How to START A YOUTUBE CHANNEL - Beginner MASTERCLASS

welcome to your master class on how to build a YouTube channel now this video goes through all the techniques and the strategies that I've personally used to get my channel to where it is today now I often get asked how do you grow a YouTube channel I have a lot of friends that want to get into YouTube and I have a lot of people that I run into that want to grow their Channel and so I wanted to create one resource that I could send people to that goes through exactly how you grow a YouTube channel and this is that video now I know when you look at the timestamp this is a long video but there is a lot to go through on both growing a YouTube channel and building a business around your YouTube channel so when starting the process of making this video I was looking at a talk that I did around YouTube and realized that all the information in this talk is still relevant to today so I'm going to share this talk with you that I've never released and as we go through it there'll be moments where I'll add more information that jumps off from what I was talking about during this talk but all the information is still relevant to today so instead instead of re-recording everything we're just going to dive right into it so I don't want to stretch this introduction out any longer let's get into how you grow a successful YouTube channel hello and welcome to my talk on how to grow your YouTube channel into a sustainable business and make over six figures if not more depending on what it is that you're doing here on the platform guys if we haven't met before my name is jevin dovey and I do a lot of YouTube education on my channel but I also do a lot of filmmaking I do some product reviews and I also like to do a lot of Adventure films so as you can see right here back on my monitor this was from a recent climb that I did down in Ecuador where I climbed at 19 000 feet and the reason that I'm able to do these films is because of the business that I've built on YouTube so not only am I able to do the things that I want to do and create the videos around the topics that I want to create but I've been able to set up my YouTube channel in a way where it's become a sustainable business where I'm able to make money and also get funding to do these types of projects there's one trip that I did recently with Nikon and it was a completely sponsored trip which means that they paid for everything and I made money off of this trip and I was able to shoot what I wanted create the film that I wanted and it was all geared towards my YouTube channel now this is one of the really cool things about YouTube whatever you have a passionate around and whatever you want to do well you're able to create your own opportunities by producing content here on the platform so this talk is broken up into two sections part one is going to be all about YouTube and part two is going to be all about how to build a business off of your YouTube and both are super important and play off each other because to have a business on YouTube you have to have a thriving and growing channel so before we get into it let me just give you a little background on who I am and where I am coming from so I started my YouTube channel about three years ago and when I started my YouTube channel it was a travel vlogging channel so what I did is I traveled around the world with my wife and we explored different places and I filmed those trips what I found is that I am not going to be doing this long term it was something that we were doing for that year and you know we might have some trips here and there but that brand and that style of content just didn't work for me long term I come from a filmmaking background I went to film school I have a production company here in Los Angeles and so I started pivoting my channel and turned it more into a filmmaker's channel and what I found is that the community of creators is more where I wanted to position myself so in this talk we're going to be discussing YouTube we're going to be discussing business but I know a lot of you are interested on how do you make money doing this so last month alone I earned over twenty seven thousand dollars just off of the different ways that I'm bringing in money through my channel and so this talk is specifically going into what I have done to get myself to this point point and what things that you guys should start looking at when it comes to your channel and building a successful business that can create over six figures now there's a few things I want to set up before we get started number one is that everyone's journey is different I really want you to think about that for a moment every channel every person every Creator out there on the platform is going to have a completely different Journey so everything that I talk about in this talk might not work for you and the same goes for everything that you see on YouTube so for those of you who watch a lot of YouTube education so if you're watching how to grow your channel how to do this how to do that well you got to take all of that with a grain of salt the thing that I always say is you want to try things on your channel see if they work you do this whole testing phase and if it doesn't work then reevaluate and try something new and that goes for not only your YouTube channel but also growing your business off your YouTube channel so I'm going to give you a ton of ideas I'm going to give you what has worked for me I'm going to come for from experience and what you want to do is take that and make it your own and that's how you're going to want to approach your entire YouTube Journey take Knowledge from others apply it to yourself test and then make it your own because sometimes things will not work on your channel that are working on my channel and it all comes down to your audience what your audience cares about and just your position in the entire algorithm and it is a complicated algorithm but there is a few things that if you just focus on these individual things then guess what you'll be able to figure out what works for your channel and what doesn't the second thing I want you to think about is that it takes time nothing is going to happen overnight you're not going to put a few videos on your channel and then be making a million dollars overnight it doesn't happen like that it just takes focus and it takes Direction so once you have all the pieces in place then you're just going to keep putting out videos and over time each video is going to grow on the last video and it's going to keep growing and growing and growing it and then eventually you'll start seeing more money coming in you'll start seeing more subscribers more views more watch time and then all of that will continue to compound so that when you get that viral video so you get that one video that just takes off and explodes your channel is ready to accept that and all of a sudden it grows your entire Channel as a whole so don't think about this as a short-term gain it's not going to happen overnight takes time so get yourself in that mindset because this is a marathon it's not a Sprint and the last thing I want you to think about is goal setting you need to have clear defined goals to be able to find success on the platform if you're just throwing videos up of things that just kind of come to you at that moment well what's going to happen is you are not going to build an Engaged audience you're not going to build people that actually care about your content and what happens is it's not going to grow we'll discuss all of this as we get deeper into this talk but I just wanted to keep these things on the top of your mind because this is what's most important to grow your channel but that also grows your business all right so let's dig into part one and this is all about building your YouTube channel now when it comes to your YouTube channel the reason that you want to be on YouTube and building your business on YouTube is that YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world guess what number one is Google guess who owns YouTube Google so when you put a video up on YouTube it becomes discoverable through the search engine now what's all also really cool if your video is ranking high in the ranking system it is also going to pop up in Google searches so for example I have a video titled how to Vlog I have optimized this video for that search term how to Vlog and that video has done very well for my channel but what's really cool is when you type in how to Vlog on Google I am also ranking right up there at the top of the search results so taking advantage of this search engine is really going to help you especially if you're just starting out now when it comes to YouTube there are two things at play there is search traffic and there is suggested traffic and you really want to get YouTube to start suggesting your content because 75 of all views on YouTube comes from YouTube suggesting the content so what that means for you is that you want to get into that suggested content however that's not going to happen overnight because there's a bunch of factors that go into YouTube suggesting your content however if you put everything in place eventually YouTube will start picking up on your videos and YouTube will start suggesting it to similar audiences and so that's super important when it comes to building your channel you need to build a defined audience so a couple more reasons why I am so passionate about YouTube at any given time there's about 2 billion logged in users and that's not accounting for all the people people that don't log in to watch content and there's over 400 hours of content uploaded every minute these numbers are like astronomical it's so hard to actually grasp how much video and how much consumption is going on at any given time of day that's why this platform is so powerful it's massive there is a ton of eyeballs there is a ton of potential and you have the ability to grow a business organically that means not putting money into paid advertisements you don't have to put anything in besides creating the videos to be able to drive an audience and then build your business so essentially you can create this organic engine that's going to fuel the rest of your business and make you money so I came up with an acronym to help you think about the things that are most important when it comes to Growing your YouTube channel and your business and the acronym is create we're creators so we have to create the C stands for clarity what are you going to create you have to have a clear defined vision of the kind of videos that you're going to make to be able to find success on the platform if you have a variety channel so you're doing a tutorial one day and then you're doing like a dog video the next day and then you upload just something that was funny on the third day guess what you're creating three different audiences that don't interact with each other so you need to have Clarity on who your audience is and Clarity on the type of content that you want to produce the r stands for recognition so when someone stumbles upon your videos or they stumble upon your channel home page they need to understand that there is a brand around everything that you're doing who are you what are you creating why would someone be interested all of these things need to be defined and all of these need to be clear when someone stumbles across your videos the E stands for equilibrium now there's a few parts to this number one is your channel you need to be consistent with your channel if you put up a video month one and then you don't put up a video for another year then