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So you’ve decided to start your YouTube channel! But in this digital age wherein you have a lot of competition, how exactly do you jumpstart your channel when you are just starting out? In this podcast, Nate willshow you exactly how you can grow your channel from having no subscribers to becoming a six-figure generating machine!
What do you do to grow a YouTube channel when you’re just starting out? You’ve got zero views, zero subscribers and yet you really want to take this seriously. You really want a chance of making 6 or even 7 figures. I’m going to show you how to do that. You’re definitely watching the right video because I’ve done that. And I’ve done it several times. Meaning, I currently produce 13 different channels. And there’s several that are making 6 figures that I started from scratch. One of them is making 7 figures every 7 weeks. So, here’s what you can expect. What I’m going to cover in this video is first, I’m going to talk about YouTube’s search and I’ll introduce you to my leaf strategy. Which makes it really easy for you to pull in traffic from people who’ve never heard of you before but are searching for your expertise. And then I’m going to talk about how to start your video and how to give content hooks so the people will stay to the end of your video. Next, I’ll talk about calls to action. There’s 3 different main calls to action that all that I’ll teach you how to do so that you can get people to take action on your videos and send signals to the YouTube algorithm that this is a good video. Well then, talk about click-through rate. And some of the things that we’ve done to get better click-through rates so that you can get more and more people to click on your videos and get better results. I’ll then share the sequel technique. There’s a few different channels talking about this strategy. It’s a really good strategy. I’m going to share how you can do it specifically to a video on your own channel and share with you a story of how we got 5 million views on one video just using this one technique. And then I’m going to wrap up this video sharing a 4 ingredient formula that if you make videos that follow these four ingredients, you will get exponential growth on your channel at the 4-month mark. It works every time. The key to getting found in YouTube search is to do keyword research before filming. You’ve got to do it before filming. So many people have come to me and asked, “Hey, Nate. I’ve got hundreds of videos. And they’re just amazing content but they’re on YouTube they’re not getting any traffic. How can I SEO these videos. Can you help me with that?” There is nothing that I can do to SEO a video. YouTube has taken away that ability. You have to do keyword research before filming and I’ll give you an example. A friend of mine Doreen’s Beckman, she came to me and says, “Nate, I have a great remedy for sore throats.” So, we could have just pulled out the camera and started filming her. And she shared her secret and maybe I would have titled the video, “Doreen’s secret remedy for a sore throat.” Okay, we could have done that but instead we chose to do keyword research first. I found the phrase, “How to get rid of strep throat without antibiotics.” 9 words long. That’s not a phrase that I made up. But that phrase had consistent search volume every month on Google and YouTube. So, that was a title of the video. Now, Doreen is like, “Okay, I know the formula by heart. I use this all the time but I’m going to answer it in a way that answers this specific question.” I’m going to teach this principle. That video ranked number 1 on YouTube instantly. And has been getting traffic for many many years now. That’s what we do with the hundreds of videos that we launch every single month across all 13 channels. Now, after you’ve watched this video, I want you to go watch my leaf strategy video. I’ll link to it right up there. I go into way more detail on how you find the questions that people are searching for online. I show you a lot more examples and I show you the tool that you can use that you just put in your idea and it will tell you the specific questions that you can use as your video titles. Now, we’re going to talk about how you start your video. See, if you’ve done the keyword research first, you know what the title is and your job is to do 2 things in your intro. The intro is the part that you start with right before your video logo, your branding piece or your opener. Okay, the intro, it needs to tell people what the video is about and why they should watch. Okay? What and why. What’s the video about? Why should they watch it? So, I’ll demonstrate this for you. Let’s use that sore throat remedy example. Welcome back, in this video, I’m going to talk to you about how to get rid of strep throat without antibiotics. There really is a way. You probably have these ingredients in your kitchen. I have been using this remedy for years. It really works and I’m going to teach you everything about this remedy. Beyond just the what which I said right at the beginning, I then elaborated with another sentence or 2 explaining why I’m the person to deliver it. And although this is Doreen’s remedy, I have been using it for years so I could make this video. That’s it. That’s your intro. You want people to know that they are in the right place that the video that they hit play on is what they were expecting. They have clarity on what the video is about and why they should keep watching. So, after that 2-part intro, then you go to a video logo. The video logo might only be 5 or 10 seconds long. 10 seconds at most. And then you come back into your content. At the beginning of your content, you’ll want to lay your content hooks. Okay, content hooks give people curiosity about all the different things you’re going to be teaching or sharing in your video. And you may have noticed that I did that in this video. I went through… I’ve got them listed right here. I went through and told you that I was going to introduce keyword research. Then I was going to talk to you about the intro. That is going to talk to you about keeping people to watch all the way through the end. That’s the content hooks. Then I assured that I was going to teach to you about call to action and how to get more people to click on your videos. Then I introduced it I was going to talk to you about the sequel strategy. And then I talked to you about that exponential 4 ingredient formula that I’m going to