DERR AL EVES

THE
FORMULA
OF
YOUTUBE
KNOW THE ALGORITHM AND GET VIEWS BUILD AN AUDIENCE
AND INCREASE YOUR INCOME
 Praise for The YouTube Formula
“Only one or two other people in the entire world understand YouTube to the level
that Derral does. I have one of the three most viewed channels on YouTube and I still
talk about YouTube data and strategy with Derral because no one is on the same
wavelength as him. Whether you have 5 subscribers or 5 million, you can learn how
to be successful on YouTube by reading Derral's book.”
—Jimmy Donaldson,
MrBeast

“Study it. . . understand it . . . dream it . . . “Derral Eves has just written the bible of
success on YouTube.”
—Jordi van den Bussche,
Kwebbelkop

Derral has the rare experience of being successful on YouTube as a creator,

marketer, advertiser, and entrepreneur. This book teaches you how to
understand YouTube from the big picture to the important details .
—Chad Wild Clay and Vy Qwaint,
Cocreators of Spy Ninjas

““When you talk about the 'brains behind the throne' among top YouTube stars,
you're talking about Derral Eves. His unique understanding of the inner workings of
YouTube, along with an insatiable appetite for discovering why certain videos work
and others languish, have put him at the forefront of online video experts. Derral
understands not only WHAT you need to do to create a larger audience, but also WHY
you need to do it. Whether you're looking to build a big business on YouTube or
simply build a community of passionate fans, this book includes more than you could
get from months of expensive consulting and painstaking trial and error. Find out
why so many top YouTubers call Derral a friend and confidant by purchasing this
book right now, and you'll be taking the first step toward making all your YouTube
dreams come true!
—Jim Louderback,
GM VidCon

“Derral Eves has a super power on YouTube. You can spend five minutes looking at a
YouTube channel's analytics and come up with a handful of actionable suggestions.
Not just helpful tips, but algorithmic game changers. The fingerprints of Derral’s
strategic brain are on most of my biggest hits.”
—Jeffrey Harmon,
Cofounder at Harmon Brothers and VidAngel ““Derral is the preeminent expert
authority on video marketing in the modern era of digital and social platforms. He
has consulted with top YouTube creators and platforms and created his own content
channels generating millions of followers. “The YouTube Formula is a must-read for
anyone interested in gaining prominence or simply learning about YouTube content
creation, the mystery algorithm, or optimizing audience growth.”
—Ricky Ray Butler,
CEO BEN Group

“Derral has been analyzing the YouTube algorithm longer than anyone I know.
Whether you're just starting out or looking to reach ten million subscribers, Derral's
book contains specific ideas that can help you do much better than you would on
your own.”
—Mark Rober,
NASA Engineer turned YouTube Creator
DERRAL EVES
THE

FORMULA OF

YOUTUBE
HOW ANYONE CAN UNLOCK
THE ALGORITHM TO GET VIEWS,
BUILD AN AUDIENCE, AND INCREASE
INCOME

WILEY
 To my wife Carolyn:
No goal or achievement would mean anything without you to me.
side.
You are my Everything . . . for eternity!
 PREFACE

Everyone should have a YouTube channel. Literally everyone,

but especially brands. When I see brands that don't have a presence
on YouTube, I think they're crazy.
It is incomprehensible that someone is not taking advantage of
the opportunity there. It's the most coveted job in America, and with
good reason. It is literally a gold mine.

When I was a kid I watched YouTube all the time, it was

always my dream job. I didn't want to be an astronaut or a doctor; I
couldn't imagine a world where I wasn't a YouTuber. I started my
channel in 2012 and only got 40 subscribers in my first year.

I now have one of the fastest growing channels in the world. I

gained over 15 million subscribers in 2019 alone with just over 4
billion video views. And it continues to grow every day.
If you're just starting out on YouTube, don't expect to attract
any kind of audience in your first year. If this is not something you
can accept, don't start. But if you can, then you need to do this: make
100 videos.
It doesn't matter what they are because they will be terrible, but
do something you love doing. Your first 10 videos will most likely
be garbage. Then do 10 more. These will also be garbage, as will the
next 10. But without a doubt, things will begin to improve.

You will improve little by little. The best way to improve your
content is to create content and find out along the way what people
like.
If you follow my advice, you'll notice something with your
101st video. It will be in a completely different league than your first
video. You'll still be a long way from good content, but it will be
better than your first video.

It took me hundreds of videos over several years before I got

good at this. I had been making YouTube videos for two years and I
still wasn't making good quality videos, even though I thought they
were good at the time. I was like so many creators: I thought the
algorithm hated me because I wasn't getting subscribers or views.

But in reality, my content wasn't good enough.

In fact, my videos were horrible, as are most videos uploaded
daily to YouTube.
Most YouTubers have their priorities backwards.
In their first hundred videos, they spend all their time thinking
about the algorithm when really they should be thinking about how
to make better content for the viewer.

There are very few cases of YouTubers who go from

entertaining no one to entertaining millions in a single day. It's very
hard work and slow, progressive work, and it should be.
Because if you had millions of viewers overnight, you wouldn't
know how to handle them.
Every video you upload is your competitor, so you should keep
working hard to keep your content relevant and competitive.

Every time viewers enter YouTube, they have to choose which

video to watch and they will choose the best video without thinking
twice. Make your video the best.

If you watch videos from your channel from six months ago and
literally don't feel like throwing up because you think you're so
much better at creating content now, you're doing it wrong.
 I can't stand watching my videos from six months ago because
I'm much better at creating content now.
I can see how bad my old videos are. They could have been so
much better! It depresses me to even think about those videos.

There is a huge opportunity on YouTube for brands. If all

brands knew what I know, they could get a hundred times more
viewers than on television for the same cost.

They should give creators like me their advertising budget to

make YouTube videos about their brand.
I will give you an example. If I were Coca-Cola, I could build a
pyramid of a million Coca-Cola cans. Or you could make a video
called "I filled my friend's house with a million cans of Coca-Cola."
Both are great ideas that would get a ton of views if done right.
(This mention has been free, Coca Cola, next time you can pay me).

Videos like these could generate millions and millions of views

with much more return than those created for television, and it
would be much cheaper.
And seriously, who really watches commercials on television
these days? Everyone picks up their phones during commercials.

If brands want to gain real visibility, they must get off

television.
What do you think people, especially those under 30, do when
ads start appearing on TV?
They take out their phones and stop paying attention! They
don't see the ads!
Their attention has moved to Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Tik
Tok.
Tweets increase during TV commercials. And people don't put
their phones down until the commercials end and their show or
sporting event comes back on.
 I pay more attention to my content each week than I do at the
Super Bowl. And I have a personal connection with my viewers who
have gained trust in me.
This value of audience trust is worth much more than a celebrity
or athlete's appearance in a television commercial.
Brands shell out more than $5 million for 30 seconds packed
with other ads during the Super Bowl.
With YouTubers like me, you could get 10-15 minutes of
focused attention on your brand for a lot less money.

You can then get viewers to watch more videos and

interact with your brand in other ways if you're really smart about it.
It's a no-brainer. Brands are literally crazy if they don't take
advantage of the opportunity on YouTube.

On the other hand, business executives believe they

know more than the YouTuber, especially if the YouTuber is very
young. They want to control their integration, giving YouTubers a
list of talking points to read verbatim with a call to action at the end.
While this works to a point, brands would convert
exponentially more and gain greater awareness and exposure for
their brand if they allowed YouTubers to simply be themselves,
without scripts and punchlines.

A smart brand should say: “Here's this money, do what you

normally do to connect with your viewers. The same thing you've
done in literally hundreds of videos with hundreds of millions of
views. Do what you think would work best to get our brand talked
about or our product sold. We trust you."

Brands that give creative license to YouTubers and allow them

to speak naturally as they normally would with their audience get
more brand exposure and ROI than they could get any other way,
guaranteed.

And they should stop focusing on visualizations and pay more

attention to what kind of impression they left. Will they remember
you once they see the video?
Let me give you an example of the power of a YouTuber.
I created an app called Finger On the App. I announced on my
Instagram, Twitter, and SnapChat that everyone who downloaded
and put their “finger on the app” at any given time would have a
chance to win $25,000.

All you had to do was be the last person left with their finger
still on the app.

The app was only available on iPhones and only in the United
States. Even with these limitations, I had 1.5 million people install
the app.

I hadn't even promoted it on my YouTube channel, which at the

time had over 37 million subscribers. Guess how many facilities
they have?
Only 300,000 the first day.
Finger On the App was inherently cool, so people started
talking about it.
Naturally it went viral. This is how companies should present
things.

Change your mindset from wanting to get the most views to

wanting to be the most talked about.

My app was trending everywhere.

I created a social footprint. And it all happened because I owned
the app myself and had the control to spread the message my way.
 Brands show up and think they know better, but they would be
much more successful if they let YouTubers do what they do best.
We know how to go viral. We know this digital world
inherently because it is what we have lived and breathed our entire
lives. We know how to get your brand talked about naturally. This is
much more powerful than mindless visualization.

YouTube is not going to close. Alpha, Google's parent

company, and Google's Android operating system funnel a lot of
traffic to Google-owned YouTube every second.
These companies have so much power and an untold amount of
money that YouTube cannot be a fad because of that. Something
with such sure staying power is worth putting effort into.

A lot of YouTube content is mediocre now, but people will start

to notice and it will become more competitive and expensive as time
goes on.
Find out now.

If you chose this book it is because you are already on YouTube

or are thinking about being on YouTube.
I hope I've helped you understand that you should definitely be
on YouTube. You'd be crazy if you weren't.

The opportunity to make money, grow a business, and spread a

message is huge, whether you're a regular person like me or a big
brand. And this book has all the elements you will need to do just
that.

I met Derral Eves in Dallas, Texas for the sole purpose of

talking about YouTube.
I was working hard towards my dream of becoming the biggest
YouTuber in the world when I came across Derral's YouTube
channel.
I knew I had to meet him because he knew things I needed to
know. So I texted him and got on a plane.
We've been best friends with YouTube data ever since.
Derral has earned tens of billions of views on YouTube and
even other platforms due to his deep understanding of algorithms
and the viewer.

He owns VidSummit, the world's #1 YouTube data conference.

Only one or two other people in the entire world understand
YouTube to the level that Derral does.

I have one of the three most viewed channels on YouTube and I

still talk about YouTube data and strategy with Derral because no
one is on the same wavelength as him.

Whether you're a creator or a brand, you can learn how to be

successful on YouTube by reading Derral's book.

Be open to what he can teach you, whether you have five

subscribers or five million. Because remember, you must improve at
all levels, always creating better content. The YouTube formula will
help you do it.
MrBeast
 INTRODUCTION

The magical unicorn that poops ice cream made me write this
book. That's not where it started, but it's what pushed me over the
edge.
If you think this makes me sound a little crazy, let me explain.
It was 1999. I had just graduated in advertising and marketing, and
had a stable job with benefits and opportunities for promotion. But
then. . . I left it.
It wasn't the right career for me. I wanted to start my own
business and create my own future.
This seemed crazy to me because my wife and I had our first
baby, Ellie, that year, and I felt the pressure of providing for my
family.
Keeping a steady job and building up savings would have been
the safest thing to do, but instead I spent all our money on the latest
Macintosh computer and the software I needed, Adobe Premiere (it
would have been cheaper to go for a PC! Damn, Steve Jobs).
I was determined to be a successful business owner and ready
to take on the world. . . from the workstation I organized on my
kitchen table
I spent days thinking about my company information, designing a
website, and making my own business card.
I knew he would be a great entrepreneur. But after just two weeks,
my wife, Carolyn, let me know that my office needed to move from
the family kitchen table where I fed the baby and where there were a
lot of spills.
Carolyn had graduated in accounting and had a good job, but
decided to stay home with Ellie and our future children.
She was my business partner: she did payroll, billing, and
accounting.
We had daily conversations about where the company was going and
how we could get money.
I needed to find clients to start making money so Carolyn
wouldn't have to go back to work, but without a doubt, the first order
of business was to move my workspace.

This led me to Staples to buy a desk for my computer.

I was admiring all the things I wanted for my new business,
walking down the hall with color laser printers.
If only I could convince my business partner-wife that she needed to
purchase one of these beauties!

A fancy printer could help me show future clients samples of ad

work I could do for them.
My sleep was interrupted by a man who asked me a
question about printers.
He introduced himself as Chuck and I was wondering if I could
help him choose a color printer.
I explained the difference between the two printers in question.
He was lucky that I knew all their specifications because those
printers were on my list of printers that I wanted to have in my
company, the problem was that I didn't have the money to pay for
them.
I recommended the more expensive printer because of its
printing capabilities and less expensive toner. He said, "I have been
coming to Staples for years and you are the best employee I have
ever talked to."
I informed him that I didn't work for Staples (which
surprised him because I happened to be wearing a red polo and khaki
pants that day, the classic Staples employee outfit).
"Are you sure?" asked. I convinced him by telling him my story
about starting my own business doing graphic design and websites.
He replied that he had recently founded his own company called
1001 Business Cards and was looking for a designer.

He hired me and my company on the spot to design his

website and business cards.

What a coincidence! I walked out of that Staples with a desk for

$200 and a check for $300 from my first customer, a net profit of
$100. "That was easy!". Owning a business was going to be a walk
in the park.
I couldn't wait to go home and share my first success with
Carolyn.
My confidence skyrocketed and I knew I could do anything I set
my mind to.
However, just a few months later, my confidence turned into a
feeling of uncertainty.
I barely made enough money to pay some of the household bills
and feed my family.
I needed more clients and fast.

You know what your problem is?

I went to see my father to ask for advice. My father had owned

several businesses and done many real estate ventures, and had been
successful in both.
He gave me very simple advice, but it was some of the best
advice I have ever received.
He said: “You need to find a way to make more money by
working less time and with diverse sources of income.”
That was his standard way: he would always restate my problem
before giving me fatherly advice.
“Derral, don't think about solutions, think about the problem,
when you focus and obsess over the problem, the solution presents
itself.”
Einstein believed that our ability to identify problems was in
direct proportion to the quality of the solutions we generate.
He said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55
minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about
solutions.”
I believed Einstein's words, but the one I really trusted was my
father.
I was determined to figure out what I was supposed to do by
focusing on my problem, which was this: I needed more clients.
I took advantage of the next morning to internalize what my
father had said and identify the problems that were preventing me
from diversifying my income.
I made a list of the problems associated with having only one
client. I thought about all the problems I could encounter next week,
month, and year if I continued on the path I was on.
When I reviewed my list, the solution presented itself to me.
I had a list of businesses and all their contact information on a
stack of business cards on my desk.
As a freelance graphic designer, I created business cards for my
only client, Chuck, at 1001 Business Cards.
He paid me $10 per card.
Normally, I would not have had any contact with those
companies that request cards. Chuck would get a new client, collect
their logo, image and design requirements, and send them to me.

I would design his card and email it to Chuck.

After customer approval, Chuck would print and deliver the
cards.
Throughout this process, I did not interact with those
companies.

But now he had a plan to diversify.

He wanted to sell Chuck's clients a five-page website design
package for $299.

I had the clients' information and telephone numbers on the

cards I had already made, so I started by cold calling these
businesses with my offer.
After spending a week calling all the business cards I had
designed, there were only two interested parties out of 200 calls.
Selling over the phone was difficult; Telemarketing was not for
me.
I needed a new plan, so I refocused on the problem. I analyzed
my talking points, learning from my telemarketing experience.
I designed a new strategy that would take the process from cold
calling to warm contact, but that meant I needed to meet with these
people in person.

I asked Chuck if I could personally deliver completed business

cards to these companies and offer my additional services for ads
and websites.
He gave me the go ahead by giving me the opportunity to meet
face to face with people who could be potential clients for my own
business.
These were the perfect candidates for companies in need of a
web designer.
When I presented the finished cards to the business owner or
manager, they were always impressed with the quality of the card.
We didn't make simple cards; We printed them using high-
quality, full-color, 100% premium-looking graphics, which was rare
at the time.
 As soon as I saw the moment of emotion or approval of the
product on the part of the client, I would jump on them with my
proposal.
Here was my opportunity to get a new client! I told them that I
was the designer of the cards, that I was glad they liked my work,
and that I could do so much more for their business by helping them
create a website.
I told them that every business needed a website, that it was the
future in marketing because leads and sales were going digital.
It was actually a tough sell, because most businesses in my area
were still connected to the Internet at that time “by dial-up.”
If you are young and not familiar with dial-up Internet access, I
will explain it to you this way, dial-up Internet access ran at 56/K
(kilobits) per second in those days. Not megabits.
Which means that if you wanted to download today's latest
Fortnite update, it would take you 30 days, 22 hours and 3 minutes,
assuming your connection didn't drop and you didn't have to start
over.
You'd imagine people didn't see the value in spending money on
something so slow and underused, but I'd start using my sales pitch.
It really was going to be the way of the future.
Even if only 10% of the city used the Internet to find a service,
your business was guaranteed to take that call if your competitors
weren't already online.
Having a website would give them a place to host FAQs, share
a bio about the business and/or owner, and most importantly,
generate leads.
It was a digital sales brochure and the future of marketing.

This new plan was working, it was converting almost every

business card customer into a website customer.
I gained over 100 clients, plus referrals throughout.
And as an added bonus, these clients would need to print a
second business card because the first one I designed for them didn't
have their website printed on it!
Point for me!
I sold these updated business cards for $20, thereby helping my
original client, Chuck, and providing him with additional clientele.
He had been my first and only client, and I became his biggest
client over the years, bringing him a lot of business.
Your Customer's Success is Your Success

But designing the website was a unique job. I mean I only got
paid once for each client, which meant I was always rushing and
trying to get more and more clients, with corresponding markdowns
to get them.
There were a lot of ups and downs, and I was starting to wear
myself out.

It was time to visit dad again.

I told my father about my situation and he smiled and said, "Do
you remember the advice I gave you?"
Of course I did. I had gone from one client to hundreds of
clients, even getting other designers to help me so I could save time
and make more money.
My dear dad smiled and said, “Well, I only gave you half the
advice.
You needed to learn that first part before you were ready to
learn the next.
You've been banging your head for a few months, right? Are
there a lot of ups and downs?”
It was like he was reading my mind.
"You've been losing sleep too, haven't you?"
How did he know?
“Now you're ready to understand the second part: success is
about acquiring and retaining customers and keeping them coming
back wanting more.
How is your retention? How many clients pay you monthly?”
I explained the unique nature of website design. Each client
paid me once.
Dad said: “You will always have ups and downs and insomnia
without retention, find out how you can keep them wanting more
and then you will discover success.”
If you haven't noticed yet, my dad is a genius.
So I analyzed my problems again. What could I do differently?
I came to the conclusion that there were two ways to get
recurring monthly payments from customers: hosting and ranking,
i.e. Internet marketing.

Every website needed a host, which required monthly fees.

So I started a hosting company called FatBoy Hosting .
The name referred to the size of the hosting packages, (not my
body weight), let's be clear. We had everything from small packs to
XXXL
I also knew that companies paid monthly for Internet marketing.
They needed websites to be ranked on directories and other
services. So I started ranking websites for companies that paid me
monthly.
My business soon stabilized and started producing monthly
income. And I slept more. Thanks Dad.
I continued to build websites for clients, hosted their website,
and helped them rank on the relatively new Internet, or Word Wide
Web , as it was more commonly called back then.
I used search directories like Yahoo! , Excite , Ask Jeeves and
AltaVista . “Google” was not yet a household name.
I did this for several years, trying to expand my company.
In 2005, I hired some employees and needed to buy inexpensive
office furniture for them, so I went to Craigslist to look for a good
deal.
 While I was on Craigslist , I saw a flyer for a contest to win a
free new iPod Nano that involved getting people to join a new
website called YouTube.
The previous iPod on the market was the size of a brick and
contained 1,000 songs!
Plus, if you threw it at someone, you could kill them because it
weighed like a brick.
Steve Jobs had just announced this new iPod Nano, which was
the size of a pack of gum (much lighter than a brick) and contained
even more songs.

I wanted that iPod! I signed up for YouTube, spammed all my

contacts and clients to do the same, and even created new personal
emails to increase my chances.

I became one of the lucky winners of the latest and greatest iPod
on the market.
Thanks to this, I started watching videos on YouTube and was
impressed by the quality of the videos and the lack of the dreaded
"buffering" loading time so common back then.
I got hooked!
I learned that you could embed YouTube videos on any website
and that people could stream them anywhere in the world.

I came up with a great idea that would make me sell even more,
offering my 865 clients the ability to embed a video on their website.
That easy.
Nobody was doing that. I could be the first to put videos on my
clients' websites.

In November 2006, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65

million.
 Naturally, as they were the owners, the platform's videos began
to gain positioning in Google searches.
At the time, my job was to keep my clients' websites ranked #1
on Google's home page.

But there was an anti-spam guy on Google called Matt Cutts

who made my life a living hell.

Matt Cutts was my nemesis.

I spent days and days trying to discover tricks and open holes in
the system to get my clients' websites to rank high, but Matt Cutts
and his team always found those vulnerabilities and open holes in
the system and closed them.
I felt like I was stuck on a roller coaster with no end in sight.
I was sick of fighting with Matt Cutts , and I was sick of
receiving the dreaded phone calls from my dissatisfied clients every
time their Google rankings dropped.
This was driving me crazy. So I focused on the problem again.
I looked at my business and asked myself what would be the
easiest way to accomplish what I needed to do.
I had an epiphany: if I stayed in line with Google's goals, I
would rank well and I would no longer have to fight the system (or
Matt Cutts).