your channel is not going to grow you need to figure out a consistent flow of videos for me I put out one to two videos a week I am consistently putting out that amount of videos per week and I'm also consistent with my brand and everything else that I'm doing consistency and action will define success so when it comes to e equilibrium you need to be consistent with the content that you're producing but the other side of this and why I use equilibrium to Define this is that you don't want to over stretch yourself you don't want to over exert yourself and get burned out what's been happening to a lot of YouTubers lately is that they have been just going hard they have been crushing it just putting out video after video and focusing so much on the content that they're creating that everything else in their life starts to drift away and what happens is eventually you get burned out you can hustle for short periods in your life but as soon as you put that long term and you're doing it month after month year after year eventually you're going to get so drained that you don't even want to touch your YouTube channel so it's a balance it's a ying and the Yang you have to be consistent really go after it but at the same time you have to take care of yourself and the third part to this is you have to take care of the people on the other side of the camera you have to think about them so all of this works together to create equilibrium on your channel and make it so that this is a long-term thing that you can keep doing year after year after year now I want to chime in here for a second and talk about consistency how I see it today versus when I did this talk so consistency is great to be able to get yourself making more content and putting out more videos I think the more videos that you create the more opportunity that the algorithm is going to find who your audience is and it's going to help grow your channel but there's a point when you're going to want to switch from doing weekly uploads to focusing more on just consistency of content and this is important for you as a Creator to stay mentally healthy to keep producing sometimes we will get stuck in this Rat Race where we're like we need to put out a video we need to put out a video but in reality you just need to be consistent with your content and if you do take a break here and there it's not that big a deal so recently there was a tweet from Todd who's the product lead for YouTube homepage and recommendations since 2014. so this guy knows what he's talking about when it comes to YouTube and he said I wouldn't recommend setting a goal around the number of uploads unless you're doing so in the context of practicing the video craft or experimenting so especially new creators who are getting into this and trying to figure out what you're doing being consistent is important so putting out a video a week is just going to get you in the flow of making content learning all the skills and getting that initial data to be able to start figuring out where you want to push your channel and what you're doing but he said in the second part of his tweet is this once you find your audience fit you should be focused on minimizing uploads and maximizing value per upload and what that means is you don't need to stick to a specific schedule you need to focus more on creating value in each upload and if it takes you two weeks to do a video then it takes you two weeks to do a video but if you know exactly what you're creating for your audience then you're going to have more success on the platform rather than trying to stick to a specific amount of uploads per week so the key is consistency is going to help you figure out how to do YouTube and then once you've figured out your audience and your Niche then it becomes just creating those videos that your audience is going to want to continue to watch from you now the a stands for audacity and the definition of audacity is willingness to take bold risks you have to put yourself out there I'm going to say this again you have to put yourself out there if you're shooting videos of yourself you have to not care what people think on the other side of the camera and I've talked to so many creators and they always say like how do you get over the fear of filming yourself well you just have to do it you have to create the videos and you have to put it out there that's the type of medium that this is you just have to get through the fear and you have to just do that's what it comes down to there's really not an easier way to say it you just go for it you have to have that boldness you have to just go out there and you have to take a risk and guess what you're going to fail I fail all the time and you know what you just learn from it and you keep going if you stop yourself from putting out that video if you stop yourself from creating then guess what your channel is not going to thrive and then also with audacity you have to take a stance so on YouTube you have to really know who you are and you have to care about things if you're writing just middle of the line and you're always just on both sides of the fence around a topic and you're always just kind of like playing it safe well you're not going to stand out on YouTube when you create some sort of polarizing view on a topic then people are going to take notice whether they love you or they hate you and it's not a big deal like if they if someone disagrees with you guess what there is two billion active logged in users at any given time so if your videos don't hit this pool of people guess what there is bigger pools out there that you can hit and so as soon as you take a polarizing stance you're going to be able to Define who your audience is and really Target them and guess what those people are going to love you for it the ones that really care and share your vision of whatever it is that you're creating the T stands for time YouTube is not going to happen overnight building your business is not going to happen overnight all of this takes time to grow and time to build it's all about taking it one step at a time and your channel will continue to grow and your business will continue to grow and the final e to This Acronym is earning potential and that is the whole second half of this video we're talking about the different ways that you can build a business and the key to success on YouTube is building a business around the content that you're creating okay so let's dig into YouTube a little bit more like I said the key is to just start so if you haven't started creating videos yet go start creating right now it doesn't matter what type of camera you have it doesn't matter what type of audio you have just go out there and start creating it and you're going to learn from the times that you fail so if you just have your phone go just start making videos with your phone just like this just shoot some videos talking to camera or however else you want to start building your content now you want to have some sort of direction of what you're doing so I highly suggest getting on YouTube and finding people that are creating similar content to the things that you want to create and start looking at how they do it now don't look at their brand new videos especially if they're big creators go look at their first videos it's really interesting to see the trajectory of creators and you can actually look at people's old videos and just see where they came from to where they are today and you'll see a massive growth like I'll show you right here this is one of my first tutorials that I did on this channel audio is terrible the visuals are terrible it's not lit well it's just lighting from my kitchen it's super echoey but then you look at one of my newer tutorials and I've actually built a set I have better audio and I have lighting that's specifically catered towards the space space just start just get out there and start creating and yes you want to think about a lot of different things before you hit record but at the same time you you need to hit records so start creating and start just getting into the habit of doing it especially for new creators you just need to get out there and start shooting because nobody's watching your videos yet and if nobody's watching your videos yet then that's a good place to be because that gives you time to experiment to figure out your style to figure out your pace to figure out how to shoot and edit and do all the things that it takes to self-produce one of the things that a lot of people don't talk about is that we are essentially our own production companies where writing we're producing we're doing locations we're lighting we're audio we're camera we're edit we're everything if you were to go to like a traditional film set or TV set there is individual people that do each one of these jobs so as a Creator you have to wear like 100 hats this is not necessarily a bad thing but this is also one of the reasons why it drives a lot of creators to burnout because when you're doing everything and you're going at 100 miles per hour well guess what you're not gonna be able to do it forever you're going to get burnt out and you're going to be like I don't want to do this anymore I'm done so just keep that in mind as you start down this process especially for new creators but like I said everything's trial and error you have to start and you have to put things out there to see what's working and what's not now you might not be getting tons of views on your content but when you shoot edit and re-watch your videos You'll see different things that you need to change for your next video trial and error just keep putting things out there and then you'll start figuring out how to change things for the next video focus on creating videos that aren't going to take a ton of time to produce and things that you can get up finished move on to the next and that's something that I'm really passionate about is just getting stuff out there and moving forward because then you can learn and yes some videos will take time and some videos will be a bigger project but as a rule of thumb just try to make it a little bit easier for yourself every time so that you can get more out there the more videos you have out there the more opportunities you'll see what's working and what's not right now on my channel I have something like 530 videos and so I can scroll through my analytics and see the styles of videos that are really hitting the videos that YouTube's suggesting and be like great this is the kind of content that's working so now I can start creating more of that kind of content that's working yeah that's the idea of doubling down on what works now your personalized touch is going to be a huge Factor when it comes to building your Channel people don't want to follow businesses they want to follow other people and the reason is they want that connection so I may be sitting here in my room by myself shooting this video but this video is going to be able to connect with you on a different level and you might actually get something in this video that's going to help you change what you're doing on the platform and this one tip or this one way I phrase something is going to just make your channel explode and then you're going to remember that it came from this video that you watched with jevin well that stuff matters when it comes to building an audience so you always have to remember that there is somebody on the other side of the camera and if you come at YouTube with just a business mindset you're just here to make money well you're not going to build a following you might get some views on videos here and there but you're