Introduction
Here, we will explore how to build a powerful YouTube content strategy to boost your channel. In this guide, we will talk about defying goals for your channel, adopting strategies to achieve those objectives, and optimizing your channel to reach more people. We will also suggest some of the best tools available out there to help you with your YouTube journey.
TikTok vs YouTube is the newest war on the internet. Influencers of each platform are scorching those of the other. Yet, YouTube remains the number one video-sharing platform in the world, with 1.7 billion unique monthly visitors.
And what’s more important is that YouTube’s users are loyal and always come back! 62% of users access YouTube daily and on average spend 20 minutes on the platform. That’s a pretty ample chunk of time to be hanging out on a platform!
When compared to YouTube, TikTok is more of a do-it-yourself (DIY) video-sharing medium. Users are encouraged to give their creativity a boost and create short and fun videos. And after a tiring day, it’s nice to watch those videos.
But unlike TikTok, users watch more lengthy videos on YouTube. YouTube is perfect for entertainment, but it’s not limited to that. If you are looking for an influencer to give you a valuable piece of advice on gaming or makeup, per se, YouTube is a place to go. YouTube influencers are not creating only fun content, but they share valuable information, experiences, and competency.
Whether you are after entertainment or to be educated, YouTube has it all!
When it comes to social media marketing, video content is being incorporated into almost every modern marketing strategy. This has become especially prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic when brands increased their interest in partnering up with influencers
YouTube has the longest watch time out of all social media platforms. It means that influencers have more time to deliver their message to the audience. So, unless you are advertising a soundtrack that has huge potential and your target audience is teenagers, YouTube is still the more reliable platform! And it will stay like that in the near future!
Whether you’re looking to create a video for your audience or to promote your brand, YouTube has plenty of opportunities to achieve your goals.
That being said, you do have to develop a strategy for your YouTube content. But before you start creating the strategy, you should first determine what those goals are!
Successful YouTube influencers have some things in common. For instance, they have defined goals and have effective content strategies in place. In addition, they consistently follow that strategy.
In this section, we will discuss how to set measurable and achievable objectives. Lastly, we will speak about how to measure your success on YouTube.
As we already mentioned, any strategy should start by identifying the objectives that you want to achieve. Those goals may include increasing channel awareness, defining a target audience, growing it, promoting a product trial… etc.
Pick a long-term goal and then work back as to how you might get there.
When determining your goal, consider the following aspects:
To monetize your channel and start earning, you need at least 1,000 subscribers. So, the clearest goal you need to set is definitely to reach 1k subscribers as soon as possible. In addition to that, you will need to have 4,000 watch hours over 1 year.
So, the number of subscribers and interesting content is the key! But, how can we increase that number?
Well, Three elements determine the growth of the average YouTube channel: 1) the loyal audience, 2) channel consistency, and 3) quality of content/content strategy.
Who is your audience? Who do you create content for?
You don’t only want to boost traffic, you want to build an audience; to reach a specific group of people. While the difference between these groups/audiences may seem modest, it actually is the defining variable in your content strategy!
Look what they are searching for, for instance! There are many online tools that will assist you to find out the questions your target audience is asking. YouTube’s search suggestion section, for instance, is one of them.
If you’ve just started and are wondering how to grow your YouTube channel, we recommend you study successful YouTube influencers in your niche.
Strive to build channel consistency. Don’t kill yourself over going viral every time you post.
Start slow. Understand who are the people that watch you? Why do they come back? How do they react to your content? What do they expect you to do next?... Ponder upon these questions more than once!
If you manage to create an active community, you will get better results on each new video. That’s because the audience will be tuning in ready to watch your content and engage actively.
When it comes to content strategy, consistency largely determines its success. With that in mind, you might be asking yourself: “How often should I post on YouTube?”
Well, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to that question. But as we mentioned in our blog post about the best time to post on YouTube: these are -roughly- the golden times:
You can also Navigate to: YouTube Studio>Analytics>Audience. Then look for the report titled "When your viewers are on YouTube." This will give you insights into when are your audience most active on YouTube. Post around two hours ahead of the time when your audience is most active.