It sounds so simple now, but it was a huge accomplishment for

me at the time. I studied everything Google was trying to achieve.
I read all the blog posts and watched all the talks by Google
founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Google CEO Eric
Schmidt.

I started to listen to what they really wanted.

 They talked a lot about organic ranking and tracking. They also
talked about the future of Google, with artificial intelligence that
would look for patterns to predict what people would want.
I made sure I ticked all the boxes when it came to what Google
wanted.
That's when I noticed some patterns in my clients' data.
Remember the 865 client videos I made and embedded on their
websites?
Most of them were on Google homepage without any hacking
I no longer had to fight with Matt Cutt and I no longer had to
field frantic calls from clients.

All I had to do was make videos that were easy to search. So I

created a plan of attack.
I made a series of videos for a few select companies and
focused on a certain type of potential customer.

My brother-in-law is an optometrist and I asked him to let me

market his work with videos. I was able to rank for some difficult
key terms that would have taken a lot of effort for a website, but
they easily appeared in the results within hours when I used videos.
Marvelous!

To make sure this wasn't a fluke, I tried a second business, a

personal injury attorney.
We got the same results: a high ranking on Google and the
lawyer's phone ringing with potential clients.
He had achieved it; I had solved one of my company's biggest
problems and from that moment on, I wanted to do everything on
video and of course, on YouTube.

I needed to become the expert in helping businesses generate

leads and sales with video.

The next thing I did was keep my big clients who were paying
thousands of dollars a month, and sell everything else.

It was my point of no return, like when the Spanish commander

Cortés sank his ships and conquered the Aztecs.
By sinking the ships, he gave himself a choice: triumph or die.
There would be no way to go back.

Likewise, I sold all of my website and Internet marketing clients

to an SEO company in Salt Lake City , with the clause that I could
keep all the video marketing work.
They agreed because they didn't know what I knew, that the
videos ranked on Google without any tricks or complicated
strategies.
They were being promoted because YouTube was owned by
Google.
Google wanted videos to be found, so it moved more users to
YouTube.

So I changed my focus from website creation and marketing to

video creation and marketing.

At the time, I was excited about what I was witnessing in the

evolution of marketing: Online video was going to be a revolution,
and I wanted to be a part of it.

Viewers were much more likely to do what advertisers wanted

them to do after watching a video (pick up the phone and call, make
a purchase, or subscribe to a service).
And also, there was no need to hire a celebrity, these videos
were made by normal people with cheap equipment and cameras that
achieved incredible distribution to millions of viewers.
This until now had never been done outside the realm of
television studios and film sets.

In my videos, I hyper-focused on making videos whose message

was focused on making my client's phone ring.
It was very important to know everything about the person who,
once watching the video, would make the phone call.
I would ask my brother-in-law and his office staff about all the
things people were asking about and needing help.
I would then take those questions and turn them into talking
points for the video with clear solutions for how we could help.
I asked a lot of questions to get a good understanding of the
niche and what would work.
Then I would make 10 solid videos that would show up in
google search.
Once the video was classified and the phone rang, I would go to
another city and do it all over again. (I only worked with one
business per niche in each city).

I had started with my optometrist brother-in-law, but I

replicated my work in that niche hundreds of times in hundreds of
places.
When I got a solid system for a niche, I replicated it for any
client in that niche. Why recreate everything again if you could put a
new logo on what already worked?
I had my systems very well marked.
The customers were happy, which meant I was happy. Matt
Cutts was no longer the enemy; He was my best friend!
Uniting People around their Passion

At that time, my relationship with YouTube consisted of creating

videos and uploading them to YouTube with the sole purpose of
obtaining a good Google ranking so that people who needed a certain
product in their city would find my client's product.
Little did I know that this was a fraction of YouTube's potential.
There was a huge opportunity to reach millions of people around the
world and I was about to witness this with my next client.

One day I received a phone call from one of my clients, Wade

Beatty, he owned a local pest control company and I had made some
successful marketing videos for him.
He had gone to spray roach poison at a piano store and the store
owner asked him if he knew anyone who knew about YouTube, websites
and marketing.
Wade said, “You have to talk to Derral.”
So I spoke to the owner of the store, Paul Anderson, who showed
me the amazing videos they were making to try to sell expensive pianos.
They put grand pianos in beautiful outdoor locations, on top of
mountains, in the desert, in a forest, and the music videos were
incredible.
I asked Paul what his goals were with his store " ThePianoGuys ".
He told me he wanted to make enough money from his YouTube
videos so he wouldn't have to work at the store anymore.
I didn't actually want to sell pianos, I wanted to make amazing
videos that people would love.
With the talents of Jon Schmidt on piano, Steven Sharp Nelson on
cello, Alvan Beek producing the music and Tel Stewart doing the
videography and editing, they had the recipe for success.
Their musical passion became a channel, and the channel became a
business that made so much money that they no longer needed the store.
When ThePianoGuys ' YouTube channel blew up, I was able to be a
part of the true power of YouTube for the first time.
They had very few subscribers when they started, and had grown to
over 1.8 million subscribers in 12 months and had over a hundred
million views.

They had developed a passionate and dedicated audience. (They

never sold a single piano! But they did fill stadiums all over the world).
This success changed my focus 100%, I would work with creators to
help them build audiences on YouTube.

Yes, I sank my ships again and I haven't regretted it for a second.

Bringing people together around a similar passion was exhilarating.
It could help people find their own dedicated global audiences.
It didn't have to be confined to one geographic location like my
previous job had been, and it didn't have to be all about business. In fact,
it had to be more than just the business.

You can find passionate followers in every corner of the internet and
rally them around your content.
It was about more than just generating leads.
It was the perfect cross between money and passion, something I
had been missing all those years before this moment.
 I had learned a lot about algorithms and classifications and the
mechanisms that worked, but now I could see the other side of the coin.
Creating content to inspire, educate or entertain was the missing
link.
Everything I had learned about algorithms, people, and messages
came together in this new moment of clarity.
Audience development was my thing.

I realized I was really good at building a community around content,

so I dedicated my career to learning what makes an audience click.
To date I have created and developed a content plan and strategy for
25 different YouTube channels.
I've helped them grow from zero subscribers to over a million
subscribers each.
Using my formula, we generated over 59 billion total video views.
I've seen this change many people's lives: not only do they become
full-time YouTube creators, but they build sustainable businesses and
brands.
For businesses, this can be a game changer for their bottom line.

This is where the magical ice cream pooping unicorn comes into
play.
I executive produced one of the most viral video ads of all time, a
stool called the Squatty Potty .
The ad showed this magical unicorn demonstrating the benefits of
using the toilet stool while "shitting" ice cream.
Yes, the stool is a real product (sadly, the unicorn is not), this ad
made over $45 million in sales in one year. It was a shocking
announcement!
 After seeing its success, I knew it was time to share what I know
about YouTube so that others can also learn how to take advantage of
this resource.
Feel free to jump in with both feet as I teach you everything related
to YouTube, the ins and outs of the platform, the opportunities that await
you, and the formula to do it right.

You may even have to throw out some things you thought were true
about YouTube, but don't worry, you'll learn it again quickly and have
the solutions at hand.

Look to this book for reference as you move forward to create

amazing content and get the results you've always wanted.

I've been on YouTube since 2005 and I've seen how it has evolved
and how it can change a business and, more importantly, how it can
change people's lives.

YouTube is one of the most powerful platforms we have to connect

with the world and grow our audience through video.
I can't wait to show you how to harness the power of YouTube.

Let us begin!
PART I The
Platform
1 Test, Fail, Analyze, Adjust: A Lesson in YouTube
History

Have you ever seen my first video uploaded to YouTube?

It's an important question. No, really, it matters.
It matters because I'm a YouTube expert and it's very high-quality
content (spoiler alert: it's not).
Seriously, I think it's important because it's history, and we can learn
a lot from history.

As a video fan, I love documentaries and biographies. I am

fascinated by them because learning about the past helps us understand
and navigate our world in the present.

When we explore history, we see how decisions and events affect

people, whether for better or worse, and how they affect families,
communities, and ultimately the entire world.

But why the hell am I talking about the impact of history on the
world in a book that's supposed to be about YouTube and how it makes
you money?
I'll tell you why: studying the history of anything can benefit
someone who wants to learn more about that topic and be successful in
that space.
 It should be obvious that the same applies to YouTube creators as
well.
I truly believe that if creators and companies took the time to learn
from the history of YouTube, how it became the mega platform that is
based on decisions that lead to failure and success, they would become
better content creators. and businesses and would be more equipped to
generate their own success on the platform.

How did YouTube start and how does that affect you and your
content?
In July 2002, the prestigious startup PayPal had just been acquired
by eBay for $1.5 billion.
This generated a lot of buzz in Silicon Valley.
Ideas were being pitched for websites, apps and platforms that could
possibly make a lot of money and transform the world into a money-
making digital giant.

Three PayPal employees, Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley and Steven

Chen, were some of these idea generators.
They soon came up with the idea for the YouTube website, but it
was nothing like the website we are familiar with today: they started as a
dating website .

From his makeshift office in a garage, the domain name

"YouTube.com" was activated on February 14, 2005, Valentine's Day,
the perfect day of the year to start a dating website.

On April 23, they uploaded the first YouTube video called " Me at
the Zoo ." It was 19 seconds of Karim at the San Diego Zoo talking
about elephants.
If you go and see it now, you'll laugh because you know he was
trying to make the website a place to find a date, and he makes a dig
about elephant anatomy.

The video was actually pretty good quality for the non-professional
video media available at the time.

Now that they had the ball rolling and the servers up and running,
these guys needed active users to add content to their new website. Who
was the demographic of people looking for love?
College-age students.

So they went to the nearest university campus, Stanford, and handed

out flyers to everyone who wanted to take one. Their motto was:
"Tune in, tune in."

There were practically no videos on the site yet, instead of dating

videos, they uploaded images of 747 planes taking off and landing.
“What was happening didn't make any sense,” Karim said.
“They were so desperate to get some real dating videos, they turned
to the website any desperate person would go to: Craigslist .”

They posted the ad in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, offering to pay
women $20 for each video they uploaded of themselves looking for love.

They got exactly zero responses.

Here's where it gets interesting and applicable: Once people started

using their "dating" website, the trio looked at the data coming in in
those first weeks and months, and realized that website users weren't I
came to look for dates, everyone came to self-transmit.

They were posting videos of themselves and their friends doing

funny, embarrassing, or weird things.

They were posting videos of their pets, snowboarding videos,

videos of places and things like that.

At this critical juncture, Karim, Hurley and Chen had a decision to

make:
Should they continue to push YouTube as a dating website as
planned, or should they change their business model entirely because the
data showed that the majority of users were not looking to get a date?

“Forget about the dating aspect,” Chen said. "Let's open it up to any
video."

This is where the power of YouTube was born. Based on the data
feedback, they shifted gears and adapted to what users wanted.
In June, they created tools that encouraged self-transmission.
They provided a growing ecosystem of whatever random videos
people uploaded. They launched an “embedded” video option that
became a game changer for websites and promotion.

In short, they gave first-party video creators the platform and control
to share their videos with the world from anywhere in the world, because
that's what people wanted.

These website users were not looking to connect to YouTube; they

were finding a place to put their work and creativity.

That decision to pivot led to YouTube becoming the most powerful

video platform in the world and disrupting the entertainment industry as
we knew it.
 It was a game changer in video entertainment, taking creation from
the hands of a few into the hands of all, if they so desired.

With access to a recording device and an Internet connection,

anyone could broadcast a video to the entire world!
This is the norm today, but think about how monumental it was in
the beginning.

Large companies and brands began to pay attention, changing their

content creation and advertising strategies.
Brands jumped at the opportunity to sponsor creators who had a
unique and organic audience.
Big companies had never had this kind of competition before, and it
was a force to be reckoned with.

The website continued to grow rapidly. Google was the first to see
the potential of the site, and they acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65
billion.

Today, more than a third of all mobile Internet traffic comes from
YouTube traffic.

There are more than one billion hours watched on YouTube every
day, and nearly two billion registered users visit the site each month.
Nearly 100 countries have local versions of the platform available.

Do you think all of this would have happened if the guys had
ignored the data's feedback, deciding to stick to their original plan and
insisting that YouTube had to be a dating website?

They had tried the dating website and it had failed.

So they focused on the problem, analyzed what was working and
why, and adjusted their strategies to focus more on that.

The YouTube origin story is the ultimate meta example of how to

test, fail, analyze and adjust to succeed on YouTube.
This formula is the YouTube formula. Understanding their story
will help you as a creator or business understand how to use the formula
for your own success.

You have to analyze what works and what doesn't, and make
changes accordingly. This is the premise on which the entire book is
built.

If you can understand this fundamental "big idea" formula, you'll be

starting off on the right foot and ready to learn the step-by-step tweaks
that make a difference in the wide world of YouTube.

In Part I, I break down the algorithm so you know exactly how the
YouTube platform works to be a part of it.

In Part II, I open your eyes to the endless opportunities available on

YouTube, opportunities for exposure, art, collaboration, sponsorship,
merchandising, and business ownership. I tell you how different types of
creators and companies have taken advantage of these opportunities and
have gone beyond “making a living” with YouTube.

You can make a lot of money in many ways on YouTube, but even
more so, there is a lot of power in influence. I can show you how your
influence can make a big difference.

In Part III, I discuss YouTube's formula for content planning,

creation, execution, distribution, analysis, and adjustment.
 I teach you how to find your audience, talk to them and turn them
into your own loyal community, the importance of traffic sources so you
know where viewers are coming from and how you can get them to see
your content.
I help you read metrics charts so you can recognize data patterns.

Your success on YouTube depends on developing these skills, so be

prepared to learn and adopt them.

I've helped countless YouTube channels take advantage of growth

opportunities they couldn't see on their own.
And I've helped creators and brands learn the steps to get views,
make money, and build businesses.

If you follow the Formula and open your mind to the opportunities
I'm going to show you, you can get the results you've always wanted on
YouTube.
2 The
Ecosystem
from YouTube
For us to understand how YouTube really works, we first have to
see how a digital ecosystem works.
A digital ecosystem works in a very similar way to a natural
ecosystem.

There are many individual parts and all of those parts affect the
organization as a whole.

In school, science taught us about the flow of energy in a natural

ecosystem, the photosynthesis of plants, and the decomposition of
animals that convert them into nutrients, are part of the cycle.

Each factor in the chain has its job to do, and if it doesn't work well,
it affects the entire operation.

The YouTube ecosystem also has a flow and a cycle, and its
contributors affect the whole, for better or worse.
 This digital ecosystem includes the creator, the viewer, the
advertiser/brand, the copyright holders, the multi-channel networks
(MCNs) and YouTube itself.

This is a brief summary of how the YouTube ecosystem works:

Creators make videos and upload them to YouTube.
Brands pay YouTube to serve ads alongside uploaded content, either
before or during a video.
When a channel meets the requirements of the ad sharing program,
they get a share of the money from the ads that run on their content.
Brands also connect with creators who they believe will be able to
increase brand awareness and/or their results.
This influencer marketing is a big part of the YouTube ecosystem.

Viewers come to interact with content, creators and communities.

They watch, subscribe, comment, like and dislike, save and share.

YouTube as a website is the host of the ecosystem, but as a

company, it is part of the ecosystem and has to make sure that everyone
in the ecosystem is satisfied and adheres to certain standards.
Ultimately, they make the rules, but the rules evolve over time
based on feedback from the ecosystem and what needs to be addressed.

MCNs played an important role in the beginning of YouTube,

connecting brands with creators and managed other elements of the
creator experience.

They also helped try to resolve issues because YouTube didn't have
creator support at the time.
 Today, creators don't have to work with MCN to get this, they can
choose whether they want to manage their own channels and deal
directly with brands or work with agencies to connect with brands.

Finally, copyright holders want their original work attributed to

them without it being stolen or copied.
They want to maintain any financial benefit from that original
content.

To be part of this digital ecosystem, understand the role each

collaborator plays.

For example, if you're a creator, familiarize yourself with

YouTube's guidelines so your content can be monetized and stay
monetized.

Don't steal or copy someone else's content, but if you intend to use
clips of scenes or songs or any other copyrighted material, you should
know how to do it legally.

The success of your content depends on you understanding its role

in the ecosystem.
Your YouTube experience should be more than opening a channel
and uploading videos. In fact, if this is your methodology, your video
will never reach viewers.

YouTube rewards original content created for a specific audience,

so if you learn the system and follow the rules, your videos have a better
chance of being viewed.
Beware of Copyright

The first consideration in the ecosystem must be the viewer. If no

one comes to look, the rest of the ecosystem is dead.
When YouTube was new, viewers were a pretty specific
demographic because the content was pretty specific.

People were uploading personal videos to share with their friends

and family, but where the audience really had the potential to grow was
in the direction of entertainment.

People were uploading clips from TV shows, movies, comedy bits,

and the like.

Viewers also came for clips of popular culture and news. It was easy
to upload this material and it was easy for viewers to find.

From 2005 to early 2007, YouTube users uploaded content

generally without oversight or regulation. This included a lot of original
content, sure, but it also included protected content that had been created
by another person or company.

Obviously, this was a direct infringement on the copyright holder of

that content.

It's important to note here that YouTube users were not doing this
sneakily or maliciously. They just wanted to share things they loved, and
it was very easy to do.

Do you remember Napster from the beginning of the century? For

those of you who were born in the 2000s, let me tell you a story.
 Imagine a world where you couldn't listen to your favorite music on
demand. The only way to listen to your favorite song was to sit by the
radio all day, waiting.
If you wanted to listen on demand, you had to buy the entire album
that included the song you wanted to listen to.
Then Napster came along.
Napster was the original popular file-sharing platform. Like, the
pioneer of all digital media shared on the Internet.
Audio files, mostly songs, were shared as MP3 format files and
anyone could download any file for free.
FREE!
This was huge for music fans around the world.
I loved Napster. Who wouldn't want unlimited access to their
favorite bands for exactly zero dollars?
Well, I guess not everyone was a Napster fan. . . that is, anyone who
should make money from music sales.
If you don't know the rest of the story, I bet you can guess what
happened next. Lawsuits. Closing.

There are no surprises here. Actually, just before Napster was

created, Bil Clinton, then President of the United States, signed the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into law in 1998.
Since then, the DMCA has regulated digital copyright and
strengthened penalties for violators. (However, websites hosted outside
the US. USA are regulated by the United Nations World Intellectual
Property Organization (WIPO).
What happened with Napster set the stage for media sharing
regulation from then on.
YouTube could have looked to companies like Napster as examples
of what not to do and implemented their content identification system
from the moment they opened shop in 2005, but they didn't.
In March 2007, a small company called Viacom , along with several
others, sued Google and YouTube over $1 billion worth of copyright
infringement issues.

Reuters reported that YouTube was only removing copyrighted

content from the site after the copyright owner had requested it, but
nothing was done in the interface to prevent that content from loading to
begin with.
Additionally, the lawsuit claimed that YouTube knowingly allowed
this to happen because they were making money off of all that content.
The content identification system would not be implemented until 2007,
beta in June and full launch in December.

The identification system would attach a unique "fingerprint" to

new uploaded content. The content could then be crawled and compared
to existing copyrighted content so YouTube could detect infringements.
Now that the law had been involved, YouTube had to work out
some things for copyright holders.

First, they literally had to figure out a strong lawsuit (the terms of
the settlement were not disclosed), but they also had to figure out how
they would proceed from there, and the content identification system
was the answer.

I can't emphasize enough how monumental this was to YouTube's

success.

YouTube would likely have followed the fate of the original

Napster and folded if the Content ID system hadn't been implemented,
and many creators and businesses like you and me would be doing
something else.

It was a total game changer.

Advertising Revenue Distribution

In 2007, as the major copyright issue died down, YouTube added

two features that would have a similar impact on its future.
These features would be problematic in some ways, but they would
also significantly change advertising and the way creators could make a
living from YouTube.
What features could be so important? (1) Video Ads and (2) the
Partner Program.

YouTube ads have evolved a lot over time. They used to be display
ads or appeared below the content, but with these changes, the ads
appeared right in the content where the viewer was looking.

Now the creator of that content could be compensated through

advertising revenue sharing. This is how the YouTube Partner Program
began.

The creators were super motivated to create good content that

would attract more viewers, because now, more views equal more
money. Creators and companies really wanted to be YouTube partners!

Unfortunately, this also meant that creators realized they could use
tactics to get people to click on their videos, even if those tactics were
misleading.

Their aggressive strategies included misleading titles, sensational

thumbnails, and superficial content that deviated from the video's
original purpose.
They wanted to get people to click on their videos at any cost so
that they can generate revenue from the ads that are integrated with their
content.

Let's not forget the first member of the YouTube ecosystem here:
the viewer.

This new ad sharing program created a big problem with viewer

satisfaction.
People started spending less time on YouTube because of direct ads
and clickbaiting that hinted at what they were looking for, but didn't
really serve that purpose at all in the content itself.

In short, viewers felt cheated and dissatisfied. Additionally, many

YouTube viewers became angry at these “sellout” creators who ran ads
alongside their content.

They even joined the channel boycott movements against the

creators.
Watching ads today is just part of the online experience, but back
then it was so important that it disrupted the ecosystem.

As you can see, the integration of the Partner Program further

complicated YouTube's delicate ecosystem.

