YouTube Mastery: Building a Successful YouTube Channel the Right Way!

1. Introduction: Skillshare, I have built one of the most comprehensive courses when it comes to growing on YouTube. And this is my YouTube roadmap to success. If you go over to my profile, you will see individual mini courses split up into modules that focuses on each topic that you need to master in order to grow a large following on social media, get views on your video, and actually become a full time content creator. Now, I have around four to six different YouTube channels. Four of them are under my actual name, Ben Rowland. In this first class, which is the first series of videos of all of the ones that you go to need to watch, we're going to focus on how you correctly build an audience and understand the fundamentals of starting a successful YouTube channel, breaking down all of the failures and mistakes that I made along the way on my journey to over 500,000 followers on one YouTube channel alone and a few other channels that have got around 30 to 40,000 followers in much smaller niches. But we're going to break down everything that I did right and wrong, so you don't make those same mistakes, and hopefully you can apply things much more efficiently and save lots of time, lots of wasted resources and also an excessive amount of frustration. 2. YouTube Roadmap to Success: So, welcome to the very first video or module of my YouTube broma to Success course. Now, this is going to be unlike any other YouTube course that you've watched before. I know you hear that 1 million times, but this genuinely is. Most of the other YouTube courses you see are like I'm going to give you some advice. Click through Watch Tip. Watch attention. Stuff you can get for free from a standard YouTube video. But this course is actually going to take you through the entire journey that I have just gone through to basically get half 1 million subscribers. And it'll take you from 0.0 to how to sign sponsorship deals, how to negotiate sponsorship deals, exclusivity, how to avoid talent management. So how to understand the dangerous contracts that you get sent out, Loads of areas that people are basically too afraid to talk about, as well as obviously how you can quickly grow your YouTube channel incredibly fast with huge intention, because I grew my YouTube channel to around 100,000 subscribers on that main channel, just over 12 months. Tik Tok as well. We did that in like eight months or something like that. So basically, we're going to take you through how to have a proper strategy and not accidentally become YouTube famous, like what most of these YouTubers are, and have no idea how to manage that. So most YouTubers that I meet and kind of socialize with have been doing YouTube for like, ten years, like since they were like kids. And now they have like 1 million subscribers or whatever. Didn't intentionally get 1 million subscribers. They just accidentally got 1 million subscribers just from sheer effort and enjoying making videos. And then they suddenly had this status and fame that they weren't intending to have. And they don't really know how to monetize it properly, how to build a brand around it. Whereas, I've manufactured that status online from day one, with a plan. There was a complete plan from day one, we're going to target this age group for this purpose to try and transform this viewer into end result. So then we can take them on a journey between various different stages. This whole course is going to reveal the whole behind the scenes of why I grew so quickly to over 20 odd million views per month, leveraging both YouTube shorts and YouTube long format, why we have multiple different YouTube channels, and the purpose of all of those, and also how you tackle a little bit of the algorithm caps that occur with these big tech companies that you have to be aware of, because it isn't as fair as you would first. 3. Why do I have so many YouTube channels?: Let's first start off with an overview of all of the different channels that I run and own and a bit of a background as to who I am. You probably already understand to the extent what I do and who I am. Found the link of this course in the description of one of our videos that you were watching, but we'll provide further context. This is my main portfolio of YouTube channels that people are aware of that I actually run. We've got Ben Rwands, which is the flagship channel that is just about to hit half 1 million. By times you'll be watching this class that'd be over half 1 million. And then we've got 30,000 subscribers on Ben Rollins music. Then we've got our new gaming channel, Ben Rowlands gaming, which is just shy of 30,000 subscribers as well. Now, the main channel, Ben Rollins is currently a technology based channel. So onside of here, we review like the latest tech, Xboxes playstation specifically gaming technology because of the age group we were originally trying to target. But then, as you'll discover throughout this course, we're now trying to target a different age group to expand the brand out into a wider market. So we're covering basically anyone 13-24 year olds, then now into 35, 45 potentially 50 year olds to keep growing that brand out. But you'll understand why that is important when we go into those specific. Here, currently, we do specifically gaming technology, Xboxes, Playstations, building computers, and we get great performance on both long format and also shorts. This is a huge area of contention. People go you do shorts. It kills your channel and lot of nonsense, people have no idea what they're talking about there. It all comes down to the age group that's watching the content as to whether you content creator, or whether you just stick to one format, shorts or long format. So you can see here, the long plays all performed perfectly fine. We average brilliant amount of views, 100,000 views here in just like a month, 300,000 views in a month. Brilliant performing content on the whole. And then, of course, the shorts to, these things do off scale, you 16 million, 8 million, et cetera. Great performance here because of the age group who were targeted. Taking a look at some of our other channels, we've then got Ben Roland's music. Now, this was actually my first ever YouTube channel. I started this in 2020 when there was a lockdown. So prior to becoming a YouTuber, I was actually a full time musician from the age of 14. I was playing weddings, you know, cocktail bars, all these different types of venues, festivals, you know, 3,000 4,000 people, different festivals. I've doing that since literally the age of 14, all the way up until 20-years-old when lockdown happened and all the gigs got canceled. And then I looked to move onto YouTube. I was already thinking about doing this anyways. And actually, it was a bit of a blessing in disguise, because it canceled all of my obligations for the music career that I was a little bit getting sick of, to be honest, and I wanted to create something more sustainable for me as I got older because I realized I couldn't just gig about all the time. That wasn't going to buy me a house. That wasn't going to buy me a nice car. It was great while I was a teenager, getting 3400 quid here or there doing these different gigs. But as I was maturing, I was like, this isn't really sustainable life. Obviously, when I have kids, and all that type of stuff, when I wanted to get old. Was already looking at doing a YouTube channel, and I started it at the end of 2019, and then lockdown happened around March time when it was my birthday, literally like a week after my birthday, when I turned like 20, be 20. So then I went full time on YouTube, and this was my first ever channel. So it took me 100 videos 1,000 subscribers, and that was for a few factors. Factor was the size of the market. So I was doing music guitar videos, specifically in a niche for live looping, which is a tiny segment of like geeky music stuff that people do. Ed Sheeran users a loop pedal type suff but this is like another level. It's like full on one man band. You could sound like Ama Metallica, that type of thing. So B I was like the world's best live looper, I could do stuff on these pedals. Literally, no one else could do on these pedals. I basically made a channel all about all the different settings, how you can link it up with software like Ableton live, sync it up with this and do things that no one was doing with these pieces of equipment. I worked with boss as well for a period of time, and they were like, boy hell, we didn't know the products could do. This was a great channel for me to first start off on because I was an expert in the musical equipment. I was an expert on the thing, so I didn't need any scripts, I didn't need any. I literally just talked to the camera about these sentence, do this, this do that d d da da. But it was a tiny, tiny market. So no matter how many hours I put into growing this channel, there was always going to be a cap on audience reach, which is why we started different channels in the future. My main aim was originally to try and raise awareness of what live looping was, explain what it was that we do, because people think it's backing tracks that you were cheating. But actually, it was all done 100% live on stage. But it was so unbelievable because no one's seen it before. So I'd hope that, making these videos that people were aware of it, but it was just something that was so difficult to market. Because, again, people watch Hub video guy, it's just a backing track, so you couldn't even convey it that way in any performance. Anyways, I first started off on this channel. I did about 250 videos, maybe like 270. I think we deleted a couple. It was basically, like three videos a week for about a year or two straight, something like that. I think it was. We were banging them out so you can see, we sort of started here in 2020, just doing like simple product reviews. Then, again, I was learning these stumnails terrible cause they're black and white. Again I thought would be by branding the green text. But you can see a lot of this stuff didn't really get crazy amount of views, thousand views. I was figuring out what sort of work. Now I was doing a lot of things in parts, P one, P two, P three, which I don't really do now. I just try and put it all in one video because I realized people struggle to find P three or part two or get a little bit too messy, but I was trying to basically pad out my calendar to figure out how to do three videos a week. The videos a week was very advantageous. Shorts didn't exist at this point on YouTube. That wasn't a thing, and Tik Tok only just, I think became an app. So short format wasn't an actual thing. These were all long format videos. And it was good doing the three videos a week because even though they were a bit rubbish, it taught me how to edit properly. I taught me how to have a bit of a strict structure to my filming schedules, how to also do a little bit of batch filming, create a workflow so I could efficiently film. More specifically, I got experience editing the videos because I was completely self taught in Adobe Premiere Pro, I had this like old MC at the time, like in 2012, 2013, MAC, and it kept crashing. It was rubbish. But basically, it taught me to edit the videos and understand how to structure a tutorial that was trying to do product reviews and so on. Now, these videos here probably took me like days to edit. You talk like a day or two, and I could probably bang out these edits in like literally 30 minutes. So of these things now, 30 minutes, maybe an hour or two perche with some fancy texts. But when you go back and look at some of these videos, You can see the conviction and confidence on the camera is completely different. Like I'm talking very quietly. D, you know, these pedals, d. Firstly, I'm going to cover a couple of the similarities. So both units have got 3 hours record time and 99 presets across the board. They all do undo and redo, and they have unlimited overdubs, and they also both output true stereo audio. Okay. So firstly the prose of this unit. I firstly think the layout and design of this unit is super. Due to the fact it's a tabletop loop. You have everything at your fingertips to adjust if you mid set, and something's a little bit too loud. You just Turn down the track. You can adjust the input level. Everything's right there. My main gripe with the RC 300 was. Everything was down. Almost whispering to the camera, eh I ought I was presenting loudly. And I'm much more energetic. I learned through time that you needed to almost like ten X the energy on the camera for it to be conveyed. Mr. Beast is a little bit of a step two far, like, This is the d. So tubes go a little bit too far. And I did that at one point as I sort of dialed in the presenting style. There was a bit where I was a bit too shouty and a bit too likes. And then I brought it back to, a little bit more Sir, but I hope you're having a fantastic day. Welcome back to another video. If you're new around here, I'm Been Rowlands and my channels all about live looping upload two videos every single week. And then now that we're pivoting my brand further, we're becoming even more chilled to attract to that older audience once again. So, you got to sort of understand that your presenting style will naturally mature. You can get a little bit of influence from you, Mr. Best or whoever you watch. I quite like Peter McIn. I was like his style of filming and Edit ing when I was first learning how to YouTube videos, I watch those quite a lot, and you could sort of imitate you could say to an extent. And then eventually you'll naturally just sort of find your a nice balance once you make hundreds and hundreds of videos. You can see this channel, 256 videos. This tech channel has 420 videos. This has 180 videos, and also all the online courses that are filmed. So probably in like the last three, four years, three years, probably, I've made 3,000 videos, you could say, and I've edited most of them myself, as well. You know, with all the online courses, because every course has like 1,600 videos in themselves. Anyways, so this is how it started off doing these two tours and these very nice things. Some of them performed relatively well. We had some performance videos, two very very accomplished guitarist. I'd been studying at University. I could also play classical guitar as well. So I was trying a little bit like guitar reviews, different bits and bobs. And then eventually, we saw started to get a little bit of a vibe going. I saw it hit 1,000 subscribers, I think, around here, 500 subs. So it was around this point, we hit 1,000 subscribers, there we go, 1,000 subscribers there. And then I saw it started to get the ball rolling at this point because it wasn't the YouTube monetization that really made any difference, money wise. Figured out how to sell online courses for these boss product guides. I was basically doing like in depth video tutorials. It took you through all the different settings on there. So then that way, even though it was a tiny market, I was actually now making products like a niche product for ache customer. No one was making these guides at all. A few channels have copied it now, but no one was making these products at all, and I was selling them for about 50, $60 or whatever. And this allowed me to suddenly make some decent money. From the knowledge that I had from these tutorials that were basically loss leaders, like this channel has maybe made 10,000 pounds in total of its entire existence, it makes about five grand years. It makes 1 million views. But that's about it. But obviously, the online courses, that's considerably higher. And this is one of the key takeaways that I actually got from this music channel was understanding that, yes, you could be making videos in a tiny niche, that doesn't get many views. But as long as those views translate into a sale of a physical product that you own, digital product in this instance, could make a considerable amount of money, you sell 1,000 courses at $67, at $67,000. You know what I mean. So whereas if you rely on sponsorships, all that type of suff, you need to have a large amount of views per video to get a decent add rate like a square. These videos, both of b square space, and they expect you to get more than like 100,000 views a video to at least pay you like two grand for an integration or something like that, which is terrible money for an integration. It terrible money. Whereas this allows you to have your own videos. There's no pressure on all that nonsense of signing contracts, exclusivities, all this crap that they try and tie you up with. Should make videos, have your own freedom of whatever you want to make, and then you just promote your own products and courses at the back end to obviously result in the income that sustains the channel, regardless of if that channel does 100,000 views a month or 20 million views per month, you could still have a huge income. And I actually have a channel that hasn't even got over 100 subscribers that actually makes around 10,000 20,000 pounds a year, ridiculous. Now share that later on in the course when we get into sort of affiliate This is the music channel as a whole. This is what we're now doing at the current period of time. We've really stripped back the upload edge. I maybe do like three, four videos a year on it now, not too many, and we've been testing a little bit of content towards the end of last year, to maybe pivot in a new direction to make it a little bit more more profitable and also attract a different audience. But you can see we just sort of stuck to this recipe of tips videos for these loop stations. But specifically, I changed the structure of these tips videos. If you look back in the day, we used to do them all split up in different parts, like P one, P two, whereas now we do them in one body of work. 14 of the craziest features you need to know, ten things you need to do. I'll talk about that later on the course and we go onto how to correctly structure a YouTube video for maximum impact with the minimal amount of work to leverage basically all of that reach. Now going over to our final YouTube channel that I want to talk about in this video. We've got Ben Rowlands gaming. This channel right here is relatively new. This channel is actually going to replace the technology channel. Obviously, on our tech channel here, we have a lot of gaming tech on this channel here, which means it attracts a little bit of a younger viewer that play Xbox Playstation Nintendo. So we're obviously going to now start putting this stuff on the gaming channel and make that like a tech two point oh, while we pivot this main channel in a new direction that attracts a little bit more of a profitable audience, you could say, who's got a bit more buying power, a little bit older. And also, that way, we can start to build a brand where people get attached to it, rather than me just being a run of the mill. This is an Xbox controller. D which is what are most of these gaming tech YouTubers are. So everything here has pure intention behind why these channels exist. Way, we're just running this channel at the moment is just nice easy content. Just to sort of get it built up, like seven of the best games to play right now for the Qest three Best games on Expo Game Pass. Great thing about content like this is it's free. And what I mean by it being free is it has no production costs. Other than me paying my editor to make this video. It has no production costs on my end. I don't have to buy PC parts, I don't have to buy have 20 different xbox accessories and box them. I don't have to basically outlay two to 3,000 pounds to make the video on physical products two on box. It's literally just gameplay trailers that we can download off of the Internet and be sitting there and explaining what are the best games? Which games I've been playing? What do I like? What's up and coming that's really excited that you should be on the lookout for. And it's completely free for us to make it. So it means, even though the ad rates a little bit lower because it's gaming content, It's actually got higher profit margins in it than some of our flagship videos that we might make on the main chat. Also, channels like this do open themselves up very well for sponsorships like this video sponsored by Nord VPN. Square space. B sf. Blah blah, blah, blah, in the future once it has over 100,000 subscribers and a very consistent amount of views where you go, Okay, we'll do some integrations on here because of the age age group of the audience. Don't really care. They're just kids watching the content, my little nephews like 13, be like, whatever who cares fast forward. So that way you can sort of start bringing in some income without irritating your main loyal audience on the main channel. The key takeaways that I hope you sort of get from this entire course while we break it down. Understanding how to create pillars of cash flow, all of these channels self fund themselves. So the music channel created cash flow for us to then do the Ben Rowlands tech channel. The Ben Ronds tech channel now creates a considerable amount of cash flow for us to then do the gaming channel, different media channels that we have, other things that we're running. So basically, we keep adding channels on and on. My life gets harder so I got to work harder to make more videos, but it keeps adding additional cash flow and stability to the overall brand because as one channel goes down views. The other one might go up. So all count balances across the period of a year, and you then really maximize the full potential of views within the business. 