not going to create that relationship you're not going to create that engagement that real engagement because that is what YouTube's all about okay so let's dig into research a little bit now this is a very important step when it comes to figuring out what to shoot for your channel you need to research and there's a few things that you should actually start digging into before you press record so first you just need to have an idea of what it is that you're going to create now from there you're going to dig in and you're going to start looking at what's already produced on YouTube so you need to identify your Niche and you need to identify who is creating for that particular Niche so what is the style of video that you're producing now look at their videos what kind of videos do they shoot what topics are they serving and then from that you need to see what types so videos are getting the most amount of views and the most engagement on the platform now how does your channel fit in with this Niche and what kind of videos are going to set you apart but also what kind of videos can you create that are going to fit within what's already being produced on the platform now the second thing you need to think about is who is your target audience who are you producing for who is the person on the other side of the camera if you're a phishing channel is it someone who is just getting into fishing or is it a pro fisherman someone who's been doing this for 30 plus years like you need to know who that target audience is because you're going to be able to speak directly to that audience with the content that you're creating so what are their interests what are they specifically searching for on YouTube what would the keywords be that they are putting into that search bar what do they want to see or learn and what are their pain points what are things that they need in the form of video content because those are all the things that then you can create videos around alright so I want to add in a couple more things about research because this is super important to be able to figure out what to produce on your channel so there's a few strategies depending on the style of content that you're producing there's search based strategies and then there's suggested strategies or home or browse and they're going to be different so if you want to focus on search say your review Channel tutorials anything where there's going to be keywords that's going to help people find your content well you should try to use search to your advantage especially as a smaller Creator now as you grow and as you get bigger search is not as important however I do still have videos on my channel that are performing super well in search for example I have this video here that's on multi-caming for Final Cut Pro and it has over 70 000 views which is pretty good for this video now when you look at the data the majority of these views are actually coming from search and this video has brought over a thousand subscribers and over eighteen hundred dollars to my channel so this was a solid video that worked well in search but not browse and suggested so depending on the kind of content you're producing there might be more opportunities for search especially when you're getting started out and then suggested in browse will kick in later but for other strategies like more entertainment style channels well browse suggested home page like that's all going to be where you're going to get the majority of your views so if you're going down this path of reviews tutorials or just guides or anything that's going to be super helpful in that way you should use search as a tool to get more eyeballs on your channel but if you're someone who's going more entertainment route well then you have to apply strategies that are going to work more for suggested and browse when I really started seeing my channel take off it came from the keywords that I was using when I started doing my initial tutorials and reviews and still to this day I use keywords in my content because it does help reach a broader audience even though the majority of my views come from suggested and browse so let me give you one strategy for search and once strategy for suggested browse let's start with the search so I used an extension called tubebuddy and this has a free version and there's also a paid version now tubebuddy is super powerful because you could see how many people are actually searching for a keyword so let's look at the topic how to fly a drone this is just a broad keyword that a lot of people are searching for so using tubebuddy I can type it in here in the search bar and then down here it shows the number of monthly searches for this topic now with the paid subscription to tubebuddy you could see how well your channel compares to the other channels that are producing content in the specific keyword and so you'll have these three different metrics that are going to help tell you if your video will perform based on your Channel History so the first one is search volume is their search volume for the specific topic and then it has competition weighted which tells you that your video might either perform really well for this keyword or it might not perform well at all and then the last one is optimization strength so it's telling you if other creators videos are optimized for this keyword or they're not so if it's in the green means that all the creators have optimized for this specific keyword whereas if it's in the red it means nobody's really targeted this keyword in these specific search results and then at the bottom it says top ranked videos so it shows you the average views for these videos that are in the top of the search results and then it shows the lowest barrier to entries so this is the video with the least amount of views that's in the top of this search and then it shows your channel what your average is in the last few videos that you've produced so the last few videos I've produced my average is 120 000 views versus the barrier to entry which is around 10 000 views and so there's a good chance if I produce a video that has the keyword phrase how to fly a drone in it that it will rank in the top of these search results and as a new Creator you're just trying to establish your audience so finding keywords where you can rank in the top of the search results will help bring new eyeballs to your channel and start getting the whole process moving so that your videos will start getting pushed in home browsed and suggested and all of that now also with tubebuddy you can go to the results Tab and you can see which videos are ranking for this specific search result and as you can see the top result is well my video so my video is performing well in this search already because this is a keyword that I've gone after but if this specific keyword is too far out of reach for your channel and for the average views that you're getting right now what you could do is use other keywords around this keyword phrase by using the tools on the right hand side which show you related searches on YouTube on Google and some different Trends and this is just going to give you some different ideas for keywords and as you start exploring each one of these you might find a keyword that doesn't have as much competition and something that you might be able to rank in and so the key with using this search strategy is you're looking for those keywords that has search volume so a lot of people are looking for this keyword but you can rank with your average views that you're currently getting on your channel so all of it is going to depend on your unique situation and where you're at on your journey but this is just a good tool to be able to find keywords especially when you're working more in these search based topics now let's go over a strategy for building suggested traffic to your videos so the key here is you want to do research you want to find all of the creators that are in the niche that you want to produce content in now what you want to do is have a YouTube channel where you're only watching these creators you're not watching anything random you're not watching the news you're not watching you know the funny video that someone sent you you have a YouTube channel dedicated to only watching the content from the creators that are in the niche that you're trying to produce in now the key here is give YouTube a lot of viewer data so watch all of these creators all the videos that you like from these creators and the videos that you would see yourself producing and start interacting like comment subscribe and just continue to watch videos and watch them through their entirety don't just like click on one and bounce off now what's going to happen over time is that you're basically creating a profile of the user who's going to want to watch the content that you want to produce and so the more that you use this YouTube account and interact and watch these different videos whenever you log in the home page is going to be all of the types of content that the YouTube algorithm thinks that you're going to want to watch this is a ton of data for you to use to be able to figure out what kind of content is being suggested and pushed on the home page and also as you're watching these videos see what's popping up on the sidebar that's your suggested traffic so having this account where it's dedicated to only watching the kinds of content that you want to produce use is going to give you a lot of information on the types of things that people are actually watching on the platform and give you an indication of what types of stuff you should be producing if you want YouTube to be suggesting your content so depending on the style of content that you're producing you might be able to use both of these strategies if you're not doing search based topics like reviews guides tutorials then you really want to focus more on the algorithm and what YouTube pushes using the second method so you can really see what is working on the platform right now alright so now let's define your channel and this is super important I talked about this a little bit earlier you need to have a brand around everything that you're doing you need people need to come to your channel and know exactly who you are and why you're creating so to start off before you start building banners and thumbnails and all these other things that go into your channel you need to just Define a value proposition it's one to two sentences that says exactly who you are and what your videos are going to be about so this is my value proposition my channel takes you behind the lens to teach you the skills you need to be a successful Creator and in one sentence I was able to Define exactly what I'm doing on my channel which is focusing on creators and helping you with strategies and then also gear and techniques on how to create better content so come up with a value proposition and make that the defining point of your channel and guess what this can evolve over time but you need to have this to start all of your content is going to have to be centered around this value proposition if you're creating videos about puppies but then you're creating videos about Auto Detail the puppies in the audio detail aren't going to mesh so you need to pick one if you're really passionate about puppies then maybe you should do a Channel about puppies but if your business is auto detailing and you want to be able to build your business and get more income off of auto detailing and the techniques that go into auto detailing well guess what you should have a channel focused on just that grow that over time and then eventually