YouTube Secrets

Who do you want to inspire, encourage, educate, or help with your products and services? Who are the people you want to entertain? (Location 216)

Figure that out and keep those people front and center. This will help you get over yourself. (Location 217)

His confidence comes from the sheer repetition of creating content. Despite this, he still has days where’s he anxious about how people will respond to a video. On those days, remembering his “why” helps him punch fear in the face and keep pressing forward. (Location 233)

If you’re struggling to find an identity or purpose for your YouTube channel, we recommend building it at the intersection of your passion, your proficiency, and your profit. (Location 297)

That being said, passion alone is not enough. You also need proficiency. John Kohler, a gardening YouTuber with almost half a million followers, is not only passionate about gardening—composting, organizing beds, juicing, and eating salads—but he has also developed his expertise on the subject over time. He has studied and learned all about it. Gardening is his life’s work. He combines that passion and proficiency with a means to profit on YouTube, and he’s thriving. John’s YouTube channel is not about making money directly. Instead, he creates YouTube content to boost the buying audience for his juicing company. (Location 303)

Are they female, male, or both? How old are they? We recommend picking a range within five years of your own age. What types of jobs or professions do they have? What are their passions? What are the top three websites they visit? What are the top three Twitter, Instagram, and/or Facebook pages they follow? Who are the top three influencers they might watch on YouTube? What is their social circumstance? Married, single, kids, no kids, family, etc. What is their yearly income range? What products or services might they spend their discretionary income on? (Books, digital products, hobby expenses, etc.) (Location 353)

Sometimes, people get too “me” focused on their “About” page. They write something like, ‘This channel is about me. It’s about my thoughts, and I think you should subscribe.’ We don’t recommend that kind of language. Use the word “you” more, so it reads something like this: “You can expect videos, encouragement, live streams, light-hearted videos, and entertainment.” You can also connect an email account here, so businesses, brands, and other people can get in touch with you for collaborations. You never know what kind of opportunities will come your way as you build your influence on YouTube. (Location 460)

The best content creators do all of the above. A popular term on YouTube is “edutainment,” and it refers to content that combines education and entertainment. Those who do it well are experiencing massive success. The best content creators inform, inspire, educate, entertain, and build community all at once. (Location 508)

We encourage you to spend time watching content from other successful YouTubers in your niche and writing down ideas. What do you like about their content? What do you not like about it? What ideas could you potentially apply to your own content? Also, it can be helpful to watch videos outside of your niche. Some of the best ideas come from unrelated subject matter. (Location 530)

Power Tip: Engagement with your audience through comments is huge for working the YouTube algorithm. The more comments and conversations the algorithm sees on your video, the more relevant the video will appear to be. This will help it rank higher in search results. (Location 591)

Many of the top YouTubers have created a community name for their fans. The largest YouTuber, PewDiePie, creates gaming videos and calls his fans “bros.” The family vlogging channel SacconeJolys calls their viewers “friendliest friends.” We call our community “influencers.” Personal brands like Gary Vaynerchuk and Jake Paul call their audience “Vayniacs” and “Jake Paulers,” respectively. Creating a community name allows fans and superfans to affiliate, self-declare, and self-align with their community and tribe. (Location 602)

We interviewed Jerry from the tech channel Barnacules Nerdgasm, a YouTuber with over 900,000 subscribers. He told us, ‘Don’t get discouraged if things happen slowly. It took me four years to get my first 10,000 subscribers, but it only took me two years to get the next 700,000.’ (Location 897)

The three most important aspects of video SEO for YouTube are your title, your description, and the tags you add to your video. Get these right, and your videos will start climbing the ranks. (Location 1120)

Motivational speaker Jim Rohn famously said, “We are the average of the five people we spend the most time with.” (Location 1467)

Years ago, JP Sears started a self-help “talking head” channel, and he worked at it for almost two years. He only received a couple thousand video views per upload, so he sought our advice for what to do to accelerate his channel. Instead of telling him to stray from his current path, we advised him to keep it up, because that niche was an underserved part of YouTube. JP is actually a very funny person, but he didn’t think that aspect of his personality fit into his channel. However, he decided to embrace his own uniqueness. Shortly thereafter, Ultra Spiritual JP was born. The character covered the same types of content he’d already created, but he did it in a comedic way. The difference in audience reception was night and day. Viewers loved the new character. The change in delivery allowed him to expand his audience, and his channel grew from a few thousand views per upload to hundreds of millions of views across both YouTube and Facebook. (Location 1528)