However, when we talk about content strategy, we should mention that strategy is one thing, and implementation is another. And compelling implementation, especially in the long run, requires a lot of endeavors. So, to avoid burning out, we recommend prioritizing quality over quantity when it comes to frequency.
In this section, we will talk about techniques and tips on how to create and grow your YouTube channel. Although there are plenty of good YouTube management companies, you can totally make and grow your channel yourself. To help you with that will start with the top reasons why channels fail and talk about ways to prevent that. Then, we will explore a detailed guide on how to make a content strategy and how to boost your videos.
But first, have you ever wondered…
To understand how to create a successful YouTube channel, we should know why many YouTubers fail. As once said:
“learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.”
As of 2022, there are more than 51 million YouTube channels out there. Over 84% of YouTube channels have less than 1000 subscribers. And only 3.4% of all YouTube channels have more than 10,000 subscribers.
Many people think that YouTubers fail because the platform is overcrowded. As you can see, the majority of YouTube channels are not huge, so why do many channels fail?
Now that we have discussed the major reasons why YouTube channels fail, let’s discuss how to create a powerful YouTube content strategy.
Elements of a solid YouTube content strategy are posting time, posting frequency, analytics, promotion, optimization (SEO for YouTube), and collaboration.
Let’s discuss each of those aspects in detail:
All social media and video-sharing platforms have their own content life cycle. For Instagram, it is the first 30 minutes after posting. For YouTube, it is 24 hours.
But what does that mean?
Based on engagement during that period of time, the algorithm will further define whether to promote the video to your followers and more audience, or not! Thus, you should carefully consider when to post your video.
Imagine you post At 3 A.M when the vast majority of your followers is asleep… Because the algorithm does not understand awake or sleep hours, it will assume your videos aren’t worthy of attention and exposure.
In other words, even if your video is not getting views because everybody’s asleep, the algorithm will still consider that the video is not worth sharing.
If you correctly researched your audience according to the aforementioned technique, you will know the period they are most active. With that in mind, you can schedule your post to go live around the period where you know they are available to watch it.
After Google, YouTube is the largest search engine in the world. People search for products, advice, and information on YouTube; just like they do on Google.
And to reach these people, you need to optimize your videos for YouTube SEO. The latter involves optimizing your channel through creating playlists, metadata, descriptions, engaging videos… etc.
SEO for YouTube starts from basics: You should include keywords in video titles, meta descriptions, and tags. But SEO for Youtube does not stop there!
Since search engine bots are not able to watch videos, they rely on accompanying text data to index them properly. A critical component of a YouTube SEO strategy is harnessing the power of your video’s text in the form of transcripts, closed captions, and subtitles, which can positively impact user experience, engagement, watch time, viewership, and SEO.
But don’t forget to optimize your videos for search both within and outside of YouTube! We suggest using Mysocial’s SmartLink feature.
The SmartLink feature is super helpful for influencers with multiple social media accounts. For instance, if you have both Instagram and YouTube accounts, you would probably want to send traffic from one platform to another. With usual links, it does not get great results because the app (Instagram for instance) opens the link within itself. You end up in the in-app browser where you can’t comment or like anything.
With SmartLinks, you can create deep links that will open your social media pages right inside of the linked-to app. More engagement, higher follower conversion, and more traffic are to be expected!
Going back to YouTube SEO, below are some great YouTube SEO tools:
These are two tools that we can wholeheartedly recommend, but there are many more (good ones) out there! To review others and get in-depth information about YouTube SEO, we recommend you check Mysocial’s Ultimate Guide for YouTube SEO.
When working on content strategy, think about how you can promote your videos. Self-promotion only leads to desired results if you are strategic about it. This promotion can grant your post the boost it needs to attract acceptance from the algorithm.
When your videos go live, use all other social media networks you have to promote them. Take your time and share the link with active groups on WhatsUp or Facebook groups.
We will talk about promotion strategies in more detail later, so keep reading!