Keeping advertisers happy was an obvious priority because that's

where the money came from, but YouTube also had to keep creators and
viewers happy to do that, and the task was proving to be extremely
difficult.

Creators wanted their fair share of ad revenue without being labeled

as sellouts, and viewers wanted to watch content without feeling cheated
or sitting through ads on every video.
 Let's pause here for a minute.

Before I run away with all the problems the Partner Program
created, I want to emphasize how monumental its existence was.
Google had pioneered advertising revenue sharing with its AdSense
program, and they implemented that program with YouTube.

They took it to another level, moving from display ads to video ads,
because video ads were more effective.
They could charge advertisers more money for video ads, so
YouTube made more money this way. Because YouTube didn't create
the content for its own website, it had to incentivize creators to create
good content that would attract people to the platform.

AdSense was the origin of advertising revenue sharing.

It was absolutely unexplored territory!
It was like the great California gold rush, but it was the gold rush of
digital marketing in the 21st century.
Never before have companies offered a portion of their revenue to
the general public! YouTube said, more or less, "Hey friends, if you
create good content that viewers come and see on our website, we will
share with you some of the advertising money we make."

And the creators were like, “Wait, really? Do you mean I can be
compensated for my hobby? Potentially earning enough that I can
replace my boring nine to five income doing something I really like, and
can I make more money doing?

Well then I'm going to make the best damn videos you've ever seen!
The gold rush was on. The owners of the canal took their pickaxes,
installed floodgates and began searching for gold.
Many creators, companies, and advertisers saw the potential for a
massive payout with ad sharing and wanted to participate.
 The risk was that they wouldn't actually make any money if they
didn't get viewers, but the opportunity was worth it for many of them.
This was a genius move by YouTube!
They were recruiting a global army of creators to do the hard work
of attracting visitors to their website in exchange for a cut of the revenue.
Canal owners were ready to compete with each other for a share of
the gold.

Advertising companies could enter this market very cheaply. They

could track their market, get a lot of eyeballs on their product quickly
without expensive campaigns, and they could do it literally for a fraction
of the cost of traditional marketing.

Many big brands and businesses ignored it because they simply

didn't realize what they were missing at first. They were too good for
that.

One of my favorite examples of a YouTube advertising success

story comes from a product called Orabrush .

Orabrush is a tongue cleaner that was invented in the early 2000s

by a guy named Robert Wagstaff, also known as “Dr. "Beto."

Dr. Bob had tried to market his tongue cleaner through traditional
product launch means, but the companies he approached wanted nothing
to do with it.

He even invested a lot of his personal money to run an info-

commercial.
Failure. So, at the ripe old age of 75, Dr. Bob went to a marketing
class at his local university and asked if anyone had any bright ideas.
My good friend Jeffrey Harmon was a student in that class and told
Dr. Bob that he thought they could sell the product online with a
YouTube video.

He took on the tongue cleaner project with the promise of Dr. Bob's
personal motorcycle as payment for the campaign.
Jeffrey and some creative friends made their YouTube video for just
a few hundred dollars and it went viral.
People wanted to know where they could buy Orabrush in their
own locations and distributors began to pay attention.

An ad campaign like this had never been done on YouTube, but

Jeffrey saw its potential. “We took a product from zero sales anywhere
to global distribution,” Jeffrey told me. “And we didn't do it with
traditional marketing.

It was 100% YouTube.

“We couldn’t have made it happen any other way.” Orabrush

became a multimillion-dollar brand sold in more than two dozen
countries in more than 30,000 stores.

For the record, Orabrush 's YouTube channel has over 38 million
video views to date for a tongue brush. Orabrush was acquired by
DenTek in 2015.

YouTube leveled the playing field for an elderly small-town

inventor and some college students.
They had access to the market that simply wasn't available to
everyday people before YouTube. It literally changed the trajectory of
their lives. Jeffrey Harmon became co-founder and chief marketing
officer of Orabrush and went on to co-found marketing agency Harmon
Brothers with his three brothers, where they created extremely successful
online products.
 Campaigns for PooPourri , Squatty Potty , Purple , Lume and many
more companies.
Others who worked on the original campaign have also made
successful careers off the path that was established since the beginning
of Orabrush .

Another friend of mine, Shay Carl Butler, started his YouTube

career back in 2006 and was one of the original partners, so if anyone
has a good idea of how the show started and how it's changed since then,
it's him.
 “The YouTube Partner Program was very exciting at first, and
everyone who knew about it wanted a piece of it,” said Shay Carl.
“YouTube had a lot of problems to solve.”

I remember when it seemed like everyone was angry at some point,

viewers were angry at creators, creators were angry at other creators,
viewers and creators were angry at YouTube, and so on.
But YouTube has generally done a good job of solving the
problems.

We will go into more details about the Partner Program in Chapter

6.

Because of this “digital gold rush” and the number of creators and
advertisers it attracted, YouTube was not equipped to respond to the
masses.

This is where multi-channel networks came in, MCNs offered to be

the middleman between other contributors in the YouTube ecosystem in
exchange for a cut of the profits, usually 30%.

They helped creators and companies with audience growth,

providing resources for production and opportunities to collaborate with
brands and other content creators.

They matched advertisers with channels that suited their particular

products or services. They dealt with rights management.
They gave YouTube a break to worry about other things.
MCNs have had both good and bad press, but they alleviated many
of YouTube's headaches in those formative and ad revenue-sharing
years.

I recently sat down with Jim Louderback, CEO of VidCon and

former CEO of the company MCN Review3, and spoke with him about
multi-channel networking on my Creative Disruption podcast , at 14:07.

He talked about how MCNs affected the early years of YouTube's

ad revenue explosion.
We discussed the ways they helped, but also the problems they
created.
In the end, Jim said, “Many MCNs didn't provide the value they did,
they had too many creators and brands to manage, and promises weren't
delivered for everyone.”

Once YouTube had a better handle on operations, offering its own

partner support, there was no longer a need to be in an MCN.
In 2011, YouTube acquired Next New Networks , a company that
had been managing many of YouTube's early creators.
YouTube was ready to take back control internally and put that
money back into its own pocket.
For this reason and others, MCNs have seen a significant decline
on YouTube in recent years.

A Prosperous Evolving System

As you can see, advertising revenue sharing completely changed

the YouTube ecosystem.
YouTube had been a minefield of instability in its early years.
 They were learning the hard way that their ecosystem was a
delicate balancing act between copyright holders, viewers, partners
and advertisers.

YouTube has learned to deal with children's privacy issues,

COPPA... and has tried to make changes to satisfy the masses. When
we come full circle and return to the viewer, the first component of
the ecosystem, we have to consider how much the viewer has
changed.

YouTube really wants to have satisfied viewers.

Over the years, they've tried to tweak their recommendation
feature to figure out exactly what each viewer might want to watch.

They know that happy viewers will stay longer, and viewers
who stay longer will make content creators and advertisers happier.
And the more viewers watch, the more money everyone makes.
The thousands of changes that have been made to the algorithm
over the years have literally paid off, so the better the algorithm, the
happier everyone will be.

Get ready to delve deeper into the algorithm in the upcoming

chapters.
In 2020, YouTube announced its revenue for the first time. In
2019, they earned $15.15 billion, almost double the previous year!
That is mind-blowing, both in the amount of money and the
percentage of growth.
People watch more than five billion YouTube videos a day. 5
billion.
To really understand how much bigger a trillion is than a
million, consider this: a million seconds is about 11 days, while a
billion seconds is 31 and a half years.
 YouTube began as a dating website for a handful of college
students in California in 2005.
Now it reaches every corner of the world on all devices.
Approximately one-third of the earth's total population watches
YouTube regularly. Once again, we are talking billions.
Where it used to be a specific demographic, the YouTube
viewer is now everyone.
Creators and businesses can proactively position themselves to
win on YouTube by learning about their own role in its ecosystem
and the mechanics of a good channel.

This learning is non-negotiable if you want to be successful on

the platform.
Don't try to game the system; Try to align yourself with
YouTube's goals so that fewer problems arise and you can focus on
creating good content.

YouTube has changed exponentially since its inception, and its

ecosystem has changed too.

If you want to be part of that ecosystem, you have to understand

how it works and how you can adapt to it, because it will continue to
change.
You can adapt intelligently by looking at the data YouTube
provides you.

I'll show you how the algorithm works and how to create and
adjust from your data.
3 The AI of
YouTube: Deep Learning
A YouTube Creator who recognizes the need to fit the data but
has no idea how to do it is like a gardener who wants homegrown
produce but has never planted a seed.

Becoming a successful gardener doesn't happen overnight, and

neither does becoming a YouTube pro.
You have to grab a shovel and dig.

There will be blisters on your metaphorical hands at first, but as

you build your data-digging muscles, you'll begin to unearth a
network of underground connections and discover a whole new
world of the hows and whys of YouTube and what it takes to
produce content. successful.

YouTube's artificial intelligence (AI) is an evolving structure in

the digital ecosystem, and it is difficult to understand and use
because it is malleable.

You will also need to be malleable, meaning you need to adapt

your strategies according to what is currently working.
Your best chance of doing this successfully depends on your
knowledge of the systems at play. The evolution of AI
As contemporary YouTube users, we have become accustomed
to the site offering what we like, spontaneously, but it has not always
been this way.

Initially, YouTube was primarily a place to find answers to our

questions, like how to change a tire, and a place to be entertained,
like watching cats play the keyboard or laughing at children's videos,
like " Charlie Bit My Finger."

It relied on a simpler system that wasn't good at making

recommendations. But today YouTube has a complex machine
learning system that has gotten really good at guessing what people
want.

Let's take a closer look at how your AI has changed over time
and why it's important to you.
Around 2011, YouTube began making changes to the system
with one purpose in mind: to get people to stay on the platform
longer.

A YouTube researcher working on this found some holes in the

system.

For example, a large portion of YouTube viewers had switched

to mobile devices and YouTube did not have an accurate system to
track user behavior on mobile devices.
There was work to do...

Since July 2010, YouTube had been using a program called

Leanback that queued up next videos that were ready to upload after
the video being watched ended. There was an initial spike in views,
but they soon plateaued.
 YouTube joined forces with Google Brain, Google's machine
learning team, whose AI development and tools were ahead of the
field.

Its main objective remained the longevity of the viewers.

On March 15, 2012, YouTube made the switch from a "View"

algorithm that rewarded video view count to a "Watch Time"
algorithm that rewarded viewer duration.

This AI followed the audience everywhere to make sure it found

the right video to show them.
It had the ability to recommend adjacent videos instead of
cloning videos. ("adjacent" means similar but different enough to
maintain interest).

“Cloned” videos inevitably drove viewers off the platform

because they were basically watching the same thing over and over
again.

More importantly, it would queue videos based on how long

viewers had watched them rather than how many clicks and views
they had gotten.

YouTube's goal was for users to "watch more and click less,"
meaning they didn't want viewers to have to click through a bunch of
videos before finding what they were looking for.

AI could better match them with the content they liked so they
could spend more time watching.
 This change in viewing time transformed YouTube's audience:
people stayed on the website longer.

AI no longer rewarded the deceptive “bait” tactics used by some

creators, because viewers quickly left when the content did not
deliver what the title and thumbnail promised.

Viewers stayed to watch videos that delivered what they said

they would, and the AI tracked these videos with longer viewing
durations and recommended them higher.
Additionally, viewers stayed to see what the AI recommended
next because they were relevant to what they had already shown
interest in.
In other words, YouTube's new AI made visitors stay, and the
people at YouTube were thrilled about it.

By May 2012, just a few months after the new AI integration,

data showed that average viewing time was four times longer than
the previous May.

YouTube AI has changed over time to create a personalized feed

based on personalization.

Your homepage is no longer dominant on the channel, but is

instead filled with a mix of videos chosen directly based on
individual viewing patterns and behaviors.

It now suggests, with astonishing precision, what a viewer might

want to see.
 It's like YouTube hired a tailor to come and take your
measurements so he could make you an outfit you didn't even know
you wanted. Who doesn't love the feeling of something that fits like
a glove?

Going deeper into Machine Learning

To explain further, let's rewind and re-examine the data. After

the turn of the first decade into the 21st century, YouTube came face
to face with some hard truths.

First, its users were watching videos from a bunch of other

platforms instead of coming directly to the site.
YouTube viewership increased, but only because people were
watching YouTube videos that had been shared on big platforms like
Facebook and Twitter.
This made it impossible for YouTube to collect data on its
consumers and retain and monetize them.

Another hard truth was that YouTube didn't have a dial-in

system to analyze mobile usage, which was embarrassing because a
large percentage of the audience was mobile.

Its digitally old mobile development was painfully slow, and

something had to be done about it.

They included InnerTube, a program created to revamp the

algorithms making sure everything fit together correctly and quickly.
It was imperative that implementations were done quickly and
could be tested before being applied across the board.
If a new change didn't work, they had to get it out immediately
without bringing the whole thing to a standstill. Then they would
modify and try again.

Another vital piece to the reboot was using deep learning

machines. Google's AI had gone through several phases of
development and use, and was getting better and better.

Google's deep learning AI was now capable of using gigantic

neural networks that got really good at things like recommendation
and search.
The input data for the learning machines on YouTube came
from the behavior of its users and monitored not only the "positive"
behavior of viewers, such as which videos they liked and continued
watching, but also the "negative" behavior, such as which videos
omitted or even removed from your personalized home page or
YouTube recommendations.

Monitoring both the positive and negative behavior of your

users is vital to the accuracy of the algorithm.

This neural network has become so good that it can even predict
what to do with new or unknown videos based on the user's current
behavior.

To say, "It has a mind of its own," is not much of an

exaggeration.

AI doesn't actually observe a user's total Internet behavior; just

watch what's happening on YouTube.
This is important because it is what maintains its millimeter
precision in the recommendations.
 As?
Let's say you went to google.com and typed "Steakhouses in
Los Angeles" in the search bar.
Does that mean the next time you go to youtube.com you'll want
me to recommend videos on how to grill a perfect steak? Or you
want to take a video tour of Los Angeles?

Probably not. But if you search “How to Grill the Perfect Raw
Steak” directly in the YouTube search bar and click on the first
recommended video, the suggested videos that will appear next
might be, “The Strongest Man in the World: full day of eating,”
then, “How to Clean a Cast Iron Skillet.”

These side videos have nothing to do with steak, but do you see
how that viewer would be a likely candidate to continue clicking?
That's a deep learning machine that knows what it's doing.

YouTube and its ecosystem are direct benefactors, because

when viewers watch more, everyone makes more money and gets
more brand exposure.

A Machine at Work. . . and it is working

YouTube recommends hundreds of millions of videos to users

every day, in dozens of different languages, in every corner of the
world.
 Your suggestions account for 75% of the time people spend on
the site.
In 2012, daily viewing time averaged about one hundred million
hours.

In 2019, that average stands at one billion hours a day. One

billion hours of video content collectively consumed by viewers on
one website every day!

Over this span of seven years and thousands, if not tens of

thousands of tweaks and triggers, deep learning AI has gotten really
good at recommending videos for viewers to watch longer.

He has become an expert digital gardener who knows what

product to harvest for each client based on the videos he has been
“feeding” on.

You can also be a YouTube master gardener when you arm

yourself with the right tools.

Just hold on to your shovel, because we're still breaking ground.

 4 The Algorithm
Breakdown
You've just learned a lot about the history of the systems that have run
YouTube since its beginnings, and you know that those systems have gotten
pretty good at what they do.
But what does that literally mean?

When you go to the website, what do the systems look like as you
browse? To really understand these fundamental concepts, let's clarify what
really happens when a site visitor appears.

As soon as visitors land on youtube.com they are followed, it's like

when you were a kid and you went to your friend's house to play and his
annoying little brother just wouldn't leave you alone, but think about it this
way: instead If you are annoying, the brother silently observes your
behavior and adapts to your every need and whim.
You want a snack, so your friend's little brother runs to the kitchen and
comes back with an apple for you. You say no, thank you.

Then he takes the apple, goes back to the kitchen, and comes back with
a bag of Cheetos.
You eat the Cheetos.
 Later you have a conversation about Han Solo, so he runs into the
living room and plays the movie “ Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire
Strikes Back ”

The next time you go to his house, as soon as you walk through the
door, he will give you a cookie and play the movie “ Star Wars: Episode VI
– Return of the Jedi ”

Their prediction about what you'd like to eat or watch is based on the
last time you came, and it's probably right. Oh, and also, you're probably
going to want to go to his house more often with this type of treatment.

They know what you like. (Unless they recommend the movie Dumb
and Dumber or Wild Games , in which case next time you'll go see the
Zuckerbergs because those movies suck.)

Let's say instead of Cheetos, you wanted carrot sticks, and instead of
Star Wars, you watched How I Met Your Mother. The next time you
showed up, little brother would offer broccoli and the series “Friends.”

These examples help explain YouTube's goals:

• Predict what the viewer will see .

• Maximize long-term viewer engagement and satisfaction .
The way they do it is divided into two parts: Collection and Use of data
and algorithms.
Part 1: Data Collection and Use

YouTube collects 80 billion data points of user behavior every day.

They collect data in two key areas to achieve AI goals. The first area
you look at is user behavior through metadata.

It determines things about a video based on the behavior of the person

whose eyes are on the screen and whose fingers are clicking.

“Satisfaction signals” train the AI on what to suggest or not.

There is a very specific list of these signals:

• What videos a user watches

• What videos are skipped?
• Time spent looking
• Likes and dislikes
• “I'm not interested” comments
• Surveys after watching a video
• If they return to see again or finish something unseen
• If they save and look again later

All of these signals feed the satisfaction feedback loop.

This loop is created based on the feedback the algorithm gets from your
specific behavior.
 It "loops" the types of videos you like through its suggestions. This is
how you personalize each user's experience.
Metadata Collection

To really get into the details, here's an explanation of how exactly AI

collects data.
Observing metadata begins with the thumbnail.
YouTube AI uses advanced technology from Google's suite of AI
products. It operates a program called Cloud Vision (CV).
CV uses optical character recognition (OCR) and image recognition to
determine many things about a video based on what it finds in the
thumbnail.
It takes points from each image in the thumbnail and using billions of
data points already in the system, recognizes those images and feeds that
information back to the algorithm.
For example, a thumbnail that includes a close-up of world-renowned
physicist Stephen Hawking 's face is recognized as such in CV, so the video
can be "bundled" in the suggested feed along with any other videos on
YouTube that have been tagged under Stephen Hawking Theme.

This is how your videos are discovered and viewed.

Additionally, CV uses a "safety" tool that determines, based on the data

it has collected from the images in its thumbnail, whether your video is safe
for all audiences to view, or whether it has adult themes, violence or other
questionable topics. content, and gives a "confidence" score of that
determination.
This score also reflects how closely the content matches what the
thumbnail shows.

This means you can create a thumbnail, connect it to Cloud Vision, and
know before you finish uploading your video what the thumbnail will look
like.
Figure 4.1 Thumbnail with data points

Using Cloud Vision can help detect something that could, for whatever
reason, be flagged as inappropriate in any data point and can therefore give
creators the opportunity to fix it before it's even live.

This has reduced demonetization and other problems that creators have
had in the past.
It can be a very valuable tool to help you stay one step ahead of
problems.

CV isn't an exact replica of YouTube's security measures, but it's close

enough that creators can get a good idea of how YouTube will determine
content.

CV may tolerate something YouTube won't, but it's still a sufficient

pre-release tool to use.
Video Intelligence

Once the thumbnail has been verified, the AI reviews each frame of the
video and creates shot lists and tags based on what it sees in the video
content.

For example, if you make a video in a parking lot, the AI detects the
front of the store, people, flowers, brands, and more, so you can record that
information for recommendations and run it with the same safety routine
you use to check the thumbnail images.

Keep in mind what's in the frame of every scene in every video you
create! It will be detected by the AI and classified accordingly, because the
AI is validating the thumbnail.

The AI cuts through the “noise” of everything in each frame and

determines what is most important based on that video and its metadata.

Subtitle

The AI does the same with the language of the video. YouTube has an
automatic subtitle feature and the AI also reads the words in the subtitle to
collect data.
Everything goes into the system.

Natural Language

The AI also listens to the actual sentence structure and breaks it down
into a sentence diagram.
This extracts the meaning from what is said.
 You can differentiate language so you can group it categorically, but
not just on the surface.

For example, two different creators could talk about Stephen Hawking
in their videos, but one video could be biographical or scientific while the
other could be humorous or entertaining.

Although both videos talk about the same person, they are
categorically different enough for the AI to categorize them differently and
group them with different recommended content due to the language used.

Video Title and Description

As you would expect, the algorithm also analyzes the title and
description of the video to complement what it has already learned from the
thumbnail, frame by frame, and language.

But only track this as long as necessary before using the viewer data
they input.

The AI "knows" that people can be misleading about metadata, but

they can't lie about what's actually in the content.

Don't randomly slap a title and description on your video just to finish
it and upload it.

Verbiage matters, so choose your words wisely. Most creators don't

make the most of the video description.

It's another data point that AI analyzes to help with search ranking and
discovery.
Part 2: Algorithms with “S”

Did you know that YouTube has more than one algorithm? The AI
It uses multiple systems, and each one has its own objective and goal.

• Browse Features: Home Page and Subscription

• Suggestions
• Trending/Trends
• Notifications
• Searches

Each of these functions runs separate algorithms that try to optimize

themselves for a higher success rate, and they all feed YouTube's AI.