4. Why I quit at 10,000 subscribers and started again?: Talking about what happened and changed when I went from doing music to technology. So as it currently stands, I have around 750,000 followers on the Internet. TikTok, we have about 250 260,000 followers on there. And views wise across all of the videos. We have over half 1 billion views. So 500 million views on all of the videos that I've made, which is quite crazy, like number to say, because fundamentally it doesn't feel like anything's changed. I still come to the studio and just make videos. I don't get recognized on the sreet. I've been recognized like four or five times, nothing crazy. But nothing really has changed, even though you've achieved half 1 billion views. The Internet, it's quite a huge number. Anyways, what happened was, I did this music channel for about two years. I then identified that I couldn't really take it any further than I took it around 15,000 subscribers. I was literally kind of the biggest live looping channel for all these tutorials. And I was like a market leader, and I was like, Well, I can't do any more videos per week because it didn't make sense. Like, it was just videos for videos sake. And it wasn't going to influence the viewership or the growth at all. So I sat down with my dad. My dad's a huge part of what we do from his experience in business. So although my dad had a very traditional business, for 35 years, he did like, personal protection equipment, PPEs, things for like the Ministry of Defense. You said there was a terrorist attack in London, the suits that you would wear if you were in a dirty chemical bomb. And my dad designed stuff like that, and he made a lot of physical products. He had, like, 70 employees at his peak. Absolutely massive business that he ran. You'd be shocked that even though he's like 60 odd, and he ran this traditional business that was, you know, B to B, blah, blah, blah, blah, of his experience is cross transferable to my YouTube channels and everything that I do. And then our two brains married together is perfect. You've got this expert on platforms, me, this young kid that knows how to make videos go viral. Then you've got my dad's brain on business, and then you marry the two and merge the skill sets. Then obviously, I learn from him so much. By times I'd be like 25 30, be absolutely genius from everything that he teaches me. It works super duper well at coming up with a refined strategy that's intentional, because most of these YouTubers aren't business people. They're just they're just like playing video games, or they're just like building PCs or something. And they've just accidentally built this huge media company, and now they think they're like an entrepreneur because it's like they've now got this status, but they didn't do it intentionally with any plan, and they don't really know how to manage it. They think, Oh, I've got a media company 'cause they do we do ten grand a month on the affiliate markets D have any products Let Market, and anyone could put a liger description, that is not a business. It's absolutely crazy. So that has been incredibly beneficial in almost my maturity. 23-years-old, and I'm almost probably like 30-years-old in terms of my outlook on things, and also being two, three years ahead in my head mentally of where we're planning on steering the ship rather than just taking it by the moment. To many people live in the moment and just go to make these videos this week. Oh, then next week comes around, I need to make three videos this week. Everything is planned month to month ahead. Right. We're gonna do this, when we hit this, when we hit that, this is going to launch everything is incredibly tactical. So on the outside looking in, the reason why my channels are so successful is because of the hours I spend on a laptop, just planning, planning, planning, planning, planning, and planning, rather than actually sitting here filming, whereas nobody else does that, and they'll just go, Oh, you were dead lucky because you did YouTube shorts and your channel blew up. It's like, No, D YouTube shorts for a reason, mate to get the right viewer to they do, et cetera. Anyways, so we had the music channel, and I felt like I took it as far as I could. I was getting to a point where I basically may as well have just had a normal job. The amount of hours I was putting into the music channel was ridiculous. I may as well just been like a project manager at the local nuclear power plant around here, make like 40 60 k a year or whatever. Eventually on level up, get through apentship and all that type of stuff and then do this music channel on the side and maybe make like 120 grand a year all in off or form a different channel. Getting to a point where it was stupid, the amount of time I was putting in, and I was wasting my potential with this opportunity vehicle. That's a very key thing you got to assess. Is your YouTube channel the most probable usage of your time? And is that obviously the best opportunity vehicle for you to leverage? Music had sort of ran its course. I'd learned how to become a great presenter, how to make videos to an extent, make things get views. And now it was time for me to move on to the next unity. That next opportunity was technology. Now, technology has always been a huge part of my life as a kid. I've been building gaming PCs since I was, like, 12 or something ridiculous. I was fixing like Xbox three 60s with Red ring a Def. I used to fix them up and then put them on ebay, sell them back as fixed. You obviously, like, new thermal pase on, clean them blah blah blah, blah. I was doing that was like 12, 13, 14, building PCs, et cetera. So Tech was always a massive part of my interest and specifically gaming as well. So the natural progression was to go right. Well, let's start a tech channel, and that's the next thing that I'm an expert in for us to talk about. So we started Ben Rollins channel. And the reason why we started a brand new channel was because obviously, Ben Rowland's music had such a library of content. There was no point in renaming that channel and trying to go again, although it was in the YouTube Partner program. Took the risk of starting a brand new channel with Geo subscribers no partner program, making no money on the content. Then that way, I could always go back to music if we wanted to, which we do do now. We have better ways of selling more efficient sales funnels to maximize the cose sales on there, so you make a little bit more money the actual out and also, I'm older now. I've got a lot more credibility when I was making these music videos. I was 20, 21, had terrible haircut. I was locked down. You know, everything was crap. My image was crap. Now, I'm much more successful. I eat better. You've got a cool car, I much more higher status, so I can sell these older guys at a 45-years-old watching my music content on a course, because they take me seriously now. I'm not just some little spotty kid. They used to watch on there. I'm a proper, young man, as you could say. So we started this Ben Rowland channel in May 2021. I be my first video in May 2021. I grew in incredibly quick. It's only about 2-years-old this year. In May 2021, I uploaded my first batch of videos, which was more specifically Apple products. At the time, I thought Apple would be a good match because even though I like gaming technology, I just thought it was a good market because there was new Max coming out. There was M one Max, all this buzz around the new Apple silicon. So I thought, Okay, let's try a little bit of apple stuff. Stuff did well. You could see some of this stuff to 200 K, 400 K over the period of time, it's been live on the Internet. But the one video that really popped this channel off was the warning, don't buy this Paperlike screen protector. We managed to get 1,000 subscribers in one month on this tech channel. It was monetized, and we were often running with the new strategy. Now, this video about the Paperlike screen protector was very clever how we framed it. So I purchased this because of Ali Abdal or whatever his name is, that guy, that productivity, YouTube. It was a sponsored integration, actually on his content, and also in some other future videos, he'd mentioned it, not sponsored. But you know what I mean? Basically, this dude was like, Oh, this is the best screen protector for the iPad, it makes it feel like a pencil, it makes it feel like paper when you're using the Apple pencil. It's great for taking notes, all this type of suf Wow. It's like, that sounds epic mate. So I bought it. Put it on my iPad. I was like, What a load of rubbish? So once I put it on my iPad, I had the latest M one iPad pro that had the liquid retina display, all these key features as to why you purchased it. Mini LED, you know, awesome contrast levels, picture perfect. Whereas as soon as you slapped the paper like screen protector on it, it made the image grainy. There was a load of noise added to the actual image, ruin the fact that you spent two grand on on the latest iPad. Was just as a whole, a terrible product, absolute nonsense. And it was a fortune. It was like 30 $40 or something like that. So I made a video game, Look, don't buy this screen protector for the new iPad, because you're buying the new iPad for the beautiful screen, and this screen protector defies all the purpose of doing that. And I showed all of the issues that the screen protector had that no YouTube had basically ever mentioned before. YouTube because they're such a huge sponsor. So this was my first exposure to understanding the sponsorships hold so much power in the market on the opinion of the YouTuber. So loads of people aren't slating off the Paperlike screen protector, because at that time, they were aware they could get very profitable integrations from the Paperlike screen protector. So they just weren't mentioned it. They go, Oh, you can get these screen protectors for your iPad. These are cool, whatever. They never do review going. This is awful, because obviously, they'd want 45 grand for the little 32nd ad going. This video is sponsored by Paperlike screen protector. So there's loads of apple reviewers just avoiding this product. Unless it was an integration that was sponsored, and they'd just talk about the key features of it and wouldn't say whether it was good or not. You know what I mean? It's got these cool features. So in that way, they were neutral and then they brought in all the cash. And this sort of made me realize like early on. I was like, B the hell, like these people are so dishonest when it comes to these products, just because they're getting paid. So I went ahead and obviously made the video about it. And because I was the only person that's being honest on the Internet, and those loads of people really wanted to know whether it was good, it popped off. We thought it was going to be my first ever video to get 1 million views. It didn't actually ever hit million views. It still simmers a way like 500 views a day or something like that. So it will eventually hit I sort of capped out at around 600,000, but it really boom. It went absolutely flat. As you can see right here from its analytics. You can see in its first period of it going live within sort of three to six days, it went bang. Absolute popped right off, and this was the views per day. Sort like 5,000 views a day, et cetera, which was incredible for a channel that had about 200 subscribers at the time. So this absolutely popped off. And then as you can see throughout time, it's just sort of funneled all the way up to where it was at, and then it sort of capped out after about a year and a bit around this region here and then it's had some periods where it's sped up ever so slightly. You factors behind the success of this YouTube video was obviously it's watch attention. You can see how high that watch tension is within the first 30 seconds. I's absolutely incredible. And it basically sustained throughout, so we're getting like 60% watch tension on it. And the clicks rate was brilliant as well. You can see even after three years, it still averages 2.9% click through rate, and you can see it was getting around a 12% click throu rate. And that's because it had a very strong title. It was like, warning, don't buy. No click bait, but obviously alarming. It was like, Whoa, and then obviously we delivered on the fact why you shouldn't buy it. So it wasn't click bait at all, so it had a very positive response from everybody who watched it. Once I discovered that people enjoyed watching content that was incredibly honest, it then made me rethink sort of my entire strategy. So I went ahead and then thought, Okay, I'll be that super honest guy in technology, if that makes sense. I'll be harsh on products when it's warranted a disruptor in the marketplace. So I went ahead and did things like the huge problem with the Plaation five digital edition. So I pointed out some real major problems that would cost you more money for purchasing this console over the disc version and stuff like that. Then did some other videos about this iPad Pro case by Logitech. Ironically, I do work with Logitech now, the Logitech G. I've always liked logyech stuff. I've got Logitech stuff here that I purchased, way back when. In fact, that was actually my first ever video reviewing those. I love Log tech products, but I bought this iPad case, and I compared it to the Apple magic case or whatever. And I just felt like Log tech one was rubbish Everyone said it was like, Oh, you used Apple Fatboy. That video got more of a negative response. And I now understand why in retrospect, because of the age group that was watching it, it was like, Millennials watching it. And when you watch this course, you'll understand the difference between Genz and Millennial. Millennial is very bold minded. They don't like being told what to do. They don't like being told what's right, what's wrong. They basically don't like getting advice. They don't take advice from elders. They just think they're ways the right way. And you'll understand later in the course when we dissect what a millennial is. Whereas a Gen Z is much more chill. Like so Millenia is like a 30 35-year-old. Gen Z is like 18 to 24, 13 to 24. Those guys, girls don't really care. They like a little bit of advice, like a bit of this. They're much more positive. Oh, cool, thanks for being honest. And the age group that watched the paper Light screen protector was Gen Z because they were students. And the age group that watched the iPad case were millennials because they were business professionals. So it was a complete contrast in views from the viewer and how that exact same style of content was received because of the age group that was watching it. And then that made me reassess the situation a few videos later. So I then did warning don't buy the iPhone 13 Pro Max. Again, this was watched by more business professionals because it was 100 pound phone. It was Millennials. They all want that false status of. I've got the new iPhone. I'm super cool. Whereas, again, like Gen Z, don't really care, got an Android, you know, 'cause it plays games better, whatever. So, this was another video where we were negative about basically the bumps on it. I ironically used the phone now today just because it was lying around the studio and battery life, and I still use it all these years later. But in that video I pointed out that, you know, if you had smaller hands, it was really difficult to use with one hand. All these things are true. I find time is too big. But again, because this was predominantly watched by Millennial, this content, I was like, Don't tell me what to do. I got to a point where I kind of got sick of it wasn't the hate comments. It give a crap about the comments. It was just more, I thought it isn't going to build the brand that we want. We want people to feel good when they watch the content. We want people to have a positive association, like they did with the paperight video because it was honest. But this was maybe going a step too far. It was targeting the wrong viewer, and it was getting lost in translation, what we were trying to achieve. So I then went back to more videos that I thought I'd enjoy making. So it was things like Xbox and gaming related content because I thought that's fun. Gaming's fun. People agree if a game is rubbish, it's rubbish. Can't get away from that fact, whereas if you think the iPhone's too big in your hand and the bumps on the camera make it wobble on your desk. That's all subjective, so it leaves yourself open to, you know, a load of nonsense that you got to deal with. So we then pivoted into gaming technology, and we then started to target a Genz viewer specifically because we'd identified and got data now that those guys were more positive than a millennial, especially with the type of content we wanted to make. And I started doing like Xbox gaming setups. I was the first guy to sort of do can box replaced a budget PC, basically plugging a mouse and keyboard into the X box and trying games out with it. I did this when I had about 10,000 subscribers and it blew up and did about half 1 million views in a month, and then every other tech channel started copying it. And again, this is where I started to learn how these channels are so unoriginal, not just copy paste, copy paste, copy paste, copy paste, what anyone's doing regardless of the size, of the small channel, big channel, et cetera. Incredibly frustrating. We have a list of channels that copiers all the time, and