that's going to become an entire source of Revenue beyond your brick and mortar business but if you're passionate about puppies then you can also build a business around your passion so it really comes down to who you are what you want to create because if you have the drive the passion and you see yourself producing videos around this topic 5 10 15 years in the future then guess what you can build a business around it now I just want to reiterate your Niche can change over time you don't have to set it in stone and that's what you're only going to do for the rest of your life however as your channel grows it is going to be harder to transition so this channel here as soon as I got into the kind of the filmmaking and YouTube world I really can't do a huge pivot unless I really want to alienate a lot of the audience that I've already built now I've tweaked my channel since I did this talk and I'm more focused on the filmmaking techniques and the storytelling aspects of creating videos rather than the YouTube strategies which is what I used to do a couple years ago however I still do a little bit of YouTube stuff here and there which obviously I put out this video which is all around YouTube strategy but personally I'm moving more on the side of creating engaging content and using storytelling to help build your Channel versus the tips and tricks and strategies around the optimization of the channel itself so as you build more content and you see what works and what doesn't you can start pushing your channels in different ways within the niche but just know that if you build a massive Channel around one topic it's not easy to be able to Pivot and do something completely different so if I start just putting out hiking videos on this channel and got rid of all my filmmaking and everything else well I'd see a massive drop off and it would take a long time for my channel to figure out who the audience is because I'm really tied into the algorithm for my filmmaking and Creator topics and especially when it comes to drones I have a lot of really successful drone videos on this channel and whenever I put out anything around drones I get a really big boost in traffic and so you'll really start seeing which topics perform well as you establish yourself more and more in a niche so this this comes back down to the central idea that you need to have a defined Niche you need to create for one audience and that's how you're going to build a brand here on YouTube so don't split your audience among a bunch of different topics it's going to hurt you in the long run the more that you can Define who your target audience is the more that you're going to be able to build growth on your channel and it's going to start compounding and grow exponentially over time when I was finally able to Define who I wanted to create for and the content I wanted to create my channel took off all right so let's dig into the algorithm a little bit I'm not going to be able to go through every single thing that goes into building a channel in this 45 hour talk maybe it's a little bit more I don't know we'll see at the end of it but I'm trying to put all the elements out there so that you can figure out where to actually start driving your attention when it comes to looking up more information about these topics so when it comes to the algorithm there's really only one thing that you need to think about when it comes to finding success on the platform if you can get people to get on the platform watch your video and keep them on the platform then you're gonna win that's all that you YouTube cares about the more that people are on the platform the more YouTube can serve ads to them so YouTube's going to make money so when it really comes down to it what YouTube cares about is watch time or session duration and how they play together so your goal is to keep people on the platform and staying longer there are so many little tricks you can do and little things that you can do to get your videos to grow but at its core the very basic of what YouTube actually wants and actually cares about is just time so if you can satisfy this get people to stay on the platform and get them to stay for longer periods of time guess what YouTube is now going to start suggesting your content because in their eyes if this video has a positive effect on their goal they're going to start pushing that video in front of more people it's so simple and makes so much sense but a lot of times we get buried in all of these tips and tricks that people go out there and talk about there are so many little things that you can do to optimize your video or optimize your Channel and yes all of it will help but at the end of the day if you're not creating videos that are keeping people interested and watching longer then there's no reason to create those videos because guess what YouTube's not going to serve those to more people so as soon as you launch it the video is going to die so the focus for you is your content that is your main focus and once you can figure out what people want to watch then you can start implementing all the little tips and tricks and your videos will start growing more and more and more so there are four things that you really need to pay attention to in your analytics these are the most important analytics I know there's a lot back there but these are the ones that you should really be paying attention to your click-through rate your audience retention your traffic sources and most importantly your watch time so your click-through rate is basically how effective your title and your thumbnail are your title and your thumbnail or your calling card for your video so you want to get your click-through rate higher and to do that you create interesting titles and interesting thumbnails now what you want to do with your title and thumbnail is tell the viewer exactly what they're going going to see in the video so your thumbnail should be a visual description of everything that they're going to find in the video now obviously you can't put everything into a thumbnail but the key the core of the video that you're producing should be defined in that little tiny thumbnail that shows up as like a micro thing on your phone so a couple things to consider when building out your thumbnails don't overload it with text if you can do it with just a visual representation of your video then just do that if you need to add text keep it very simple only a few words in your actual thumbnail so if you go over to my channel you can check this out I do some text and I do some without text and guess what if they don't have text they still perform well because if you define exactly what it is that's in the video in a visual format people are going to know and then when they click on it now your title also needs to support what's in the video so you need to have a title that defines what is in the video but also reads like a human so you can't load it with keywords but keywords are super important so for example if you're targeting like a specific product well you should probably put that product into title but what you don't want to do is just load the title with like 10 different keywords it should just be one targeted keyword per title and you should write it out like a human is reading it when your title and thumbnail play well guess what people are going to click on it and your click-through rate is going to go up now I know there's a lot of discussions on thumbnails on YouTube personally what I've found works for me is clean and simple thumbnails and if you look through my entire Library it's very clean I try to keep things very minimal just because you don't want to make a really busy thumbnail because it's harder to see what that is now one thing I didn't mention this talk but I do want to say here is that curiosity is huge when it comes to your title and thumbnail so you could set up exactly what you're doing and give some indications of what the video is about but you also want the viewer to be thinking well what happens in this what comes next and so if you're an entertainment Channel this is super important like what is going to happen in this video I need to click this and that's your job with the title and thumbnail is to create this curiosity so that someone's like I want to see what happens there when it comes to reviews and tutorials it's all about Clarity so if I do a video around a specific product I want my thumbnail to be that product or me using that product in a way that's very clear and then I want my title to have that product in the name because that's the keyword and then add something onto that that's catered towards humans that might give a little bit of curiosity to what this is about so if I was doing a video around a new camera I might do something like is insert keyword camera the best camera for vlogging so you've created this question that someone's like well I want to know what's about this camera let me see and then they're interested in this camera and then you're gonna answer this question throughout the video but the video is more about the review and talking about all the features of the camera so curiosity is a great tool to play with to be able to get people to click on your video now the second thing you need to pay attention to in your analytics is your audience retention this is how long people are watching through your video If you have a long audience retention so say your video is eight minutes and most people are staying to the six minute Mark well guess what that video is doing very well so you want to see basically a flat line across your audience retention what you don't want to see is the hockey stick so people click on your video and then drop off immediately so say only 20 are actually making it to the end and most people are dropping off at that minute Mark well what's that signaling to YouTube is that you have a clickable title and thumbnail but it's not matching what's actually in the content so what you need to do is make sure that your title and thumbnail need to support your content so that when someone clicks on your title and thumbnail they get to a video that is exactly what they thought they were going to watch because if they get something that's not what the title and thumbnail are describing then they're going to click off and guess what that video is going to die on YouTube and so what's gonna happen is YouTube's gonna stop serving that video and you're going to lose all momentum on it now the next thing you need to start looking at is your traffic sources this is something that I've been digging into more and more because this is super important you can actually see where people are finding your videos from so they can see that they were watching this video over here from Creator a this video over here from Creator B and those people are now watching your video traffic sources is super important because this is going to give you a ton of ideas on what to create and what style of videos to create because if someone's interested in your video but then they're also interested in ABC that's not on your channel well those are ideas for you to start creating and also will help Define who your audience is you'll be able to start seeing the whole picture now now most importantly out of all the metrics is watch time and your watch time is most important because what does the YouTube care about it cares about keeping people on the platform longer so watch time has a few different metrics that play together to create this time and the higher that your watch time goes the more that YouTube's going to be serving those videos up to new audiences and so what's also