They have separate hit rates to determine what really works for users
on each particular system.
The hit rate means how often viewers can find what they really want to
see. Have you ever heard of an angler getting a "hit"?

It's when a fish takes the bait. Imagine that you are the fisherman who
has thrown his "video" into the water.

Potential spectators are the fish swimming next to your "bait".

Maybe 10 fish will take one look at the bait and keep swimming
because it's not the brand of bait they like. But a fish comes along and says,
“That looks good,” and bites.

Let's say you cast 10 times, and out of 100 fish that swam by, 10 took
the bait. There's your hit rate.
This hit rate is very important for every system in AI.
The algorithms are very sensitive to user behavior and the metadata of
each traffic source so they know how to change to increase the hit rate.
 Additionally, YouTube runs experiments constantly - several thousand
a year, and they deploy about 1 in 10 changes as they go, so this translates
to hundreds of changes being deployed annually.
These changes help the system become smarter, and smarter means
better at providing viewers with what they will see.

Exploration: Home Page

The YouTube home page has changed over time. Users no longer have
to type a search query.
The home page used to be where users only saw video
recommendations from channels they had subscribed to.

The home page now has a personalized recommendation feed based on

that user's history over time.
Whenever a user logs in when using YouTube, the algorithms can keep
track of the videos that particular user has watched in the past so that it can
make better suggestions for the videos the user is likely to watch, even if
they don't. has done.

This seems contradictory. It seems like the algorithm might be more

successful at suggesting videos that it knows a user has already watched
and liked, but it's actually the opposite.

Keeping suggestions updated makes users stay on the platform longer

because they don't get bored with the same old things.

The way YouTube does this is by dividing the home page into two
categories: family and discovery.

Show users familiar content from places the viewer has gone before.
These suggestions could include recent or trending videos from a channel
that a viewer has already watched.
 The discovery side includes videos or channels that users with similar
viewing patterns have viewed and liked
YouTube found that these combined strategies keep viewers more
engaged.

If you want to get on the homepage, and this should definitely be your
goal, learn the triggers that get videos there. Try to improve your click-
through rate and audience retention as this will help you reach a more
general audience.

Exploration: Subscription

This one doesn't need much explanation. The Subscription section pulls
content from channels you've already subscribed to.
It will suggest new videos from your subscribed channels, especially
new videos with similar content to what you have consumed before.
For example, you watched one or two prank videos from a channel you
subscribed to, so the AI pulls the most recent prank from that channel into
your subscription feed.

Suggested

Another place homepage creators should focus on is the Suggested

feed, including the “Up Next” video.
These are the suggestions below (on mobile) or to the right (on
desktop) of the video you are watching.

This is a pretty powerful place to be! Viewers stick around when this
feature works really well, and sticky viewers are the goal of YouTube.
 So if you can use the triggers to get your video to appear in the
Suggested feed, you're exactly where you need to be.

What are the triggers? First, make sure you have created a strong
relationship between the data in your own content.
This means that if metadata connects between your videos, the
algorithm connects your videos to the “Next Video” feed and the
probability of your video being viewed skyrockets.

Metadata includes the title, keywords, description, and the content

itself. We talk in depth about metadata in Part III of the book.

Viewer behaviors trigger which videos are placed in the Suggested

Feed as well, so when your content keeps viewers watching instead of
leaving, your content is more likely to be recommended here.

Other things the AI looks for in this feature include the “rabbit hole”
type and the “see something else” type.

The rabbit hole is explained quite well. It is the type of videos that are
similar, which makes the viewer follow a specific path. These include:

• Videos from the same channel

• Videos and channels similar to the one being played
• Videos that other people watched after watching the
current video.

The watch something else type (which is also self-explanatory) exists

because viewers eventually get tired of watching videos with similarities
and need something completely different if they are going to stick around.
This is not a random selection; It is still a personalized
recommendation based on your past behavior.
This recommendation arises when the AI has a stored history of what
 that viewer has seen over time.

Trending

I like to call this "the geospecific water cooler." A common

misconception is that “trending” is synonymous with “popular,” but it is
not.

Trending topics are broad topics that people are talking about right
now all over the internet.
It's what's happening right now in the news, on social media, websites,
blogs and elsewhere.

By "geospecific" I mean that even the Internet has geographic regions,

both in location and authority.
Websites with more authority than others will have topics that are more
popular because YouTube knows there will be more eyes on them, so it
includes those topics in its own trending section.

They realize that's what people are watching elsewhere, so they're more
likely to click on that topic when they're also on YouTube.

By location, groups living in the same area are often interested in the
same things. For example, something that would trend well in Los Angeles
would probably flop in the Midwest.

Notifications

When someone subscribes to your channel, YouTube can notify them

when you upload a new video, but only if that subscriber has also clicked
the bell button.
 The notification arrives through the subscriber's YouTube application
or by email.

Searches

Another simple feature is search. Users type a keyword or phrase as a

query to find what they want to see.

The search function displays videos related to that query. The

algorithm narrows down results based on metadata and the video generated
by the creator, and also carefully analyzes past data of people asking
similar queries and how they responded to those videos.

Many people think that you only need to do SEO to get your video to
the top, but there is a "freshness" feature that will attract new videos to
these results.

Take a look at what's trending and create content with the right
connection metadata. Know especially what's trending in your niche. If
your video performs well, the algorithm keeps it in the search results, but if
it doesn't, it discards it

It's not YouTube's fault

You just learned a lot about the history of YouTube and its inner
workings. . .
Congratulations! You've done a good dig.
But do you find yourself pondering, "Okay, great, but what does all
this mean for my content?"
I often encounter creators with good intentions and lofty goals, but
they're not seeing the results they want to see and they blame YouTube for
it.

If I can get anything from these first few chapters to stick in your head
it's this: don't blame YouTube, blame your content.
I know this sounds harsh, like I just called your baby ugly, but try to
take a step back and look at it objectively.
Maybe your baby really is ugly. If you can swallow the hard pill that
maybe your content is to blame instead of the Big Bad Algorithm, you'll be
ready to learn the YouTube formula.
If you don't think you might be doing something wrong, then nothing I
say will help you, and you might as well close the book.
Now that you understand the inner workings of the algorithm a little
better, you can move through the rest of this book ready to implement
systems and strategies that work with the algorithm instead of being subject
to intimidation or ignorance of it.
YouTube's goal is simple: engagement and satisfaction with viewers.
At the end of the day, it's all about creating good content.

The purpose of this book is to teach you the formula for aligning with
YouTube's goals and being able to analyze the performance of your content
so you can adjust it for viewer satisfaction.

You'll be ready to arm yourself with the tools you need to dig and plant
the right seeds in your content garden.
PART II The
Opportunities
5 Why Most TV
Channels
YouTube DOES NOT
have
Success
You probably learned a lot about YouTube in Part
That's why you didn't think you came to this book.
Some of this may seem irrelevant to you right now, but I promise it
will all make sense in the end.

But let's be honest, you are here because you want to achieve massive
success on the platform.
Some creators define success as "x" number of views or subscribers,
but all YouTube success stories point to one thing: making money.

YouTube provides a place for people to share their passion with the
world, and that's great, but you know what's also great?

When people are compensated for their passion. Earning money is not
a bad thing.
That's why we're here, friends. You can spread your passion and make
money doing it without being a sellout. In fact, the more money you make,
 the more you can spread your message to the world.
Maybe you have been working hard to achieve success on YouTube
for a long time, but your efforts remain fruitless.
Remember how I said your baby might be ugly? With this thought in
mind, I invite you to lower your defenses and be open to what I am going
to tell you:

It's not YouTube, it's you.

I've helped hundreds, if not thousands, of YouTube creators see things

on their channels that they simply couldn't see on their own.
I've learned from many YouTube "fails" over the years to change
things that weren't working.
I use quotes because I don't really consider them bugs; I consider them
an important part of the process.

As Thomas Edison said: “I have not failed. “I just found 10,000 ways
that won’t work.”
“Failure” is a harsh teacher, but it is a teacher nonetheless, and when
you begin to accept what you might be doing wrong, you are ready to move
on.
Some YouTubers don't analyze why a video underperformed or don't
know what to watch. So what do they do?
The same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.
This is called insanity, and it will cause YouTubers to burn out and quit
or scale down.

I've seen this happen a lot.

Making a living on YouTube isn't easy when you don't realize why
your content is underperforming and you don't know how to make small
adjustments to course-correct.
 Most creators I work with know what they're supposed to do, but
continue to release content with the assumption that something will
magically start working or suddenly attract an audience.

That's not how YouTube works. Taking this approach leads to

frustration and self-created obstacles that stop or slow you down from
reaching your goal.

Your first step to success on YouTube might be to admit that your

content isn't working.
Take a giant step back right now and ask yourself if you are truly
satisfied with your content. It's you? Is working? Do you know why it isn't?

One way to look at it is through the eyes of your potential viewer. Do

you think they would watch your video, or even just half of your video?
As a company, YouTube is a great example of learning from things
that don't work.
Remember that it started as a dating website and was modified based
on "glitch" feedback.

They couldn't get women to post on their website even when they were
offered $20 per video.
The dating website didn't work, so they changed the website to what
their users wanted. If what you are doing hasn't worked, be willing to
change it.

Some creators who have been on YouTube for a while often get stuck
in old habits.
If you fall into the “old YouTuber” category, reevaluate your ideology
and methodology.
 Clinging to outdated processes and ideas could be what's been holding
you back from seeing real growth.
Just because something used to work for your content doesn't mean it
will work forever. Don't be afraid to ditch the "old" YouTube and see how
today's successful creators are doing things.

The next step is to accept the fact that the data doesn't lie.

Maybe your mom tells you that your videos are amazing, but have you
considered that she might be the only one who thinks that way?

The good news for you is that you can learn to analyze data and create
amazing content much easier than a bad singer can learn to find the perfect
pitch.
It's all about the data. You have to be willing to become a student of
data

Become a data student

To become a student of data, you need to change the way you approach
everything on YouTube. Stop watching to be entertained and start watching
to learn.

Imagine that you have enrolled in YouTube University and paid the
tuition to be there. This may surprise you, but many creators don't even
watch anything on YouTube; they only go there to upload their own
content.

I had a consultation with a creator who wanted tips to improve his

videos. I watched two of his videos and asked him:
How often do you watch YouTube?
He said: “Never. "It's not what I like."
 This is like wanting to compete in the Tour de France because you
have a bike, but you've never seen a race. And your bike is a BH with a
banana seat.

You don't have the right tools if you haven't learned by watching others
who do it well. This is you?
If you want to do YouTube right, you need to see what other creators
are doing on YouTube to see what works.
If you never go to the Trends page, how will you see the trends? How
will you be able to see what is working and why?

A YouTube learner consumes everything on YouTube with a desire to

understand how successful content works.
This is achieved by looking for patterns. Looking for patterns includes
looking at the content, the audience, and all the little details.

To make sure we're on the same page, you need to understand that
content is more than just the video itself.

When I say content, I mean the video title, thumbnail, description,

hook, and yes, the video.

Start actively looking for patterns in each of these content breakdowns

across channels that do it well and I promise you'll see them.

There's a reason they get the views. . . Can you find out why? Do the
same with the audience of a successful video or channel.

I always dig deeper and ask questions like: Who are they?
Where are they coming from?
What is your age and sex?
 What kind of things do they say in the comments?
What other videos are you watching?

In addition to learning patterns, you should also learn the tools and
systems that YouTube gives you as a creator.
There is no successful creator who doesn't know how to observe and
interpret analytics. Stop being afraid of your analytics!

It may initially seem overwhelming to some creators. Again, all I ask is

that you are willing to listen to what I will teach you and willing to do the
work.

I was visiting my client Jimmy Donaldson, aka "MrBeast", in North

Carolina when another creator named Zachary Hsieh, aka "ZHC", came to
give Jimmy a custom Tesla.

We were eating sushi at the end of the day, chatting about our favorite
topic: YouTube data.

I watched some of Zach's videos and asked him some questions about
his data. Then I bet I could guess the demographics of their channel. Jimmy
said he would pay for dinner if I could be in the 2%. The bet was accepted.

Well, I've been on YouTube for a while and I've seen a lot of data.
I'm always looking for patterns, and I've been doing it for a long time,
so I thought I could guess right.
After learning just a couple of things about the channel, I made an
educated guess that 46% of Zach's viewers were in the US. USA and they
were more masculine than feminine.
He pulled out his analyzes and guess what? I was right; It was exactly
46%.
 They were surprised by my accuracy and I was happy that I won the
bet, because Jimmy had to pay for my dinner. Nothing is better than
winning and receiving free sushi!
Thanks, Jimmy.

Know your analytics. It's the only way to know what needs to change,
and there is always something that needs to change. Even the most
successful channels continue to adjust to be better.
That’s how they achieved success, and it doesn’t stop once you
“arrive” at success. Your audience will change and evolve over time.
If you don't see this, your audience will stop seeing your content if
you're not course-correcting, because your content will become stale.

There are many ways you can learn to improve your content, but the
best ones are always based on what you can see in your analytics.
To create your best work and make the smartest decisions, you must
understand your specific niche. How do you do this?
Research other successful creators in your niche. Ask why they are
successful. Take note of what they have in common. Why do they create
the video and make the edits the way they do?

Watch your most successful videos and take note of these patterns. See
if and how they interact with their communities, both in the video
comments and in the Community tab.

Read the comments on your most popular videos and note which
specific comments are the most engaged. See what is being said and you
will understand the viewer much better by reading what they have to say
here.

Look at all content (title structure, thumbnails, and description patterns

and video composition) through the lens of analytics and application, and
you'll be ready when it's time to create your own content.

Comparison and the traps of the imitator

However, a word of warning: don't fall into the comparison trap.

Yes, you need to do niche-specific research, but that doesn't mean you
sit back and compare your channel to others.

I can't tell you how many channel inquiries I've had where the creator
tells me their content is much better than their competition's content.

They don't understand why a channel with lower quality videos would
be outperforming theirs.
Stop doing this. Instead, focus on what you can learn.

Ask yourself what that creator could be doing to get more watch time
and viewer engagement than you.

Focusing on what makes you angry or frustrated makes it difficult to

look at analytically. Take out the emotion and put on your thinking cap.

Comparison is a slippery slope and will leave you feeling discouraged

and immobile.

Focus on yourself and the ways you can improve.

I often laugh when I have conversations with MrBeast and he is
comparing an old video (from last year) to new videos.

About an old video, he said, "Why would anyone watch this?" thinking
it was a bad video (and it had 50 million views).
 We could have done much better knowing what we know now.
We then discussed how we could have improved the videos based on
the data. This is the superpower.
You can always learn a lot when you are competing with yourself.
Always be improving.
Also, be careful of becoming a copycat creator.

There is a difference between following a trend and stealing an idea.

You can learn from others' methods, content, and topics, and use them
without copying exactly what they say and do.

I've seen too many clone videos from copycats who produce frame-by-
frame replicas of other creators' videos, don't be this person.
Take an idea you like and put your own spin on it.

Create unique content for your audience, even if it is similar to what

others are doing.
Also, be careful of becoming a copycat creator.
There is a difference between following a trend and stealing an idea.
You can learn from others' methods, content, and topics, and use them
without copying exactly what they say and do.

I've seen too many clone videos from copycats who produce frame-by-
frame replicas of other creators' videos, don't be this person.

Take an idea you like and put your own spin on it.

Create unique content for your audience, even if it is similar to what

others are doing.
Course correction and consistency

Many creators don't know how to course-correct when things go

wrong, or even when things go right.

Maybe they get a burst of views and then plateau and go back down.
They don't know how to analyze what went right or wrong, and they
don't know how to replicate good data.

They simply continue uploading content without learning how to

modify it to maximize results. That's why it's so important to free yourself
from the dreaded “analysis paralysis.”
Don't be afraid of analytics! Some creators are so afraid of seeing
negative results that they resort to not publishing any new content.

Obviously, this does more harm than good and absolutely hinders
creativity.
Another reason creators struggle stems from a lack of consistency.

Creators must follow a consistent schedule with uploading at the right

time on the right days. There is no recommended schedule for all channels
everywhere.
For example, a Monday, Wednesday and Friday 8am time slot does not
work for all channels.

Each creator has to test the loading time with their specific content to
see what works best with their own audience.
When creators are inconsistent, it's difficult, if not impossible, to get
feedback on metrics.

Figure out what content resonates with your audience and when, and
stick with it. This is how you get metrics data that will show you how to
change or improve.

Being so consistent doesn't matter as much if your traffic comes from

Search.
For YouTube referral traffic, which is where you want to be, it does
matter that you upload and engage when your audience is active on
YouTube and ready to engage.

Take the gaming channel Thinknoodles as an example. With its more

than eight million subscribers, Thinknoodles operated under the Field of
Dreams directive:
"If you build it (or upload it), they will come", uploading new videos
without programming. A subscriber base in the millions provided enough
viewers, but inconsistency crippled its speed potential.

The creator of Thinknoodles asked me to look at his channel and based

on what I saw in the data, I strongly recommended an ideal loading time for
his audience that didn't make sense to him.
It was a gaming channel, so I had been uploading videos in the
afternoon when gamers were coming home from school and work. But I
saw that your content performed better early in the morning, so that's what I
recommended. It defied logic.

He turned me down a little bit, but in the end, when he took my advice,
that video was the highest performing video he'd had in a long time. Once
he corrected his course and changed his strategy, his channel skyrocketed
to 64 million views in 28 days.

Keep in mind that it was just a small tweak that got you millions more
views in less than a month. See Figures 5.1 and 5.2.
Get the right feedback

Now that you've become a student of data and realized some things you
might be doing wrong, you can put your energy into getting feedback.

It's so important to get the right feedback from the right places (read:
not from your mom).

Some creators mistakenly assume that receiving feedback is a good

thing, but not all feedback is created equal.
 Views are up! Your channel got 64,770,178 views in the
last 28 days.
Tha's more than the 20,490,000 - 25,190,000 your channel usually gets

Views Walch tune (hours) Subscribers Your estimated revenue 0

64.8M 9.6MO +193.0KO

39 6M more 6 4M more than 140.0Kmorethan
than usual usual usual

□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□
Us, 1320- MM 18.2320 MM 22.2020 Mar 27.2020 Us, 31.2020 Apr 3, 2020 Aft $,2.

SEE MORE

Figure 5.1 More than 64 million new views

Figure 5.2 Increase in views and subscribers over 28 days

If you are receiving comments from a group that does not represent your
ideal viewer, then you could be doing more harm than good, because they are
not interested in your content in the same way as your ideal viewer.
So their behavior when they interact with your content is erratic, they send
all the wrong messages to the AI and play with your analytics.
So if your audience is primarily Gen Z , you shouldn't be getting most of
your feedback from millennials and boomers .
 It is better to receive no feedback at all than to get it from the wrong
source.

Or maybe you're getting feedback from a group that simply doesn't

understand how YouTube and its AI work.

For example, a small outdoor channel decided to make videos shooting

bullets through objects to see if they were bulletproof.
The creator's current content was based on walking in the forest, so it
seemed like a good topic related to his current videos. His accountability group
liked the idea and helped him with video content ideas.

But there was a major problem with this issue. They had recently had a lot
of unrest at YouTube headquarters around guns in the United States due to
repeated mass shootings.

What this creator and his accountability group didn't take into
consideration was that you have to create content that YouTube and their AI are
"happy" to push and promote to viewers.

Basically, you are a YouTube partner; You have to match your content
with what they will be good at promoting.
Successful content in this niche came from older channels that had already
established their content with YouTube.

The thumbnail this creator put in his first video showed him pointing a gun
at himself with a shocked look on his face.
It was his worst performing video.
He came over and asked me why, so I helped him understand the reasons I
listed above. He had received the wrong answer. His group had good intentions,
but they didn't understand how YouTube views and recommends content.
 Another way to get poor feedback is from a group that will only pat you on
the back and encourage you.
There is a place for surrounding yourself with positive people, but when it
comes to getting honest feedback on your content, Positive Pol is not it.
There are many people who love to give their opinion even when they have
never uploaded a single video. Sometimes this person is your spectator.
Trust people who really know what it takes to make a good video.
The wrong content

Many creators are publishing incorrect content.

Sometimes "wrong" means a creator is doing something they're not
passionate about.
Don't waste time doing something you don't care about just because
you think it will work.

I have a friend, let's call her Sally, who has been on YouTube for 10
years and is probably reading this book. I've given Sally this advice for
years.
She started as a daily vlogger, then the following month she changed
her content and became a sketch comedy channel.
Then a few months later it changed again and became a challenge
channel. After that, she wanted to do serious interviews.
Stop doing this.
Discover what you are passionate about and stop changing with the
trends. Spend more time figuring out what content you actually want to
create.

Think about how YouTube's AI responds to a channel like this. If I'm

confused as a viewer, what do you think is going on with AI? You get so
confused about who your audience might be that you don't know who to
recommend it to. There are no patterns to go from.
Sometimes "wrong" content means random.
 This is when creators are not creating niche-specific content; They
upload what they want as if they were throwing everything into Dropbox.

Variety channels like this are simply not effective.

Plus, sometimes "wrong" means content that doesn't keep viewers
watching. Content without retention does not convert.
Figure out where the drop is, discover patterns in which content
resonates, then incorporate that content into your creative process and make
more content like it.

YouTube Superstitions

Some creators think there's a YouTube wizard behind a curtain

somewhere pulling the levers and making all the decisions, controlling the
content at his whim and pleasure.