we just go watch the channel and go, Oh yeah, they copied ye copied that video. I might mention throughout this course, depending on how I feel and whether I actually want to do. Anyways, we then went into gaming technology. Still we're doing some smartphone stuff here and there, and I realized this stuff was just too competitive because you were competing with the likes of Mr. Ho's D Boss, you know, Mega channel, 16 million subs line is tech tip, 16 million subes or whatever he's got now. Unboxed therapy, 20 million subes. And these guys were getting the phone early. So me coming and racking up, like, two, three weeks after it, like being initially announced, like, this is a new phone. Videos were underperforming because it was just too competitive, because you had these mega channels getting the phone two weeks early. Everyone had seen the content and it was old news by times I get my preorder. So we canceled doing the phone reviews, and we've never actually done one since because it was points same with the tablets. Big channels were getting them early. And my last ever saw of tablet review was the iPad Air, some fun little reviews that did quite well, again, because the Tiger audience was Gen Z. Was a predominant viewer because we were doing gaming tech. Young guys and girls want in an iPad as a student, iPad as the perfect student iPad because of it's price point and features. So then we sort of went in on gaming tech, and this phase right here is the most important phase of my entire career. This block of videos from essentially this right here, destroying my RTX TX graphics card with eight K gaming. This was the start of a completely new path. 5. How I blew up my Youtube Channel: April 2022, this was the start of my brand new strategy on YouTube. Prior to this, after we'd had the success of the replacing a gaming PC with an Xbox series S, and I got lots of different data. I literally spent two months refining a strategy of how we were going to target Genz what videos we were going to make, how we were going to start making viral technology based videos. Almost I labeled it as the Mster Beast of Tech, trying to make something that was unique and different that nobody else was doing. I spent months on this strategy basically coming up with the video ideas, who was going to watch them? Why they were going to watch them? How much money does that viewer make? What stage of life are they at? Do they have a girlfriend? Are they single? Are they at uni? Are they an apprenticeship? Are they at work? Are they still at school? Absolutely crazy. Basic making a viewer avatar and profile, which is exactly what we'll do later on in this course when it's relevant. And I basically spent two months on this strategy just reading, reading, reading all about Gen Z, millennials, differences between generations, how they view money, how they view the world? Products they like, brands they off scale obsession. That then resulted in my very first video trialing the new targeting, which was destroying my RTX 30 90 with incredible eight K gaming. I couldn't afford to make this video. I sent everything back. I spent like 2000 pounds or something ridiculous on that graphics card to make the video. I put that in the PC that I already had, and then I spent a couple thousand pounds on an eight K TV that I also returned as well because I couldn't afford to keep it. I basically spent all the cash flow that we had at the time in the business that was, you know, liquid cash that was available. I spent about five grand or whatever on the different bits and bobs that we needed to make this video with about 15,000 subscribers. There was no way this video was actually going to work. And I gave it my all. I actually had COVID when I filmed this video. I was really really ill. I started filming it, and then filmed and edited it, and I was ill because I really wanted to get it out, that type of thing. You see halfway through the video where I get ill, I've got, like, a block nose, and that type of suf, you're like, that guy's not very well. Anyways, I uploaded this video, and it actually underperformed. It was devastating. When I first uploaded it, was gutted. I thought, Oh, my God, I've wasted all this time is effort. And look at how it flatlined. Do you see here, I went live 4,000 views first day, and then it just flatlined. Absolutely completely flatlined. It took about 60 days to actually do something. This was incredibly like, you'd acquit at this point if you were just like a regular human being, because I'd exerted so much effort. Prior to this, I'd been on YouTube for maybe a year or two years with my music channel. I was trying this and that tech channel couldn't get the views that I got in January when that video blew up for Xbox, and I was like, This is it. We got it. This is it right now. Flat line, complete waste of time. And I though, Oh, my word, nothing's ever going to work on these long formats. This is crazy. But around this period here. When the video starts to pick a little bit more pace up, I switched out the thumbnail, and I changed a few things around the video. You can actually see in the click through rate around this period here, we sort of switched out the thumbnail. And it went up. You see here how it went from 5.5% to around 10%, and the video started to get pushed out after 60 days. So I switched out the thumbnail and sort of revived the video because I had increased the click rate so dramatically from, like, three, 4% to boom, 10%. This also coincided with market timing. Look at the date right there. Wednesday, 29 June. What happens in June? The kids start to go off for summer holidays and school ends. So the perfect age group that want to watch this contents got loads of free time. This is something no YouTube has ever told you before. This class, there will be an entire video that will break down supply demand on YouTube? No YouTube Guru ever talks about this. All they ever talk about is YouTube algorithm. YouTube algorithms Shadow ban me. YouTube algorithms. YouTube algorithms just nonsense, mate. It's supply demand based on the viewer. So basically, is the demand for your content right now, or are those viewers busy? Are they off skiing 'cause it's Christmas time? Are they at home? 'cause it's summer? They've got nothing to do. Are they back at work? Are they now working from home? All these different factors that spread out across the year that influence when your views go up, go down, and when you should, increase and decrease your upload schedule to run the channel as efficiently as possible, so you don't make pointless content. No YouTube guru has ever talked about this because they don't understand it because they're not business people. Most of the YouTube gurus have only built a successful YouTube channel talking about how to grow a successful YouTube channel. They've went from zero subscribers like 1 million subscribers talking about how to grow on YouTube, when they've never grown a proper YouTube channel that isn't about being a Guru on YouTube and all that type of stuff. Whereas, I've built proper channels first, then I educate people on how to do it because I'm actually an expert, because I see things these people have never seen before. When you get 2020 5 million views a month on one channel, you understand things that other people don't. And this is one of those examples right here, because I've got a business brain and not some Ponzi creative brain. I actually understand why this actually turned the video up. Any Guru would have said it was the um neem new had an influence to give it the impact, but then the viewers increased the demand, and it all just was perfect market timing. This video then shot off boom within like a month or two, half million views, and it achieved what I thought it was going to achieve when I was depressed and wanted to basically give up back in May. I just uploaded it the wrong time. I I had held off the video for like one month, bang, it probably would have been even more successful than it ended up being. Obviously, flat lined out around 1 million views because then a new graphics card came out the RTX 40 90 a year later. So it sort of led its path, but it did what Two. Another video from this time period that was a huge testing piece of content for the new direction of the channel was this, I bought the cheapest gaming PC on Amazon. Originally, this video was titled I bought the cheapest gaming PC on Amazon. It underperformed. I then changed it out to this $300 gaming PC is ridiculous. And I also changed out the thumbnail. And this is what happened on this piece of content, too. You can see right here, it completely underperformed and flatlined. Four, 5,000 views in the first ten days. It's going absolutely nowhere. Change the thumbnail out here where it suddenly shot up from like 10,000 views to like 20. Change the thumbnail out here. Market times as well with the summer holidays, boom, Video pops off, and then it pops off again because it's Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Obviously, it's on sale. Supply demand again. Christmas period, it gets more views, flat lines out. And then it starts tick up in January. Again, New Year's sales, supply demand, flat lines out, and then it pops up again sort of March springtime, little bit of summer like half term, you know what I mean, that type of thing going on. Then it's sort of flat line and just has done what it's done. But this a piece of content that I knew would get 1 million views underperformed, and a usual YouTube that wasn't headstrong would have given up. And YouTube's not for me. I can't do it. Can't do it. There's another piece of content that died. I thought, No, it shouldn't have died. Switched out the thumb now. You can see here we literally took it from 4% to 12%. Bang, switched out the thumbnail, revived the video, and then I knew that my content strategy was sound. I thought, I'm doing it right. These videos are popping off now Absolutely perfect. It was then at this point, I had confidence that my strategy was working, and we were targeting the right viewer, and the videos that we were making were completely correct. But there was still one fatal flaw in the format of the videos that we were making, and that was the fact we were making them this way. Instead of this way. We were making them horizontal, but Gen Z predominantly watched short format content. It's ridiculous. Like something like 93% or something I'm sure I read online. If Gen Z watched content like this, basically instead of content like this. Once I'd identified this, I thought, Ah, Okay, we need to start making short format content that's vertical for the age group that we're targeting, not just because again, the Guru were so wrong during this period of YouTube. They were going, YouTube, I just turned the touch on mate. They were saying things like YouTube shorts will damage your channel, or YouTube shorts are getting loads of views at the moment because YouTube's pushing the algorithm more than long format. Just think about that ridiculous statement right there. YouTube can't possibly push the algorithm of shorts more than the long format algorithm. Because they're separate parts of the app. You have to literally as a human being. Physically go to a different area of the app to watch a short, and you're actually presented with long formats as soon as you boot up the app. So you can't possibly YouTube couldn't have been manufacturing all these views because they were pushing shorts more the long formats. So people were using, they were competing against TikTok. Absolute rubbish buzzwords from all the guru. It was complete user habits that were meaning shorts and becoming more popular the long formats, because all the kids on the phone were wanting to watch the short format stuff instead of the long format stuff. So it was just complete market forces, again, supply demand, and consumer habits evolving. So as you can see right here, within the June period, I then started to do YouTube shorts literally on this day right here, and then three days later, we got 1 million views in one day. And that's because I intentionally made the shorts target an age group, because prior to this, I'd made three shorts, I think it was, and I'd been testing them. I made them in around January. And I was just testing to see what the shorts were doing and whether they had any shelf life to them. I originally thought the shorts would literally just be like, maybe seven days, you get a load of views on them and then the die. So I made three videos in around. I think it was January, February, and I was just monitoring to see whether they got any views in YouTube search, whether they kept resurfacing and getting pushed out. And I was quite pleasantly surprised at these two, three shorts that I'd made and had no idea how to craft a viral short at that point. Pulled around 30 to 40,000 views, and I was like, Okay, and that was each. And I thought that's quite interesting. So at that point, I thought, right, we'll go all in on shorts because they do have a degree of shelf life to them, and they're not just dead in a week. They've got like three or four months, you know, even longer now, I've see. They last for years. Actually, when you know how to craft them, they last for years. Now I'll explain how you do that in this course, because most of your shorts probably only last like 48 hours because they flat line, and they get like three or 4,000 views of flatline. I'll explain why that's happening in this course. It's a pretty simple fix. Here, I went all in on shorts. We started doing them daily. I was doing daily shorts. Also, I started TikTok as well in sort of this May June period. So I thought, Okay, we'll just sort of repurpose all the content across YouTube, and then put it on TikTok, et cetera. And that'll be fine. So we went all in, boom, blew up the channel to 1 million views, did like 3,000 subscribers, something like that in a day. I think it was. Yeah, 2.5 thousand subscribers. Day, and then since then, we've sustained this amount of traction, basically, like 600,000 views a day, go to take a few dips when the kids are back at school. May, again, they're doing exams in May. Of course, your views are going to be rubbish. In the UK, you got GCSCs. A levels are all set in May before the summer period. So your views are going to drop. And then they come back up. Summer holidays. Absolutely you think your career will be over there, right? You got getting 600,000 views a day to 170,000. Ben, your career is over. Soon as the exams finished on May 24, bang back 2 million views a da. I changed nothing. I wasn't The load sched was the same. Absolutely fine. And then you can see drops down, you back at school, Christmas, whatever. From that moment of blowing up the YouTube channel, we've sustained it because everything was done with intent. The reason why most channels blow up and then die is because they accidentally got a viral short, and they don't know how they manufactured that success. So then they're just constantly chasing that trend. We don't do any trends. We don't do I get, like my YouTube shorts partner manager. Lovely girl. But she always e mails me, YouTube short trends. You go to try out these short trends in the community. I'm like, I'm Mike No, I'm not doing a trend because the trend is out of your control. I don't use any trend in music. Don't use any of those things, because all of that is influencing your content, and you don't have pure data. Whereas, I have pure data because all I use is just some royalty free music, and it's whether the content was good or bad, whether it got 1 million views or not. And that way, I can go, Okay, that piece of content was rubbish, so I won't do that again, that piece of cars that was excellent. Let's make another short just like that. Whereas, if you're doing trends and all this type of stuff, you're just guessing as to whether it's going to pop, and you can't build a business around that. So basically, I've had around 16 million to 24 million views every single month since June 2022, and we've held that for over a year and a bit now. And even in periods when I'm hardly uploading, we'll still get 14 million views. And it's just all pretty solid, really. And this is just dt, you can see the great amount of performance on all the videos, and also very interestingly, as well, you can see how I evolved as the channel became more successful. I'm just a little geeky kid here. I don't need just sort of started going to the gym. You sort of fast forward a year and a bit, and you sort of see how we've started to, you know, build out with the muscles, got the contact lenses. I sort of changed the branding on the content now. So it's really nice to sort of look back on that from myself personally. But also for yourself, as well, if you're too worried about, I don't have a brand, I don't have a personal only just started to figure that out in the last four months, we sort of started to change my clothing style, started to make me dress cooler, then we dropped the glasses and still have some of the glasses in this older content because were still sorting the contact lenses out, so we weren't fully ready, but the clothes starting to get a bit better. And then finally, you know, New Year comes around, new Y new Ben. Got his contact lenses, got his cool clothe, everything's bob on. And about half 1 million subscribers, you think I should have a personal brand by now. Fundamentally, just 23 year kid that makes videos on his own, got a couple of video editors. So you can't do everything at wants. And everything just naturally matures as you develop as a presenter as a YouTube as a person, as a business person. The Gym took ages. I went from being a super skinny kid to, like, pretty rip now. It's pretty cool. But obviously, when I was originally starting my YouTube channel and coming up with a brand. I had no idea I was going to become the Jim never thought I was going to start lifting weights. You can't really put too much pressure on nailing the brand from zero subscribers to 100,000 subscribers. It's just a natural progression that will occur, and eventually it will become what it becomes. And then you'll look back on all your videos and think, I, why was I making videos with these massive glasses on? Look at this guy here. 6. YouTube Equipment: Throughout this course, we're going to get hands on in the process of making videos, and I will take you through all of the equipment that I currently use, how I'm using it, and why I'm using it in practical demonstrations, even the tripods, how we capture certain angles, the philosophy behind the cinematography of how we capture the footage. But I first want to sort of go over some of the equipment that you might require or basically you need for running a YouTube channel and also debunk the extent and the complexity of some of this equipment that it needs to be. Now, obviously, now that I'm a famous YouTube, I've got half 1 million followers or whatever. Do film on cameras like 2000 3,000 pounds. This set up right here. The lens is two grand alone and the camera body is like 2000 pounds, whatever. So I have a $5,000 camera. We take this out and about, because I can risk this equipment, and it also makes my life easier. But when I first started the channel, and all of our views still come from most of this content, I actually filmed on this setup right here, which is just a little $500 beginner Sony ZVE ten camera with an upgraded lens. This is an ultra wide lens that was like, 400 pounds or something like that, which just gave it a little bit better image