in a big day a big way i've seen uh quite a few creators say you know my click-through rate is at 15 and i'm getting 60 audience retention you know i thought that was really good and my answer to is it is it is be patient youtube is gonna eventually figure out exactly who your audience is and then as you as you say sean one video sometimes can be can be the one even if sometimes you don't realize it you know you could publish it and three months later there it goes it suddenly hits the search algorithm of the discovery engine so powerful um in a second we're going to talk about some of your questions we're going to talk about best software for thumbnails and youtube shorts that question came in i'm curious rob's take um but if you're just joining the stream smash the like button um and uh super pumped to be partnering on this deep dive training make sure to go back and watch it if you didn't catch the beginning with rob from vid iq and right now you can get a free month of any paid plan on vid iq with the link in the description down below or you can just go to vidiq.com forward slash think making data driven decision decisions and having the best possible tools is a great way to get an edge um in a 2021 youtube landscape but rob i'm curious when it comes to thumbnails how do you create your thumbnails and what are some of the softwares you recommend this super chat thank you greggy for bringing that in about canva which is a great web-based software but what do uh how do you like creating thumbnails so i use photoshop i actually have to give a lot of credit here to uh jeremy vest who um who helped me mentored me a little bit in making thumbnails he has lots of um really uh helpful uh tips and suggestions as i was building out mine um i think canva is a an excellent uh way of um making thumbnails and i i think one of the best ways to think about your thumbnail content is to establish a template of some kind because what you want is consistency through your thumbnails um which means that you know when somebody sometimes you'll get to the point where a viewer doesn't necessarily care about what the content is they just know it's from think media or vid iq and they'll watch it regardless and so if you have uh instinctive association through the style of your thumbnails and that can really uh help with creation and i mean if i was just gonna rattle off you know a few thumbnail tips in in this sense if you're gonna have a face on screen make it uh as animated as possible and you know make sure you see the whites of a person's eyes in terms of colors try and limit it to three dominant colors or less because once you have more colours on screen it turns into a very complex chaotic thumbnail when it's reduced down to postage stamp size and then in terms of elements i think of maybe having no more than three or four elements and that could be a a youtuber face an object of some kind whatever it is you're maybe talking about in a video some text and then a background a dominant background color and those are your three or four elements you might have it in from thumbnails um i think camber canva has some free options so that's certainly a good one uh and i think also um is another one which uh is a good starting point i i hear that's almost like the the photo the online photoshop free version uh of thumbnail creation what have you got any suggestions sean um no i mean you really hit him i do think we we lean towards canva because it's easy to use web base and the free version is powerful um and then photoshop is what we use here at think media um but rob i'm curious this is the topic we're talking about is how to get those first 4 000 watch time hours i'm curious your take on youtube shorts right now and if you would recommend channels that want to grow uh be experimenting with youtube shorts or using that as their way of growing their channel and it's gonna take a little longer to get the watch time hours but if you get high views at 60 seconds or less on some content um it's going to add to your bottom line what what's your uh hot take on shorts rob okay so we first have to address uh youtube shorts monetization and the fact that if a video is watched through the youtube shorts player then any watch time from that video will not count towards monetization so i have to be very clear about that also um the monetization mechanism for youtube shots is going to be completely different so when we're talking about the youtube partner program you know getting to 1 000 subscribers 4 thousand hours of watch time even if you are on a youtube partner program and you make youtube shorts you won't earn any ad revenue from youtube shorts um youtube are going down a different path where it's going to be invite only to some of the um i guess the more successful creators now hopefully in the long run you know a year to 18 months down the line then there may be more accessible monetization programs like a youtube shorts partner program but what i will say is that i have seen some channels that make youtube shorts successfully transition into making um either short form landscape content so it's still like 40 seconds long or a minute and a half but it is eligible for monetization all move from shorts content to long-form content uh an example i can think of off the top of my head is a channel called block facts and they started making 27 second minecraft shorts about every block in the game and they got billions of views millions of subscribers and earned less than five figures from all of this because they weren't getting