Of course, you've already learned that's not true, because you've

become a YouTube analytics student who knows that data doesn't lie. But
others continue to waste time and energy on things that don't matter.

Let me tell you a story to expose.

There was a woman who cut both ends of a stew before putting it in her
roasting pan. She did this for years. One day, her husband asked her why
she did it and she said it was the way her mother had always done it.

Then the husband went to his mother-in-law and asked her the same
question. She replied, “Because my roasting pan was too small to fit a
whole roast.”
 The wife's roasting pan was big enough to fit a full roast at all times,
and she had been doing the task unnecessarily for years (not to mention
wasting perfectly good meat).

Likewise, creators spend a lot of wasted energy when they don't know
there is a better way.

For example, there was a time on YouTube when there was a glitch in
the scheduling feature, so channel subscribers were not receiving
notifications about new scheduled uploads.

The creators started uploading manually because they thought it was

the only way to fix the problem. The bug was fixed, but many creators
continued to think it was broken. They believed this for years and were
slaves to the clock.

No matter what interfered with sleep, daily work, family obligations,

they stuck to manual charging.

YouTube's fixed scheduling tool would have saved them a lot of

frustration, but they just didn't use it. Imagine how much of your energy
and time could have been spent elsewhere.

If you're cutting both ends of your roast, so to speak, know why you're
doing it, and if you don't like it, explore your options.

Maybe there is already a solution, but you don't know it yet.

Exhaustion

A common condition I see among aspiring YouTube successes is

creator burnout.
People get excited about creating content, but the harder they work and
the harder they work, nothing seems to work and they get no results.

So they work harder, uploading more and more content because they
believe it's a quantity problem.
Working like this is a great recipe for disaster and eventual burnout. It
feels like there is no light at the end of a very long tunnel.

It is incredibly rewarding for me to work with “victims” of burnout and

provide them with tools to help them feel hopeful again and, ideally, finally
start to see success.

Other creators try to do too much and end up endangering their mental
health. If any of these conditions catch your attention, you've come to the
right place.

Stay; I am here to help you.

Don't feel like you have to upload videos three times a week to be
successful.

My friend and YouTube creator Mark Rober is an engineer and

inventor and uploads a new video only once a month. It still gets tens of
millions of views per video because its content is really good.
Her videos require a lot of planning and execution, but she has fun
every step of the way.
He made a video on how to create the perfect squirrel-proof bird feeder
that took a lot of time, but it's fantastic content and got millions of views
very quickly.

He has a video about peeling a watermelon that has over 100 million
views.

Another video required a lot of engineering and troubleshooting, but

created a glitter bomb for porch package thieves , and the video has over 80
million views.
Go check out Mark's channel and find out why you don't have to kill
yourself with a heavy loading program to be successful on YouTube.
Realistically, yes, Mark would get more views if he uploaded more
often, but his channel is doing very well, he's making a lot of money, and
he's not burning out or struggling with mental health issues.

I know several daily vloggers who uploaded videos day after day for
years, and the load eventually became too much to bear, so they quit.

Modify your schedule if it doesn't feel sustainable.

Remember that this is a business and there are ways to lighten your
load. You don't have to do everything alone. You can and should build a
team.

For your sanity, build a team. When I was starting my own business,
my father told me that one of the quickest ways to succeed was to surround
yourself with people who share your goal and help protect your sanity.

Then he taught me what I now call "Workweek Analysis."

Since then, I document everything I do in the day, from checking my

 email to posting on social media, running errands, and everything in
between.
At the end of the week, I pull out two different colored highlighting
markers.

With one color, I highlight everything I hate doing, and with the second
color, I highlight everything that wasted my time.

I then hire another person or several people to do all the highlighted

tasks.
This will help you stay focused on what you love and what matters, and
save you from burnout.

Focus -Focus

Don't let your focus be your downfall. Your problem could be that
you've been focusing on the wrong things all the time.
You think you need a better camera or other equipment (you don't), you
comment on tons of videos for channel exposure (you shouldn't), you blame
YouTube or someone or something for your lack of exposure and success
(it's not them; it's you , remember?).

If your focus has gone astray, accept it and move on.

You're ready to set clear goals to guide your efforts in the right
direction.
 When you do, it helps solidify the laser focus on your purpose, without
question. It allows you to focus on the things you will do every day to work
towards your imminent success.

We're not reinventing anything here - this is a proven formula that

works. . . If you're willing to be a student of YouTube, analyze your video
performance and adjust it to create better content that resonates with an
audience.
 6 Earn Money
Association
with YouTube
How do you make money on YouTube? And you do this full
time? As?
These are real questions I get all the time when I tell people
what I do for a living.

The general population does not know and does not understand
it.

The first and simple answer is that you can start earning money
by becoming a member of the YouTube Partner Program (YPP).
As you will see, this is just the first straw, we will see the rest in
the next chapters.

You remember you learned about the YouTube ecosystem in

Chapter 2, that this program started in 2007 and it was like the great
California gold rush.

Advertising revenue sharing had never been done before Google

AdSense on google.com and then youtube.com, so this was a great
new opportunity.
 Creators could monetize their content if it performed well
enough, so they did everything they could to achieve this.
In other words, YPP raised the bar for consistent, reliable
quality and quantity content.

I already told you that YouTube finally shared its annual profits,
claiming revenue of $15.15 billion in 2019, but all that money didn't
go directly to YouTube.
A large portion went to the creators of the Partner Program.

The program began with a 45/55 split, meaning YouTube took

45% of the revenue from ads that ran alongside the content, while
the creator of that content took 55%.
The percentages are a little more complicated now because
many factors are taken into account, but it's still a good return for
creators.

Monetization has been the number one reason for YouTube's

success. It has also helped people consider YouTube as a viable
career path or business.

Let me say it again: sharing revenue with everyday people who

put content on their website is what created exponential growth for
YouTube.

Yes, this changed the game for creators, but think about how it
changed everything for YouTube too.

It was a great move. YouTube gets so much money because it

started giving away a lot. And because they were incentivizing
creators, creators created better content which led to higher visibility
and views.
 When the content is better, people want to see it more. The
Partner Program is a brilliant win-win-win. Yes, that's three wins:
For the YouTube ecosystem to thrive, everyone must win in the
revenue triangle, including the creator, the advertiser, and the
platform.

Nowadays, there is an endless list of creators looking to

monetize, but in its early days, YouTube was actually looking for
creators to join the program. Shaun and Mindy McKnight were
among these early YPP recruits.

They had been running a popular hair blog and had uploaded a
how-to video to YouTube to embed on their website.
Shaun and Mindy hadn't even been paying attention to what was
happening on their Cute Girls Haircuts YouTube channel, but it had
received enough traffic that YouTube reached out to ask if they
wanted to join the Partner Program.

Shaun and Mindy earned some fun “bonus” money at the

beginning of their monetization, but they had no idea what was in
store for them because of the ad revenue.

Eventually, Shaun would quit his job, they would be the first
YouTube family with millions of subscribers, and their children
would also have their own channels with millions of subscribers.
More on this in the next chapter.
Join the Partner Program

Now that you know you want to make money on YouTube,

even if it's just because I said yes, let's talk about how you're going
to do it.

To get monetized and stay monetized, you must follow the YPP
rules, no ifs or buts.

If you break the rules, you can lose monetization, lose your
partner status, or even delete your entire channel.

This is serious; I have several people a day contact me asking

for help because YouTube demonetized or removed their channel.

YouTube wastes no time with this program. It can be tedious to

read all the paperwork, but you should familiarize yourself with
AdSense's Community Guidelines, Terms of Service, copyright
rules, and program policies if you want to stay up to date.

You'll likely find everything you need to know on YouTube's

support page and navigate from there.
But first, to qualify. It used to be monetized with a single video,
but YouTube stopped doing that because it brought a lot of "junk"
content that was monetized video by video.
They wanted to promote videos that people would actually
watch and channels that they would actually subscribe to.
You need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of streaming time
in the last 12 months to qualify for the Partner Program.
You must also have a linked AdSense account. Once you meet
these requirements, go to Monetization in your menu and sign the
terms, and you're all set. You will automatically be put in line to be
reviewed for monetization approval.
Approval used to be automatic, but now the review team can
and will reject a channel if they believe the content does not follow
YouTube guidelines.

The usual turnaround time is a few weeks to a month, but of

course there are always reasons why it might take longer.
This is the part where you can practice patience, but it's a good
time to check that your content and channel follow YouTube
guidelines.

It takes a little time because real humans do the evaluations and

approvals, not machines, so give them some space to do their job
before banging on the door for answers.

YouTube will continue to monitor your channel after YPP

approval to ensure your content remains compliant with the policy.

No creator has a right to the program just because it fits into the
numbers game.

Remember that you are a partnership and you have to hold up

your end of the bargain to maintain the benefits of the program.
The review team will check your channel's main topic, most
viewed and newest videos, titles, thumbnails, and descriptions for
compliance.

But that doesn't mean you can "get away with" letting other
things slide, because they can really fact-check anything, and if they
find something out of policy, the video or even your channel can be
demonetized. Just follow the rules.
The Logistics of Money

Let me explain how YPP money works: Advertisers pay

YouTube to display their ads on the site as display ads, search
results ads, and pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll ads.

When a viewer sees an ad in a video, the advertiser has been

charged money that YouTube received and split with the creator
whose video the ad played on.
The amount the advertiser paid is called CPM, cost per
thousand or per thousand impressions.
As a creator, you can go to your income metrics and see how
much money you make from these ads playing on your videos.
Looking at the RPM metric, or revenue per thousand/mil.

According to YouTube, they take your total revenue from ads,

Channel Memberships, Super Chat and Super Stickers, and
YouTube Premium and multiply it by 1,000, then divide it by your
total views in the same time period.

This used to be an "estimated" metric, but YouTube announced

the new RPM metric in July 2020 to show transparency and peace of
mind to creators as numbers decreased due to Covid-19.

I'm happy to report that the RPM metric is no longer estimated

and you don't have to do the calculation yourself. It was always an
awkward "estimated" metric, so it's amazing that YouTube fixed it.
Thanks, YouTube.

It's helpful to know how much advertisers spend (CPM) and

how much they can earn (RPM).
 Keep track of these numbers when you log in to YouTube, and
you'll find yourself thinking about your content and strategies in
new and exciting ways, focusing on the right data points that make
money.

As a creator, you can't choose which advertisers serve ads with

your content; in fact, it's the other way around.

Advertisers choose where their ads are published and get what
they pay for. Which means the more specific they are in their
targeting, the more they will have to shell out.

For example, paying for an ad to be shown to "women" costs

much less per thousand for an advertiser than choosing "Asian
women ages 35-45, zip code 90210 in Southern California."

They can go crazy specific here. They can specify their target as
cat lovers or within a family income range.

Additionally, just because you've been accepted into the Partner

Program doesn't mean you've earned the right to run great ads with
your content.

Think about it: if your content isn't being seen by any of the
demographic specifications advertisers choose, ads won't show with
your content because it doesn't meet the specifications. So in theory
you could be a YPP creator with no income.
What can you do about it?
Know your audience, then figure out how to appeal to pop
culture as well, expanding your reach to a broader demographic.
We talk more about this amazing audience mix in Chapter 11.
 Additionally, CPM can fluctuate; increases as more people
advertise. Often this increase in ads occurs during holidays and big
events.

Think about all the ads you see during the holiday season. When
there are more ads, it costs the advertiser more money to publish
them at that time.

Additional YPP Income Opportunities

What else does the Partner Program offer? In addition to ad

revenue, YPP offers other ways to monetize, including channel
member submissions, live streaming of Super Chat and Super
Stickers, a merchandise rack, and a rate reduction for YouTube
Premium subscribers when they watch. its content.

Each has its own set of requirements (some have subscriber

count, age, and/or region limits), so find out what they are when you
want to implement them. You'll also have access to tools like the
creator support team and Copyright Match.

Channel Memberships

Channel viewers can pay a subscription fee to join a channel's

membership, which supports the channel and provides the viewer
with special benefits.

Memberships can offer members-only content such as early

access, behind-the-scenes, and exclusive videos. They can also
include things like chat badges or custom emojis to make members
stand out in comments and chats.
 Some viewers pay for a membership simply to support their
favorite channels and belong to their exclusive community.

To apply for the channel membership program, you must be in

good standing with YouTube.

Gaming channels must have 1,000 subscribers, but all other

channels must have 30,000.
You must also be a YouTube partner. The membership program
is not available worldwide, so please check if it is available in your
area.

Memberships cannot offer some things, including one-on-one

meetings, downloaded content, and marketing to kids. The revenue
is split 70/30 with YouTube, so you get to keep 70% of the member
submission fee while YouTube takes 30%.

Some creators make a lot of money from their channel member

submission programs.
A pair of travel vloggers quickly signed up members with the
promise of an exclusive miniseries, gaining 1,000 members in six
days in dozens of countries. Yet another creator who tripled his
comedy channel's revenue after rolling out the show.

Live Streaming, Super Chat and Super Stickers

Super Chat and Super Stickers are a fun addition to live streams
and another way you can diversify your YouTube income.

They are basically "advice" from viewers. A Super Chat

appears as a pinned comment at the top of a comment feed during
live broadcasts. It stands out by color and duration depending on the
amount of tip.

This encourages the viewer to spend more money. And Super

Chats encourage other viewers to do the same, often creating a
domino effect. When you add Super Chat to your live stream,
introduce it to your viewers.

Many of them don't know this, so give a quick introduction

before jumping into your live stream and then let them know when
you receive a Super Chat to draw their attention to the option.

YouTube gamer PrestonPlayz likes that Super Chat creates

another avenue of interaction between dedicated viewers and
content creators. He does a great job of recognizing his livestream
contributors while remaining committed to the purpose of
livestreaming.
Always mention or thank your Super Chatters.

I witnessed a live stream that generated over $400 per minute

with their Super Chat.
This is such a simple integration that can make you a lot of
money and be fun at the same time. You can implement automatic
triggers to respond when donations of different levels arrive.

Tier breakdowns encourage viewers to donate more if they want

a greater response to be triggered.
For example, you can decorate your set with automatic lights
and a confetti cannon, and when you get a Super Chat, you activate
the light to flash, or the cannon to fire, or both, depending on the
amount donated by the viewer.
 Super Stickers are animated graphics that viewers can purchase
to appear in the chat stream.
It's a fun way to give your viewers donation options while
helping them feel like they belong in your community. Stickers are
purchased separately in Super Chats.

Merchandise

YouTube's merchandise rack has made a ton of money for some

creators. The rack is displayed below the videos and offers more
than just t-shirts.

YouTube partnered with Teespring so creators could design and

sell a variety of branded items such as bags, pillows, blankets,
stuffed animals, mugs and more.

Mugs, stuffed animals, and t-shirts are always in demand for

viewers who want to support or showcase a brand.

Use these timeless products to further diversify your income

streams. An animated jumping spider named Daffy has over 400
million views and sold $800,000 worth of luxurious Daffy replicas
in the first 10 days of the channel's merch rack!

The plush doll sells for $20 each at Teespring, but other options
include T-shirts, baby onesies, backpacks, and stickers that say
"Boop!" Lucas's slogan.
Get yourself a merch rack.
YouTube Premium

Viewers can pay a membership fee to join YouTube Premium

and enjoy an ad-free platform experience.
Premium also allows downloads and background playback
options.
YouTube returns most of this revenue to creators, meaning
you'll earn a percentage when Premium members view your content.
Even if viewers watch your content as a download or in the
background, you'll get the same watch time credit.

I wish I had an affiliate link to connect here to encourage

everyone to sign up for YouTube Premium, because it's awesome.
It's worth every penny to have an ad-free experience and download
and background playback options!

Earn even more with advertising revenue

Once you become a YouTube partner, your advertising revenue

still has the potential to change and grow; Not all advertising
revenue is equal.

The proportion of YouTube creators is overwhelmingly male,

so there is greater competition for advertisers who want to work
with female creators.

Likewise, there is fierce competition and the opportunity to

reach audiences that focus on specific races, ages, religions, and a
 variety of other demographics.

Therefore, the same ad running on different content can cost

different amounts depending on who the creator is and who their
audience is.

Google Preferred

For example, Chad Wild Clay and his wife and partner Vy
Qwaint create content together and put the same types of videos on
their channels.
Chad's channel has millions more subscribers than Vy Qwaint's,
but Vy's channel generates more than double Chad's advertising
revenue because advertisers pay more to be seen on a channel with a
female audience.

When Chad and Vy create a video that they know will do well,
they upload it to Vy's channel because they will make a lot more
money.

Don't forget that advertisers spend more to choose details about

who sees their ads.

If they want to target viewers based on age, gender, ethnicity,

location, interest, household income, or any other characteristic or
demographic, they pay for each specificity.
 Therefore, you can earn more ad revenue than another creator if
your content matches well with a precise niche or demographic.

Do your homework to make this information work in your

favor.
Create content to reach those unique audiences if you want to
get more of the money advertisers spend on CPM.

Case Study: Dan Markham @ What's Inside

Let's talk further about the most fun part of YouTube with some
amazing success stories. What is the funniest part of YouTube?
Make money, of course!
Take Dan Markham from the What's Inside channel, for
example. He hangs out with his son and makes a lot of money doing
it.

They cut things for their videos and have made many memories
together over the six years they have been active on YouTube.

His multimillion-dollar subscriber channels provide ample

income for the Markham family to live whatever lifestyle they want,
but Dan remembers the early days as a YouTube partner and was
excited about the small benefits.

His channel was making nickels and dimes at first, so he

remembers very clearly the day he made $4 in ad revenue. . . and he
felt excited about it.

"I thought maybe we could save some money for college if we

had a little income while we slept."

Dan said. “So I started reading tons of articles to research how

to do YouTube.” He started posting videos weekly, which is all he
could do at the time with his day job and family life.

In four months it reached a thousand subscribers; Within three

more months, he had a hundred thousand, and just four months later,
he had a million subscribers.
In those early days, Dan could see real growth potential with
YPP AdSense, but he never dreamed of the domino opportunities
that would come because of it. It opened up brand deals,
sponsorships and big business ideas.

This would be exciting for someone who wasn't making much

money at his regular job, but Dan was.

He had a very comfortable and stable job that paid well, as did
his wife.

She was one of Honeywel's top vice presidents and they each
earned six figures (not to mention their benefits packages).
Money was no problem for the Markhams. So even when the
YouTube channel took off and he was earning more than his day
job, Dan felt uncomfortable leaving something stable for what
seemed like a phase.
 Looking back, you can see that you could have gone full-time
on YouTube before, but you had to get comfortable with the idea
that "steady" in a traditional sense can be crippling.

Case Study: Jackie @ JackieNerdECrafter

Sometimes losing is the best thing that can happen to you. This
was the case for Jackie " NerdECrafter ", who participated in a
giveaway for a cute pin featuring a parrot.
When she didn't win, she thought she'd just buy the pin because
she loved it, but then she saw the $80 price tag and had an even
better idea: she could make her own.

Jackie had already tried her hand at some YouTube videos, but
without direction or success. Mostly, it had been something to pass
the time after he lost his job.

Now he thought he could make a video of his cute craft parrot

and teach other crafters how to make it.
At the time, women's channels often fell under the umbrella of
beauty and makeup.
Even the crafting channels gave off an atmosphere of
perfection. Jackie thought that to be successful, she had to do the
same.
It wasn't working for her. So he stopped doing it his way and
did it his way.
As soon as she decided to stop trying to be perfect and just be
herself, something interesting happened. . . His channel began to
take off.
 His authenticity rang true to an audience that identified with his
down-to-earth “nerdy” side.
She was a nerdy crafter who liked games and geek culture, and
her sense of humor was very appealing to the right audience.

In Jackie's first year as a YouTube Partner, she made a total of

about $100 on YPP AdSense.
His second year brought in $500. He spent a lot of time creating
and editing videos for basically free, and always in his free time
outside of his teaching job.

Then something great happened in year three: His consistent,

authentic content found its audience and he earned $23,000.
The fourth year brought in $34,000, and after that, it tripled. “I
could see there was a pattern,” Jackie told me in an interview.

“The more confident I was in front of the camera, the more

sincere, silly and genuine I was, the better my videos were.”
He took a year off from teaching so he could treat his YouTube
channel more like a business, always keeping fun at the forefront.
Jackie's mother passed away when she was younger and her
father did not take care of the family, so Jackie had to step up and be
the mother of her siblings.

“It was pretty much the definition of a broken home growing up

after my mother passed away because she was the glue, she was the
joy of the house.

My number one goal has always been to take care of my family.

I don't want anything from anyone.
 But as far as the money aspect of YouTube goes, I want to give
my brothers the life they should have had.”

Jackie has enjoyed taking her family on trips and seeing the joy
on their faces when they get to experience new places. “I would
never have been able to do that on my teacher salary.
Honestly, teaching money at this point is pocket money.”

Case Study: Shay Carl Butler @ Shaytards

Shay Carl Butler is an original YouTuber who has been on the

platform basically since the beginning. He was one of the first to
make money from advertising revenue.

"I became a YouTube partner in February 2008 and got my first

YPP AdSense check on April 24, 2008, for $367.40 for one month
of videos."

“I couldn't believe I was actually getting money for

'entertaining.'
I knew my family couldn't live on less than $400 a month, but
the wheels in my head were turning. “I dove into YouTube.”

Shay quit his granite countertop business, became a weekend

DJ to make ends meet, and the rest is history.
 Forbes called Shay one of the “most successful video
entrepreneurs on YouTube.”