important is session duration so if someone starts YouTube on your video but then goes and watches five other videos well all of that is connected to watch time so to not go too deep into this the most important factor is get people to click onto your video and get them to stay through the duration and then from there get them to watch another video on the platform and so this is something that you really need to think about keep people on the platform longer so when your video is finished instead of sending them to a place off of YouTube try to drive them into a playlist or other videos that are of similar topic and going to keep people on the platform longer the key is get people to watch your videos and stay within the ecosystem now there are things that you're going to do to drive people off the platform to build your business but the idea is for the most part you want to keep people on the platform watching videos and then as you build your channel as you grow your brand you can create those videos that then drive people off the platform to your different businesses which is what we're going to talk about in a minute so let's talk about business building techniques when it comes to YouTube and this is super important because if you don't build a business then you can't make this sustainable and there's a lot of people out there that are growing followings but don't have the business ready to go so they're actually missing a lot of opportunity when it comes to making money on the platform there is so much opportunity to earn a living off of the videos that you're creating so I've broken this down into a four-step process Step One is create your business plan step two is create your funnels and Lead Generations step three is create an authentic Channel and step four is create videos that drive traffic and I've already dug into the YouTube which is step three and step four and so this is is kind of a departure from building the channel you have to build your business plan separately and if you focus 100 time on your channel then you'll never be able to build out your business so you need to be able to balance yourself you need to have that equilibrium so focus on your business a little bit and focus on your YouTube channel a little bit and if the things aren't set up in place to build the business then take a step back from your channel and focus more on the business and vice versa if you're not growing the channel then take a little bit of time away from the business building activities so you can focus on getting the channel to grow and get more people and Views and watch time and all of that okay so Step One is build out your business plan the first thing that you need to think about is that are you building an extension of a business you already have or are you trying to build videos and content in a brand and then build a business out of that it's going to help Define how you actually approach this so if you're building out an online presence for a business that you already have then basically all you need to do is start focusing on the videos that make sense for that business and don't do videos that don't make sense for it so all of your research should be targeted towards looking at what's being built around similar styles of businesses and what is being built around that topic now if you are trying to just build a YouTube channel and then build a business out of that well it's going to be a little bit different approach because it comes down to what you are trying to do so what do you want to do and this is why it's really important to Niche down into one idea or one topic you need to focus in on what are the things that you are passionate about and really sit down and think through like are you going to be wanting to do this five or ten years from now so you have to think through the topic that you're creating for and figure out if this is something that you actually want to do and then you'll start being able to craft the business around it the next thing you need to think about is diversifying your income so when it comes to building a business on the platform you have to have a portfolio of ways to make money it's not going to happen just from ad Revenue it's not going to happen just from product sales you have to build out the entire portfolio so let me give you a rundown of of the different ways that I make money on YouTube Just so you can get a sense of how I've built out my portfolio so ad revenue is number one that is coming from YouTube views equal money the more views you get on your videos the more ad Revenue you get and if you don't know anything about ad Revenue how it works is you get a CPM based on the niche that you're in so your CPM is going to be how much you're getting paid per thousand views and then you also have an RPM which is the money that you actually make because the CPM is the total amount of money that you make but YouTube is taking a cut of that so your RPM is the actual rate that you're making off of your video now entertainment channels typically have a super low CPM and RPM whereas a finance Channel might have a massive CPM and we're talking like a four dollar CPM for an entertainment Channel and a 55 CPM for a finance Channel typically my videos here on this platform sit somewhere in the middle and it ranges video to video I have some videos that have hit upwards of fifty dollars for a CPM and some that are five six dollars for a CPM so your CPM is going to fluctuate based on your Niche but then also based on video to video and so you don't want to rely on ad Revenue as being your only source of income because it fluctuates and if something happens with the algorithm or just something happens with ads on YouTube and all of a sudden ad rates drop well you don't want to have all your eggs in one basket and then your whole business disappears because you were only focused on ad Revenue it's one good stream of income that's great for your channel but it's not the only stream of income and you want to build out your entire portfolio of different streams of income to be able to make this a sustainable business the next way I make money is through affiliate sales so I talk about products or services on the platform like if I do a review around a new gimbal or I do a review around a camera in my description I'll have links to those products and those will be affiliate links so those affiliate links will earn me a small Commission for every person that purchases through those links and the key is making sure the products and services that you're promoting on your channel make sense with your brand and make sense with everything that you're doing so I'm not going to go through and promote like a dog food on my channel because my channel is more about filmmaking it's more about creators it's more about YouTube dog food has no place there so if I did a video promoting dog food and having affiliate sales for dog food not really going to make any money off that but if I do say a Gimbal and it's a gimbal that my audience is very interested in and they start buying through my link I'm gonna make a lot of money off of that one affiliate link so just start looking for the affiliate sign up for whatever products or services that you're helping promote now there's also a couple things that I do to help boost my affiliate sales I use geniuslink and I use kit.com so kit.com basically allows you to put a full list of all the products that you use in one place so you can send people just to a kit it's kind of like a bucket of products and so if you're interested in the filmmaking gear that I use I can send you to this kit and you can see all the products and guess what all of those are affiliate links now genius link is a way that you can set up tracking for all of your affiliate sales and also for places like Amazon you can capture International sales on top of all the Us sales because there's different storefronts for every Amazon around the world and when you're driving traffic and they're not in the country that you're affiliated with well you're losing out on that sale also when it comes to affiliate sales look for ones that are reoccurring so for example tubebuddy tubebuddy pays you every month that someone is subscribed to their service and you sent them there awesome it's great it's a service that I use I love tubebuddy I use it all the time for my keyword research and I talk about it all the time in my videos and guess what every month the amount of money coming in from my tubebuddy affiliate goes up and up and it's reoccurring so you really want to look for those reoccurring affiliate sales because that's how you can start making more money with Affiliates as my channel has grown I have gotten more and more into doing sponsorships so sponsorships is where you work directly with a company they're going to pay you to promote a product or pay you to use a product in your videos now there is a ton of opportunity with sponsors but there's also a few things you really have to think about as soon as you start getting sponsors on your channel you need to think does this actually work with my channel like does this enhance my audience's experience because if you're promoting products that you don't believe in your audience is going to see through it your audience is very directly tied to you so if you're selling something that you're not actually passionate about and you're promoting something that you don't care about your audience is going to pick up on that so whenever you're doing a sponsorship you want to make sure that it's something that fits you and it fits your brand and it's not going to be something that's going to drive people away from your channel a word of caution when it comes to sponsors I've dealt with some pretty awful sponsors and one of the things I've noticed with YouTubers is they kind of act like they own you in a way so there's been sponsors who demand the world for like the littlest amounts of money so you have to be clear when you're dealing with sponsors you have to be clear on what your boundaries are are and you can't let yourself go past those boundaries so you need to say like I'm willing to do a sponsorship for this amount of money and a sponsorship needs to have X Y and Z and when you look through the contract you need to make sure what the terms are defined I've gotten stuck in some really bad contracts because I didn't see things that were written in there it's my mistake and I understand that and now I have an attorney look over all of my contracts so that I don't have any issues moving forward because if you get stuck in like an exclusivity agreement you're screwed because now you can't work with other brands and a lot of times these sponsorships aren't that much money there are times where you might want to go exclusive with a company but you better be getting paid for that exclusivity if someone's giving you like a thousand dollars for a sponsored video and then you're under exclusivity cause for the next six months and you can't work with other companies well it just stumps your earning potential when it comes to sponsorships so you need to Define what your boundaries are and you need to look for the sponsors that are going to take Advan one thing that I really suggest is finding other creators that are in your Niche and actually have discussions about this so I've been working with a bunch of different creators that I am friends with and when I get a sponsorship deal I'll jump on the phone and call them and be and ask you know what if they've worked with this company what their deal was how much they made because once you get involved in the community of creators