quality, and also I could capture the angles that I wanted because I wanted wider shots. But this is like an entry level APSC camera. This right here. It's obviously a full frame camera. And the stuff that I'm filming this course on is Panasonic S five Mark two. So again, they're like six K cameras, like, in terms of resolution, four K, six K, you know, and about 23000 pounds and all the different lenses on them, but that's because we've established where I am as a creator. But the only camera you need. This camera right here is basically generated over 400 million views on the Internet. This exact camera body, we filmed all the shorts, all of the long format over the last year and a half, or every single long format on the tech channels being filmed with this camera other than in the last basically these sort of six months when we upgraded to Panasonic and then switched over to this Sony camera, because I just really love this format of camera. But just to prove that you don't even need a fancy camera, part of this course is actually being filmed on the webcam inside of my MAC in front of me right here. This camera right now is just an MAC camera, 12 megapixel facetime camera with a filter on it just to make it color match, the other stuff. Looks fine. Honestly, if you're doing like news videos, like, these are breaking news on Twitter or whatever. This is all you would need. No one would really care as long as the audio is good, like we're using these log tech microphones. It's the audios good. Nobody really cares about the video quality. The only reason why we have fancy cameras is because we're a tech channel, so you sort of expected to have that higher level of production because you're high tech, and you're obviously showcasing products in extensive detail. But this is the camera right here, the Sony ZV E ten, which is the perfect beginner camera. You can literally get 1 million subscribers with just this camera alone. This right here would cost you even on flash sale. But you can pick it up for around $500, brand new in some sort of Amazon Black Friday type deals. Incredibly cheap. I've seen it as cheap as like 430 pounds. So you about $450 $500. This includes a kit lens as well, which will do the job. I personally would upgrade the lens to that Tameron 11 millimeter. On just so you can do the wider shot, especially if you want to log with it and do them types of first person shots where you're capturing you holding a product or something like that just makes your life. Way easier and you don't need to have the camera right, like, really high up, like you're literally trying to capture clip like this. You can just sort of hold it there and sort of get a nice wide angle. I also, personally, this was just my choice. But because I'm hyper obsessed with audio quality, because of my past in music and music production and stuff like that, I did have this XLR mount on top of the camera. This literally costs more than basically the camera. It's like a 500 pound audio interface that basically attaches into here. You can plug X microphones into it. This was just to improve my workflow when it came to more than music channel, really, we could plug microphones directly into the camera without having to capture that audio externally. The amount of times I forgot to click record or it stopped recording for some whatever reason in logic, and we lost the audio from our super nice XLR microphones like these ones, or whatever was crazy. So I just purchased this because it saved me time, and it worked really well. For my preferred workflow and you had, like, crystal clear audio, even with this little shotgun mic right here, for the overall setter. But this is completely unnecessary. You can get you can use what we're using here, which is stream labs, where I've got the webcam. This mic phone pugged into ESP audio interface, and it's all being recorded into one embedded file anyway. So there's loads of work arounds for this. This just suited my workflow at the time. Now, the Sony Z VE ten does have a bunch of other features, including stabilization. Now, the stabilization on this camera isn't in body stabilization, it is digital, but there was something about it that I really liked the look of it. Like, we turn it on inside of the camera settings and it would crop in, which all the camera reviewers are like, This is rub. Actually worked really well because it meant you only needed one lens, because you could crop in and get extra distance and focal length out of the little 20 millimeter that we've got on here. It would crop in and make it more like a 30 millimeter, so you could get more zoom on the products, you have to switch out your lenses. And also, I like the little glitchy luck it had because it had like rolling shutter effect and stuff like that, because it's got a slower sensor. But it worked really well for the shorts, like, stuff sort of just looking not too pristine and perfect. And I like just the overall aesthetic style of working with this camera. Course, I will be using this exact camera in examples of how to make YouTube shorts, as well as some of my more expensive equipment that we use now, then that way you can sort of see the comparison in workflow, and you can actually see that much of a difference and also using the more fancy cameras actually can be slower to make videos because of all the additional stages, when it comes to color grading the footage, the harder codex, so you need a more expensive computer, because that is another area of consideration you need to think about when it comes to your equipment. Sure, you can buy the greatest camera in the world, which is this one right here, not this one specifically, but this is one of my favorite cameras at the moment. You've got five grand camera, but you then also need a computer that can actually edit the footage that this camera produces. And also, you need faster SD cards for this camera. So then you obviously got more cost there with the SD cards in order to capture the certain codec that it can offer like the slow motion, at four K, you know, S log three, like, whatever ten bit 422, blah, blah blah, blah blah. Then obviously, you need to color grade the footage, so you then need a fancy monitor that's color accurate, most people just don't need to do. It is so many more steps, but because we're so fast at doing the basic things when it comes to constructing a brilliant video, we now have time for more post production like color grading and stuff because we're so fast at doing the base cut that you would traditionally do. But as a beginner, you want to just have the quickest set of possible, standard picture profile, eight bit color, really easy codec to edit on no matter what PC you're using, it will be compati will work, and you don't need to worry about colrading it too much again. Maybe add a bit more contrast in saturation just to make it pop a little bit more, but it's very basic like almost editing a photo on Instagram. And then you can actually just focus on the core elements, what's important, actually crafting the video, learning how to edit it efficiently and fast, rather than worrying about all the different fancy stuff, because I still have settings wrong on this all the time. I'm like, Oh, maybe, we filmed it like this. What an idiot. Oh, we'll have to fix that in post, because it is such a huge learning curve. The thing that's massively underrate as well, is actually just your iPhone, the amount of times. We use the iPhone for B roll and also for filming YouTube short ***** because it's super fast is off scale. And it looks so good down, you can colo grad it a little bit and make it match your fancy cameras. But we use these a lot when we're filming out and about like in the airport or sometimes in shops, because you try and film in shops, and they obviously spot your huge setup that you've got over here. Like no cameras allowed in the store. Or my word my when we were out in America. Las Vegas, they were okay with it. But like LA, they were super funny about the filming in stores in the UK, it's impossible to film in stores without permission. You just get college straight away. Whereas, when you've got an iPhone, no one can really tell you off because when they don't notice it, they also think you might just be sending a video to your mom or dad, like, Oh, do you like this Tel or like, Oh, should I buy you this for Christmas or whatever? So you're much more discreet with this, and the footage quality is more than good enough, and also the audio quality is exceptional straight out of the iPhone. Oh, car straight in. And then they've all been super fast charge as well, because 'cause that's the other problem with the UK. The amount of different environments we film in, aeroplanes, outside, whatever, where the conditions are awful in terms of ambient noise levels. This manages to suppress so much noise where you can actually hear me talking in the log or the shot, very crisp and clear, and it's much easier than us having to post produce any of the audio that comes out of these microphones that you put on a DSLR camera or these miles style cameras. So it also is super easy to chop up. Also, as well, if you're an apple user Mac. You can air drop the footage straight off of your iPhone onto your laptop. So again, when I'm traveling, I'm now currently running an m1p MacBook and not even the latest one. I got it dead cheap because it was like, two, 3-years-old, but it was like a brand new unit that they needed to get rid of. And I just literally air drop the footage, straight onto that. Can edit up a show, edit up a TikTok or we went to this cool event today, bang by bag by bang. Super easy. So I don't even need to plug a cable in, transfer the footage onto my windows, PCS about that way. Just air drop it, put it on my Google Drive and access it wherever I need. One thing I will do for you is I'll put some links down below in the description of this video with some sort of beginner kits with the essential lights that you need, the essential microphones, what I would personally use because again, we've tested so many different microphones over the years, ones that have a little hiss on them and things like that way, you've just wasted like $100 on it on a pointless mice. I'll build that out down below so you can salt to see the different price points depending on what you're willing to pay. But we can spend a little bit of time here just sort of going through the basics. I would go for this camera personally this Sony EVE ten. If you're then going to be running a Sony camera, I 100% recommend this microphone. It's wireless. So basically, it plugs straight in with that hot shoe out into the camera, a little bit like this CLR adapter does here. Plug straight into the camera, and it transmits the audio straight in to the file, and you don't need to have any external cables plugged in then plugged into that. It's just straight in. So it means it's cable free, which makes it perfect for out and about if you're doing any form of flogging. It doesn't get broken. Just literally attaches straight on the top of the camera, looks super slick and clean, keeps the setup as discrete as possible as well. You don't have a huge microphone. There, so 100% best mic, and also the audio quality is off scale. Like, it's really nice and compressed. It's very loud out of the camera. And also, there's no so white noise that you get if you're using one of those, like, road cheap road microphones that just sort of clicks in with a auc cable. So you get the best quality audio, and also it picks you up really well in noisy environments. Much better than this type of rubbish that some of the other YouTubers would recommend that do these budget YouTube setups and like, you get this microphone for 40 quid. Yeah, but it goes In the background of all your videos, and it ****** you off. While you're trying to edit, and they got to apply load of effects, and it still sounds crap because you lose all the depth in your voice because you've got like noise suppression not type of suf. You just get that bad boy, 170 quid, maybe even 120 pounds in a sale. You won't regret it. Then when it comes to memory and storage, I would personally go for one of these sandisk extreme pro SD cards. I've never fingers crossed, never ever lost any footage using these over the last sort of 2.5 years since we upgraded to them. Super Row bust as well. The cheaper SD cards break over time, know when you constantly take them in and out of the camera. They just get worn out and basically fall apart, whereas these ones haven't done that yet, and I've been using them for over two you're going to be using the Sony camera that I've recommended over here. Personally, all you really need is 128 gigabyte, which will be about 15 pounds, I think it is, 22 pounds. Again, you can pick these up in sales back Friday for like 50% off, like 12, fifeen quids off scale. This will be more than enough memory for the file format size that that camera produces. You'll be able to film for hours and hours and hours, like multiple filming sessions just without formatting on 128 gigabyte card. And as well, you don't need any of the super fancy ones. This is what I was talking about earlier. If you get a fancier camera, you need the faster SD cards. And as you can see, there's a considerable increase in price there, $134 versus $22 for the essentially the same amount of storage space. But because those fancy cameras that we now run require those higher speeds in order to do four K 20 or whatever it wants to do. So, that's where the cost gets off scale. So you just get that for about 20 pounds, and it does the job. Pretty much right there is the entire setup that you would need for starting a YouTube channel and running it until you get about two, 300,000 subscribers. Literally that microphone, that camera, and an SD card. Sure, you need a tripod or maybe a little log arm or something like that. But that is the premise of everything that you would need. Obviously, you may need some additional add ons such as lighting, but you may be surprised you can use a lot of natural light within your content. I travel so much now. Have a very light setup, so it means we don't have really that many lights at our disposal. So we use natural light loads. In all the hotel rooms where I stop, just literally crank the curtains open and use all of the natural light, and it looks fantastic for the thumbnails and also the lighting in the videos for just sort of getting by. So that's always an option if you just literally want that setup and ready to go. But if you want some very discrete lights. The ones that I'm actually filming with right here are these Logitech G tra beams. There's also the tra Beam ultra that does RGB. You don't need the RGB though, just like for more gamer setups. So you can literally pick these up for about 100 pounds. If you go over to the Logitech website and use code Ben Row, you can get 10% off for further discounts, you can get them even cheaper. And these are unbelievable. They're tiny, they just look like dest lights. The cable management is a little bit rubbish on them out of the box. I have some additional sort of cable ties on them just to make them a little bit neat. The size of them is what's beautiful and also the lights incredibly soft. So if you look to the sidemy here, you can see one that's right there, you wouldn't believe you would have so much powerful light from such a small light source. Usually, the bigger the light source, the softer the light will be, so it looks much more beautiful on your face. But these are tiny, but still generate very soft light, and I'm very impressed with the overall performance of them, especially this key light over here, the way we say it up absolutely perfect. And they hardly take up any space. So it means if you're in a flat or you don't have much resources for your key light for doing your talking head stuff. These things will work perfectly fine. And also, they double up as a nice ambient light for you actually working and, you know, editing and stuff like that is like, basically a desk lamp. Another key feature of these tra beams as well, is they actually don't damage your eyes. You've got to be very careful of buying cheap lights on Amazon for your YouTube setup because they have LEDs in there that generate a lot of excessive blue light and stuff that actually damages your eyes over time. Same issue for my friend who's a musician. He plays on stage. 30,000 people is like a proceession musician. And there's a lot of old lights on there. And he says, eyes. After doing that for years and years years, he could actually tell a decrease in his vision. So these are safe. So we can have these on all day while I'm filming all day while I'm editing. Their log tech says these have got a safe light in them, so they're not going to actually damage my eyes, which is good because my eyes are already bad enough. We don't really want them to get any worse. I got my big glasses and my contact lenses in, so All in for less than $100. I think that's the perfect setup for running a YouTube channel to a couple 100,000 subscribers, millions and millions of views to a point where you can then get more pro stuff. If you don't want to drop $100 on this setup, which I think will make your life just a little bit easier because of the SD card workflow, have a proper camera, you can learn how to use a camera. You can take high quality pictures with the camera for thumbnail. But you literally have one of these in your pocket. I can guarantee, and this will do the job. It's probably better than what I've got. I've got the 13 pro here. Some of you've probably got like a 14, 15, et cetera that has even better cameras. So this would do the job equally, as well as what we've got on offer here. 7. Content Formats: We're taking our time to understand the fundamentals of YouTube. Let's briefly talk about the different content formats that you can upload and post onto the platform sounds pretty obvious, but I want to just help you understand how they all linked together more than just going, Oh, you can upload a long video on a shot, et c. Want to show a bit of context to how you can leverage all of the content pieces. Right here we've got our main YouTube channel. Now recently YouTube had started to compartmentalize all of the different content into folders. So back in the day used to have just the videos tab, and this used to show your videos and also all of your shorts, super Duber messy for people who are hy content creators but around sort of July, I think it was last summer. They introduced this new short sub folder that then allowed you to basically categorize all of your sub 62nd vertical videos off in a separate part of the app, which in my opinion, I think makes it much better for the user, and also, it just keeps your brand much cleaner because it means when brands are like sponsorships or looking at your channel, they can see how your long format stuff performs much more consistently compared to the short. Originally when YouTube introduced YouTube shorts, they broke their own app. So the algorithms were linked between YouTube shorts and also YouTube long plays. So it meant because all of these shorts were going viral and popping off, it sort of destroyed the Meta, you know, sort of the strongest play on YouTube. So people that were making long format content that was like an hour, 2 hours long was no longer being recommended because so many people were watching 62nd video. So a prime example of this is this guy's channel right here, Ozzie Knuckles. I don't know who he is or what he does. But I