This is the guy who had been a door-to-door salesman, a school

bus driver, an MLM guy, a countertop installer, a radio DJ, and
dropped out of college because he could never find a parking spot.

Now he's the guy who sold a company with his partners to
Disney for $500 million.
All thanks to YouTube. Side note: Shay would be the coolest
bus driver in the history of all bus drivers!

YPP AdSense is just the beginning

You might roll your eyes and think: Sure, I bet it's nice to be
the #1 channel on YouTube.

Let me stop you right there. You don't have to be on a Forbes

list like these creators to make big money on YouTube.

Becoming a YouTube Partner is a great start and you can make

a lot of money there, but you can do a lot more than that.

As you stay true to your passion and connect with your

audience through the YouTube formula, you'll be ready for all the
opportunities that await you.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki reported in late 2019 that,

“Compared to last year, the number of creators with one million or
more subscribers grew by 65%, and creators earning five or six
figures a year year they increased more than 40%.

YouTube as a platform for creators continues to thrive.” She is

not wrong.

YouTube creators continue to capitalize on the opportunities

created on the platform.

YouTube provides a unique opportunity for creators to go

beyond earning a side or full-time income to open up a world of
possibilities.

It is the opportunity to build a business and a brand.

No other platform has the power or means to share the revenue

that YouTube has.
And as you've learned here, ad revenue is just the beginning.
PART III The
YouTube
Formula
7 Formula Based on Data
and Human Beings
It can't be that difficult to start a YouTube channel that gets a lot of
views and subscribers. That teenager makes videos of himself goofing
around with his friends, and he's a millionaire. I can do that. I'll hit
record, click upload, and watch the money come in.

Unfortunately I've seen too many YouTube creators who started

their channels thinking it would be easy.
It doesn't take many videos with little to no views before a
creator becomes frustrated. YouTube is harder than they thought it
would be. We have all been there.
You took a lot of time planning, filming, and editing, and you
think you made a pretty good video. . . So why doesn't anyone want
to see it?

It turns out that the YouTube pool is actually an ocean and

you're just a little fish in the sea.

I'm always impressed when people keep working on YouTube

without getting the results they want. It's very frustrating, but they
refuse to give up.
 I love YouTube and I love helping YouTube creators and
businesses. I am lucky to work with all types of channels around the
world.

No matter how big or small the channel is or what type of

content they create, all YouTubers want you to help them with the
same thing.
They want to grow. Some want to grow in views, some want to
grow in subscribers and some want to grow in money.

In reality, different types of growth often go hand in hand.

When you get more views, you get more subscribers, and overall
revenue growth follows.
Part I of this book was to help you understand YouTube, the
history, the ecosystem, and the platform.

Part II was to help you discover the possibilities and

opportunities for creators and businesses on YouTube. I hope you
have been educated and inspired.
I hope it made you reconsider your Why.

Part III is where I'll help you learn how to be smart and create
content tactically.
I want the wonderful opportunities for success to be yours too.

I want your hard work and passion to pay off. YouTube has
given creators some incredible tools and data to help us figure out
how to reach more people with our content.

You probably won't see the secrets to YouTube success in a

shower of revealed digital codes like Neo did in The Matrix, but you
 will learn the step-by-step formula to help you achieve the YouTube
success you've been dreaming of.

If you want your videos to be discovered in a sea of millions,

keep this thinking at the forefront: make data-driven decisions, but
always optimize them for humans.

You have to become a YouTube analytics professional whether

you like it or not.

But this does not mean that you become a robot or create
content for a robot.
Your success on YouTube depends on maintaining the human
element.
You have to create for humans: The bot was created to find and
follow the humans who would most likely love your videos.

YouTube Sixth Sense

Dan Markham is a very successful YouTube creator.

One day I got a call from him asking if he could use my studio
to film a video because he had recently moved to the area where I
live and his studio wasn't set up yet.

Dan and his son Lincoln came and filmed video for a couple of
hours. On their channel What's Inside, Dan and Lincoln open things
to see what's inside (a brilliant idea for a channel...
Why didn't that occur to me? The video from that day showed
the opening of a real and a fake Rolex watch.
You can find the video by searching for “ What's inside REAL
vs FAKE Rolex ”.
 They finished filming, and I thought it was a pretty good video.
But Dan turned to me and said, "Well, this video's not going to do
very well."
I was surprised. I asked why he thought that and Dan listed
several things that would have helped with audience retention on
this video.

Audience retention is an important metric that indicates whether

the viewer is truly enjoying the video.
I asked him if he thought I could fix it in the editing or
voiceover, but he said no.

Some elements were needed to make it happen in real time and

the editing didn't work.
And he couldn't reshoot the video because he couldn't open and
destroy another expensive watch. Dan did what he could and
uploaded the video to his channel, and guess what? His intuition
was correct.
The video underperformed exactly as he said it would.
How did Dan know his audience wouldn't respond to this
video?
Does Dan have some strange sixth sense?
I've found that the most successful creators have great intuition
about what will work and what won't. They know their audience so
well that they can predict the outcome in their head. They know
which video will become a “banger” and which will not.

This type of YouTube Sixth Sense can be learned and comes

from analyzing successful content and knowing your audience. To
analyze the contents, you must put it under a microscope and
discover every moving part.
 Data analysis will force you to overcome biases and
assumptions that can cloud judgment and lead to poor decision
making.

Becoming a data expert is what helps you discover your own

YouTube Sixth Sense so you can intuitively know how your content
connects with your audience.

The perfect example of a creator who has this sixth sense on

YouTube is Jimmy Donaldson, "MrBeast."

I've been working with Jimmy for a few years and I've never
seen a creator like him before.

Watch YouTube differently than most.

Imagine how people will feel and respond to each aspect of the
video and make decisions from there. Really think about what will
get them to click and when they might lose interest in the video. But
more importantly, it validates your intuitions with data.

He has always been obsessed with data. Jimmy and I met in

person because I wanted to have a face-to-face conversation about
data without interruptions.

He literally dropped everything and got on a plane just so we

could talk about YouTube data.

Its data obsession is the reason it gets tens of millions of views

every day and millions of subscribers every month.
 You have a unique perspective and personality that can connect
with a specific audience.

This audience just needs help finding your content in a really

big ocean, and the way to do that is by making data-driven
decisions.

Instead of getting frustrated when no one sees your video, be

tactical. Take control by learning the ropes of numbers and graphs.
YouTube AI is always actively looking for a potential audience
for your content.
YouTube has given us the tools so that we don't have to rely
solely on our gut feeling or intuition.

Know your Objective, know your Why

Every creator and business should be able to answer the

question, “What is your goal?” or "What is your goal?" You may be
surprised to learn that many creators can't answer this question
directly.

If you don't have a goal in mind, you're probably running in

circles on YouTube.

I want to help you determine your finish line so we can make a

game plan to get there. This is the first step in the YouTube formula.

An easy metaphor here is running a marathon. Marathon

runners have a literal finish line to cross, but their goals can range
from running the entire length without walking, to beating their best
time, to qualifying for the Boston Marathon or the Olympic Trials.

Each runner in these scenarios has to run the exact same course
for the exact same distance, but their training plans will look very
different from each other because their goals are different.

Whatever your finish line is, you need to define it to make a

plan, know the steps it will take, and how to track yourself to get
there.

Most creators want to get millions of subscribers and dream of

the day when they can post a photo of themselves holding their own
golden play button.

Your goal could be as simple as replacing your nine-to-five job

with your YouTube income. Maybe you want to influence change in
other people's lives.

Or maybe you're like MrBeast and want to be the biggest

YouTuber of all time.

Everyone is motivated by different things. Personally, I'm not

motivated by rewards like more views, subscribers, gold play
buttons, or money, but I am obsessively motivated by goals.

I feel a lot of achievement and satisfaction when achieving a

goal. Maybe your motivation is money, and that's totally fine.
We just need to know that from the beginning to know what
plan to create.
 Let me tell you about a YouTube creator from the Invisible
People channel. Mark Horvath interviews homeless people on the
streets.

His channel has more than half a million subscribers and more
than 120 million views.

I asked Mark why he was on YouTube and what his goal was,
and he told me he was on a mission to help educate the world about
homelessness.

He explained the misconceptions about homelessness that make

it really difficult to address the root of the problem.
Mark then told me a heartbreaking story about a boy named
EJEJ, whose parents died in a car accident when he was six years
old, so he was placed in foster care.

Foster care was a nightmare for EJ, who was abused by his
guardians, so he ran away.
He lived on the streets for 11 years.
Mark told me: “Derral, people just don't understand it.
Politicians don't understand it.
And I'm on a mission to let people know that homelessness is
more than it seems. “I want to change the narrative.”
I could tell this meant a lot to him, so I asked him why. Tears
welled up in her eyes and she told me that she used to be home less.

He was unemployed for an extended period of time, which

caused him to lose his home to foreclosure and had nowhere to go.
 He felt like he became invisible when he was homeless. This is
why Mark was so passionate about the reason behind his YouTube
channel.

He said: “This is not just talk. Each year, our innovative

educational content reaches more than one billion people around the
world.

Our real, unfiltered stories of homelessness break stereotypes,

demand attention and provide a call to action that is being answered
by governments, major brands, nonprofits and everyday citizens like
you.”

Mark's finish line is perfect for him.

When I work with clients and students, I help them create a plan
to follow the YouTube formula and follow the steps to reach their
own goal.

The Formula will help you create any plan that fits any goal for
any channel as it is formulated from the data YouTube provides us.

YouTube is great at providing creators with data that will help

them make smart decisions based on real feedback; We don't have to
guess what to do next.

Know your goal, create a plan, execute it, analyze how it was
received, and adjust your approach moving forward. In short, this is
the YouTube formula, but there are a lot of moving parts and data
we need to understand to really take advantage of it.
Align with YouTube's Purpose

As I explained in the book's introduction, my career began in

1999 when I started my own online marketing company.
Performed ranking of websites in Internet directories and search
engines.
While learning how to do Internet marketing in the 1990s, I
learned a lot about search engines and SEO. Basically, I was good at
keyword stuffing.
The internet was dumb back then, so this worked.

Traditionally, search engines were done by submitting to a

directory, but Google changed the way everything was discovered
by analyzing the results and then ranking them in the search results.

Page one of Google search results is like the most viewed part
of Netflix, obviously everyone wants it; while page two of Google
search results. . They say it is the best place to hide a corpse.

I spent years using all kinds of tricks to get to the top of page
one for my clients.

Every time I thought I was on top, Google kept making updates

to plug the holes and uncover Internet traffic, and they gave each
update a cutesy animal name: the Panda update, the Penguin update,
and so on. .

I hated these updates because they made my job and life very
difficult.
Then I would go back to that cycle, looking for any tricks or
strategies to get those websites to rank.
All I could think about was the algorithm.

This was a vicious circle.

I finally realized that I had to change the way I did things in
order to operate in line with Google's goals. Once I did that, I was
successful every time.
This is my plea for you not to hate the YouTube algorithm.
Take a step back and realize that AI's job is to follow viewers and
predict what they will see, and this is a good thing.

YouTube is not out to get you! Don't try to game the system like
I did for too long in those early days of the Internet. Think of
viewers as people, real humans.

YouTube is designed to help people find the videos they want to

watch, videos they enjoy and are satisfied with.
That's why you should optimize for humans, not search engines.
To be the best creator you can be, you must create content for
people.

Many creators place too much importance on keywords,

thinking that they are the key to the YouTube kingdom.

Let me tell you the truth: YouTube looks way beyond your
keywords anyway.

When you upload new content, YouTube has systems in place

that determine exactly what's in your video.

YouTube's AI doesn't care about the title or thumbnail, but if a

person cares and clicks, YouTube pays attention.
 When the viewer connects with the content or the creator, they
watch longer and longer. This makes YouTube happy and they push
your content to similar viewers.

Most people promote content, content, content, but they should

care more about connecting with the viewer.

The first time someone sees your content, they click because of
your title and/or thumbnail, yes, but if they watch the video and start
connecting with you, that's your golden ticket.

When you convert a viewer to a fan, your title and thumbnail

lose a lot of importance because that fan will be watching your
video anyway at this point: they like and trust you, and they want to
watch it based on those facts.

To optimize for humans, I recommend defining your video with

a title that is less than 60 characters. This is difficult to do, and will
require more thought than you think.

The human eye is attracted to shorter titles. Humans, unlike

robots, are attracted to certain images and have an amazing ability to
quickly navigate through them.

A human brain can process miniature images in a staggering 13

milliseconds. And once the brain lands on an intriguing image, it
takes an average of 1.8 seconds to process the accompanying
caption.

Additionally, humans respond to storytelling. Your video

 should have a narrative arc.
It should start with you delivering on the promise of your title
and thumbnail.

After that, you need to re-engage the viewer and draw them into
your content.
This is a good time to share the personal touches: your
backstory, your beliefs, and other compelling elements.
Doing things like sharing your beliefs puts your viewers in a
position to decide if they agree with you.

At the end of the video, you again fulfill the promise of the title
and thumbnail, showing that they got what they were looking for,
and show or point to another of your videos so that they continue
watching videos from your channel for longer.
Finally, interact with your viewers and respond to comments.

Once you try to optimize for humans instead of search engines,

you will do exactly what the algorithm wants and YouTube will be
able to find its audience. AI analyzes people's patterns, so when you
create content for people instead of robots, everyone wins.

Traffic and Impulse: decoding the viewer

I first learned a very important principle when I started my

company around the turn of the century.

My clients were often local mom-and-pop type businesses, and

it was hard to convince them that online marketing was worth
spending money on at the time.

I mean, we were still on dial-up Internet. Do you know the dial-

up sound? I can still hear it in my head to this day.
It took forever to connect to the Internet! Anyway, one of my
first clients came to me for help with his marketing because he had
tried television, radio, newspapers, and other resources, and nothing
seemed to be helping.
I convinced them to let me do some online marketing for them.
It took a couple of months, but customers "magically" started
arriving at their door.
These people were coming because of my online marketing
efforts, but my client didn't recognize the correlation and didn't ask
the customers where they had heard about them.

They told me they no longer needed my services because

business was booming.

He was devastated to lose his business. They didn't take the

time to figure out why the traffic was coming through the door, but I
knew. I also knew that their traffic would slow down when we
stopped marketing online, which happened after a couple of months.

They came back to me and we re-engaged, and they ended up

growing by leaps and bounds.

The important principle that this client had overlooked was

knowing how to replicate what had worked.

While I knew the why behind their results, they didn't, and
naively assumed they didn't need to know. You have to know why
your traffic came and where it came from.
 Many companies have made bold assumptions about things they
thought would work when the opposite was true.
You have to know which message works for which traffic
sources.

Some of you are new and some are experienced YouTube

creators, but everyone should know that traffic source is the key to
understanding your viewer and their behavior.

Here's why: If you access the data provided to you by YouTube,

you'll see a list of places your viewers access your content, including
YouTube search, suggested videos, browsing features (homepage
and subscription), playlists and channel pages, YouTube advertising,
videos, cards, annotations, notifications, end screens and other
features.

You'll see how many views are coming from where, and you'll
notice that the other metrics are completely different depending on
which traffic source you're looking at.

If you remember in previous chapters when we discussed AI,

you will remember that there are multiple algorithms with an "s".
This is where the "s" comes into play.
Each traffic source has a separate algorithm that aims to
increase the likelihood that people will click and watch your videos.

Knowing where your traffic is coming from can change the way
you do everything.

Kristina Smalhorn is a real estate agent from Louisiana who

used YouTube to create content from a search traffic mindset.
You spent a lot of time researching keywords and creating
content for search traffic.
He saw some positive results with clicks and views, gained
leads, and closed some deals from his content, but he wanted to
improve and grow his income even more.
He had purchased some online courses and read some books on
SEO, and they just weren't giving him the results he wanted to see.
At this point, Kristina approached me for help with a
consultation.
I looked at Kristina's channel data and we talked about which
videos had the best numbers that were still bringing in views.
There were two contenders: “How to Get Rid of Dog Urine
Smell in Carpet,” with 223,000 views, and “Pros and Cons of
Mobile Homes: Manufactured Homes,” which had 107,000 views.

After digging deeper into the data, I could see that his older
videos in particular had performed well, so I recommended that he
make more content to reach the viewers who had responded to those
two videos.

She rejected my first recommendation. She didn't want to

become the "Dog Pee Lady" on YouTube. We both laughed at that.

However, she was willing to give RVs another chance, so she

went and did exactly what I told her.
He didn't have much faith that it would work, so when it did, he
was excited.

Now, his channel's growth statistics are through the roof and
climbing.

He was able to get six million views and over 33,000

subscribers, all because he was able to create content for a specific
viewer that YouTube could find and recommend his content to.

The best part was that he was also able to get a flood of new
leads for his real estate business and more referral income, and he
was able to find other sources of income that would replace the need
to be a listing agent.

If Kristina hadn't known how to look at her real-time traffic and

traffic sources to know what content to make and how and for
whom, she would still be spending tedious hours on keyword SEO.

Know your traffic sources so you can know your viewer.

I understand if you are frustrated. I understand that you have
thought about leaving YouTube.

But I also understand that if you stick with it, knowing your
goal and learning the Formula, you can achieve everything you want
and much more.
Prepare to dive into Part III with this mindset and complete the
Action Exercise tasks at the end of each chapter.
Action Exercise
Task 1: Write down your finish line (your goal) and post it
somewhere you will see it every day. Don't lose sight of why you
are creating, especially during difficult times.
Task 2: If you have content on YouTube, go to your real-time
analytics and review your top-performing videos. Write down
the ones that are more than 6 months old and that continue to
generate the most traffic in the last 48 hours.
Task 3: Plan, create and upload a video on the same topic as one
of the ones on the list you made.

There is a free companion course that goes with this book. You
have free access to all the videos, additional training, resources and
workbooks at http://www.ytformulabook.com/ .
 8 Identify your Audience
You can't simply upload content and cross your fingers for
everyone to see; you have to be tactical to find out what works with
a precise audience.

Your audience consists of the individual viewer, who we

sometimes call the avatar, or the representation of the real person on
the other side.

I use these terms interchangeably throughout the book.

Understanding the avatar is the most important thing you can do. It
doesn't matter if you are using videos to grow your audience or to
sell something, you need to know who your audience is.

However, before you worry about the audience, you should

focus on Your content. If you're not creating good content in a niche
you're passionate about, your channel will fail, plain and simple. Do
something that interests you and create good content. Period.

The audience will follow, and YouTube will follow the

audience.

I'll show you exactly how to be tactical about it, but remember
to start with a commitment to a passion.
I've seen a lot of creators who change their content too quickly;
They don't give the content a chance to sit long enough to gather
 data and make a plan.
If you're working on something you care about, you have to be
willing to put in the time to let data help you.

Don't make videos for yourself

Once you arrive at a base of content that you're passionate

about, you'll be ready to identify your specific audience.

Here comes the big question that I have heard thousands of

times: How do I find my audience? It's not a stupid question; In fact,
it's the best question to get answered if you want to be successful on
YouTube.

Even creators who are doing well sometimes don't have an

answer to this question, and it's preventing their channel from really
taking off.

Shaun McBride, “Shonduras,” was already a successful social

media star when he started his YouTube channel, so he had an
inherent audience, but his channel didn't really find its stride until
after he had made over 800 videos.

“Once I focused on a certain demographic and was true to who I

was and what I wanted to film (life with my family outside of
work), that's when I found a loyal audience and saw massive
growth,” Shaun said.

I don't want you to need 800 videos to identify your ideal target
viewer.
That's why I wrote this book: to help you plan, execute,
analyze, and adjust your content based on viewing patterns so you
can find your audience faster.

Create content around your passion, but don't do it just for that
reason.

Do it for the people who will actually watch your videos.

Combining your passion with your ideal audience creates a
crossover that works perfectly.
The old Venn diagram shown in Figure 11.1 nicely lays out
what I'm trying to say here.

Stay true to what you want your channel to be about, but don't
make the video for yourself, make it for the audience who cares. If
you don't find this intersection between your passion and your
audience, your channel will never grow.

What Does What Does My

My Brand Hearing Care
(Channel) About?
Stand For?

Figure 11.1 Valuable Content

 Chad Wild Clay and Vy Qwaint are two creators who are pros
at figuring out who their audience is and what they'll watch.
They used to make parody videos, and one of them went viral in
response to the Pen Pineapple Apple Pen phenomenon.

As a result, they learned that viral videos don't necessarily do

you any favors.
They gained many subscribers from the success of the video,
but soon realized that a subscriber usually does not equal a
dedicated viewer.

There's a big difference between building an audience from a

viral video and building an audience from your content and your
personality.

You want a more stable audience; you want viewers who are
loyal to you.

Viral video does not attract the same type of viewer as those
who loyally follow regularly scheduled content and personalities.

One thing Chad and Vy did well was read their viewers'
comments and create new content based on the suggestions viewers
had made.
They found that even their lower production quality videos
performed well when they responded to what viewers had asked for.

But in numbers, they also realized that their subscriber

conversions were much lower than other channels, so they started
experimenting with different types of content to see what worked
best.
 Eventually, they accepted that their audience was getting
younger, so they decided to create content aimed at children ages 6
to 12.
It worked. His channel exploded.

It worked because they kept trying to understand their audience

and changed their content to match.
It's important to reiterate here that you have to create from a
place of passion, so don't change your content to match at the
expense of doing something you love!

