In my career, I haven’t spent a huge amount of time on YouTube and I’ve been hesitant to chase the channel as I thought it may be a difficult place to find customers. This changed drastically two years ago in late in 2019, as one of my companies chose to tackle this as a new marketing channel and we learned how to rapidly grow our YouTube channel.

In our first 90 days we netted:

 •  241,333 views on the platform 
 •  3266 new subscribers
 •  14,333 hours of content has been consumer

Since that time we have: 

 •  Acquired 1 M+ views on the platform 
 •  42,202 hours of content has been consumed
 •  And a total of 17,590 subscribers 

We’re now seeing a growth of roughly 50+ new subscribers per day since has started I wanted to share with you the tactics of how we’re using this channel and how we’re getting the results we have now. 

0.1 Create Great Content

I don’t need to say this but for the most part, you shouldn’t be on any platform if you’re not creating great content, to begin with, which I’ll cover in a later guide. Now back to YouTube. 

1. Create a Compelling Video Thumbnail

Let’s start with the obvious. It has to look good to get clicked.

Have you ever created a Facebook ad or Instagram post that popped? It got tons of click-throughs, engagement, and even drove sales? Well, the chances are it would make for a great YouTube thumbnail.

Take a look at the difference between these two clips:

One has a great thumbnail the other does not and the view count between is a pretty clear indicator. Make a great thumbnail to get started. 

2. Update the Date

On our original video, notice how it was uploaded in 2019, but it says 2020 on the video title and thumbnail. The Aaron Smith content will always be relevant so we’re able to keep it around for a long time. Instead of reshooting this, we edited the title, thumbnail, and description. Now it’s ranking for the word 2020 and passing to be more relevant. We’ve done the same again now to reflect the changes in 2021.

By doing this, you’re not having to repeat the same content year on year and only film once. We’re in the process of going through all of our old videos and updating the dates for this to match the new year. 

3. Get People to Subscribe on the Video

Did you know you can have a watermark on your video? You can put your company logo on it, then when people click it – it asks them to subscribe. The problem? Who would want to click your company logo? Instead of uploading your company logo as a watermark, use a YouTube subscribe image.

To upload the watermark, go to your Creator Studio, click channel, then select Branding. 

This is a rookie error that we’ve missed on a lot of our videos but it’s something you can do that will earn you new subscribers time and time again. 

4. How to Optimize & Create Content Around Search Terms

In the example below, notice that our recently uploaded video of our interview with South African centre Jesse Kriel we placed his name as the very first word of the search term. 

The reason we did this is that we did a deep dive into the keyword research (this is what people use to search YouTube with) and found that we had a fair chance of ranking for that search term, this simply means showing up as the first result in YouTube. When the podcast first aired we were on the fourth page of results and today we’re now on the first.

The tool I use to achieve this is called Keywords Everywhere. 

This tool is a free Chrome Extension and allows you to see how many people are searching for your content on YouTube.

You can see here the metrics for the keyword search “goal kicking rugby”:

 •  Volume: Searches per month (210/mo)
 •  CPC: This a term that means how much someone is willing to pay to bid on that search term 
 •  Competition: This is a scale from 0.01 – 1.00 and the higher the number it means the harder it will be to rank for the search term

With this tool in mind target keywords around rugby that we know: 

a) Have low competition 

b) Have low-quality content produced or are not optimised to have rankings 

c) We can create good content around 

d) Has over 100 searchers per month

That way we can usually rank at the top of the list and reap the benefits of long term views on our content.

5. Optimize Your Headline and Description

This one is simple.

You get a search boost (SEO for those who want to dive into this further) from adding the keywords to the beginning of the title. Find your favourite keywords you want to rank for – then put them there.

We wanted to rank for the keyword search “Aaron Smith” in YouTube. So as you can see at the front of our title: 

Next are your video descriptions. The more optimized your description, the higher you’ll rank. To optimize your video, include keywords in the first 25 words, make the description at least 250 words, and include your keywords 2-4 times. As a result, this search-optimized description helps tell Google and YouTube what your video is about making them more likely to rank you better.

Lastly, include timestamps (i.e. “9:27  Hand Placement When Receiving A Pass”) to guide the viewer and increase audience retention.

It’s as easy as typing in the numbers and YouTube will automatically link the sections for you.

6. Ask Your Current Fans to Subscribe

There are two ways to do this:

#1: In your video, when you’ve given a lot of value to the audience, simply ask them “Hey, if you’ve received a lot of value from this video, please hit subscribe.” You’d be surprised at how many people will do this in return.

#2: The second one is to send out your channel link to your current fan base whether through email, Messenger, or social media. 

Except don’t use the regular channel URL. Instead, add a ?sub_confirmation=1 to the end so it looks like this:

Now when people click through, they’ll see the pop-up to Subscribe.

This is an easy way to transfer your audience from other platforms to YouTube. This wee trick netted us nearly 900 new subscribers in a day from simply sending to our existing databases. 

With these tools and tricks added to your arsenal, you can create a compelling YouTube strategy that converts people who are in your target audience to loyal followers of your brand and begin to monetise their attention from there.