came across this guy's channel two years ago in the YouTube recommendation. As you can see right now, this guy doesn't get any views at all, like seven views, eight views, four views on these little clips that are like 50, 40 seconds long from him playing like GTA San Andreas and stuff like that was the game he was playing two years ago. Now, when you go back two years ago, most popular, you'll see his videos were getting 800,000, 700,000, 500,000. These little clips that he was literally just taking, like, Xbox record that, you know, that type of thing, just literally clip a load of nonsense from whatever he was doing. Driving a car off a cliff, you know, stuff like that. But you can see these sub 62nd clips were classified as long format videos, and they were being pushed out like crazy because YouTube had ruined their own algorithm. They were previously recommending videos, 20 minutes long, an hour long, or 30 minutes long, 8 minutes long to the relevant viewer. Then suddenly, people were now watching sub 62nd videos because of the shorts, and that was linked to the long format algorithm. So then it meant it was starting to recommend videos that were full length that were under 60 seconds long, that were horizontal instead of vertical, and it disrupted everything. Then what YouTube had to do was, they had to, like, panic and basically like, unlink the algorithm. So the short algorithm then became separate to the long format algorithm. So it meant, let's say you had 1 million subscribers because you had short your long format content would never get suggested to them because it was like they never subscribed or watched your channel ever in their life. So that was why there was a lot of channels in sort of 2021, 2022, that had a lot of subscribers, a lot of short views, but couldn't get like 102,000 views on their long format content, because the algorithm wasn't recommending it to their return viewers. And this is where all the guru are misinformed. The one, don't ever mention this, and they just say, shorts, destroy your channel, da da da da because of this brief six, eight month period where YouTube were trying to fix basically a huge mess up, which is now resolved, no longer a problem. Also, as well, they don't understand what was happening in terms of the 62nd videos that were pointless that were going viral on the platform, and there was loads of people making channels at the time that leveraged and took advantage of this YouTube glitz. Another prime example of this is this Foster Hizon clips channel. Again, at the time of the shorts, Foster Horizon five just came out. So I think it's a girl from Russia or something, if I recall right from the community tab. She was basically posting all of these sub 62nd clips again that were getting recommended as long format, so you were getting a proper add rate on this content, where Shorts were only paying out of the bonus, so it was a dead easy way to make money on YouTube. They're getting ridiculous views like 4 million, 4 million views, 2 million views on just nonsense, like someone crashing into a sign or something in Forza horizon. And then obviously, you look at their more recent stuff, and it gets the views that that type of content without being rude should get because it isn't content. It's just game clips. Is it like a proper video? So you can see that obviously YouTube sort of figured out what these people are doing. And she's obviously evolved her strategy. She was getting like 300 views of video on these things because the Algorit recommend it anymore because it realized it was a lot of nonsense. And then now they've started to do five minute, ten minute videos, that are actually starting to do a little bit better because they've had to strategy. But this was basically the start of YouTube shorts and leveraging sort of these algorithm glitches. I have to admit I tried it myself. That's what our Ben ns gaming channel originally was. I had some, GA SJs clips or, like, little no commentary clips on games. And those were, some of them had like 100,000 views, and then we deleted them all and sort of restarted the channel. Because again, we weren't getting a useful viewer on there. A lot of the views were coming from countries that weren't really English speaking, and then that meant, there was a whole transition period of me then speaking in English and the content, so it sort of meant there was a load of irrelevant subscribers on there for the way we pivoted the channel. So it actually hindered it more than anything. But again, it was all data collection for when I was figuring out YouTube back in the early days, just understanding what was happening and just spotting trends and going, Okay, let's have it go and try that. Now YouTube has fixed this issue with the algorithm recommendations. And if you are a hybrid content creator like myself, your shorts do now get recommended to your long format viewers, which is a much healthier way to grow the channel and it means you can actually leverage shorts for growing and fostering a proper audience now rather than having two separate audiences watching the different formats on your content. Of course, on YouTube, you can also live stream. I've got a little bit of experience with live streaming, we just did two really simple streams in summer last year. We got some friends on almost like a podcast sy, and we just watched some generic game announcements at, like, a game show. So there was tens of thousands of people streaming the same thing, so it wasn't that unique, but it was great experience of talking for over 2 hours, live on air and just sort of keeping the conversation going and reacting to the chat. I really enjoyed this format of content. But again, live streaming has evolved on YouTube. So if you wanted to encompass everything on one platform, that is now possible, because, for example, if you upload a YouTube short now, and you're live at the same time, There'll be a little red bubble around your name, almost like an Instagram story. Remember, you have an Instagram story. Somos a little purple bubble around the name. It'll be a little purple bubble around your name to basically say that you're currently live. So somebody can be just scrawling through the shorts feed and then click on the bubble on your name and then be jumped straight into a live stream. So there's a lot of clever ways that you can leverage these little features that are recurring within the A. I'll also show you a nice new feature that also lets you promote long format content within a short as well. Proceeding on with the other features, you've got these other subcategories such as playlists. Upon first impressions, playlists appear to be quite irrelevant. I think people use playlists incorrectly. So I'll have, I was a victim of this on my music channel. They'll have like 35 playlists, like tutorials for this product tutorials, there's too much going on. So you come to this playlist tab, and you have no idea where to start. Was we just have it as four playlists, PC gaming stuff, playstation stuff, YouTube shorts, and then Xbox stuff. And that is it. And then eventually, if we do any smartphone or product reviews, we just have a product review type. There. But it's super easy for people to find things that are relevant to our sort of three core topics that we do on the channel, PC gaming Xbox and Playstation. And surprisingly, these playlists have pulled quite a large amount of views on the channel. You're talking like almost 1 million views or so per playlist from people just clicking on and binge watching the content with them just being there, which I was quite shocked about. I thought it was points like, who's going to watch these playlists. But they do pull in some views You then also got the new community tab. I think a lot of people use the community tab incorrectly. And throughout this course, I'll show you how you can leverage it to really get a lot of data from your audience to basically influence decisions and directions that you'll take in the future without having to exert too much time and effort to get that data. We've been currently using it for just repurposing some Instagram posts, like I was at an event. I met some famous Hu tubers like Austin Evans and Line of tech tips and stuff like that. The picture posts don't get crazy engagement. I've noticed across everybody's channels. You're looking about like 1,000 likes per post for a guy like my size. I have seen some people that have managed to pull off like 8,000 10,000 likes on a community post, but they are like instagramers, so you know, they're sort of knowing for their pictures. But just cool it a way to connect with the audience and ask them some questions, you know, 50 comments or whatever. Cool. The biggest way of leveraging the community tab, however, is actually with these community polls. So asking your community a question with an image po I see a lot of people do community polls with the text because they're too lazy to get some images. Those used to work. Used to get hundreds of thousands of votes on those. We used to do that ourselves. But now it's evolved into the image polls. You now need to put the effort in and put some images on there and you'll get the same amount of vote. It's worth it for an extra three, 5 minutes of finding some images. So we've been doing things like, you know, which do have disc edition, digital dision. They'll get like 70,000 vote, 60,000 vote. Then we've even got some that are in excess of, like, 140,000 votes, 40,000 vote. And these month these were quite not relevant though because they were more about sports because we were just figuring out whether they did sports or gym stuff. You can see a great little way just sort of ask questions within your audience, 140,000 vote. Do you have an Nintendo switch? So this gave us some information as to whether we should do Nintendo switch videos or not, and it was like, Okay, 60% of them don't have a switch, so maybe we don't need to do videos on the switch. We then did two videos on an Nintendo switch, and they're both underperformed, which was obvious because they don't have an intendo switch. So that backed up that that data was correct that was coming through on the community tab. You just leverage this communities having a very clever way to dictate which direction you're going to take certain video projects in because you can just get such a huge response and a huge amount of votes for such a minimal effort and work, even figure out what platforms you might expand on to next, we were looking at wanting to do more live streaming, and we personally thought Twitch was on a decline and the new kick platform was looking quite sexy. So we just asked, you, would you rather watch live stream on kick or Twitch? 50,000 people voted. And still, to our surprise, it was 80 20, and Twitch was still quite dominant in the votes. But then if we did this again, this was seven months ago. If I did this paul again, the results would be slightly different. I bet maybe 40% kick now. That way, we can assess it across a period of time, and go, Okay, the market is shifting. Let's go on kick, not waste our time with Amazon and Twitch and getting paid nothing on there. Same as well, Xbox game power play station plus, 150,000 vote. Just a really good way just to spark up a bit of conversation within the community and just keep things relevant, especially if you're not uploading too much at that current period of time, just so you keep popping up in their feeds and your videos keep getting recommended to them. Then finally, we've got the YouTube storm. Now, this is an area where you can connect your YouTube channel with your Shop of fi website. And all of your products on Shopify, whether they be digital or physical products, you can basically sell those over on your YouTube channel. Now at the current time, we've got one product on here, which is just a wallpaper pack, a little $5 digital product. It appears for all of our American viewers, but there's a glitch that doesn't mean it shows up for our UK viewers, because they haven't fully optimized it yet for digital products, but it is there and present for physical products On this YouTube shopping feature, basically, it allows you to have people see all of your products on a shelf within your videos, and they can basically check out directly within the YouTube app. You can be like, R, go check out this camera. You might be like a store that sells cameras. We've got this available on our site right now, and they can literally buy this directly within the YouTube app, and it just makes the customer experience way easier and better than sending them via a link. You can also track it much better, see how many impressions the storefront is getting, how many clicks the storefront is getting, and you can monetize it and monitor it, in fact, from there. This is a feature that we're going to be leveraging throughout this coming year, and we'll show you how you can get it set up and how you can use it. And of course, I'll update you throughout this course, how it goes and how it performs and what we've learned from using the YouTube shopping feature in more of a physical product base. But so far with just a digital product, it's yielded some pretty nice results. 8. Traffic Sources (PART 1): YouTube's got lots of different traffic sources that basically funnels traffic over to your videos. Now the main key ones that we're going to focus on right here are browse search, and some other ones, including suggested YouTube related features and external. Now, to your YouTube strategy, the two most important traffic sources you should focus on is brows and also search. I feel like these are the two that you have the most control over that you can try and funnel and get momentum onto them. Now, I'll break down what each of these traffic sources are, so you have a key understanding of them and the differences between them, and also the similarities between some of them as well. And then we'll focus on how we can target these two predominant ones. So first off, we'll start off with the most basic one, which is search. So this is the one that probably every single YouTube guru, you've watched until you've met me, has told you to focus on. And that's because unfortunately, most of these YouTube gurus have never built a viral YouTube channel, or they have built their YouTube channel during the era of YouTube when I was still at school, 2013, 2014, I was a 14-year-old kid mad. So they're preaching the same strategies that they used over ten years ago, a decade, over a decade ago, and they're still pushing them on YouTube today. And unfortunately, if you are a new YouTuber who is an absolute Nub, you know, you're a newbie. I was that guy as well, about three or four years ago, and I never used a camera, never knew how to make YouTube. You watch these channels because they're some of the biggest that give the advice, and you just listen to what they say like it's gospel because you have no idea. You're just naive to how the platform actually works. So you will be following literally all of their crappy strategies that they tell you about. Some of them have academies like, Well, I can't even remember what they called, but it's like the literally academies teaching you how to use YouTube search, and it's like their online course, and it's like some workshop. I can't remember what they called. It's probably best say what the cogs. Probably get bloody sued. But some of these channels literally have online programs all about YouTube search. So they funnel you over to YouTube Search because they've made online courses all about YouTube search years and years ago, and they can't be bothered re learning YouTube and making new courses. Like the course you're watching right now, this has literally taken me almost four, five months to film it produce and do this entire course, plus also the three, four years of learning YouTube prior to this moment right here. So, these people don't want to go out their way to make a new YouTube course to show you the new way to actually grow on YouTube. So they're telling you all about YouTube surge and then sending you on a sales funnel over to their website, where they're then selling you on their stupid little program that's going to do absolutely nothing than what you learned in that free video. So basically, YouTube search still has it a huge place within a YouTube strategy, but it's complimentary to browse. So obviously, you'll know what search is. Search is where you go onto YouTube, and you actively go to the search bar and type in exactly what you're looking for, you know, iPhone review, Xbox review. How do I fix a tire? How do I tie a tie? How do I reset a Macbook? How do I install Google Chrome? How do I remove a virus from my on my laptop or whatever. So you go and you actively find a problem, a solution to your problem. So mostly, search is used for two key things, buying decision, or fixing a tutorial, a fixed like an educational video. So a buying decision will usually be a buyers guide. What are the best cameras to buy in 2024? So if you've never bought a camera before, you'll watch three or four videos on YouTube and go, Okay, these are the popular ones at the moment. I'll go ahead and now I know a foundation of knowledge, I can just sort of find what I need to find from there. Another way is obviously tutorial things that you'll go on to just quickly, how do I do this in windows? How do I copy and paste this in Dvente resolve or Premiere Pro? Got it done, sorted. That's fine, forgetting views. You can get views through YouTube search. No problem at all. People will go on. Use the Little search bar, and then they'll find your channel. You right here. This is you and your channel. They'll find you and you've got your channel. So they're watching your video. The problem is with a YouTube search viewer is it's almost transactional the relationship. They're coming for a piece of information. Once they get that information, You don't exist anymore. It's as brutal as that. They figured out how to install that app on their phone. They've figured out how to fix that problem. They figured out which of the best ten cameras they should buy this year, so they're gonna go buy them now, and they no longer require you you're obsolete. So you can get views via YouTube search, but you can't get followers or subscribers in the same way because you're not building an attachment in any way whatsoever. They're just literally using and abusing you for a solution. So, that's one of the problems with search. Next up, let's talk about browse. Now, funnily enough, only I think it's 20% or 22% of views come from search. 22% on the entire platform on a daily basis, only about 20% views come from search. So where are the remaining 80% coming from? And that's browse. Literally browse and suggested they're sort of the same algorithm. That's where 80% of the views are on YouTube. So you've got growth guru that are telling you how to keyword, optimize a video, use tube buddy, use VDIQ. Use all these different tools and apps to optimize your video for search, when really, all the views are here. This is the gold mine over on the browse feature. 