Table of Contents
When you decide to start growing your YouTube channel, you have to go through 4 phases. Building leverage, optimisation, gaining traction, and expansion. In that order! There are many strategies to follow, and this is one that you can try – let’s break them down.
Phase 1: Building Leverage
The first phase is all about creating a plan that won’t fail. You need to let go of everything you know about YouTube and start to learn new things on your own to leverage your growth. This will take approx. 3-4 weeks to do, and this is the phase to sit and soak in everything that you can. If you skip this part, you will have to keep going back and therefore why you should spend more time here.
Week 1: Get clear on your content strategy
Week 2: Study your competitors and observe the platform
Week 3: Get video ideas through SEO – Content Research
Week 1: In the first week you need to define your unique perspective and your audience. Your niche is your “unique perspective” but if you don’t have one then is also fine. Sit and think about what makes you unique. What do you know a lot of things on or always educating yourself about that you are interested in? Instead of focusing on a specific topic, you can use your identity as a niche. If you’re a student, you can be talking about day-to-day student life giving tips about that!
Define your audience which is very important. Instead of becoming a master of the algorithm, become a master of your audience. Don’t think about YouTube, think about the people you are trying to target and what sort of videos they like, what sort of thumbnails they would click on, and what are they looking up now. If you can understand your audience inside and out, the algorithm will follow.
Week 2: Study your competitors and just be an observer of the platform. If you want to be a YouTube creator, it helps to observe rather than consume. Take a look at what videos are on your homepage. What do the titles say? What are the thumbnails? What videos make you want to click on them? What videos make you want to scroll past? Start paying attention to those things.
Take a look at competitors and study what they’re doing – what are they doing and what aren’t they doing. Look at recent accounts that are working well, not accounts that’s been up for years with millions of followers because those accounts grew their following with a strategy years ago that won’t work now. Find profiles whose profiles are working now and then create yours off of that.
- Look at their popular videos
- Look at the “viral videos” – out of the 12 they have recently uploaded, which one is their best one?
All of these should give you topic ideas and video ideas.
Week 3: Now build your video ideas through SEO and content research. If you’re starting from 0, the best thing to do is to build traction by making videos easily discoverable for your target audience. In the beginning, as your channel is new, these will be the videos that will get people’s attention and are search friendly if you’re using SEO keywords but don’t use it forever – just to build momentum.
There are websites you can pay to find popular SEO keywords, or you can use Google Keyword Ideas to generate words. It depends on how much you want to invest in your channel.
Phase 2: Optimisation
If you film and post with no strategy, then it will take longer. Rapid success comes with taking it slow and doing your diligence first. Optimisation is all about implementing everything you’ve learned from phase 1.
Week 4: Title and Thumbnail research. Now you have done your content research, you need to craft the perfect title and brainstorm thumbnails before you even film. This helps create a seamless story for the audience.
Week 5: Outline/Scripting your first 3-4 videos. Create 3-4 videos before you start posting so you are consistent with your content and you know you have something going up.
Week 6: Filming and Editing. There should be 4 sections of your video when you’re filming and that is the Hook, Intro (optional – 2 sentences – don’t make it long), Body & CTA’s, and finally, an Outro.
If you’re starting out, just use your phone to film and edit. It’s okay and it gets you used to the action of filming. Phones are also better quality nowadays than professional cameras so don’t be afraid to experiment with your phone. There are many free editing apps you can use to edit and some you can invest in too like Adobe Premier Pro.
Phase 3: Gaining Traction
Week 7: Posting and scheduling content. Post once a week as it is a realistic consistency that you can try and keep up with. So, think about what is something you know that you can stick to for 90 days when it comes to posting on YouTube. After 90 days, evaluate your posting strategy and tweak it if you need to. Focus on the keywords that you found when you were researching your SEO and plug them into your video in the description and in the time stamps so it’s search friendly on Google search results.
Think about what keywords your audience is going to type in and use them everywhere you can – even say it in the video! Voice optimisation is the future – you heard it here first.
Week 8: Repeat and study Analytics. If you want to repeat everything then do that from the SEO research to here! Once you have approximately 10 videos up on your channel, then start studying the analytics. See what is working and what you need to improve or adapt. Don’t discount your videos completely, as they could still go viral, so keep them up there. Adapt your findings into your future YouTube Content Strategy.
Phase 4: Expansion
If we had to break this down into weeks, it would be:
Week 9: Shorts and repurposing content. If you started creating long-form content, in week 9, you will start looking into how to create engaging shorts from your long-form content. You can then repurpose that short-form content onto other social media channels. Work smarter, not harder!
Week 10: Monetisation. How do you want to make money from it?
Week 11: Hiring out/expanding a team. As your channel evolves, you might need some help and that’s fine as you’re investing in yourself and your channel. Find out what task takes the longest and where you might need help (editing), and maximise your time somewhere else, like film.
Week 12: Check in with yourself! Don’t forget about you – we are all human and we all need a break sometimes so make sure you have wind-down time and don’t overwhelm yourself with everything.
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