Find the sweet spot

One of my favorite examples of someone who found his

audience is Devin Stone.
Devin is a lawyer who started making YouTube videos to help
law students prepare for the LSAT and survive law school.

He found a good audience on his Legal Eagle channel, but he

wanted his channel to grow. Devin reached out to me and I had a
consultation with him to give him tips and advice to grow his
channel.

I asked Devin how many law students there were in the United
States at any given time and he said about a hundred thousand, so I
helped him understand that he had reached the market penetration
threshold with what he was doing, and if he wanted To grow beyond
that, it had to extend its reach.

Devin's audience was maxed out with the type of content he

was creating, and if he wanted to get a larger audience, he had to
change his content to reach people outside of the law student
demographic.

I asked him to reiterate why he wanted to make videos in the

first place, and he said he just wanted to share his passion for the
law and help people better understand the law.

So the follow-up question was: How can you help more people
outside of law school understand the law?

The answer we came up with was to use law-related TV shows

and movies that a mainstream audience already enjoyed watching
and bring it to a “Real Lawyer Reacts to” format. . .”.

I already had a video in this format, but I needed to create more

in this series.

He also created a true crime special. It was still reaching its

original viewer, but it had also found a way to appeal to a pop
culture viewer.

Legal Eagle now has over one million subscribers and one
hundred million views. Devin discovered how
Figure 11.2 Scalable valuable content

He crossed his passion with his audience, but the real sweet spot came
when he added the third dimension: pop/popular culture.

Take a look at the Venn diagram in Figure 11.2 to see exactly what I
mean.
Let me stop you here, because I know what many of you are thinking:
"But my content is for everyone." No, it's not.
If so, then that is your problem. First you have to find your audience.
Recognize who your “love” group is for your niche and expand to a
broader audience from there. By "love" group, I mean his loyal followers.
These are your groupies. Think Grateful Dead fans; They are so loyal
that they even have their own groupie name, "Deadheads."

These are the people who go to every concert, even if it's the same
concert, in every city, taking time away from work, relationships, and
hobbies just to follow the band.

Your online followers, when you find them, will consume everything
you do just because you did it. They have converted to you.

Matthew Patrick, known on YouTube as "MatPat," made a video in

2020 to talk about some pretty deep issues for creators trying to make a
living on YouTube.

MatPat's channel, Game Theorists , is obviously for gamers, so in order

for this offbeat video to work well with his "groupies," he brought an
analogy to Infinity Gauntlet to explain the topics in a way they could
understand and want to follow along. seeing.

But you know who else is familiar with the Avengers and Infinity
Gauntlet movies? The mainstream. MatPat nailed this video, both for his
 loyal fans and a broader audience, and kept them watching because they
liked it and because he used something widely relatable.

Not all channels are the same

Not all channels work the same in the Venn model. You will see
different results depending on the type of channel you have; That's why it's
so important to know who your love group is before branching out into the
mainstream.

If you have an educational channel, you shouldn't take what a gaming

channel does and copy it exactly and then wonder why your successful
strategy didn't work when you tried it.

Content resonates differently with different audiences.

Someone who likes to watch gaming videos will have specific viewing
behavior towards gaming content and specific viewing behavior towards,
say, a cooking tutorial.
And vice versa.
There are a ton of different types of content: how-tos, best of, vlogs,
product reviews, cooking, games, music, pranks, kids education, the list
goes on and on.

It should make sense that if your channel is a vlog, your viewer will
have different patterns than a how-to viewer.
Ultimately, people consume content they care about, so find out who
cares about your particular type of content.

Be careful to assume, however, that this means that a food viewer is a

food viewer on all content about food, for example.
You really have to narrow it down beyond a broad category to
understand your ideal viewer.
 In other words, someone who wants to find and follow a recipe doesn't
want you to add your commentary, personality, and visual creativity; They
just want the recipe.

Whereas, another channel could be perfect for that viewer who wants to
be entertained and connected to the person making the food. See how
specific you can be? When you can identify who is watching and where and
what they enjoy, you've hit the jackpot.

Think Sezar Blue . The people who watch your content aren't there for
the recipe, they're there for the entertainment.
Food is another character in its story; It's not what you're making for
dinner tonight.

AI Also Needs to Know Its Audience

When you can get YouTube's algorithms to understand who your

viewers are, they will do the work of finding other viewers with similar
viewing patterns to show them your content.

Remember that YouTube's #1 goal is to keep the viewer on the platform

longer, so if you've honed your content to match a specific viewer, YouTube
will help your content be seen by that viewer who's most likely to want to.
see him.

AI puts together similar videos to recommend to like-minded viewers

because, well, it works.

The faster you can fit content into a collection of videos that will be
grouped into batches, the faster it will be included in recommendations and
discovered by the right viewers.

However, to stand out among them, use strategies to obtain high

viewing time and ADL.
I show you how to do this in Chapter 13.
I truly believe there is an audience for anything you could possibly want
to do on YouTube.
Canada's self-proclaimed “saltiest” creator, Jackie NerdECrafter , found
her audience when she stopped trying to do it the traditional way and started
being herself.

“I thought I had to try to be pretty so I could attract people because I'm

too simple,” she said. “So I started wearing eyeliner, but I was allergic to it
and I was crying in my videos.
When I realized I was going to get negative comments even with the
eyeliner on, I stopped.”

Jackie embraced her authenticity and showed her personality and her
mistakes, and that's when growth happened.

She attributes her growth to being herself; In fact, she believes that's
why her channel took off compared to other female channels that came
before hers.
They were trying to be perfect; she was being genuine.
Jackie said: “When I posted my first video on YouTube, it got 30
views.
I thought, 'Holy Moly, 30 views; that is incredible! 'Who are these 30
people?'”
She really cared about who those people were, and she wanted to
understand them on a level where she could continue to create content that
they would watch and like.
This should be your goal whether you have 30 viewers or 30,000. Ask
 yourself who they are and what they would like to see.

But . . . How do I learn from my audience?

This may sound crazy or impossible, but I like to figure out who my
audience is before I discover my niche. That's how important it is to find the
right viewer.

Don't get ahead of yourself with content creation, because if you do it

right, your viewers' behavior will change your content.
This is where we could talk about the whole cart before the horse
analogy.

People often create content quickly without fully understanding who

they are creating it for, which is a big recipe for frustration.

I like good recipes, but not this one. Learn who you are creating for.

Your content will be consumed and shared naturally and won't lead to
frustration, so take a step back and get to know your audience first.

The Breakdown of the Person

To accomplish this, I make some educated guesses before I have the

data I need.
 I call it a Persona Breakdown.
The person is your viewer, your avatar, your target audience.
You want to get to know that person as best as you can.

This is tricky to do right off the bat, but you can make assumptions until
you have the data to help you.
Figure 11.3 Persona Breakdown

Take a look at the Persona Breakdown shown in Figure 11.3.

If you want to know your viewer so you can create content they will
watch, you need to know things about them demographically,
psychographically, and behaviorally, both online and offline.
I analyze this breakdown twice: once for a male viewer and once for a
female viewer.
First, demographics. Think about age and gender, first of all.

Otherwise, consider your viewers' income range, education, location,

marital status, and children's status.

Don't you think it would be useful to know if your audience is a

majority single male between 25 and 35 years old? If they are girls?
Generation Z? Middle class?

I know some creators who assumed they were making content for teens,
but when they had a live event, the vast majority of attendees were actually
eight or nine years old.

This fact surprised them, but they changed their content to really cater
to that younger audience, and their channel performed exponentially better.

After demographics, look at your viewer's psychographics.

Demographic charts are external traits or facts about a person, while
psychographics are their internal traits.

Psychographics analyzes a person's beliefs, values, attitudes,

motivators, lifestyle choices, fears, and vulnerabilities.

It's what drives them. They are your goals and aspirations; It is what
they are passionate about. Demographics are the boring facts;
Psychographics is where it gets fun, because you can find out who your
viewer really is.
They are no longer a number; They are a person. Now you can connect
with them on a level you couldn't otherwise.

A great example of seeing the person behind the number is when a

celebrity connects with a fan one-on-one. You've seen the videos.
One of my recent favorites includes Billie Eilish sending a personalized
video to a 13-year-old leukemia patient.

Billie solidified a lifelong fan, not only in the girl who was sick, but
also in people like me whose hearts were deeply touched.
Think about how that gesture affected Billie's “love” group and his
loyalty to her.

After looking at demographics and psychographics, you may have a

pretty good idea of who your viewer is, but none of that matters if you don't
know what they really do. You have to know how they act in their daily
 lives, both in the real world and online.

YouTube's algorithm can't think about your viewer's psychographics

like you can, but what it can do really well is observe your viewer's online
behavior. In fact, it sees data that we cannot see as humans.

Even with over two billion active and registered viewers, you can still
observe each viewer to understand their behavior. Specifically, AI watches
what a viewer does and doesn't do when they click on a video.

You see what a viewer searches for, they click, they don't click, they
watch for five seconds and leave, they watch for the duration of the video,
they click next, and so on.

AI connects unstructured data and similarities between viewers.

Your viewer lives in Micro-Moments

However, you need to know even more about your viewer's daily,
minute-by-minute behaviors. These are what Google calls "micro-
moments."
Google put together a great guide on how people interact with online
content and how it affects their real lives.

The essence is that people always have their mobile device near them, They
check it 150 times a day, and most of the time they spend on it is recovered in
moments.

These moments are defined by intention: they want to know something, go

somewhere, do something, or buy something.

A brand needs to be there to answer any of these queries quickly, because

the opportunity to put content to them in a useful way will only last a moment.

Here's a quick example of each type of micro-moment:

• The "I want to know" moment: You go online and search for a random
fact. This happens a lot in everyday conversations. A question comes up,
and someone says, “Google it.” So jump online to get the answer and go
down.
• The moment of wanting to go: Probably the most common here is
something like the "find Italian restaurants near me" type of search. You
want to go somewhere nearby for something specific.
• The moment I want to do: You need to change the air filter in your
vehicle, so search how to do it on YouTube.
• Time to buy: Your toaster fried itself this morning and you need to order a
new one today. You are ready to buy.

Think about your own day-to-day mobile habits. Do you pull out your
phone to search for something on Google and spend the next two hours casually
browsing through an entire website, or do you pull out your phone when a
thought occurs to you about something, click on the first result you see most
relevant and determine in a few seconds if it will remain in that place?
When you find what you're looking for, you put your phone away and
return to the task at hand.
Five minutes later, you pull out your phone, text your friend, check your
social notifications, and put your phone away.
Fifteen minutes later, the phone comes out again, tells you the closest
Mexican restaurant with good reviews, and goes back into your pocket.

At the restaurant, you open your phone to take a photo during lunch, send or
post it, and put your phone away. We live in micro-moments, online and offline.
 We all live in this binary, but we have different habits.

Planning a trip to Europe, for example, some of us plan months in advance,

researching the best places to visit and eat, booking hotels and tours in advance.

Others book a last-minute trip when they see a deal and work out the details
on the fly. My daughter Ellie is like that.

He accompanied me on a business trip to Berlin and I asked him to find

out where we were staying and what we would do.

After my speaking gig was over, I asked her what the plan was, and she
pulled out her phone right then and found us the best burger joint hidden in
a converted basement bathroom. And the food wasn't bad;

It was delicious. Their online behavior decided what we did in real time
and where we went next.

If my wife Carolyn had been on the trip, she would have planned the
details of our trip months before we packed our bags.

Putting People Breakdown to Use

The Persona Breakdown applies deeply to the way you create content.
Learn your avatar's details and habits so you can give them exactly what
they want.
Let's do a Persona Breakdown with a hypothetical example.

Remember when I said you can't lump all the "food" viewers together?
 Gordon Ramsay viewers are not the same as I Want a Recipe viewers.

So let's say we want to make content for a food audience, but we want
to target "food lovers".

Food lovers are a completely different group of people than the recipe
guy. Who would fit the gourmet mold?

I'm just going to make some assumptions here. Demographically, I'm

going to assume they are between 25 and 40 years old, skewed majority
female, income range between $40,000 and $120,000, most live in larger
metropolitan cities, with some form of education after high school.
In terms of location, I'm going to assume that many of them live in one
of the top three states for YouTube viewers: California, Texas, and then
New York.

Next, we'll think about the psychographics of this viewer: these are
people who are not necessarily cooks, but enjoy food socially.
They like to take photos of their food and post them on Instagram. They
like to recommend good places to eat to their friends.

They like to be entertained, not just fed. They are often the nine-to-five
working class, and this type of activity or hobby is something that brings
them pleasure.

As for their online consumption, they gravitate toward pretty

thumbnails and good entertainment.

You can subscribe to Gor don Ramsay and similar channels. They
watch cooking shows on Netflix like Cake Boss and British Bake Off. They
like "food porn."
 Their offline behavior reflects the habits of millennials: they can take
time off from their very stable job to go do whatever they want; they can
take a long vacation; They are less apt to marry and have children young.

Now here's the golden zone: the fusion between your online and offline
behaviors.
They take a photo of their food and post it on social media.

They eat at a restaurant and then review it on Yelp. They love finding
the hidden local pizza place and telling their friends online.

When they are at a party, they talk about the places they have been and
make decisions about where they will go in the future based on those
conversations.
They are more stubborn. They are more likely to watch Cake Boss to
agree or disagree with the judges.

Remember we're just guessing here. You can make a more informed
guess by doing some Google searches about your topic or people you think
would fit your audience.

The more content you create and observe patterns, the better you will be
at guessing. And then as we get more data, we can decide what to do based
on that information because data is not a guessing game.

You will be able to see all the demographics and online behaviors in
your video analytics and in your comments. When you have analytics in
play, you can go and collect more information and take it to the next step,
collecting external information about your viewers' online behaviors.
The more you know, the better you can serve them.
That's My People

When evaluating our viewer in a Persona Breakdown, we loosely define

what we assume the viewer is.
We can then do our research to validate or rule out the assumptions we
just made.
We'll cover how to perfect your scope by doing reconnaissance and
research in the next chapter.
This is the fun geeky part that I'm always excited to share; Most
creators have no idea what they've been missing in their content strategy and
are surprised by the ideas they find.

I promise you that you will discover things about your content and your
audience that will change your strategies and help you create better content.
You will learn how important it is to make a plan: it is the basis of Your
success.

There are so many different types of people in the world. Who they are
and how they behave online and offline depends on how they were raised,
their social status, their lifestyle, their personality, and more.

When you make videos the right way, it's a magnet for certain types of
people, who will then consume that content the same way another viewer
with similar traits and interests does.
YouTube finds like-minded people and gives them your content to
consume.

There are two ways to view your avatar when it comes to YouTube: as
someone who will watch your content and as someone who will share your
content or potentially buy something.
Some may not agree that these are two different people, but I think it's a
valuable distinction when it comes to who your viewer is and what their
intention is with your content.
 My grandmother, God rest her soul, was a shopper.
When he passed away, we had to sort through tens of thousands of
dollars worth of things he had bought on QVC. good ads always made her
pick up the phone, credit card at the ready.

For better or worse, I'm the same way: When I see an ad that shows me
how something can functionally improve my life, even if I never thought I
"needed" that item before, I buy it immediately.

My basement is starting to look a lot like Grandma Eves' QVC stash.

In the next few chapters, we'll delve into researching and creating good
content to make it easier to find your audience, but to start, the Persona
Breakdown is a great way to get an idea of your potential viewer.

Then, as you make data-driven decisions based on your viewer's traits

and behavior, magic will happen.

I love using data to make decisions because it's no longer about

guessing who the viewer is and what they're doing: the facts are there; The
data doesn't lie. You will finally be able to say with confidence: “These are
my people.”

Action Exercise
Create your Viewer Persona breakdown. If you have channel
content, check your analytics to get insights from your viewers to
complete these tasks.
If you don't have content, you can still do this as a projected
Persona Breakdown until you have data to extract.
Do this twice, once for a male spectator and once for a female
spectator.

Task 1: List your viewer character's demographics: age or generation,

gender, income range, education, geographic location, and marital status.

Task 2: List your viewer's psychographic data: motivators, values, attitudes,

lifestyle, fears, and goals.
Task 3: List your viewer persona's online behavior: types of media consumed,
content consumed for personal interest versus entertainment, and channels
subscribed to.
Task 4: List your viewer character's offline behavior: purchasing behavior,
habits, hobbies, and where they spend their time offline.

Get the companion workbook and find more resources at

www.ytformulabook.com .

9 Recognition
and Research

The business knows that there is no business without customers.

A lot of money and time is spent on marketing to acquire customers.

You should also spend some time figuring out how to get people in the
door. You may not be seeing your viewers as customers or clients, but you
should. They are consumers you need to acquire to be successful.

I'll show you how to find your people and, more importantly, how to retain
your people. You have to know how to keep them coming back for more, or
you'll lose them.

Our goal is to keep the loss or "churn" rate as low as possible and the
growth rate constantly increasing. Every good business does it well, and you
should too.

This is going to be one of the most fun chapters in the book because we get
to talk about exactly how to go and find your viewer tactically. The funniest part
is that it works.

In the introduction to this book, I said that a shitting unicorn made me write
this book. This was not ironic; I literally meant it. Here's the story behind it: I
was visiting my friend Jeffrey Harmon, who I've worked with on many projects
over the years.

We complement each other very well professionally.

He told me about a possible new project he might be working on that would
have a unicorn pooping in his ad. He had me in unicorn, but he really had me in
poop.
The ad was for a company called Squatty Potty and they had a challenge to
overcome.

Their demographic was the boomer generation, and they had stagnated.
They knew they needed to reach a younger, health-conscious avatar, and
contacted the Harmon brothers' marketing agency for help.

I told Jeffrey I really wanted to be a part of the project (Who wouldn't? A

unicorn that poops ice cream? Sign me up!), so we joined forces and started with
creativity.

We needed to take the "ick" out of being number two, and we needed to
convince Squatty Potty's owners and their Shark Tank investor that this would
work.

Originally, the plan was to use a Clydesdale-sized artificial unicorn to poop

because it was big enough to fit an ice cream machine inside, but Daniel
Harmon, Jeffrey's brother and business partner, came up with the idea of using
effects computer generated and a little unicorn in its place.

We needed to know where to find the world's unicorn lovers.

and discover who they were on an individual level so that we knew how to
connect with them in our message and delivery.
The success of every marketing campaign depends on knowing who the
buyer is, but I wanted to know more than who would buy a Squatty Potty;

I wanted to know what kind of person cared about unicorns enough to

respond strongly to an ad featuring one.

So I went to Reddit, which is always a great place to go and find niche

groups, and I was looking for people who liked My Little Pony, because we
thought this would be a community that would respond to the unicorn.

There's a subreddit for every topic, and don't you know it? I found a
community of My Little Pony fans. Men and had their own culture of My Little
Pony memes, terminology, and costumes.

I will never forget the costumes. I lost three days of my life with the
Bronies, because I simply couldn't believe such a strange subculture existed, and
I kept going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.
It fascinated me so much. I went back to Jeffrey, Daniel Harmon, and Dave
Vance, the lead writer on the project, and told them what I had found.
 We had the Bronies in mind when we brainstormed and created the ad,
because we wanted to do something that resonated with their subculture; we
wanted them to like it enough that they would talk about it and share it with
people.
Dave came up with the wizarding world and the prince, and wrote a brilliant
and entertaining script.
The moment of Brony's discovery was monumental for me in my work
because it made me realize how important it was to go find your avatar.

The light bulb had gone out; It was a very aha moment for me. It's
important to note that Bronies were not our target buyers.
They were the focus group that would respond to the video ad naturally.

They would create a feedback loop for the campaign: they would find the
ad and view it in full, comment on it, and share it.

They would create the buzz for viewers who purchased the product to see
the ad. They would launch the campaign and make it grow.

For every 10,000 views, we knew how many shares we would get and how
many people would tag their friends, engage, or purchase.
I managed organic pushes to different personas of viewers who would view,
consume, share and purchase.

Jeffrey looked at it from the long-term approach of acquisition and

retention. It measured the buyer persona based on one criterion: who swiped the
credit card. Between us, we had all the bases covered. Like I said, we work very
well together.

When the ad was ready to launch, we knew we were on to something big.

It was a longer format video, almost four full minutes, much longer than
traditional advertising, but original and highly entertaining.
 Jeffrey and I had a launch strategy session and had the idea to make a gif of
unicorn poop ice cream with the caption: "The world is going to change on [this
date]."

What did we do with that? He leaked it to the Bronies, of course! I privately

shared the animated gif with a member of the Brony community.

As the saying goes. . . You can lead a Brony to water, but you can't force
him to drink? Well, they drank. They were crazy about the gif, and when the
video was released later that week, it made it to Reddit's front page.
We got over 20 million views on the video in less than 24 hours, and it
continued to gain traction by the hour. Jeffrey and I were stunned by the
response.

The best part was that we knew that for every dollar spent we would earn a
certain amount. We added fuel to the fire by publishing ads against it in addition
to its organic distribution.

It has sustained sales over time, which is great because we were able to
analyze and adjust along the way, and it has continued to work.
In the first year of the ad, it generated $28 million in attributable sales, and
to this day, years later, it converts every time the ad runs.

There are still people who haven't seen the ad, even though it's several years
old, and we know they will buy because we know the person, so we can target
exactly who we need.

There are new buyers coming to the market every day and when the right
one matches, we have acquired another customer.

I haven't seen a viral ad like this before or since. It was even dubbed, “The
 Biggest Viral Ad in Internet History,” by Boing Boing.