any monetizable views but now they've got an audience they've successfully transitioned that audience to long-form content which is ten minutes long and they're still getting millions and millions of views because they've got a very loyal community and now they've really been able to monetize it so yeah sure uh sean in terms of shorts sean's that's a say that fast 10 times um it's a very tricky dynamic right now although youtube shorts exists on the the youtube platform in terms of how a creator is going to monetize that it's a very different prospect and proposition and we have to realize still that youtube shorts is technically in beta and from where it was this time last year in that it didn't exist i think it's incredible now that we've got to a point where i think i i saw this statistic yesterday that there are now 15 billion short views on a daily basis which i find incredible i mean three months ago it was six and a half billion so there's still opportunity for expansion we just don't know where the monetization aspect of this is going to be in the long term but youtube is going to figure out a way they always figure out a way to make this financially viable for the creator yeah that's a great point and i like the big takeaway for me is that if you do lean into them shorts could lead to initial exposure it could lead to some awareness some growth some subscribers and if you can transition that into if that same audience would want to watch some longer form kind of traditional youtube videos then that might be a way of getting noticed right now um question for you from dr omar and uh i'm gonna take it two places can i make a bilingual channel about medicine in english and arabic or keep a channel for each language so should he do two channels should the channel be bilingual and then my question for you is does keyword research and uh tools like vid iq is it relevant for multiple languages what are some of your tips so i'll answer a second question first uh as long as people are searching for the content on youtube irrespective of the language vid iq will be able to provide you with search results and data and that type of thing now in terms of a bilingual audience think of it from the viewers point of view or my point of view if i watch a video in english and then the next video is in a language i don't understand that's going to alienate me as a viewer and then i don't know when you're going to be publishing the next video that i can understand so i personally would recommend having a separate channel for different languages and we actually have experience of this because not only do i speak english but i also speak spanish and russian because we have a spanish and russian vidiq channel now the truth of it is we actually have a team called unilingo do a fantastic job they bring in um professional voice over artists and they dub me in those different languages and we've grown a spanish channel now to 160 000 subscribers in itself which is incredible the russian channel i think is about 25 000 subscribers because they really appreciate that we've gone to the efforts of fully translating our content and we're not just talking about the voice dubbing uh we actually go into the screens and change the language to their native language wherever we can so i would highly recommend segmenting your channels into different languages i think mr beast has just done this as well i think he's just launched a spanish channel where again i've done done the dubbing i have though uh i i'm not sure if this is going to be rolled out fully but i'm sure i saw uh a couple of weeks ago on one of mr beast's videos that there was the option to actually change the um the the language track you could change it from english to spanish but i don't know if youtube are going to be rolling it out and i think that also has complications in terms of you know translating your tags titles and descriptions which you can do but oh man that sounds really messy uh sean i mean if i was to ask you the question if you were going to start a if you're going to start dubbing your language into another doubling your content into another language would you start with a new channel do you think or would you try and merge it into the existing think media empire 100 i would um start a different channel because again to the principle of um never upload a video your subscribers didn't subscribe for if i clicked subscribe because i expect the videos to be in english and then some spanish videos start coming at me i'm not ready for that and chances are you would you know alienate your audience or just miss your audience and really mess with your click-through rate and um people be skipping over every other video or whatnot and so yeah i think um starting a second channel and i think one thing that's important to talk about that as well rob i mean you mentioned mr beast doing it we're talking mr beast and we're talking about a multi-multi-million dollar business with a huge team uh editor's infrastructure um and you know some here a couple questions came in about um should i you know i've got two channels like should i start a second channel or these are the two channels i'm working on and i like to caution about trying to do multiple channels because it's hard enough at the start because it's hard enough to do one channel well and so when you start to divide your focus you lessen your impact but it's kind of like a quote from michael jordan that says be a laser don't be a flashlight so i think when you're starting really focus and someday you