Collaboration with other influencers is yet another must-have brick in your YouTube growth strategy!
Growing your channel doesn’t have to be a race against everyone else in your niche. You can partner up with other creators as long as the cooperation is mutually beneficial.
Collaboration with other influencers is a great way to reach more people and grow your audience. Plus, through collaborations, you will be able to harvest fresh ideas and diversify your content.
Yet, for a collaboration to be successful, it needs to organically make sense. Reach out to like-minded content creators who you love to watch and find a creative way to do a video together, that you share on each other's channels. Audiences can get excited to meet a new guest on a familiar platform, and then become new fans.
Yes, collaborations are awesome! But here comes the question: how can you find a perfect influencer to collaborate with?
Using Mysocial’s Matchmaking feature, you can discover, chat and collaborate with other like-minded influencers at ease. This is an innovative tool, much like Tinder, but for influencers only.
With the help of Mysocial’s Matchmaking, you can easily meet other influencers around the world to help one another reach new audiences. In other words, the feature will easily grow your audience and influence on YouTube!
Now that we have covered all important aspects of the YouTube content strategy, it’s time to talk about making content.
What’s the point of optimizing YouTube videos for SEO, maybe creating a great thumbnail, and complying to all YouTube’s guidelines… if the content is actually unengaging!?
According to the audience, a YouTube content creator's jobs certainly involve satisfying their expectations and engaging them. They don’t care how much effort you put in from your end. The final product, is what they care to see.
So, in a competitive arena such as YouTube’s, this is how you stay relevant:
As of 2022, there are more than 51 million YouTube channels out there. Chances are that no matter what your niche is, there are already many successful content creators putting out videos for the same potential audience.
Be prepared that you will be competing for the hearts and minds of the viewers against the already established influencers.
To do that, provide viewers with something unique that they can only get from you. Everyone has a voice, but they’re not the same! You should find your voice on YouTube as well! Your identity!
It can be anything from your unique experience and points of views, to the depth of the research you are willing to make on a given subject.
You have 15 seconds to grab viewers’ attention on YouTube. Viewers spend a very brief time deciding if they want to continue watching a video or not. Thus, if you want to make your video appealing to viewers, a compelling introduction is a must-have.
On top of that, YouTube only counts clicks as views if the person watched more than 30 seconds of your clip! That's in order to prevent bots from artificially boosting views number.
Accordingly, you not only have to persuade people to watch your video, you also have to keep them there for at least half a minute (actually for more).
And to brand your YouTube Channel, you can start all your videos with a nice animated title sequence, for instance. Don’t forget to add a nice logo and memorable music to the sequence!
After the powerful title sequence, create an introduction that will instantly hook your viewers. Start with a bewitching story, an intriguing fact, a breaking news story, or a controversial viewpoint.
You can ask a very intriguing question at the beginning and promise that you will give the answer at the end of the video. Just make sure you’d be able to fulfill the promise & deliver the expected goods.
As we have already discussed, sparking curiosity is one of the best ways to hook people to watch your videos. But how can you do that?
Curiosity is one of the strongest human incentives. It is the brain’s lust! And to spark on-demand curiosity we recommend leveraging the information gap theory of curiosity.
The theory, in a nutshell, claims that: if a person understands that there is a gap between what they know and what they want to know, they are urged to take action.
But how can you use that notion for your benefit? Well, in many ways!
For instance, you can try to evoke curiosity in your viewers’ minds by using a simple, yet thought-provoking headline “Influencer Marketing is Back.”
This title will trifle a lot of questions in your viewers, like “ influencer marketing was gone?” or “What does it look like now?” Increased curiosity and urge to understand what is going on with influencer marketing, per se, will probably result in people watching the video.
Now that we have discussed useful tips on how to create engaging content on YouTube, it is time to speak about ways of boosting it. If you want to harness the platform’s potential, learning how to promote your channel is a must. And that’s how you do it:
Let’s assume you’ve made it and started getting your first thousands of views. How can you leverage that to get even more and more views? In other words, how to leverage the existing data about our viewers to get even more and more views?