share at the end, right? When I prepare my videos and I have my clients prepare their content for their videos, we just do it by bullet points. So, when you start into your content, you want to give a summary of these points but not telling people, “Oh, the first ingredient is raw honey the second ingredient is cayenne.” No. You might say, “Well, I’m going to share with you the first ingredient…” Alright, you might say it this way: “I’m going to go through all 3 ingredients and tell you why they’re in this concoction what they do for your body. And then I’ll explain how you mix them all together.” That make sense? So, I’m giving a summary but I’m not giving away the meat. I’m creating curiosity so that they want to watch the rest of video and get all that meat. You want to have a call to action in every video. And there are 3 different types of calls to action that you can give. One, it can be a call to action to get people to join your list. Now typically, you don’t say, “Hey, if you want to join my list or get on my email list or buy something from me, click the link below.” Typically you say, “Hey, I’ve got a free gift for you. I want to give you my book for free. If you want access to that, go ahead and click the link or go to the link in the description below.” See, that type of a call to action, they’ll know, they’ll get your free gift. And they’ll be in your sales funnel. You’ll have their contact information. You can follow up with them after that. That works all the time. And you definitely want to every once in a while, have a video with a main call-to-action leading people to your lead magnet. The second call to action all share is you can get user engagement. You can ask people to like, to subscribe, to comment below. You can actually do a poll. I’m going to do a poll right here. Go ahead and click this link and answer the question. Did you know that you could do a poll on YouTube? Just click yes or no. And we’ll see what percentages come up there. That’s a great way to get engagement and you can have that as one of your main calls to action. The reason for doing that is the YouTube algorithm likes engagement. The more engagement you get on your video, the more YouTube will promote it to other people. Now, a third type of call to action that you want to do regularly throughout your videos is recommending that people go to other videos whether on your channel or other great videos on other people’s channels. So, I’ve already done that in this video. I’ve recommended my leave strategy video. It’s still linked right up there. After this video is done, I definitely recommend that you check that one up because it’s really going to help you know how to find those questions that people are searching for. So, when you’re preparing the content of your video, know what is the main call to action for this video? Am I going to lead it to my lead magnet? I’m going to lead it to user engagement or am I going to lead people to click on another video? When you get to the end of the video, you don’t want to say, “Hey, hopefully found this video helpful. We’ll see you tomorrow.” Because you’re essentially telling people, “Bye, you can go about your day now. You’re done with YouTube.” YouTube would actually rather that after they’re done watching your video, they watch another one. So, at the end of the video, you might say something like this: “Now, that you’ve got a good foundation of how to grow from 0 subscribers and 0 views up to a seven-figure revenue stream, let’s dive deep into that leaf strategy. Okay, go ahead and watch this video next. That makes sense? I’ll probably say that at the end of this video. Click through rates, thumbnails, they become far more important. My business is really focused on YouTube for the last 7 years. In all the years that I’ve been doing YouTube, thumbnails have just become more and more important especially in the last year or 2. See, when people open up YouTube there’s a whole menu of different videos that they can watch. They see an image with a title underneath. The do I want to watch this one? Do I watch that one? Do I watch that one, right? You’ve seen this. So, how do people choose which video to click on? It’s really a matter of what’s interesting. What creates curiosity. So, the first recommendation I have is to definitely design your own custom thumbnail, okay? YouTube will go through and pick three different still images from your video and you can say, “Which of these three do you like the best?” Or you can design your own custom thumbnail. You can design your own image that creates curiosity that relates to the content of your video of course but will compel people to want to watch your video or want to click on it. In the beginning, all you can do is just give it your best guess. Put your imagination and your creativity to work and create a thumbnail. You can use Canva or Photoshop for that. But then you can actually do A/B split testing. YouTube says that this feature is soon coming. Right now I use a tool called tubebuddy. So tubebuddy, I use that to do my A/B split testing. That’s where I can design version A, launch it. A few days later, I launched B and then it will do an analysis and compare which thumbnail gets more clicks. Sometimes all I do is I just change the color of the text. That’s it. The image, the the design of the thumbnail stays the same. I just changed the color of the text and that might change it from a 4.6% click-through rate to a 5.9% click-through rate. It’s crazy. But you can do stuff like that to get better and better results. So, as you launch your channel and you’re putting all this work into creating these videos, doing a/b split testing can really help you get better and better results. Now, let’s talk about the sequel technique. Okay, a lot of YouTubers are using this. They’ll find a very successful video on YouTube and that they’ll create a sequel to it, right? They’ll try and create a similar video that’s better than it and they’ll try and get some of the traffic from that video to then come to yours. I’ve tried this strategy for other videos. And it works maybe one out of every 10 or 20 attempts. And it works okay. I’m going to share a strategy that works way better, okay? And that’s to look for great opportunities within your own channel. So, YouTube analytics is great. Once you’ve been at this for 4 or 5 or 6 months, you have a lot of videos in there. Chances are there’s been some that have caused spikes. When you’re in your analytics, the