around your topic then you'll be able to see what is going on and guess what creators want to help out of creators sponsors a lot of time are only looking out for themselves they're not actually looking out for you so you need to be vigilant when it comes to sponsorships the next way that I make money off of my channel is through stock footage and so this is kind of indirect but at the same time it's also Affiliates so stock footage is individual shots that I sell on platforms that people use to license for their videos but how I do it is anytime I'm shooting a video with b-roll I can break down that b-roll into individual shots put it up on these stock footage platforms and make money from those sales now the affiliate is tied to it because black boxed is a software that puts your videos out to a bunch of stock footage agencies so you only have to upload once goes out to all of them and I highly suggest if you're someone who's shooting more b-roll start looking at stock footage and look for this video on YouTube because I Define exactly how you actually do stock footage and make money at it another way that I make money is through online courses so thinkific is where I house all my courses I've been doing courses for a long time I have one course that's a step-by-step guide on how to sell stock footage so not only am I making money off stock footage but I'm making money teaching people how to sell stock footage so courses is a great way to build a business on YouTube you could teach anything especially when it's tied into the videos that you're creating and I plan to keep creating more and more courses I have a bunch lined up that I'm going to produce over time and all of these can help build a sustainable business and the last way that I make money is through my products and merchandise so I sell things like this hat and I sell things like Luts which is like a color that goes over your footage products is not one of the things that I really focus on my business plan because my focus when it comes to my portfolio is my courses my affiliate sales and my sponsorships now ad revenue is one of those things that's just kind of a bonus because it keeps building the more views that you get but you also like I said you can't rely on it so I focus more on the other aspects of my portfolio so that if something was to happen with my ad Revenue it wouldn't be like a major shot to my business so as you can see here's just a quick pie chart that shows you the percentages of how much I make off of each one of these sources and this changes month to month on some months my courses will sell more but when it comes time to like Black Friday and December my affiliate sales Skyrocket and I make a ton of money off of affiliate sales so what you need to do is think through different ways that you can make money off of the content that you're creating and I wanted to show you what I'm doing just to give you some ideas now this is not the only ways that you can make money but these are some very very good ways that I've found to make money off of my YouTube channel so let's dig into step two once you've figured out your portfolio of all the things that you're going to create you need to focus on your funnels and you need to create some lead generation the key here is your email list you need to get people into your email list off of YouTube into your email list and the reason is you're on borrowed real estate so when you're on YouTube when you're on Instagram Twitter any of these platforms basically your following is tied to this platform and if YouTube was to pull the rug out from under you all of a sudden you don't have access to these people so you need to get an email list and the way to do that is to get people off of YouTube into your products and your services and different things that you're going to be offering so there's a couple ways that I've found that have worked for me to get people off the platform and that is through freebies so you can give away like either a checklist or an extra video or something different that they're not getting on your YouTube channel and it has to be something of value if you can give your audience something of value they're going to click off and they'll sign up with their email address and then now you have captured their email and you can start using that for your newsletter or you can use it to promote your products and the key is like creating value and that comes through everything that you do on the platform if you can create value then your audience will care so create value in your freebies and so what I do is I get people off the platform I get them into my email list and then I use that as a newsletter so I send out emails every time a new video comes out it also will help your YouTube channel by giving your videos a little boost at the time of upload and but that also gives me a place where I could also sell my products to so if I do a sale I can send it out to all of the people on my email list and say hey my course for how to sell stock footage is 25 off this weekend only and guess what you're going to get a bunch of sales just from having that list and growing it and one thing you need to remember when you're building out freebies and you're building out your email list you just just need to make sure and test everything so you don't want to have people clicking through and getting excited to get like this free checklist that you've put together and then they click and they there's nothing actually there you want to make sure that just everything's working so always keep testing stuff make sure things are working where you're sending your traffic to and one word of caution Here YouTube does see when people click off of YouTube and go somewhere else so if all of your videos are driving to your email list through like a free course or free something else then YouTube's gonna stop sending your videos out to other audiences and the reason for this is what does YouTube want they want people to watch videos and stay on the platform longer so if all of your videos are driving off the platform then YouTube's gonna stop serving up your videos to people so you need to filter in your content so some videos might be promoting your courses or your freebies whereas others are there just to bring value to the community and be a video that's driving people into another video and into another video you want to create Direction on your YouTube so for example I do a lot of YouTube education on my channel and I've created different playlists around my YouTube education one of them in particular is the biggest mistakes YouTubers make so whenever I do a video that is tied into that style of topic I'll drive people into that playlist from that video and what happens is people will start watching that playlist and they'll go through and watch multiple videos on that playlist just skyrocketing my watch time so you don't want to always be driving people off the platform because you want to satisfy YouTube the way to grow your business on YouTube is to make a thriving Channel and then have your services and your offers within everything that you're doing and this goes right into step three and step four step three is build an authentic Channel it has to come from you you have to care about it if you're building a channel just to make money you're never going to be able to grow it so you need to be authentic you have to be passionate about the content that you're creating and then step four is create videos that generate views and watch time and all of that so you want to go after topics that are trending you want to go after topics that your audience cares about now a couple tips when it comes to finding those videos that are really topical when you're going through your library of videos and you see a video that is just taking off in comparison to all the other videos on your channel you want to double down on that video so for example I did a video 20 biggest mistakes YouTubers make that video did very well on my channel so guess what I made another video about the biggest mistakes YouTubers make and I made another video and I made another video and all of them are a little bit different it's not the same information it's not even in the same style but I'm using the similar keywords and all of those videos have taken off and created a lot of attention to my channel and like I said I put all those in a playlist and that playlist is driving more subscribers and watch time and all that so you want to look for these opportunities for trending topics whether it's videos that take off on your Channel or videos that take off on other people's channels so if you're looking at the different creators in your Niche and you see someone who's created a series of videos that's really taking off well maybe that's a series that you should go after that style of content because that's a good opportunity to get a lot of eyeballs on your channel which will grow your channel and because you have everything in place you have your business set up you have all the different ways you're going to make money set up guess what when you get that burst of traffic from that video that just takes off you're set up to capture those people and actually make money off of everything that you're doing the key is foundation have everything in place have your channel in place have everything that you're going to produce on your channel thought out and have a goal this is what you want to do with your channel now the same thing with your business have all the different methods that you're going to make money off your channel set up ready to go thought through that's how you grow a successful business on YouTube and the last piece to all of this is you need to be constantly thinking through all of this so you can't just set this up and forget about it that's not the kind of platform this is it's not a set up and forget it's a setup maybe a month later reevaluate look at what it's working look at what's not do more of what's working and stop doing what's not working and reevaluate then the next month do that again reevaluate next month do that again reevaluate when you do this when you're constantly paying attention to what's working and what's not and you're focusing more on the things that are working you will keep growing and you'll keep elevating your channel to the next level and as you grow your business will also grow with you I wish I could give you a formula that was do X Y and Z and you'll make money but it's not as easy as that you have to try things you have to test them like I said at the beginning of this whole talk it takes just having awareness of what works on your channel and what doesn't so try things see if it works do more of what works but stop doing the things that aren't working and this comes down to your YouTube channel and also your business so you can't force things to work you have to actually use your data and make data driven decisions that's how you actually build a business here on YouTube now this video is not done here this is the the end of this talk but I have a couple more things I want to go through that's going to help you on your journey and the first I want to talk about my Failed YouTube strategy because I think my failure is going to help you position your channel a little bit better so that you can start growing faster and not go through the same issues that I had as I've built this channel now when I first started out I didn't know my Niche I wanted to do travel I was thinking travel vlogging because that's what I liked watching at that time and it's just something that seemed really appealing to me but I wasn't thinking