9. Keywords are Overhyped: L et's talk about why keywords are overhyped and actually bear zero impact on the overall performance of a YouTube video when you upload it onto the platform. Now, probably one of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to YouTube growth is that because Google own YouTube, YouTube is a massive search engine, and you should effectively treat it exactly the same as Google Search, because, yeah. Obviously, Google own YouTube, they want to prioritize YouTube, and you want you to use it in the same way. Yes, factually, Google own YouTube, that is correct, but they're also completely separate companies in terms of how a customer uses that app and also the desired outcome of why they're using that piece of software that Google makes. So it's foolish to treat them as if they're the same because they're not. The way somebody or rather, somebody goes to Google Search, and the outcome they want from Google Search is completely different than going and watching YouTube videos, which is predominantly used for entertainment and a TV replacement and leisure. Even when it comes to researching and hobbies and different stuff like that, it's leisure activities. Oh, I use YouTube for education. Probably leisure education, like a hobby that you're interested in arts, drawing, guitar how to play music, it's leisure. It's a hobby, whereas if you go to Google, you're usually doing serious stuff on there. You may be buying things, you may be bucking things, you may be organizing stuff for work, you may be researching stuff for an essay. The quality of information, you're vetting much higher than if you just watch a casual YouTube video. So when you take a step back out of that situation, and actually think about that phrase that somebody says, the consumer habits and the consumer purpose of each app are completely different. So that means that they are not the same. So when someone says, optimize your videos for YouTube search because it's just like Google Search. Can't be further from the truth, and let me explain why. So, back in 2016, there was something called the Apocalypse. Which was caused by a guy called Logan Paul, which you probably know. This guy is everywhere. What happened was Logan Paul made a video in 2016 in Japan that was inappropriate for the platform. It had content within there that shouldn't really be on the Internet. And the biggest issue was huge brands like Coca cola, your household names. You think of whatever you think of a massive brand. Their little ten, 15 seconds skippable ad was appearing before this inappropriate video that had been uploaded onto YouTube, which effectively caused a stock market crash with the YouTube ad sense. So this was the apocalypse. It caused every single advertiser to panic and pull their content and their ad spend off of the Google platform, which then meant the ad rate fell through the roof, so it went from being up here to boom. Absolutely killed the platform, and then it's taken years and years and years to recover. It sill ain't even really fully at its same height. So this was referred to as the ad apocalypse. And the reason why this happened was because Google didn't really have a full way of policing the content that was going onto their platform, and then we're still kind of figuring it out if we're really honest. So What they did was, after the apocalypse, they then introduced this AI feature that scans all of the content. So you uploaded YouTube video. It now has this cool Google AI that will scan everything that's in that video from the objects that you're holding from the ethnicity of the person, from the type of people in the video, from the hair color, the skin color, their eye color, their accent, their nationality. Even the objects. So, for example, in this video you're watching right here, it knows there's a guitar in the background. That's a base guitar. And it's so clever that it even knows exactly what type of brand object it is. So if you were holding a smartphone, it would know what brand smartphone that was, the particular model and year of that smartphone. Very, very clever. So all of this Google AI is working to scan the videos to ensure that there's nothing inappropriate within there that may get detected and flagged. So, for example, nudity, underage children that shouldn't be on the platform, and so on. Different things like that. You don't need to go into what's inappropriate on the Internet. Think you have a fair idea of what that is. So they introduced this AI feature in and around as a solution for the apocalypse to make the platform safer so they could tell advertisers, this won't happen again because we now know what's happening in every single YouTube video, and we don't need billions and billions of employees to watch every single second of content uploaded. Onto YouTube, the AI is going to do it. So they introduced the AI that scans all the content to the AIs doing all of the checking, basically. In combination with this, it also knows what you're saying in the video. It's scanning every single word. So it scans the visual content of the video, but now it also scans the audio, too. So it knows every single word that you say, which is why we have now got the auto generated captions on YouTube, where you can see the captions or Mat generate. You can even translate that into other languages because it knows every single word that the presenter is saying within the content, and all of that meta data that's generated by those tags and all of that scanning, then then influences Where that video gets placed on the platform. Is it safe? Yes. What's he talked about within this. He's talked about how to grow on YouTube. Okay. What else? Okay, is this age, the presenter this age? We'll present it to this type of person because they want that content, they're the perfect demographic for this. That's an 18-year-old person that wants to learn how to grow on YouTube or we'll show him this 24-year-old daughter team. It's very intelligent, how it's scanning everything, and also it knows everything that you've just said. So all of that data about what you've just said are your keywords, has nothing to do with what you put in your tags, what you put in your title, what you put in your description. That bears zero fruit on the outcome. Of the content. So, when somebody tells you SEO, keywords, But spend hours doing all of this and putting it in your description and your title and all these different areas on your tags. It's terrible advice that is just waste of time. It ain't even worth your time doing this degree of optimization on the video because you're not going to appear anywhere on search, really, if you spend hours on this or if you spend 5 minutes on this, because all other factors that I just explained are actually influencing the placement of that content. Let's continue with this point before I actually explain how to correctly use keywords and tags. What also influences how a video performs on YouTube or ranks in Search is authority of topic and also watch Time click Tre and so on. So first, let me talk about what I mean by authority of topic. So there's different tools like Cube buddy and VDIQ, that personally, I think are incredibly overrated. Because most people use them incorrectly. So again, most people tell you how to use vidIQ and up buddy in a way to get more views on YouTube, by adding keywords, optimizing new content stuff that we've just established doesn't make any difference to a video. There's some videos I make, and I've never put tags in it. I've done a two paragraph, sorry, two sentence description, and they've gone on and done half 1 million views, long format, as well. So these tools are used incorrectly, which result in them being overrated. But where you should use them is for market research. So if you have tools like Q buddy and VDIQ, you can look at keywords or search terms and gather an understanding for search velocity on stuff. So this will basically give you an idea of the overall market size of a particular topic, so you can then make an intelligent decision as to whether that video is worth making. You got a, average views on this are 3,000, not worth making. Oh, average views on this are 36,000 maybe worth making. I can maybe get that 80,000 if I structure the video in this way. So it's very good for researching and vetting whether a video is worth creating. But also it helps you understand what your authority is on a topic. So if we take my technology channel, for example, I predominantly do gaming technology, and I have huge authority on the keywords Xbox, in particular. So if I was to go ahead and make a video about X box, there is a high likelihood that we'll perform very, very well, and also rank in search, because my channel authority for topics of X box is very high. Was, if I suddenly decided I wanted to make video about a Samsung smartphone, that isn't going to rank anywhere really in search, because my authority on that keyword is drastically smaller than X box. So my channel authority on this keywords dictates whether I get placed higher in search, and this all is influenced by a few different factors. So your channel authority comes from, firstly, your channel size, but not always. But let's just, you know, say channel size is one of the factors because it is. So if you have somebody with 10,000 subscribers or somebody with 400,000 subscribers both made a video about Xbox, There's a higher likelihood chance that the person with 500,000 subscribers will be higher in search than the person with 10,000 subscribers. Because they have a larger content library. Let's just figuratively say, I think I've made 400 videos on the tech channel. So let's say I've made 400 videos, and 302 of those are all about X box, the rest of them are PC, playstation, et cetera. But let's just say 302 of those videos are X box. And then you have someone with 8,000 subscribers, 10,000 subscribers, that's only done, 46 videos. And only four of their videos are about X box. So, I have a larger authority on that keyword because of the legacy of content library and data on YouTube that shows my channel is associated with those search terms or those keywords. So this is why when you're a new YouTube and you get told or spend load of time on optimizing your videos, it doesn't make any difference because you have zero authority on those keywords and topics, so you have to spend the time building up a content library and going through a pain barrier, basically getting out the mud and just going for it and build up a degree of basically algorithm links between certain search terminologies and your channels or rather certain topics and your channels, so then you appear in the right places. Other things that bear impact on the ranking of a video is the CTR plus also the AVD. So the CTR is the click through rate of your thumbnail, and also the AVD is the average view duration of that content. YouTube's very strict on these metrics because, again, it's a way of them checking which content is good and which content is bad on a statistical level. So, click through rate is your thumbnail and title. So On YouTube, we've already talked about traffic sources, brows, home page, suggested, search, so on. Now, each traffic source has its own click through rate on a video. So when you have a video that goes live on the platform, and you just go in your basic analytics, and you look at how it's performing, and you click at engagement, I'll say, Oh, this video has a 5% click through rate and you'll go, Oh, Oh, that's sto great. That's the average click through rate across all traffic sources. So, for example, you might have a traffic source where the click through rate is 14%, usually YouTube search, but then the brows traffic source might be 3%. So that's bringing your average down to do rough math 6%. So then that means on your channel wide data when you go into that particular video on the simple analytics, it just says this video has got a 56.2% click through rate. So each algorithm on YouTube, Each traffic source is its own algorithm. So you've got the search, that's its on algorithm. You've got brows, that's its own algorithm. You've got suggested that its own algorithm shorts as its own algorithm. And depending on how your content is optimized, and the traffic source you've tried to target will dictate how it's treat in each algorithm. If you optimize a video for brows, it's more likely that it's going to have a higher click throu rate in browse and a lower click through rate in search. If you've optimized your video for search, it's likely going to have a higher click through rate in search, than it is in brows because of the way you've packaged that video and put it out into the world, and it's appealing to the different consumer habits. Again, somebody on YouTube search. The way they use the app is different than somebody that just gets served content on the brows and Home feed and never types anything in to the search buys, a different type of customer. So all of these traffic sources are independent algorithms, and the way that that content gets tret on those algorithms is slightly different depending on its metrics. So, for example, if it's got a 14% click through rate in YouTube search, it's going to rank very, very high in YouTube search, but if it did a 2% click through rate in brows, then YouTube's going to stop pushing it out in browser and just let it simmer away. So you might often see when you upload a new video, it flies. First 24 hours, then it slows up, and you go, what's going on there? And then eventually, it does this because that search. It's that slow and steady views coming in, the little turtle winning the race, whereas this was YouTube testing the content in the first 24 hours, and unfortunately, you lost. Someone had a better click through, someone had a better title, someone had a better whatever. And they won that allocation on brows. And you had to go for the slow growth instead. Same as well with the average vi duration. This comes hand in hand with the click through rate. So the AVD is the average vi duration or rather just the percentage of the video watched. So the higher this percentage, let's say 40% to 60%, depending on the length of the video, if it's a shorter video, like 4 minutes long, it needs to be 60%. But if it's a ten, 12 minute long video, 35, 40% decent, if this is decent, it's the median on YouTube, it does the job, that will also influence if the video ranks higher. So, for example, you might have a video that has 12% click through rate in search, and you think I've nailed it. But then the AVD is like 14.6% on your video. That ain't going anywhere. YouTube's not going to push that out because it goes, yes, the video is packaged bell. Yes, there's interest in this topic, but To the algorithm, you haven't made a piece of content that backs up that claim. Click bits, whatever. Usually, if YouTube sees a high click through rate in a low AVD, they think click bait. The video is lying. It's overpromising, and the creator hasn't delivered on that. Let's stop pushing it out. So you have to bear all of that in mind. If you have lots of videos a great click through, you think, why are we getting views? Go ahead into your analytics and look at the view percentage graph, and I can guarantee they're probably all under 15 maybe 20% at best. That is why. 10. Understanding Search: So, with all of that out the way, let's talk about keywords and where you should use them and spend your time. So firstly, you want to structure the title with keywords in them, but you do not want to overwhelm the title with keywords. This is where everybody goes wrong. They just cram it and cram it and cram it with loads of terminologies, thinking that's going to help it rang, but actually just confuses you two with where to place the video. So you want to target, let's say two main keywords within your title. So it's obvious what the topics about. So it might be, let's say 14 of the best. And then we're going to target two keywords here. New games, or it might be new. And then we'll put here Xbox games, and then of and then whatever year or on Xbox game pass. So with in a title like this, we have done two things We've titled, we've targeted new games. So that's a key word, new games. We've targeted best because a lot of time people type in what is the best. And we've also targeted Xbox or rather Xbox games. So that's also a key word. People will type in new Xbox games or the best Xbox games or Xbox games. Something as simple as that. But then also, if we were to have also added Xbox game pass, the ten of the 14 of the best new games on Xbox Game Pass, That is also another keyword. People always type in what to download on Xbox Game Pass, new releases on Xbox Game Pass. The upcoming games on XPox Game Pass. So in a simple title that isn't full of rubbish, we've tied in, let's say, three to four keywords, and they're all linking nicely. So from a human perspective, they can read the title easily without it being like, Whoa, what the heck's going on here, where again, people will be like, the best cameras you need to buy this year, and then they'll be like, Cannon, Sony, Pan boom four K, eight K camera, HDR camera. It's just full of stuff where I ain't clicking on This is still digestible for your customers, so it appeases brows and search. And then also, it has data for YouTube to leverage just nowhere to test it and place it on the platform. Next place, we want to use our keywords is in the description. This is another area where people waste too much time. They spend hours and hours and hours white writing out the perfect description. There's two ways to write a description. First is with chat GPT. Go ahead and go on chat GPT, whatever it's called, and you literally type in write me a description four and then boom the title of your YouTube video. It will then go ahead and spew out a huge paragraph, bullet points. We're going to talk about all of this. And then even it'll put useful links. It'll be like links. And then you can go ahead and fill out the links with your little affiliate links, whatever you want to put there. So that does the job for you. You can then read it and then tweak it and change it, add any different phrases that you want Job De. We do this on some of our channels because I just do not have time to sit there and write a description because I'm a busy boy. Second way, and this is what we do on the tech channel, because that's our most important channel. It's our main channel. I will, for the description, literally just write a paragraph. You're talking I don't know, like, four, five lines. So I'll go ahead with the description, and I'll just write a simple paragraph. Within this paragraph, we'll target keywords of prior successful videos. Then that way, the algorithm can sort of hypothetically link those videos within one another. So it might be, for example, we might go 14 of the best Xbox games. You need to play something like that. So we'll literally rewrite the video title again. So the first line of the description will be the video title repeated usually. Then we'll go ahead and put these will help you get the most out of, you know, and then we'll list other keywords we've targeted in the past. This will help you get the most out of X box features or the latest Xbox features. That dropped in the new X box update. So another keyword, new X box update. So two key words there. New X box. Pop are always trying to figure out if there's a new console being released, X box update, another thing they want to know about. And then it'll be like, these are some of the greatest games out right now. And then we'll put something like X box, everything you need to know. So we're literally just filling the description with a load of nonsense that makes sense if someone reads it, so it's not rubbish. Is, this is what the vide is about. But really, we're just using other successful video titles scattered in and around there. So all that meta date is actually linking it back to the or authority on a keyword I was