Perhaps one of the most common questions I get is,
-"I have been working on YouTube for a year or two years, and my views are just kind of flat. I'm not really building. My subscribership isn't going anywhere. And I'm just kind of feeling frustrated".
I'm going to give you a couple different strategies that you need to implement to really get you past that hump and onto growth. it's a very common question that I've received.
"Hi,My YouTube audience hasn't been doing so well. I'm feeling a little frustrated, and I'm about to give up. What might I be missing on my channel?"
We've all felt that frustration before. I certainly have, you are not alone. But I have figured out a couple things that have actually worked really, really well for me and a lot of the clients that I work with.
And I've spelled it all out in a step-by-step process ,I talk about three different strategies that you need to have. And I'm going to tell you what those are, because I think maybe that this can help you. And there's actually a fourth strategy, but I'll get to that at the end.
But the first strategy that you need to have is you need to have a channel strategy, a search and discovery strategy, an audience development strategy. And then all of that kind of gets wrapped up into a video strategy.
Let's start with the channel strategy first. This is basically where you are looking at your channel, and you're looking at how it's designed, how it's laid out, and you're saying, what does this channel need to do in order to really communicate well with people who I am, what I'm all about, what value they can expect to hear from my videos, why should they care about this, why should they subscribe?
And just by the way you're presenting your channel, you're answering a lot of those subconscious questions that people are wondering when they come to your content.
One of the channel strategies is channel branding. And that is, how are you presenting yourself? That has everything to do from your channel trailer to your channel icons to your header image to the sections that you're displaying and the play list that you're displaying.
And why are each of those being displayed strategically, with strategic content in them? And all that really revolves around, who are you targeting and what value are you proposing to them and lots of things. There's the branding aspect of your channel first.
And then the second part of the channel strategy is the channel experience. What are people experiencing when they come to your channel? And that has to do with things like, how consistently are you publishing content and is the experience from one video to the next video pretty similar or is there a lot of discrepancy? Or people feel like they're playing Russian roulette with your videos when they go from one to the next. It also has to do with, how are you hooking the viewer to actually feel enticed to want to watch your videos, and many other things.
Now, we talk a lot about the optimization for search. And we talk about different things like titles and meta data and tags and descriptions and caption files and all that kind of stuff that I know a lot of you guys are familiar with.
But I don't think a lot of us are thinking about, how do we use these things strategically together? I think we're just thinking about them all as these individual little things I've got to do. But having a strategy means that you're taking all these little individual things, and you're actually putting them all together to work cohesively together as a unit with each other. So that's the search part. And then the discovery part is, how are you reaching out? How are you getting your name out there?
I know a lot of us, again, rattle off some things-- collaborations or seeding your content to other platforms and blogs and websites. But again, you need to actually put these things all together and have a cohesive overall strategy for this, not just do this thing randomly and that thing randomly. I've got to do this. That doesn't work as well.
And then the third strategy you really need to think through is your audience development strategy. So you've optimized everything. Your house is ready. And then two, you put yourself out there. You have a strategy for inviting people in. And then third, it's like once they're there, at your house, and they've actually found you, how do you keep them there? How do you get them to have a good time? And that's what the audience development strategy is all about.
It's about cultivating that community, fostering the relationships with the people who are viewing your content. And how do you keep engaging with them so that they keep coming back for more, in terms-- from just being a passive viewer who just found you one day to actually being a highly engaged raving fan who loves your stuff and is a valued asset to the community around your channel?
Fourth strategy is the video content strategy. And a lot of you guys fortunately probably are already more familiar with that than you think. Just the fact that you are uploading a video to your channel indicates that you have some sort of idea of strategy. It might not be a good one, might not be an affective one, but you are at least thinking about video strategy.
So as you work on those first three strategies, the video strategies, the thing that encompasses all three of those and makes it all work together is one that seamless channel that is highly valuable, very subscribable, very sticky to people and is really positioned and designed to take those passive viewers and turn them into a fan base that loves your stuff and is really accepting the message that you have to share with them.
So I would love to hear from you what strategies do you think are important and how do you implement them on your content and on your channel to kind of make this a one cohesive experience rather than lots of little things that we do on a checklist that might be independent from each other.