In fact, how can we even get those insights?
Well, there’s no better place to gather actionable insights than your YouTube Analytics itself.
Want to know which of your videos are binge-worthy? Curious where the bulk of your viewers are coming from? YouTube Analytics has all the answers!
But while YouTube’s native analytics platform is a treasure trove of data, its depth can be overwhelming and time-consuming.
Luckily, you can use Mysocial’s Mediakit. It’s an amazing analytics tool to help you grow your channel and get easy-to-grasp insights about your videos. What’s great about this feature is that it updates your data daily to ensure that you get the latest analytics.
All you need to do is choose a video you want to get analytics and you will have a repost in a blink of an eye. Once you create the report, you can easily share it with potential sponsors and other influencers.
A great YouTube channel starts with great SEO. We have already discussed some basic principles of YouTube channel optimization. But in this section, we will speak about more specific aspects, like keywords.
Great SEO starts with understanding what people are looking for (user intent). But one problem with keywords on YouTube is that they are super competitive. This means that if your channel is new, it will be difficult to rank above bigger channels.
What can we do about that? The simplest answer to that question is that you should try to optimize your videos around new, trending keywords.
There are some very useful tools to help you with identifying fresh and popular keywords. The Ultimate Guide for YouTube SEO (again) includes all the information you will need to determine which tools to use.
The YouTube Community Tab is an underestimated place to promote your upcoming videos. All you need to do is come up with an engaging post that explains WHY people should look forward to your video.
Effective usage of smart links can help you boost your engagement to bolster your status on YouTube or any other platform you desire. In fact, SmartLinks can significantly increase your YouTube ad revenue and engagement from external traffic by 800%! Simply because when you promote your videos using SmartLinks, your followers end up directly in the YouTube App where ads can be displayed & they can like & comment easily.
The good news is, Mysocial has a feature to generate SmartLinks. The later generates DeepLinks to help your YouTube channel from all other social media and platforms with one link! In addition, this feature makes the task of cross-promotion much easier for you and your audience, as it always takes them to the necessary page you want them to go to!
Starting a YouTube channel in 2022 is a difficult decision to make. People worry about not succeeding, receiving negative feedback, burning out, and many other things.
Having a compelling content strategy is great! But, there are some things you can’t put in writing. So, let’s discuss some extra tips for aspiring YouTube influencers.
The number one fear about getting started on YouTube is always the same: "I'm worried about negative comments and feedback”.
And, it is a very natural anxiety to have.
But there will always be people who are not satisfied. And your job isn’t to please everyone… You don’t even like everyone, as they say! In other words, you will always have people writing negative comments or even showing hatred. The right thing to do is to focus on the positive side and nourish it with more satisfying content.
Even PewDiePie has haters! So, let them hate, and keep growing!
Bear in mind that YouTube is a social media channel, and therefore social interaction is a must. If you’re just posting videos without encouraging comments and discussion, you’re missing a huge opportunity.
YouTube prioritizes channels with powerful engagement, including overall time spent on the channel, watch time, likes and dislikes, and most importantly, comments. So, dedicate time and energy to answer every comment you receive, and encourage people to interact even more.
This is especially important when you are just starting!
PRo-Tip: You can also take the time to visit other channels and engage. It could be a brand similar to your own or simply one you admire.
Don’t always wait for the audience to take the initiative either. Post questions or comments that can drive engagement by asking questions relevant to the content or even just asking what content they like to see on your channel or would like to see more of.
After reading this, you may be wondering: How do you make a poll on YouTube? It’s super easy! First, go to YouTube Creator Studio and open video details. Then, Click on the Cards tab and go to the place in the timeline where you expect the audience to drop off. Add a poll and fill out questions and answers to the poll. Finally, click Create Card and you are ready to go!
A MediaKit is like your influencer’s resume. It includes in-depth insights about your audience’s demographics and engagement and many other insights.