just talking about. It's just linking it straight back to Oh, Xbox, everything you need to know, Xbox features, XBox shortcuts, Xbox tips and tricks, et cetera. So we're not focusing on keywords. We're just focusing on key topics that we've basically discussed in the past on the channel to just link all of the content. Another way a description is important is it's got nothing to do with YouTube, but sometimes this description does help with ranking on Google Search. Obviously, YouTube is owned by Google. Google is a search engine, YouTube, two degrees a search engine, as well. So if you have a half decent description that explains what's going on, that means your video might Rank on Google Search. If someone types in your Xbox new update or Xbox features or how to use this software. You might appear or how to fix this in Windows. You might appear on Google Search, and that will be an external traffic source, which is completely unrelated, and is just basically I would say look of the draw, most of the time. We have a loads of videos that Rank on Google. It just comes down to who had the best video, who had the best click rate on YouTube Search. Best of the best, really. I think it just takes an average of everything and then goes, Okay, y, and in his description he talked about this, boom, he ranks second or third on Google Search. It's a bit of a throw your hat at it. If it happens. I happens if it doesn't. Don't worry about it. Move on to the next one. Now, finally, let's talk about tags. This is probably the biggest overrated area of YouTube growth that I have ever been exposed to. So the tags are obviously the little fold at the bottom of your uploader, where you can go ahead and you can throw keywords in there that will help you get more views. This is nothing to do with that. The way I believe this is my theory, hypothetically, I think Google uses this as a way to dictate what ads are going to be played on your content. Think about this from a sensible perspective. You make your YouTube video. If you don't put any tags in the description rather in the tag area, the keywords area, the video performs exactly the same. I have loads of examples on our main channel of videos with hundreds of thousands of used long format videos that have no tags in the description. I've either forgot to put them there, or I just can't be bothered. Get it up, bang on to the next content. Those keywords, I don't think really influence how video ranks or appears, because we just copy and paste tags. A literally just there's a great feature on YouTube now where you can click reuse date details, and you can just re use prior tags from old videos, descriptions from old videos, playlists from old videos, titles from old videos. This just let us basically copy and paste tags across all our content. And we just use those same tags in all 3400500 videos. You use the same set of tags every single time. But the way I believe YouTube uses this tag is to dictate what ads are being played on your consent. If you've ever ran adverts inside of Google Ads Manager, you will know that you create your campaign, you create your viewer, and you then go ahead and you type in the keywords that you want to target. I want to target this word, this word, that word, this word, this word, and then this age group, this gender, this part of the world that lives in this postcode, that lives in all these places. Google, I believe, is using the tags information to basically decide which YouTube videos get linked up with which ads. The little five second ads, skippable ads, the clickable ads. It's just using all of that as data to go. Okay, this is a gaming channel. Their keywords are about Xbox, Playstation, PCs, how to build a computer. Let's put this video game ad on there because that's a relevant viewer. That's the only way I believe YouTube is using these. It's the only logical solution. Otherwise, they'd remove the feature because it doesn't really do anything on the performance. We've tested it. Lots of people have tested it. The only thing they're doing it is for categorizing content. Understanding where that content sits within the Google Ads platform. So then their customers on Google Ads can get those adverts placed on the right videos for the right viewer in the most efficient and simple way possible. That's the only reason why that box exists. So for that reason, I do fill it out to make sure that we're getting the right ad placements on our content, so our CPM is as high as possible, so the content is as profitable as possible. 11. Traffic Sources (PART 2): Next, let's talk about YouTube Browse as a traffic source and how you actually use this to your advantage. Now, Browse is a completely different approach to how you're going to create and optimize the content. You're going to optimize it for the human being that actually is on the other side of the screen. Let's call this Jeff. You're gonna make your videos for Jeff. Now, where everybody goes wrong is, they forget that the views on YouTube are real people. So I've pulled over 1 million views in one day on my channel, done a couple of times. It's very easy to sit there and go, Oh, Dad, I did 1 million views today. Views, 1 million views. And it's so easy to forget that those views are a reflection of human life. They are real humans. They're not just numbers on a screen in your YouTube's studio analytics. That could be 1 million people that just watched one video, or it could be 500,000 500,000 people that's watched two videos of yours today. Every single view has a human being behind that statistic. And every single human being has got interests, hobbies, emotions, things, problems, et cetera. All the huge list that goes on, with watch related to a physical human being. Now, all of these different psychological things play a factor into how they feel, into why they clicked on your video in particular, into why they watched your video, why they subscribed, why they didn't subscribe, why they disagreed, why they agreed, why they liked, why they disliked and why they also shared it with a friend. How did you make that person feel within that video. It's a transfer of energy. You're making the video, but it's a human watch ns. Not just views, and you have to keep that in mind that there's always a person there. There's always an expectation as to how you have to display yourself within your content. Now, we'll talk about in a future module exactly how you unlock all of this knowledge about your viewer, who they are, what they do, why they do certain things to do, why they react, how they do very huge information that's going to allow you to create a real content plan and also build the perfect audience for videos, but you're not quite ready for that. Yet, we're still understanding traffic sources. So we'll go on to that in a future module. But let's just take a look at brows and how we can leverage this to our advantage and how we can make videos for Jeff, not for the algorithm. Now, YouTube Browse is effectively the home page to just keep this simple. So when you log on to YouTube, the home page is full of content that you can choose from. And all of this content has been pushed out by YouTube. It's being pushed out by their algorithm, it's been picked up by their algorithm. It's ticked certain boxes to dictate why it's been placed where it's been placed versus YouTube search, where it's zero search result until somebody types a particular thing in and then it presents a curated list of content for that particular search term. This is all of the interests of that particular YouTube account from entertainment to music to arts to movies, to gaming, to woodwork whatever that person's interest in to political news, everything on that home page. Now, the way that you appear on this home page is you have to be YouTube's best friend. Every single tech company has an ESG score. They have particular scoring criteria that they have to tick boxes on. I've got to tick these boxes in order to, you know, I don't need to explain it, but if you know you know. So you as a content creator, you have to think, how can I tick as many boxes as possible for the platform that I'm on to ensure that I get pushed out over somebody else? The way that you do this is obviously by being clever about how you position yourself within content and also the things you do and also don't say within that content to ensure that you are loved by YouTube, by that platform, whatever it may be. Now, as a test of this, 'cause you somebody you might be figured, this guy's a bit of a theorist. He's talking rubbish here. Go ahead. If you have a smart TV and you've never used a YouTube app. Go ahead and boot up the YouTube app on your telly. It will present you with a brand new account, where you don't sign in. It'll just present you with a blanketed account where you don't have an e mail address, and you've never watched a video on the Teel, it has zero data. What you'll notice is just browse around the home page. Browse around the home page of a Smart TV YouTube app, and just look at what craters they're appearing. Just look and make a list. That person appeared, that person appeared, that person appeared, and then think, why? Why did that person appear? Okay. What similarities do they have between another crater? Yeah. Okay. And you'll see a pa. I review 15, 20 TVs in a year. We have TVs coming and going every month. TV TV TV, TV TV. I always go straight to the YouTube AAP to do a screen test, and I never log into my account because at no point because the Teel is going to be sent back or sold or whatever. So I just boot it up and just do a quick test. So that means I have spotted this pattern across 15, 20 different teles every single year over the last three, four years, coming into the studio. And booting up YouTube and seeing the exact same creators appearing on that home page. The exact same ones, without any reason, because they're not going on. You always watches this creator, this guy. It's a brand new telly. It's a brand new account. He hasn't got a YouTube e mail address linked to it. It's just a blank slate. That will give you a huge indication as to which creators are in the special ticket boxes of the YouTube algorithm. It's not a conspiracy theory. It's not creating. It's just analyzing data. Do it. You'll know exactly what I mean. You'll boot it up and go, Oh, it's that creator, that creator, that person's there, they're always there. That person is always there. And then you'll understand why they have 15 million, 20 million subscribers. It's because they are in that top percentile of creators in that favorited percentile of creators that always gets placed on the home page regardless of who's looking. So, you have to use this to your advantage and just play your position in the field. We can't compete with that as a tiny channel. Even me with half million subscribers don't get any preferential treatment on the algorithm. Maybe one day, if I had five, 10 million subscribers, but to get to that point, with all of the things that you're going to understand at this course, is very, very difficult because of all the factors that are against you in order to grow like that, without the assistance of the algorithm. So on brows, we have to just make sure we make the videos as clean as possible for exactly what YouTube won. We optimize them for the human being, so we'll do titles like I bought the coolest, the craziest, the most expensive, the cheapest, 27 of the greatest, you didn't know this about this. I bet you've never seen this instead of being like ten Xbox accessories you need to buy. That video might still get 23 million views, but it'll take three years if that videos get 23 million views versus a year to get 23 million views if we do something outlandish and crazy with a degree of spectacle to it. Now, if there's a degree of spic spp Spectacle. The scope that word. To your content. You need to deliver that with a great thumbnail and title, but also with a great piece of content to back that up. So when it comes to brows, you need to change your workflow. Most people make the video first, they go ahead and shoot the video. They shoot it, then go ahead and edit it, edit it up, and then they upload it to YouTube, then want it on YouTube before they click published, they'll then make their thumbnail, then they'll add their title and keywords, and then they'll click publish. That is the standard workflow of a YouTuber. Problem with this is, you've made a great piece of work, then you might struggle to come with a thumbnail that's clickable. So you just wasted, two, three days, maybe even a week making that piece of content, and it flatlines. Instead, when you're making content for browse, because on browse, you're relying on YouTube to push it out. With search, you can bring in slow and steady traffic over time, and your expectations are lower for the content. But with brows, you are relying on YouTube to push it out, push it out, push it out, and push it out. So you need to ensure that it's packaged in a way that maximizes and widens that net of potential eyeballs as much as possible. So, this time with browse, you're gonna change your workflow And we're going to make the thumbnail first plus a title that goes with it. And there's a website called thumbs up dot TV that let you preview a thumbnail and also a title on YouTube. And then that gives you a good idea of what look like, or whether it's a viable idea or not. This is huge because It doesn't make sense. I think, Well, I'm gonna thumbnails on videos that might not go live. It saved you from hours and hours and hours of making content that wasn't going to do the views anyways. Because you'll stims make a thumbnail and title and then you'll look at it objectively, and you'll go, Yeah, that's not clickable. Someone's not gonna click on that. Let's not make that video. Or you might make it four months later because you've learned more about thumbnails and then made the right thumbnail for that idea, so you increased the likelihood of a piece of content performing very well. And you also bin ideas off faster without sinking time into producing it. Go, Okay, y, that's not gonna work, like I thought in my head, not the best. As you become more of a season pro. I've made hundreds and hundreds of videos now. I don't always do this work f because in my head, I instantly know what the thumbnail is gonna be. I'll go. A, we're gonna make a video on this? Tubail' is gonna look like that. I can visualize the thumbnail in my head. Boom. We'll film it get it out the way done, because my filming schedules so tight. I've got to go here here there just film film film film film film. Okay, we'll do the thumbnails now. But back in the day when I more precision and also understanding the platform, I had time to do this and bin off thumbnails. Was. Now, I just know. I can be like, Yeah, that's gonna be thumbnail. That'll look great actually in head and then I can go ahead, film the video, do the thumbnail. But that comes with experience a master of the trade. So that's the first thing you need to change when it comes to browse is your workflow. This will then allow you to create very interesting titles that over promised to the viewer. I bought the coolest the craziest, the most crazy little titles. If you've never seen this, I bet you didn't know this about this stuff that people have curiosity and think, Wow. Okay, let's click on it. But because you've done the title of um nel first, you can then create a piece of content that delivers on that promise because you've retrofitted the workflow. You've not made the video first and then click baited to try and get views on it. You've done the click bait first and then figured out a way to ensure it isn't click bait and actually deliver value on that promise, so the customer and the viewer feels a degree of satisfaction after watching the content, something they very rarely get from all of the other YouTube channels that they watch. 12. YouTube Shorts Boost with Links: I promised, I did say I would show you a cool way that you can cross promote content now with YouTube shorts. Now, back in the day, I was always doing this. I was using a YouTube short to promote a video that had underperformed, because I knew the YouTube shot would go viral. Because the beautiful thing about a YouTube short is it removes all the variables that stop a piece of content from popping off. So if you make a beautiful long format video that's edited to perfection, the storyline, the pacings, everything's brilliant. But you screw up the title, you screw up the thumbnail. You maybe didn't quite optimize the video to the best sort of extent that you could have. I didn't put the YouTube chap in, whatever. Can underperform and you could have wasted like a month producing that piece of content, or because you essentially messed up the click through rate on it and the title, whereas with a short, it only judges a piece of content based off of how good the piece of content is because of the swipe rate. Doesn't matter what the title is, doesn't matter what tags you put in it. Doesn't matter what the thumbnail is because it just auto picks it anyways, and stupid, no clicks on the content. I just comes up in the feed. All YouTube cares about is the swipe away rate. So if the piece of content is brilliant, will go viral on a YouTube short. So it's a brilliant way of making content as a beginner and understanding actually what works without wasting and exerting too much time and effort on formats that have too many variables of failure. So as you can see right here, all these YouTube shorts have hideous thumbnails because you can't pick them. I just. YouTube does its thing. But what you'll notice is basically back in the day, I used to upload a YouTube short cross promote a long format that I think could have performed a bit better to sometimes reignite a little bit of energy into it. And in that way, YouTube would know a little bit better what audience to push it to because they're going, Okay, a lot of 18-year-old lads are watching this content. Well maybe push it out to more of those because it's had 4,000 views in the last couple of hours. So we used to just basically make a YouTube short, and I would link over into the description. So you would click and watch the video and I'd say, check out the full video. Link down below, then you would go here, and it would be like the top link in description. Unfortunately, YouTube recently removed the ability of adding links into your content, which now defies the purpose of any affiliate marketing, which we'll talk about later on in the course. So you now can't share any links to products that you want to sell on Amazon. You can't even link to other YouTube videos or other YouTube channels within the description. Or in the comment section. And they did this for safety of digit. The truth is, they did this because they want a UT used YouTube shopping feature where they both make commission off of every transaction, and also it keeps everything in the app, and also there's some other influencers that have got online academies that, you know, were going viral at the time that they didn't like people signing up to that person's academy. Ways, so we don't get canceled talking about that topic anymore. Let's talk about the new way that you can at least cross promote long format content. So you can maybe make some viral shorts to promote an Amazon product and then get them to go over to the long format that will show them a little bit more detail about said product where you can share links. So here's a prime example. We bought the most expensive Xbox controller on Amazon. Video did pretty well. We followed the same recipe of one that I did. I bought the most expensive playstation controller that I did earlier in the year that did like two, 3 million views. Just followed the same recipe, literally the same script. Xbox controller. And now you can link over to a related video here, which is quite a nice little customer journe. You can just click right there, and it'll take you over to the long format where then you can share all of the relevant links in the description. You can throw the links down here to all of the different products, different websites, df YouTubes you were collaborating with, or whatever later on in this course, I'll show you clever ways how you can leverage this feature for funneling traffic over to special promotions, landing pages, to sell proper products, not just to a generic long format video, with secret private videos that nobody sees on your channel. So that was a simple overview of how you can use shorts and long format on your YouTube channel to basically grow it, but also a little brief introduction into how you can also leverage YouTube live for that additional piece of content just to build a little bit more personability with the viewer, chill out with them for a longer period of time, talk to them, answer the questions and stuff like that. Of course, at the relevant stage in this class, I will show you how to build out a complete content strategy that leverages all of these core pillars of content together for the maximum impact, then also how you can leverage the store feature to ship and sell products to basically maximize the amount of revenue that you can make at the end of the day, because you obviously want to go ahead and be making some ambighini money from all of this effort and all of these views. 