I saw the post analysing MrBeast’s YouTube strategies which is great, but the tips are hard to implement for the average business owner’s channel. Here are 6 tips that I used myself for my own channels and other businesses I worked with on their channels. TL;DR at the bottom.
1) Pick on someone your own size
Don’t get tricked into only looking at the biggest channels and try to replicate everything they do.
Large channels have already built up an audience that regularly watches their content, so their upload schedules can be more intermittent but whenever they post their audience is there to watch the video. But for small channels without an established audience this would just hurt your channels growth.
Another example is their thumbnails may have context that their audience understands and therefore it has a high CTR and works, but newer viewers wouldn’t understand and therefore wouldn’t click. If you tried certain thumbnails it just wouldn’t work as the majority of your viewers will be new viewers who don’t know anything about you or your business.
Instead look at channels that are roughly your own size and in your niche to see what’s working for them and use that. As your channel grows you can then begin using techniques that larger channels use.
2) Look for failure
Don’t just analyse succesful channels who made it, go out of your way to find channels that tried something similar but failed. Often times by only looking at succesful channels you won’t know what they avoid doing on purpose as they won’t do it. But you may think you’re adding something unique to your strategy while it’s something that’s hurting your channels growth that already succesful channels know to avoid.
This could be certain video topics, video duration, thumbnails, titles etc depending on your niche.
3) Stick to a schedule (But actually do it)
This is a pretty basic tip but I still see the vast majority of channels not doing it. If you want to build up an audience on your channel they’ll need to know when to expect your next upload and get into a routine of watching them. If you upload a video every couple weeks viewers just won’t remember that much about you the next time you’re recommended to them and will be less likely to click even if your content was great the last time they saw it.
You’ll want to upload at least once a week (I was uploading every day or every other day but that’s not realistic for most people to create high quality content). You’ll need to stick to this schedule for months to see real results and to decide if it’s working or not. No, 2 weeks isn’t enough.
4) A/B test your titles and thumbnails
Most people upload their video and are done with it, and start working on the next video. When in reality you can sometimes significantly affect the reach of your video once it’s uploaded.
Come up with a couple potential titles and thumbnails and switch them out when you upload to see if there’s a difference in CTR (Click through rate). If you have a small audience then it’ll take longer to see the results of this, but if you have at least a few hundred viewers the first day then it’s a lot quicker to test these out.
There’s tools that can automate this process and supposedly YouTube might implement this feature natively. But even doing it manually on new uploads and on older videos that stopped gaining views is very worthwhile to revive older videos that stopped getting views, or to take a new video that flopped and potentially 10x your views on it or more.
5) Don’t just upload screen-recorded Zoom calls
I see a lot of businesses doing this on their YouTube channel and for the vast majority of them it simply results in 20 views and coming to the conclusion that YouTube doesn’t work for them. Instead of a 40 minute or even 2 hour screen recorded zoom call or powerpoint condense it down to the main points into a 10-15 minute video. There’s a lot of fluff that isn’t needed to convey the value you are putting into your video.
Get some decent lighting (at least a film keylight with softbox ~$350, or sit next to your window if you can’t spend that), nice microphone (Make sure it’s positioned near your mouth) and at least your phone camera to get a huge quality improvement in your content which makes it much more watchable and therefore increases your AVD (Average view duration).
Most viewers when it comes to business content are used to seeing screen recorded zoom calls as videos so they probably won’t deduct too many points, but if you have something that’s nicer it instantly gives you more credibility and a much better first impression of your business.
6) Hiring employees
This doesn’t really apply to smaller businesses where you can’t afford to hire anyone and have to do it yourself. But for larger companies who I see with 1, 2 or even 3 employees that still get at most 200 views per video.
A really good video editor, thumbnail designer are areas you can buy back the most of your time spent on creating content. They can directly improve CTR and AVD if they’re really good but the truth is that just hiring an editor won’t get those results. Most editors will edit your video but just won’t care enough or know enough to directly increase those metrics. And companies expecting to hire one employee to film, edit videos, edit thumbnails, research content ideas for $40k a year aren’t getting someone who can hit those metrics 98% of the time or they would be freelancing or running their own channel. It’s better to just work with a freelance video editor and pay them a better rate for exactly what you need done then try to hire a fulltimer for cheaper. An employee would also have to start from scratch building up their own asset library for your channel and trailing things out that can take months.
I often see employees just aren’t given much if any guidance when it comes to what content to make so they just create videos they think would work instead of looking at content that was succesful for other channels in the past or questions that their customers are asking. It takes a few months at least of uploading “in the dark” before the algorithm begins recommending your content to initial test groups and deciding if it will continue to push it out or not. But many channels will upload 3 or so videos and decide it’s not working and switch tactics completely or stop uploading which just isn’t enough time.
If you’re a small business it’s best for the founder to focus on short form video content and be the face of the videos, and as you grow expand to long form content (live streams and podcasts work well for some too) aswell as hiring an editor to take that post production off your hands.
Conclusion
Hopefully you find some of these tips useful and are able to implement them to your own YouTube channels or video content strategies. If you have any more questions just leave them in the comments and I’ll answer them, kept this post pretty short so people are more likely to actually implement some tips. There’s a lot more tips and things that go into it but I think these are the most relevant to most people here and would have the largest impact. My own channels have 400k subs since 2020 and 348 million views ($1.6M advertiser ad spend on those) but including the channels I helped grow it’s closer to 2 billion views (about half short form content, half long form).
Screenshot of the views on one of my channels so you know it’s not BS (Haven’t uploaded on it recently as the niche went downhill).
Duolingo does this super well with their short form video content and they recently announced a $40M quarterly revenue increase year over year. Likely largely helped by their content.
But even for the average business it can help bring in new clients or to provide more value to existing customers. Most likely your competitor doesn’t have a good YouTube channel so that can be an advantage you have over them instead of pumping even more money into PPC, SEO, or writing blog posts and competing with everyone.
TL;DR
-
Analyse channels that are near your size
-
Analyse channels that failed and try to figure out why
-
Have a regular consistent schedule
-
A/B test a couple variations of titles and thumbnails on your videos
-
Don’t upload hour long screen recorded zoom calls, cut out the fluff to condense it into a 15 minute video and have a decent microphone, camera and lighting
-
Do it yourself to start until you can afford a good freelance video editor, thumbnail designer etc