long term what that means and how I'm going to do that sustainably for 5 10 15 years it was kind of just a fun experimental stage and I made like 200 videos that were travel Vlogs at the beginning however as I got more into YouTube after producing all this content I realized that I wanted to build a channel more around the filmmaking and Creator world but I still wanted to produce films that were in the adventure travel space so as my channel grew I would do these films once in a while I would go on a climb or I'd go out to Thailand and work with an elephant sanctuary and produce a film for this channel that had nothing to do with the Creator space filmmaking or any sort of education and those videos didn't perform that great some of them got some views I actually had a climbing video that got up to 50 000 views which is great but the issue is that's bringing in the wrong audience for this channel if I want to speak to creators and I want to help creators on their Journey well they're not going to be watching a mountain climbing video that you might have found my channel through a drone or a camera and then you watched that mountain climb film but if you came to my channel through that mountain climbing film there's a good chance that you have zero interest in in any of the other topics that I'm talking about and worse if you subscribed and you're only interested in that mountain climbing topic well as soon as my videos are being fed to you the ones about the cameras or techniques you're just gonna ignore them and so it's telling YouTube the wrong data so it's telling you YouTube that I'm not producing videos that my audience who has subscribed is interested in and what that does is it hurts the channel overall ideally what you want to do is keep producing videos that your audience who is watching your previous videos would be interested in and so personally for years I've been trying to do this dance back and forth where I have these films on my channel but then I also do all the other stuff on my channel it just doesn't work because YouTube really wants to treat each Channel like a show and yeah there's going to be different topics that you talk about in the show but you don't want to have multiple shows on one channel so if you think about a network say like Discovery Channel or National Geographic they have a lot of different shows underneath that umbrella of the Discovery Channel but that's not how YouTube Works our channel is not an umbrella of shows our channel is actually just one of those shows and so ultimately what I did is I split off all of my Travel and Adventure films and videos onto a second Channel and as a Creator starting out you really want to focus in what you're doing into one Niche or one style of content but you actually might have multiple interests and if you want to grow a channel and build a business out of it you'll want to try to separate that out I don't suggest doing multiple channels to start but as you grow one channel and you really figure out how YouTube works and it starts really moving and you've got your momentum and you've built your business well then you can start thinking about other channels But ultimately you want to put your focus into one channel and really get it moving first now the purpose of this video is to help you grow a channel and build a business so that's why I'm bringing this up and why it's so important you need to have a topic around what your show is what you're producing on your channel and if you stray too far from that and you're doing all these different topics it's going to hurt your growth overall now at the beginning of this year I did a video where I went through nine different lessons that I've learned over my years of being a Creator I started in 2016 so there's a lot of different lessons that I've learned and I think that these lessons are important for you to hear here on your journey so let's dig into these nine lessons that I've learned on my YouTube Journey for the last six years I've been making videos here on YouTube [Music] this journey started as a creative outlet and eventually morphed into so much more I launched my channel by making travel Vlogs With My Wife under the name wanderworks we explored some really cool places but learned that travel vlogging just wasn't something we wanted to do long term so I started pursuing my passion of Adventure filmmaking and this channel evolved into what it is today so in this video I'm going to go through nine lessons that I've learned on how to be a successful Creator and some of the things that have helped me along the way first big lesson is that the numbers really don't matter if you set a goal for yourself to get 10 000 subscribers a hundred thousand subscribers a million subscribers well once you get there it's yeah it's going to be awesome it's a reason to celebrate you hit this goal of a subscriber Milestone but the next day you're gonna have to set a new goal and you're going to be moving towards a different objective and in the end what does a million subscribers really mean like what to you is a million subscribers I think the biggest question that you need to ask yourself is why do I want a million subscribers like what is the purpose of that because having something like a million subscribers doesn't necessarily mean that you are successful so you have to think of what does success mean to you is it have to do with your income does it have to do with just having a place to have a creative Outlet like what is the purpose of making videos and we set these goals for ourselves like getting to these different subscriber Milestones or these different objectives but a lot of times we don't take the time to take a step back and actually think of well why do we want that why do we need this in our life so one big thing that you can take take away from this is don't set your goals based around just getting a bright shiny plaque figure out what it is that you actually want and what goals do you need to set to be able to obtain that and what happens when you actually get there is are you done are you going to be setting new goals like think through the longevity of what you're doing rather than just thinking short term and trying to get this one number goal [Music] another big lesson that I've learned is that quality doesn't really matter that much it does and it doesn't so the overall quality of videos that we see here on the platform are rising creators are getting better at shooting they're getting better at editing but overall if you can tell a good story then the quality doesn't matter as much there is a huge range of quality on the platform and if you're just someone shooting with an iPhone well you can make videos that can reach millions of people I've saw a channel recently that was shot all on an iPhone 11 and all the videos had 4 million views so the idea of needing all this expensive equipment cameras gimbals drones everything it's it's not necessary you could use just the tools that you have at your disposal and you need to think of well who is your audience and what are you making videos for and how can I tell a story that's engaging and if you're not making entertaining videos if you're not making videos that necessarily have a story say you just want to show how to fix a flat tire well you still have to know why you're making videos you have to know what the purpose is of that video is it educational is it entertaining but at the end of the day the quality doesn't matter as long as you satisfy what the person came to your video for so if someone came to learn how to fix a flat tire they're not going to care if you're using a a7s Mark III and a drone to capture b-roll all they care about is getting that content from you so quality really doesn't matter that much and it gives you a lot of freedom when you're out filming to just let things not be perfect all the time if you are someone that wants to shoot on high-end cameras and make the best looking content that's great but you also can realize that things don't have to be perfect and that's definitely a big lesson that I've learned coming from more of a filmmaking background with a production company it's just you can just let things slide sometimes they don't always have to be perfect [Music] thank you how cool is this just one tree out here in these Hills by itself pretty random so the next lesson that I've learned is only focus on the things that we can control and what I mean by that is things like what the algorithm does we don't really have a whole lot of control on yes there's ways that we can position our videos in a way where maybe the algorithm will pick up on it and put it suggested or put it on the home page but at the end of the day we really don't have control over that we have control over making videos and if we've made a video that performs well we can try to dissect that and make more videos like that but if we focus too much on these things like the algorithm well it just clouds your judgment and it clouds what you're doing and we should really just be focusing on making better videos at the end of the day if we can make a good video that reaches the audience that we're trying to reach that's all that really matters and I think one of the big traps that we get stuck in as creators is just looking at our analytics all the time I know one of the things that I'm going to do in 2022 is going to be to not look at my analytics every day maybe not even every week I'm going to try to only look at it once in a while probably do a day where I really dig into my analytics find out what's working what's not and then make adjustments to my content moving forward but when we're constantly just looking at our analytics on our phone every day looking at how many views we're getting per hour it's really not helping us as creators it's actually putting more stress on you and focusing so much on the numbers is one reason that creators will burn out I know that I've had periods where I've felt completely white and it was because I'm constantly just checking my analytics and trying to figure out exactly what worked that day versus the day before or why that hour was getting a big push of traffic and this hour wasn't like it you'll make yourself go crazy if you look at this kind of stuff all the time so focus on things that we can control focus on your videos I thought it was going to be awful weather on this hike but Sun just came out I'm gonna climb up here to see if I see the ocean but the next lesson that I've learned is don't respond to trolls don't give them the time of day and I see it all the time in my comments I see just people talking trash I see people saying the most hurtful things and I've seen other creators talking about this as well see on Twitter people showing comments of what people have left and then their response and sometimes it goes back and forth you know when it comes to trolls the way I've learned to deal with them is to just ignore it it's one thing if someone's giving you constructive feedback or you made a legit error but there are still a lot of comments of just things that shouldn't be said or people should just keep to themselves a lot of times it's probably just a reflection of that person being upset or that person being jealous at the end of the day but the best part about YouTube specifically is there's a tool to deal with trolls it's called hide user from Channel so what you can do is if someone leaves a nasty comment is you just go through and hit hide user from Channel and basically that user is blocked they don't realize they're blocked so they'll try to comment on more future videos but those comments will