might want to expand into another language or you bring in enough revenue to have somebody help you do that because if you're already trying to be the solo creator that's getting all of one type of content out man if you start trying to do multiple channels um again it's going to dilute the focus on each and i think focus is power folks i want you to give me a thumbs up in a chat if you think sean cannell could should release a book this uh holiday season called uh my favorite quotes because every time i watch one of your videos sean's you just come out with some amazing quote that just makes so much sense i'm not gonna forget that one now yeah be a lazer not a flashlight love it well uh rob i'm super fired up listen if you're just joining the stream hit the like button and uh today's training was all about how to get your first 4 000 watch time hours there's five tips quality leads to quantity identify opportunities research the competition build momentum through cons content consistency and manage your youtube goals you're going to want to watch the whole training to make sure that you can see all the nuances and details that were shared within that and we have time codes and chapters that you can find your way around the video so check those out in the description and also check out vid iq um it's one of our favorite tools uh today we're partnered with vid iq but um years ago when i was before think media had nolan and omar and heather taurus and tony areola and before it was a team and before we were doing five videos to seven videos a week i was like how everybody starts on youtube shooting videos in my bedroom shoot doing the shooting doing the editing doing the content creation doing the topic research doing the video optimization doing the video seo and i've been using vid iq for years and years and years so it's super cool that rob is here and that we're collaborating today and i'm excited to be doing a lot more stuff with vid iq um in the future and so you'll see him back on the channel as well but we have one or two more questions and specifically uh this one kind of goes into the training rob the cello online says when studying the competition how do you narrow down what videos you might also make when the competitors videos are equally popular hmm so let me i'm just trying to fully understand this how do you narrow down the videos you might also make when the compensators are equally popular should you make the same videos that uh they make are you trying to make a spin-off of them um one you when you go and see the top five to ten ranked videos um or videos being suggested to you how do you how do you synthesize that information to come up with which idea you're going to make next that's my interpretation of the question yeah i i was just i was worried that you know we were going back to the concept of um you know you're comparing yourself too much to uh a competitor and they're they're much further on in their journey in terms of you know i'm looking at all of these channels with 50 000 subscribers plus and you know i'm here with a thousand 500 subscribers thinking how can i compete with them yeah i so i look at it from this point of view in terms of whenever you're looking at somebody else's content and you see they have success even if you try and uh replicate their content as a creator you're going to be adding your own um interpretation your own style your own voice i'm going to be open and honest uh right now i sometimes use think media as an idea generator you know i'll watch some of their videos and i think oh i really like the way the the title list and the thumb and the thumbnail there and i like the content you know what i'm going to do i'm going to make a similar piece of content but i'm going to add my own voice to it you know i'm going to use the the the the humor that i sometimes add to my videos and i'm going to make sure that i incorporate the vid iq tools into this so that i'm not necessarily trying to steal vid um think media's thunder but i'm adding to the conversation of the topic and you know it's up to the viewer at that point to decide whether they choose you know a or b or they choose both in their um in their in watching their their content so i i would say don't be afraid to look at um other channels and what they the content that they're making and i've also called this sometimes passive collaboration you know you know a collective community is making content based on what's trending and what the discussions are but always think about how you're going to make it unique to your audience and unique to the to to youtube as a whole and i again i think that's that's developed through you know just putting in the hard yards putting in the miles and developing your own voice and your own style i hope i've interpreted the question uh somewhere correctly there yeah i hope you've uh yeah your own voice your own style and as a resource that i would recommend um there's a really great documentary a second version is coming out called everything is a remix um it's pretty old now um and that's why i think version two is um coming out soon from uh kirby ferguson and i it's it's been one of the most inspiring um uh videos uh documentaries i've seen it's a two-parter it came out in 2010 but it sort of was just this idea that uh they even talk about like a quentin tarantino movie like kill bill and they showed frame by frame how he had scenes with the exact same composite shot composition the exact same kind of inspiration to old kung fu films and old western films of