best thing to look at is what videos are YouTube suggesting. Okay? There’s a lot of different ways that your videos can get views and traffic. You can get it from search, you can get it from what YouTube calls browse. Suggested. There’s other sources of traffic like you know Facebook leads or email clicks. Okay, we’re talking about suggested. If you find a video that YouTube is suggesting to other people to watch, that means YouTube likes this video on your child because it’s making YouTube money. They’re probably pairing ads with it. That means YouTube likes this video and it’s suggesting it to other people because it’s making YouTube money. Either because they’re pairing ads with it and it works really, really well or this video leads to long session watch time. You know, something like that. YouTube has chosen this video and likes it and is suggesting it to other people. So, here’s the opportunity that you have: You can create a sequel to your own high performing videos. Let me share with you a story, okay? So, one of the first videos that Kris Krohn and I created is “How to invest your money in your 20s?” So, I’d noticed that that video it had I believe over 60,000 views at the time and a lot of those views had come from suggested traffic. The original video is only about six minutes long. Kris Krohn was sitting in one place. In fact, he was sitting on his pool table with the red felt. And he just shared his story. So, I told Kris, we’re going to redo this video. We’re not… We’re going to leave the old one there on YouTube. It’s still doing well but we’re going to make another one with the exact same title. And I thought… I tried to think like, ‘Why did they like that thumbnail? Why did have a good click-through rate?” I thought if they liked his pool table, they’re really going to like his car.” So, I had him put his BMW i8 in the video. And when I filmed the video, I actually… I had to really twist Kris’s arm at the time. He was… He didn’t want to be that guy. But I had him pull up in his car, the wing door came up and I followed him with my glide cam as he walked and talked into his house. So, I followed him in through his door. His cleaning lady happened to be vacuuming so I said, “Hey, cleaning lady.” Went into his kitchen. Got a drink of ice water. Went downstairs where his pool table was. Went back upstairs where a flipchart was. We made a longer video. Shared the same story but it was a lot more inviting like we’re going into Kris’s home. This strategy totally worked then and it’s worked in many times since. Over the next 2 weeks, this channel performed above average. Okay? It was a good video. And then, it totally took off. From the next 5 weeks, our channel grew from 80,000 subscribers to 160,000 subscribers. I don’t want to confuse this but we actually did two sequel videos at the time. This one that I’m telling you about was the main one. And these two videos together or the next five weeks doubled the size of our channel. We got way more views. Adsense revenue became significant. You know, 5 figures. So, how does this apply to you? Well, you’ll find similar opportunities in your own YouTube channel. Just look through the analytics and find which videos YouTube is suggesting the most and create a sequel. Are you ready for the 4 ingredient formula to take your channel exponential? Right? You’re going to have spikes in 4 months. It works every single time if you have these 4 ingredients. I’m serious. I’ve done it many times. Ingredient number 1, you’ve got to do keyword research before filming. Number 2, your videos have to be 10 to 12 minutes in length on average. Okay, have a minimum of 7 minutes. You can go longer. That video that I just told you about the sequel that went huge it’s got over 5 million views, that one was actually a 20-minute video. We didn’t plan on it being that long but it’s worked really really well. Have your videos average 12 minutes in length. Okay, ingredient number 3 your videos need to have a good retention rate. You know, have an average of 45% or higher retention rate. So, if you’ve got a video, we’ll just make math easy. If you’ve got a 10 minute video, people should at least be watching 4 and a half minutes of that video on average. Ideally, 10 to 12 minute video should have a 6 or 7 minute average view duration. The reason that that’s an ingredient in this formula is YouTube likes watch time. And if you’re putting out tons and tons of content but your videos on average are only being watched one minute through or one minute 20 seconds through. Which I’ve seen. This formula will not work and your channel will still grow gradually but you won’t experience a spike. Okay, here’s the last ingredient. Ingredient number 4 is you’ve got to post five episodes per week. Now, there is some controversy. Different YouTube influencers that I highly respect that are friends of mine and there are other ways that you can achieve success on YouTube with different amounts of frequency. Such as one video per week. In the space of experts making how-to informative type content, this formula works. And if you have these 4 ingredients, you will get a spike. I’ve never seen it fail. Keyword research before filming; 10 to 12 minutes in length; average retention rate or view duration of 45% or higher; post five episodes per week. And at that 4- month mark, you’ll experience a spike. On the Kris Krohn channel, it was 4 months to the day we had a spike. We were averaging like 500 views a day. Something like that. And our first spike we got up to 10,000 views in a single day. And we never got down below a thousand or 2 a day even when that settle down. But then quickly had another spike up to 30,000. 35,000, in fact. Soon we got to a point where our average baseline was higher than our first spike. And we’ve never looked back. You’ve heard me talk a lot about keyword research in this video. And I’ve actually created a keyword research mini-course. So, in addition to watching my leaf strategy video that I’ve linked to above, down in the description and on my end screen here, it’s probably somewhere on the screen, I also want you to check out my keyword research mini course. This is a free gift where I actually take you step-by-step through finding the questions that your audience is searching for. You know, so you have expertise. This’ll guide through finding the questions of people are asking. So you’ll know what to title your videos. Go ahead and click the link below and watch that leaf strategy video next.