never show up and it is one of the most satisfying things when someone is just talking trash they write this huge big long five paragraph thing about how you're wrong and how you're the worst person ever and blah blah blah blah yeah I've gotten stuff like that but you go down you hit hide user from Channel never see that person again and that comment is gone they don't even realize that they've been blocked and speaking of trolls I know there's someone that's going to say you're out of breath why don't you work out more it's ridiculous every time I do a hiking video someone talks about how I'm out of breath and I need to get in shape I'd use it from Channel [Applause] but the next important lesson that I've learned is that consistency is more important than having a viral hit if you have a video that gets 10 million views that's great but if you don't have a consistent practice to making videos then having a viral video doesn't mean anything you could have a video that really just takes off and blows up your channel but if you're not ready for that traffic if you're not ready to be consistent then you're not going to be able to find success on the platform unless your success is defined by having one viral hit the important thing with being a Creator is just being consistent over a long period of time I like to tell the story of when I first started my channel I made over 200 videos they're all travel Vlogs or just Vlogs around Santa Monica where I was living at the time and in that first year I only made about forty dollars I got monetized but it was pennies and over time I figured out what works and I figured out what I like making and what kind of content does perform well and I've been able to do that again and again and be able to see the numbers actually grow so one of the biggest things I've learned is just keep moving forward don't worry about if something takes off don't worry about something tanks just keep the consistency moving forward so another big lesson that I've learned is don't take on more than you can handle and there's definitely times where I've taken on way too much I've had I've said yes to too many things and then I just feel stuck because I have so many different things that I have to do at one time that I end up getting nothing done at all so in general like the saying says don't bite off more than you can chew and as a creator the more that I say no the easier it is to make videos I focus on one video at a time now and if I have ideas pop up if I have things on my agenda that I need to get done I make sure to take care of those so that when I come out and film a video like this this is the only thing that I'm thinking about and when I go on a trip I just went up to Death Valley recently spent multiple days filming and that was the only thing I thought about on the entire trip was working on that video and just being in that really awesome place because I found that if I'm thinking about a hundred things I'm working on a course at the same time as trying to make a video while dealing with emails and sponsors and thinking about how I'm going to tie Affiliates in or you know there's so many different components to being a Creator and I've decided just to take a step back do less but put all my effort into the things that I am doing [Music] another lesson that I've learned is stop listening to all of the education that's around us I know that might sound counter-intuitive because there's so many good resources out there but if you're just binging YouTube Educators and you're listening to everything they say and applying it all to your Channel well that's going to set you up for failure there's a lot of things that you have to figure out for yourself and you have to figure out for your channel and just recently I've been chatting with one of my buddies who's a creator that has a channel similar size to mine but completely different Niche and he was told by a YouTube educator to take off the call to action to say subscribe at the beginning of a video and this is something that was told to me a while back as well and we started looking at our data and we found that the videos where we had this call to action gain subscribers at a much faster rate than the videos that didn't have this call to action it's just a minor little switch but it is something that actually affects at least on our channels if people subscribe from watching that video it's super interesting because I'm constantly hearing of people saying take these kinds of things off of your videos but then you look at the data over tons of videos and the data is different and this is what I mean by don't always listen to the education I think there's a lot of good tips and tricks out there but it really comes down to testing things and what I've learned is if I'm going to make a change I'm going to try something new on my channel I'm going to test it out thoroughly and I'm going to find data points and see if it actually works or if it doesn't work because if you're just doing things blindly based on what someone says in a 10 tips video then you might actually set yourself up to have a negative impact on your channel so everyone's journey is a little bit different and everyone's channel is going to be different something that works on my channel isn't necessarily going to work on your channel and this is for every channel out there there are things that some creators do that work super well but that's for that specific style of content reaching that audience and there's things that other channels will do that will be completely different and they'll also work so I guess the biggest lesson that I've learned over the years is don't consume so much and the biggest thing that's helped me is having other creators that are friends that we can bounce ideas off of that we can actually look at our data and compare channels side by side because when I do that that's when we end up finding things that actually work versus just listening to a tips video that we found on the platform [Music] another huge lesson that I've learned is that comparison will ruin your experience here on YouTube there's a lot of creators and there's a lot of creators doing exactly what you're doing or something similar and as soon as you start comparing and start trying to figure out why their videos are performing better than yours or why they are having a higher subscriber count or anything like that it's just going to get into your head and you're not focusing on the things that actually matter because again we have no control over any of that and everyone is coming to YouTube from a different perspective some people have more time to be able to make videos some people have a family some people have only one day a week to make a video because they have another job don't think about other creators because every Creator is at a different stage in life every creator has different things going on behind the scenes and so as soon as you start comparing you're starting to put yourself in this position where you're just going to be up in your head you're going to be thinking about everything that you could be doing versus actually doing the things that will help you grow your channel be successful whatever your goals are and some of the things that I've noticed over the years is that two channels might do the exact same thing but for some reason one channel will perform better than the other and it might have to do with the way that someone is on screen might have to do with the background might have to do with the pacing the editing like there's so many factors so as soon as you start comparing yourself to other people you're gonna set yourself up for failure and it's going to lead to burnout because you're going to be over analyzing analysis paralysis however you want to call it you're just going to be overthinking it too much rather than actually just going out and doing it and figuring out what works for you and figuring out what works for the audience that you want to build [Music] another huge lesson that I've learned is you don't have to have a plan you don't have to know exactly where you're going you could just go for it and just figure it out along the way and this is something that's plagued me especially in the last couple years I've been over analyzing everything and trying to figure out what are my goals or or where do I want the direction of my channel to go or how do I want to position myself so I did a YouTube Mastermind back in early 2020 in the beginning of the pandemic and that Mastermind really didn't help me that much it actually put me in the wrong direction it made me over analyze everything that I was doing and it just like had such a negative impact on the content I was creating in 2019 I was on a good path I felt like I was making the videos I wanted to make and I was trying new styles of content and I was really just going for it and then I took this course I took this Mastermind where we met every week talked about YouTube talked about goals and objectives and the things that we wanted to do and I felt like it just looking back at put me in the wrong direction it made me get stuck in analysis paralysis and over the last couple years it's been something that's just dragging on me in the back of my mind and one of the big things that had a negative impact on me was this whole idea of having to have like a set plan a set goal of objective that you're trying to achieve and setting all these smart goals to get there and it just it's too much at the end of the day sometimes you just have to be okay with making the kind of videos that you like making figuring out your goals in your direction as you make those videos this channel started as a travel Vlog Channel with me and my wife and it's gone a completely different direction and that's okay your channel can evolve over time and one thing with this lesson that I've learned is that there's no reason just to start over I feel like a lot of times if we feel like we're going down the wrong path we have to like start over and if you start over if you're just like wipe everything and I'm going to do something completely different well you're basically starting at square one again unless you absolutely need to switch everything and completely start fresh it's better just to keep moving forward and just building on what you've already done and just keep figuring it out for yourself along the way I think when you take a step back from the whole thing and you can figure out ultimately what you want in life then you can find a rhythm and you can be making content and you can enjoy the process rather than stressing about it all the time now I know this was a super long video but all of this is important if you want to grow a channel and build a business YouTube's going to have lots of ups and lots of downs and it's going to be quite a journey throughout the entire process but if you have a passion for making videos it can be a super rewarding career now next you should check out this video right here which goes through a ton of mistakes new creators make and there's a lot of information in this video to be able to help you on your journey see you on the next one

Channel: Jeven Dovey

Views: 71,804

Keywords: jeven dovey, creator film school, how to create a youtube channel, how to start a youtube channel for beginners, how to start a youtube channel, how to make a youtube channel, how to start a successful youtube channel, youtube for beginners, how to grow a youtube channel, how to make money with youtube, how to start on youtube

Id: NL7-r3lr2wU

Length: 85min 44sec (5144 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 10 2022