13. The Perfect Strategy: So, with all of that knowledge about traffic sources, let's now focus on what would be the perfect YouTube strategy. Now, I feel like there's a hybrid strategy required here when it comes to specifically your long format content. Now, with technology in particular, we have to ensure that we have views come through the door in the most fastest and efficient way possible because of the shelf life of the consent. Some people seem to live in this false mindset that every single video they make on YouTube builds up to a huge content library of evergreen content, and it's a legacy. This just isn't true for probably 95% of content creators, because of the category of videos that they're making videos on the topics. So, for example, if I make a video about an Xbox controller and I go to the coolest Xbox controller in the world, check it out. When I'm 60-years-old, no one's going to be watching that video. It's expired. It's gone. It's gone. I made no impact on the world or an maybe who pulled 1 million views making that video great, whatever. Whereas, if I make a video about how to play the guitar or how to guitar solo and play the pentatonic positions and do all this type of stuff. If I film it in four K, eight K, edit it to an absolute beautiful level lighting on its perfection, when I'm 60-years-old, the fundamentals of how to play the guitar won't have changed unless we're in the metaphors of something crazy. But how to play the guitar, just like 100 odd years ago is exactly the same as it is right now. That video and the information taught within that video. Doesn't expire. So, when I am 60-years-old, that video is still relevant. I might not be on YouTube, but the video file on my laptop or whatever hard drive I have then, if we back it up correctly. Could be somewhere, so 20 odd year old Ben could teach you the guitar. So this is the biggest biggest like lie. The growth Guru just tell you, they sit there. Ding these live streams, and they'll be like, guys. Every video you want video away from success could be the next video changes life. Lie. Every single video is evergreen, and it builds up a content library. Big and bigger content library. Big and more and more views lie. So, with all of these things, you need to understand what content falls into which type of category. Are you making content that expires after six months, 12 month, 24 months, e, e, 36 months, or are you making videos that someone can watch when you're 60-years-old? That is then going to dictate how you package your YouTube strategy, but then also just your strategy of content, because YouTube's, the vehicle you're using right now to grow, get attention and eyeballs on the Internet, but it won't be in ten years. But the videos you make right now could be used in ten years on whatever that platform might be if you're making the right videos. So, with all that I said, with my technology channel, Because the content expires. That means we have to maximize it self life before it goes out a date and needs to put in the bin. So that video on the Xbox controller needs to pull 1 million views within six months, 12 months, 18 months at a push before no one cares about it anymore. Same as well with the tips and tricks video on the Xbox. It needs a maximum amount of eyeballs in eight months before the next update comes out, and no one wants to watch that video anymore. So, you have to optimize those videos for browse and widen the market and the about people who could click on it by titling it in a certain way. Ten of the craziest Xbox features, you've never seen. Wider market than going. The new Xbox update, everything you need to know, widen the market. The most this will make your X box faster. If you change this right now, widens the market, pulls 1 million views in 12 months. We've made a decent amount of money off that. We've made a decent amount of impact off that. We've grown the channel from subscribers off that. That piece of content has achieved what it needs to do. Now it's expired. Go make another video. Whereas with the guitar, I might be like, right, How to play the pentatonic positions in, five pentatonic positions in the easiest way possible. Really boring title. It might only do 1,000 views in the first month or something ridiculous. But in 56 years time you might sit think, Oh, wow, that video has got 400,000 views. And it just keeps timering and Simarin and Cimarin, but you've done, in that meantime, 400 videos about guitar, pentatonic, da da da da. So you've got 46, seven, 800 videos, all doing a couple hundred views, couple hundred views, couple hundred views. So that builds out into a huge compounding asset of a content library, and that's achieved via YouTube search because the content never expires. So you do just keep adding to that content library to that content library to that content library, where's when you're using YouTube browse, and you got this expiration date to content. It's incredibly difficult to build any form of momentum on the algorithm. Now, I do believe there's some form of algorithm caps on YouTube. Cause what will happen is with long format, you'll upload a video, and go bang, and then it'll go and then you views the next day will be like that. And then you'll go again, and then and then you'll upload, and then it slows another video down. And then you never seen to exceed a baseline, let's just say about 25,000 to 30,000 views a day. No matter what you do, you could upload three videos a week, video a day, one video a week. We've even done one video a month, and our analytics have looked exactly the same. We've tried everything on the tech channel, where it'll just be that. And then you might have a good couple of days because it supply demand. You know it's Christmas or something, and then y, y, Okay, all over the place. Ridiculous. And I believe that's because There's algorithm caps and there's allocations on the algorithm. If you go on YouTube home page, only so many slots on the home page. There's billions of billions of videos that YouTube has to serve onto that home page. So each creator will get an allocation on that home page. 23% of your views come from there. Okay, today, we'll give you 44% allocation on here. I think there's a degree of allocation algorithm caps on where your videos appear, how long they appear there for, and then YouTube go, Okay, yeah, that's getting switched off now because he's exceeded his algorithm cap. We see this also with YouTube shorts at the moment. As soon as a YouTube shorts hitting 10,000 views, I'm not even kidding. It'll hit 10,000 views, and then it'll go from like 3,000 views an hour or 5,000 views an hour to 100. That'll be the graph, and then it'll And then if it's good enough, I either watch attention, the swipe rate, the engagement, YouTube, I've got no choice of push that out cause it's better than everybody else's. So the algorithm makes a choice at this point to go. Okay, well, I have to pick his video 'cause it's better than all the other crap on this topic. And I've got screenshots. I'll put them up on the screen that shows all their algorithm caps in real time. So there's algorithm caps for multiple reasons not to make the platform fair, so everyone's got a chance on the home page. It's to make sure no one makes too much money. Think about this. If everybody got the views they deserved on YouTube, everyone will be a millionaire. It's true. There's billions of people using the app. There's millions of views available on your videos. 1 million views is around five pound to 8,000 pounds depending on what Nitin on average. I've got videos that may more than that. If every video did 1 million views like it should, and all 500,000 my subscribers actually seen my video and I uploaded it. Well, job done, wouldn't it? Everything would be great. But with algorithm caps, it means they complete the platform to a degree of earnings, which means you still make decent money, but, you know, you may be on 100 k, you know, whatever on your ad sense. And that's that. And it's up to you on top of that with your products, your buildout, your digital products, your sponsorships, the things you do to leverage your status online to unlock further income. Cause otherwise, every single YouTube would be a millionaire. There's too many millionaires. There's too much power, and Google might get replaced and dethroned. So, with all of this in mind, you have to not get angry at the algorithm and just play your position on the algorithm. So you need a dual strategy. So let's say right now, probably 60% of the views are coming from Browers on our channel. And we could do more views. And we need to do more views. We need more consistency to those views because of what I've just explained here with this going all over the place from YouTube turning the tap on and off on your content when and when they like. So this means in order for us to stabilize views, we have to increase our search traffic. So we'd have a brows strategy where we might do viral videos that have high audience engagement potential. And then we make our slow and steady things like tips and tricks videos, best games to play videos, stuff that will pull decent views, but over eight month period versus an eight week period. And that will be search. The perfect strategy is using both of these in combination to the maximum capability, because what I most commonly see is this, someone will have a massive brows strategy, and then a tiny amount of search traffic, or the opposite. They'll have a tiny amount of brows traffic and massive search. So they've got extra bandwidth on the algorithm that they've been allocated by YouTube here within their algorithm cap that they're just not using. So it's just getting it to a point where you have maximized your algorithm cap on all traffic sources to the best ability. And then that means you're pulling very good views, Incomes great, growth great, your sponsorships rate great, your product sales are great so you're a happy chappy. And then from there, if you can, Consistently pull out for a period of time, you'll enter another algorithm cap. It'll just happen over time where he's bedded in so nicely here. You'll enter the next pitch. Oh, oh, we get a little bit more allocation here because you're building out, you're building out the audience, build out the audience. It's compounding over time, because that's the biggest thing. The videos that you make aren't the compounding asset. They expire, but the audience that you build, if built correctly, is the compounding asset that will help you beat these ulterior forces that are capping your videos. The caps that we see across these are just not just my channels, but channels that my friends own that also have hundreds of thousand subscribers, millions of subscribers. I know a lot of your tubers. Once you get to a certain level of a YouTuber, you meet loads of other tubers. This was a big thing when I had, like, 40, 50,000 subscribers. I live in the countryside, middle of Nowhere, and I thought, H I go to meet other creators? This is impossible. And then as soon as I hit like 200,000 subscribers, boom, like, job done. You go to events, you meet a couple of them. Then they go, Oh, come to this. I'm in London. Oh, bo bo bo, boom. The next thing you know, you know, like 50 YouTubers. And four or five of them are you really really closive. I know the influences on TikTok Instagram models, you know, I mean, it's good stuff. So that's what happens, so I wouldn't get too stressed about that. But what we commonly see is an algorithm cap of long format views, around 25,000 to 35,000 a day. That's what we've seen on a lot of channel. Some of my friends upload two videos a day. Two videos a day. They do news. Two videos a day. And the data as soon as they hit 35,000, boo cap. So this then means you can pull on average. Let's say 1.2 is the great is the classic cap to around 2 million views. Long format. On a normal channel that doesn't have preferential treatment. You're pulling one to 2 million views. Now, it's an incredible amount of views. Both from YouTube ad sens. Great. 1015 K depend on your actual topics of videos, and maybe five or six on the lower side, if you've got a bad ad ray. But if you're pulling 2 million long play views, sponsorship ad slots, and also the products you could sell off the back end, if you have the right audience that you'll talk about throughout this course, I believe, at some point, then that's fine. Cap my videos or you like YouTube. That is perfectly fine. It's if you don't have a substantial business behind you, where this becomes a problem, because you can never, you know, you've got the editor costs. You've got production costs, you've got the stdio, got the cameras bas this is too much stress. So if you build the channel correctly, which is why you're watching a course like this, to make sure you don't make any mistakes like other YouTubes do think they know best, you will be fine with that. You'll think 2 million views App App, happy because as well, in order for you to pay for 2 million views, if you were on Google Ads, it'd be tens of thousands, if not more of pounds. So to get that for free for just making great content, and then you leverage those eyeballs efficiently perfectly fine. But the only way to beat this algorithm cap is with the dual strategy. And that is where you leverage brows to get those fast views, to get, let's say the 1.2 million views, and then you get capped, your videos get shut off. Boom. You get no more push out here. That's it. And then you see those patterns in the data, you know, you know, that type of stuff. The only way to combat this is to introduce search, to go ahead and you introduce that search strategy, and you may be unlocking additional 800,000 views from search. If not more, depending on how much content you're uploading, how you're structuring and packaging that content, it's all up to you to outwork the algorithm in this position. There's been times where I have worked my socks off and done four videos a week, structure in all different ways, just to get data for courses like this. And I'm pretty sure I explain later on in the course in one of the future modules, all of these caps in real time with data. But I have worked my socks off to a point where I've then found a balanced point where I'm going to right, a, It's now unprofitable for me to push for that e any more than I have. We'll settle with it here, allocate my time to other activities, other tasks, other ways we can leverage me as an asset as a presenter. So you've come to a point where you've become too hyper obsessed with it and you okay, this is as far as we can take it realistically, right now. Let's focus on this, come back to it in 12 months, but leave it not like abandon it, but leave it doing its current strategy, because you can get too consumed with the strategies. So just follow follow what I'm saying here is a guideline, because I am probably one of the most obsessed guys over all of these things, looking at my analytics and figuring out solutions. So that's your solution there. You leverage browse the best of your ability, then start making searchable content to support browse to expand out those views and increase those views in a more slow and steady predictable manner, and making even searchable content in less competitive niches or less competitive topics, where you're not going to get replaced on the algim. 14. YouTube Growth: Finding Purpose To Your Content and Making a Positive Impact!: That you've completed the first main module within my YouTube romp to success. The next class that you want to watch is creating content with a purpose. This is going to break down how to create a content calendar, how to be consistent on YouTube, have a bit of a workflow, but also understand which videos you should and shouldn't create, so you don't fundamentally waste time. That's one of the most important resources you have got. You don't want to waste it, you want to use it to its maximum ability so you can create impact within your goals and pursuits. Get to check out the class project. It's very beneficial at this stage, just to make a little one page document, little A four piece of paper about what your goals are for you two. What are your targets? What do you actually want to make? Because even if this changes throughout this entire course that you watch, it's very good to look back on, because once you have all of the knowledge, you'll be able to see maybe why that initial plan wasn't going to work, or whether there's still certain elements of it that you can take and apply to your final troupe strategy that you will get once you've watched all of the ten, 15 different modules that this class has actually got. So worth doing that, just write down your goals, your ambitions, how many monthly reviews you want to get. What types of videos do you want to make? What styles? Don't want to be lifestyle, you want to be logged. Do they want to be very real life. Do they want to be high production? Just different stuff like that, get it mapped out like an idea map of all of the different things going on in your head, very crative. I do these loads. All the time you've now got huge whiteboard in the studio. We just write stuff down, figuring out different products so we can make du. Half the stuff doesn't even come into fruition because we eventually realize it doesn't work. But it gets it out the head, clears out the system, and then eventually you'll start coming up with the banging ideas. So do that, and then that way you can look back on it throughout this course, as you gather more and more relevant knowledge as to whether that is realistic or usable in any way whatsoever. I'll see you in the next class where we're going to understand how to create content with a purpose.