Usually, a MediaKit is a PDF file that has to be updated manually every single time you want to use it. You certainly don’t want to keep on updating, re-updating, and then re-updating the re-updated file…
Luckily, MySocial has got your back!
MMysocial’s Mediakit feature is an auto-updating media kit for influencers. It includes the latest statistics about your videos on YouTube, your channel as a whole, and also all your pages on other social media accounts!
Having an easy-to-share report about your YouTube insights, including engagement rate, watch time, the number of views… etc, is crucial to landing brand deals and collaborations on YouTube.
In a nutshell, brands and influencers select partners based on data! That’s why a MediaKit is a must-have feature for everybody who wants to boost their channel.
For better or worse, gone are the days of just being able to point a camera phone at yourself and generate a YouTube following. While sometimes random videos go viral on YouTube, the overall production quality often determines the success of the content.
This means that viewers now have certain anticipation of quality that cannot be neglected for long. Just remember how many times you have started a YouTube video and stopped after a few seconds because of bad sound or low-quality resolution.
Even the lowest effort/low budget YouTubers who find success, upgrade their quality eventually. No matter what type of video you are making, video production is key. Even if you’re creating a video that mostly uses footage that you haven’t shot yourself, such as from a video game, movie, etc, you will need to have a grasp on how to edit both the visual and audio components of your video.
Here comes the most interesting part! You have worked hard, created a powerful content strategy, and planned your videos carefully. Doing so will ensure you’d succeed in attracting a worthy deal of views and engagement. It’s now the time to learn how to transform your hard work and effort into financial gain.
Let’s have a look at a step-by-step guide on how to monetize your YouTube channel.
Joining YouTube’s Partner Program (YPP) is the first step you should take to monetize your YouTube channel.
Simply put, the program allows creators to monetize their content with automated advertisements. The concept is pretty basic: you join the Youtube partner programs and earn ad revenue through ads that show before, during, or after your videos.
There are a few restrictions on who can join the program:
If you are going to earn money from your videos, YouTube needs a way to pay you. And That’s Google Adsense. Setting up the account is quite simple. Creating an AdSense account and linking it to your channel is a crucial step toward getting paid on YouTube. You can follow YouTube’s guidelines for AdSense Accounts.
If your content is in line with YouTube’s advertiser-friendly content guidelines, you can turn on ads. But that does not mean that ads will appear automatically. Your video will go through a standard check process including automated or human reviews to see if it meets YouTube’s guidelines.
The merchandise shelf allows some creators to showcase their official branded merchandise on YouTube.
As a YouTube influencer, you must attract a large enough number of subscribers before you can expect to make any real money with this strategy. But you can begin small & gradually build-up to the level where you’re making a consistent income from your merch sales.
YouTube has a detailed guide on how to use the Merchandise Shelf. Feel free to check it!
When it comes to marketing, brands gleam with excitement at the opportunity to partner up with YouTube influencers. Especially when appealing to a younger audience. And, there are good reasons behind it!
Yet, brands carefully select influencers to partner with. Truth is, discovering good collaboration opportunities is not always easy. Luckily, there are features that make things easier. Let’s take Mysocial’s BrandOutreach feature.
The biggest problem with securing partnerships with brands is that communicating with them can be a tricky task. You can try and send DMs on Instagram, but chances are you won’t get a response quickly (if you get any). Mysocial App is the most convenient way to connect with brands. There, you have access to 3,000+ sponsors that you can contact with the touch of a button!
All you need to do is open Mysocial’s app and go to the sponsors' section. You will see recommended brands, their content, and the contact details of dedicated marketing specialists.
There are many ways for earning money on YouTube and it’s up to you to decide which strategy works for you the best!
So, what are you waiting for? Download the best social media manager and keep it in your pocket now:
These are several key aspects that you need to know to create a successful YouTube channel. Use these tips to set up your channel, optimize it to get your videos ranked, and gain more subscribers.
These are especially helpful if you are new to YouTube and are starting fresh. These will help you make a great start and set you up for success.
Reading this guide is a perfect entry point to start your YouTube journey – so what are you waiting for?