course he synthesized all of these older uh inspirations from his favorite directors or from his favorite music producers producing scores and made something new but the idea of everything is a remix is that you're again you're not plagiarizing but you're synthesizing all these different ideas um into your own original piece of content your unique take your unique angle to it and someone said you're adding to the conversation and uh there's a lot of power to do that but anyways definitely you can google that everything is a remix it's a fun watch um finally as as we land the plane i just want to thank silky feather for the super chat as well and i looked at your channel and i would say um with the around under 300 subscribers you have i would um build on the channel that you already have now that you have a clear idea i think definitely apply some of the thumbnail advice that was in this video um and uh start start plowing forward like you're not so far in building a subscriber audience that you'd be taking too much of a right turn it looks like your videos have been kind of random and you've certainly got some views get focused make that commitment and then start posting those videos i'd keep them on the same channel um and uh smash like if you got video today rob the final word i want to hear from you is just this idea of man youtube is a marathon and not a sprint and in marathons we get tired and sometimes tired eyes don't see a bright future can you just speak as a creator yourself as accomplished in so many different areas just a little bit of encouragement to those on the journey to get those four thousand watch hours that maybe maybe some are just at the beginning of the journey and you're probably like i mean you posted seven videos man you got some work ahead of you but some of us have maybe posted 50 videos maybe we're over a hundred we feel like we aren't getting the results yet can you just synthesize some ideas um for uh persevering on this journey to monetization into 4 000 watch time hours sure sean but just let me just write that down first um tired eyes don't lead to a bright future perfectly um i would i would argue that uh youtube is not a sprint it's not a marathon it's an ultra marathon and i would always say two things i always start with is first of all you've got to understand whether you enjoy making youtube content enjoy being a video creator because if you are successful at it you're going to be making a lot of videos over a long period of time and it to to use a quote from uh morpheus uh from the matrix um franchise there's a difference between knowing a path and walking their path and again that's why i encourage uh you to just get stuck in and start making videos to understand whether you're gonna enjoy making it uh 12 years and 2 000 videos down the line because i think that's where i currently am in my journey i think setting expectations to begin with in terms of investing as much time and um i guess motivation into yourself to understand that the skills of making content and to then understand what an audience wants to watch from you can be really beneficial there's going to be plenty of time to start building an audience but i think you have to make sure that you're you're happy in yourself as a content creator first then when you start to build momentum and i think again this is really important recognize that momentum and capitalize on it don't make one video and then go in a completely different path and then go in a completely different path and ignore what youtube is telling you about the successes on your channel because by the time you've created 25 50 videos you know some people even encourage making 100 bad videos you will have data to work with you will have patterns you know there may be 90 terrible videos that you've made but 10 of those videos have performed better than you would expect and those are your i guess touch points those are your um i guess the the uh excited eyes of a bright future and that's what you really want to be focusing down on saying right how can i leverage this successful content and make all of the content going forward and do similar things and i think i'll stop there because i'm going to end up just rambling on as much as i can i hope that was uh uh inspiring i've sean always as always just sum this up in five seconds what i've just said rob no i appreciate you and thank you so much for breaking that down and for the uh training today think media i hope you got value out of uh this training if you're just joining check out the replay right here on the channel smash like um and uh there's another video that rob created with some specific tips for getting the first a thousand subscribers and so you can click or tap the screen to watch that one right now check out show notes and links in the description down below for all the resources we talked about and in the meantime keep crushing it keep smashing it and uh we will talk soon peace

Channel: Think Media

Views: 110,836

Keywords: how to get 4000 hours watch time, how to get 4000 hours watch time fast, how to get 4000 hours watch time hack, how to get 4000 hours watch time quickly, 4000 hours watch time, how to get 4000 hours watch time trick, how to get 4000 hours watch time on youtube, how to get 4000 hours, how to increase watch time on youtube, how to get 4000 hours watch time easy, how to get 4000 hours watchtime, 4000 hours of watchtime, think media, sean cannell

Id: P59Yy--tR2s

Length: 64min 52sec (3892 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 30 2021