This is how I discovered the real secret of understanding content creation

from finding the right person for the content.
We found the right viewers who would share the ad and we found the right
viewers who would buy the product. This is the secret magic of the ice cream
poop unicorn.

Recognition

Recognition means you are in discovery mode. You need to discover your
own Bronies, so to speak. Your job here is to nail what type of content you want
to make.

You want to know if anyone is already doing something similar on

YouTube and, if so, what each channel represents and what their audience cares
about.

You want to know who the big creators are in the niche, who has movement
and momentum. You want to find out who the target audience is and how they
are responding.

So let's work on the how: Go to YouTube and make a list of 20 different

channels in the niche you're interested in.

Then go to the videos on the first channel and sort them by most popular.

Watch the most popular videos that have been uploaded over the past year.
Go to the next channel and do the same. You have to write all this down.
Pay attention to the recommended videos below when you are watching
each video.

You'll be able to see what's working on YouTube right now. Some of these
channels may have a lot of subscribers, but have not seen recent activity.

Make sure the channels you are listing have active viewers who have
recently consumed the content and/or commented.

Some of these big channels haven't posted a video in a while, so don't use
them for your recognition purposes.

When sorting by most popular, make sure they have something recent in
their top results.

See how engaged viewers are with each video and channel. Look at the
viewers to subscribers ratio to see how big or small the market size is for the
niche.
Remember Devin Stone from Chapter 11, whose Legal Eagle channel
teaches people about the law? As you acknowledge, keep in mind how Devin
reached a broader audience than the law student crowd.

What you are doing is collecting enough data about content similar to the
type you want to create. Grouping similar channels helps you see patterns.

When you understand similar channels and how your viewers interact and
respond to your content, you are figuring out who your viewer might be.

I don't want you to do deep research on these channels yet.

Your purpose is to get all the information you need to find out what's in
 your niche and who those viewers would be. You will analyze all this
information in the investigation phase later.
After making your list on YouTube, look for the niche outside of YouTube
as well.

People who would be interested in your type of content are interested in

other things on the Internet, and you need to understand their behaviors and
interests. Reddit is a great place to find communities.

You'll be surprised at the things your viewers are interested in that you
didn't even know existed. Once you have all this information, you'll be preparing
to make data-driven decisions.

Great creators are always in recognition mode, even after achieving great
success. You don't do reconnaissance once and call it good.

There's always more to discover about your audience, and your analytics
will continually show you patterns.
You'll discover hidden gems when you diligently look at your data.
Look at the data with the question, “Why?” always in your mind. Why was
your content successful or not? Why did your viewers interact with your content
the way they did?
But be careful not to get stuck here: a big mistake I've seen creators make is
spending too much time in recognition mode.

It's very easy to fall down the rabbit hole when you start digging (read: my
journey into the annals of the Brony world). Get the information you need and
move on to the research phase.

Investigation

Okay, now you're ready to dig in and do an analysis of the things you
gathered in the reconnaissance. Go back to your YouTube channel list and click
on one, then again sort the videos by most popular.

Just forget about the older videos on the channel; You want to see what has
been working recently.

Choose 6 to 10 videos per channel that have the most views and make notes
on titles, thumbnails, video views, likes and dislikes, and video length.

Notice if the creator uses a hook to draw viewers into the content, how the
pacing feels, and how they edited.
Ask what similarities you see between different videos and on different
channels on your list.

Take note of reengagement throughout the video, calls to action, video

descriptions, and comments.
You're looking for patterns here: patterns in content creation and patterns in
audience behavior.

This practice is all about viewer response and interaction with the content,
and to see what is working right now in your niche.

While this section of the chapter is not long, the research process takes
time.
It can get tedious, but don't skip it. You have to do the work if you want
to see the patterns. I promise it will be worth it; Just stay with me.

The Last Unicorn: Jesus

Recognition and research can provide the perfect storm when it comes
to finding your community and getting your content out into the world.
 Another project Jeffrey Harmon and I are currently working on is the
polar opposite of a pooping unicorn; It's Jesus.
I am more passionate about this project than any other I have done, and
I have done many projects.

We wanted to create a television series about the life of Jesus Christ that
would appeal to the evangelical community and have the professionalism of
an HBO-quality series.

Jeffrey introduced me to a creator named Dallas Jenkins, who later

became my partner and the writer and director of the Jesus Christ series
called The Chosen.
Ricky Ray Butler, Matthew Faraci and Earl Seals also joined as owners.

Jeffrey was not going to own it, but he was going to distribute the
product with his gel company VidAn.

On a big project like this, we do a multi-day lockdown marketing

session, but before that, we have several brainstorming sessions to get a
good idea of who would be the right fit for the viewer: who would be
passionate about it and who would support it. the project.

I thought it would be easy to do because it would be people like us.

Dallas knew we could get the message across, but he was more skeptical
that we could get people to invest.

We had to crowdfund our project needs, and he said he'd be impressed

if we could make $800.

Matthew had worked on several large evangelical projects and knew the
space well. Dallas also had a lot of experience in space.
But no one had ever made Christian productions with HBO quality.
 Texas is one of the largest groups in online video consumption, so we
focused on Texas and other southern Christian areas.

In other data we had collected in reconnaissance and research, we

realized that Gen 45 years.

We targeted people who were community, school, and church

volunteers, I-love-Jesus types.

For our lockdown marketing session, we got an Airbnb, ordered food,

and got to work.
We were laser focused on who our audience was. We defined the path
of how we would get from where we were to our final goal.

We had to figure out how we would raise the money and how we would
find the army of people who would resonate with our content and promote it
to the world.

We had seed money with the intention of crowdfunding to meet the

needs of this project.
At the time, Mystery Science Theater 3,000 and Veronica Mars were
the highest-grossing crowdfunding projects with a devoted, cult following.

So we set out to surpass these projects and become the #1 crowdfunded

project in the history of film and television. The goal was $10 million.

We knew we wanted to make our message and vision resonate with a

specific person (woman ages 25-45, married or single, parishioner,
volunteer).

So we asked where do these people congregate online? The answer was

not on YouTube. We defined Facebook and Instagram as where we would
find them.

We built our messaging and content strategies around this precise

audience and targeted them primarily on Facebook, because it was the
easiest platform to share our campaign content and message with like-
minded people.
We launched the pilot episode, which told the nativity story about the
birth of Jesus, and brought it to the right people at the right time: right
before Christmas.

The first episode hit the sweet spot on the Venn diagram (from Chapter
11) because it was timely, topical, and could reach our ideal viewer as well
as a broader pop culture audience.

We more than doubled the all-time crowdfunding record with a show

about Jesus.
You could even say it was like manna raining from heaven, if you're the
biblical type.

Some of our biggest contributors said they donated money because

someone pushed them; that someone was usually a person who fit our target
persona profile (our buyer strategy worked!).

In just a few weeks, we were able to gain tens of thousands of followers

on Facebook.

I knew that in order for us to grow massively organically, we needed to

nurture our audience on other platforms.

It took me two years to convince Dallas to fully accept me becoming

the “influencer” face of our project, and that's when everything changed.
People identified with him and his passion, personality and authenticity.
 When we went live on The Chosen YouTube channel, Dallas started
talking to our avatar, YouTube found matching viewers and suggested our
content to them.

We got 146,886 subscribers in 14 days. Yes, 14 days, and yes, that

exact number. Each one mattered to us.

We couldn't be more opposite in demographics and content than in the

two examples in this chapter, which I actually love because it shows that
the method works, no matter what its content is.

Target your target audience and then scale up to bring your content to
the masses.
The next few chapters will show you how to really take advantage of
that.
The gist here is that the more you understand and engage with your
audience and create content for them, the more YouTube will connect the
dots and give them their preferred flavor of ice cream, so to speak.

Maybe it's the unicorn poop flavored kind, or maybe it's the Jesus
kind.
Our recognition and research made it possible for us to form a
community of people who loved and distributed our message and content.

This is what can happen when you do enough reconnaissance and

research; this is the reward. That's why you do everything in this book.

A word of caution here: this is not a one-time step. You don't do

reconnaissance and research from the beginning and cross it off your to-do
list.
You have to go back and look at your data and reevaluate.
The more data you come in, the more patterns you'll see and the better
you'll be able to change your strategy as needed to make better decisions
 about your content.

Action Exercise
Take the reconnaissance steps to better find your audience and see
what they consume on YouTube:
Task 1: Research at least 10 successful creators in your niche.
Task 2: Take note of what they have in common. Watch your most
successful videos and take note of video creation and editing patterns.
Task 3: See if and how they interact with their communities, both in the
video comments and in the Community tab. Read comments on your most
popular videos.

Get the companion workbook and find more resources at

www.ytformulabook.com
10 Content is King

May 26, 1980.

That date will always be etched in my mind because something

changed me that day, and I haven't been the same since.
This chapter is about the moments that change people. This is what I
am most passionate about in my job: discovering how our message or
"content"
You can have the greatest impact on others. Some of the greatest
rhetoricians have changed the world, both for better and worse, from
Aristotle to Hitler to Gandhi, with their messages. Every interaction we
have in every facet of our lives comes down to conveying a message.
Messaging is a big part of our YouTube strategy.

It helps us get people to do what we want them to do and achieve our

success goals.
On May 26, 1980 he was six years old. My two uncles had gone to see
a new movie that had come out a few days earlier, and they loved it so
much that they needed a reason to spend money to see it again.
 So they asked if they could take their nephew Derral. What a good
idea! We arrived at the theater and found our seats, and the title sequence
began its trademark Star Wars crawl across the screen. It was The Empire
Strikes Back, the second film in the original Star Wars trilogy. Now, I
don't say this lightly, but The Empire Strikes Back is
THE BEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME THAT HAS EXISTED
IN ALL OF HUMANITY. This was content at its finest. . .

I knew it even at the age of six. The cinematography and story were
like magic to me.

But there was one epic moment in the movie, everyone knows it now,
when Darth Vader revealed that he was Luke Skywalker's father (oh, and
Luke's hand was cut off too, by the way).
At the time of filming, only a few people knew that scene would be in
the script: Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), James Earl Jones (voice of
Darth Vader), the film's creator George Lucas, and director Irvin Kershner.

Hamill says he didn't even know about the plot twist until right before
filming the scene, and Kershner threatened him with a "We'll know it's
you" if the twist leaked.

The shocking sequence was burned into my brain. This moment

changed my life. I became obsessed with everything Star Wars (even the
embarrassing content, like Luke's passionate kiss with his sister, Leia, and
the Star Wars Christmas Special), including all the movies, posters, and
other memorabilia.

He coveted all the collectibles that a poor kid with nine siblings
couldn't buy.

My parents bought The Empire Strikes Back on VHS and I've seen the
 movie 16,482 times since then (although no longer on VHS). (For kids: A
VHS is inserted into a VCR and plays a movie, like a DVD in a DVD
player. If you don't know what a DVD player is.

Ads with Impact

Fast forward a few years. I was watching television in 1984 when a
commercial for a Wendy's hamburger came on.
I was already an ad nerd, even at age 10, but this ad caught my
attention.

There were three old ladies looking at a big bun talking about how big
it was, and when they opened the bun, there was a small hamburger inside.
Then one of the old ladies says the classic advertising line: "Where's
the meat?" I laughed and he laughed. This was great marketing! I told my
siblings and parents and everyone I knew about the announcement because
of its impact on me; It was so fun and different.
Of course, we didn't have a DVR or Internet, so I waited by the TV
with my finger on the record button on the VCR so I could show everyone
what I was talking about.

It was the 1980s way of hitting the share button or tagging someone in
a post.

Later that year, Dunkin' Donuts' “Time to Make the Donuts” ad had a
similar effect on me.
In the ad, Fred the Baker walked in and out of a door saying the
catchphrase "Time to make the donuts" each time, and at the end of the ad,
he surprises himself by walking in and out of the door. at the same time.

It was as if time had folded in on itself and I was seeing double.

 What a fantastic surprise! At this point in my life, I was consumed by
ads like this. I wanted to know why they worked.

I wanted to learn how to create content that was equally brilliant and
effective in its message and impact.

In 1987, PSA ads were my teenage obsession. They were so striking

and powerful in a disruptive and original way that had not been done
before.

Ads like "This is your brain on drugs" and "Didn't see that coming?" It
had a shock value that worked. In the first ad, a guy picks up an egg and
says, "This is your brain."

Then he shows a hot frying pan and says, “These are drugs.” Then he
cracks the shell over the pan and says, “This is your brain on drugs.

Any questions?" as viewers watch the egg fry. I was blown away by
the power of the message in such a quick and simple video. The ad lasted
less than 30 seconds and I will never forget it.

Of course, YouTube didn't exist when this ad aired, but it's fun to go
to the replay on YouTube today and find comments like, “That's my brain
doing math. Not meth…."MATH."

The "Didn't you see that coming?" US Department of State PSA

Announcements USA of Transportation had a similar shock-value effect.

In one video, he starts out like he's advertising a minivan, listing all
the specs and selling points as a family loads up after their son's soccer
game.
 Suddenly, another vehicle crashes into the side of the minivan where
the son was sitting. The screen goes black and says, “Didn't you see that
coming? Nobody does it. Seat belt. ”This was extremely powerful
advertising; The message was loud and clear.

I also started watching Saturday Night Live (SNL) skits in the 1980s
and 1990s that were very funny and memorable to me. I recorded the skits
on VHS tapes so I could watch them on repeat and share them with my
family and friends.

One time when I needed to record a show, I accidentally grabbed a

VHS that was sitting near the TV that had my brother Joe's school project
recorded on it. It was a cute little video of Joe demonstrating how to milk a
till that I recorded over.

What content had been so important to capture that cow? Was it worth
sacrificing precious family memories? It was a sketch called "Colon
Blow," a parody of fiber cereal that ends with the warning "May cause
abdominal bloating."

My family will never let me experience that. Other favorites were

“The Love Toilet,” a combo-john for obnoxiously attached lovers, and
“Oops! I Shit My Pants: Elderly Underwear,” which is pretty self-
explanatory. Looking back, I like to think of these ads as precursors to my
work on Squatty Potty ice cream.

Shitting unicorn ad. What can I say, my penchant for petty humor runs
deep.
Of course, the long-awaited advertising event arrived every February
when it was time for the Super Bowl.
I eagerly awaited the Super Bowl for the commercials as much as any
football fan did for the actual game.
 I recorded all the commercials during the game. In 1984, Ridley
Scott's Apple commercial introduced the world to Macintosh computers
during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII. In 1949, novelist George
Orwel had written 1984, a book that portrayed a dystopian society under
the yoke of a corrupt government.

Since the year was now 1984, Scott created his own version of the
story: an ad boldly proclaiming that his product would free people.

The ad showed an athletic woman running toward a giant television

screen, which broadcast a message to a crowd of brainwashed people.

She had a sledgehammer in her hand, which she threw at the giant
screen, destroying it just before the authorities ran her over.
The message then says: “On January 24, Apple Computer will release
the Macintosh. And you will see why 1984 will not be like 1984.”

It was such a confident statement and such a brilliant message.

(Interesting fact: The estate of 1984 author George Orwel and the holder
of the television rights to the novel sent a cease-and-desist letter to Apple
and its advertising agency, alleging copyright infringement.

The ad aired only once nationally, but it won awards and was dubbed
the television commercial of the decade.)
I wanted to figure out the elements in epic ads like this so I could
make my own. I wanted to be the guy who came up with the idea for the
Super Bowl ad that people would talk about next.

I literally took polls with my family and friends to see which ads were
their favorites and why.
Eventually, I went to school for marketing and advertising, which was
no surprise to anyone.
 Like these ads and SNL skits, all good videos follow a pattern: They
grab your attention with a hook, keep your attention with re-engagement
strategies, and leave you with an unexpected reward or surprise at the end,
like the big reveal. of Darth Vader. in The Empire Strikes Back.

In the ad survey, which took days of my youth, the results of each

survey reflected that the clear winners were the videos that followed a
specific storytelling pattern to keep viewers engaged and had a memorable
payoff at the end.

What is Content, Exactly?

The phrase "Content is king" has been used before, but it is the best
way to emphasize how true the statement is.
As you can see from my own career path starting at age six, content
can change people's lives.
His message inspires, educates, impacts and changes people to the
core.

When we talk about “content” on YouTube, one of the biggest

mistakes people make is thinking that “content” equals “video.”

The video is definitely a very important part of it, but the content also
includes the title, thumbnail, and other metadata.

Your video should be well made, sure, but you should pay just as
much, if not more, attention to your video title and thumbnail, because
they are the deciding factors when a viewer decides whether they will
click and watch.
 You will learn in Chapter 12 how to make a good title and thumbnail.

After you get them to click, you can do the fun part: making the video!
Scratch that: make a good video.

You have to know what makes a good video in order to make a good
video.
It's simple circular logic, but it works. Like when Chris Farley says in
the classic SNL skit, "You'll have plenty of time to live in a van by the
river when you live in a van by the river."
We hear you, Farley. You will make good videos when you know how
to make good videos.

Narration Pattern: Storytelling

All good content has good narrative elements.

People remember a good story even if they heard it decades ago.
Storytelling in good storytelling and good content follows the same
pattern across the board, whether you are making videos about food,
travel, education, or pranks.
And it works for kids, millennials, and boomers alike.
It's called a narrative arc, and the best way to break it down is to refer
to an episode of one of the most successful television series, Seinfeld. The
episode was titled " The Café " and aired in 1991.
Figure 13.1 shows an overview of the narrative arc.
 Figure 13.1 Story arc

The Hook

Most of the nine-season episodes began with Jerry performing a

monologue on stage, telling jokes that foreshadowed the story that would
be seen in the episode.
Its purpose was to hook the viewer from the beginning and introduce
the theme of the episode. In the monologue of "The Coffee", Jerry says
that there is a store in every neighborhood or town that always changes
hands.
"It's a phone store, then it's a yoga store, and then it's a pet store."
He jokes that it's like the Bermuda Triangle: no one can have a
successful business there.
This monologue is the “hook,” our first element in our story arc.
The hook creates enough curiosity that the viewer wants to know what
the episode or video will be about.
Reconnection

Next, Jerry moves on to the reengagement element. The episode has

begun and Jerry is with his friend George in front of a restaurant and says:
"No one has been in that restaurant since it opened. Poor guy"
Later Jerry appears in his apartment looking at the restaurant from his
window with binoculars.
From there he sees Babu, the owner of the restaurant encouraging
passers-by to enter the restaurant. He would like to help you.
His friend Elaine who is with him in the apartment tells him that
people go into restaurants if they see that there are people inside.

The Setup

The third element of the story arc is called setup. It is the part of the
video in which you set up the approaching climax and is another point of
reengagement with the viewer.
Jerry finally enters the restaurant to support Babu.
He thinks he knows business and offers the owner some unsolicited
advice to turn his multicultural, eclectic cuisine restaurant into an all-
Pakistani restaurant.
The owner listens to the advice of Jerry who is completely sure that
his idea will be the reason for Babu's imminent success.

This is a great setup. Be careful not to go straight to the climax at this

point, because you have to continue to intrigue the viewer.
As a viewer, we see that Babu is closing the restaurant to renovate it
and we want to see if Jerry's advice comes true in the next step of the
narrative, the climax.
The climax

Now Jerry is ready to show us the climax of the story arc.

He returns to the restaurant after Babu reopened as a Pakistani
restaurant. We see that Babu is clearly upset with Jerry because he took his
advice, spent time and money on the renovation, and it didn't work out.
The place is completely empty.
Jerry's arrogance infuriates Babu, and the climax ends with Babu
storming out of the room yelling at Jerry, "You're a bad person!
Jerry sits horrified, feeling guilty about everything that happened.
The restaurant closes due to transfer.

The Goosh

The story is over, but don't think it's over yet if you want to retain your
viewers.
Really great content has a bonus element called "goosh."
This is the icing on the cake, in this episode, Jerry is talking to his
friends on the sidewalk in front of the closed restaurant.
Jerry asks his friends what food they want.
Jerry suggests Mexican food, George wants Italian food, and their
friend Elaine wants Chinese food—an eclectic cuisine.
Then Jerry says, “You know what would be great. . .”
Bring everything back to the original restaurant that had been there
before Jerry opened his big mouth. George and Elaine look at him, and the
audience laughs one last time.
This is where you hide your hidden gem; it's the greatest value you
have to offer, even on top of what the audience came for.

Your viewers will come to expect this from you if you do it

consistently, which will keep your retention high because your viewers
 won't leave knowing there's still something for them if they watch the
video to the end.
The Marvel Universe movies are known for their goosh.
When any Marvel movie ends and the credits roll, no one leaves the
theater.
Why not? Because everyone knows there will be an extra scene after
the credits roll.
The additional Marvel scene establishes a plot of the film, offers
comic relief, or hints at a future Marvel film.
However, whatever its purpose, moviegoers love it and leave the
theater with that goosh moment in mind, which they will probably tell
their friends about. If you want to make a really cool video, you have to
add a goosh.
The Recapitulation - Wrap-Up

There's one last thing to tie up the story arc before the video ends: the
summary.
On Seinfeld, almost every episode ends as it begins, with Jerry
concluding the original joke he had presented to the audience at the
beginning of the episode.
In this example, Jerry talks about superheroes, the quintessential good
guys, who hide their identity to prevent people from criticizing them for
the collateral damage that occurs when they are saving the world.
He's defending his "good deed" even though it didn't do anyone any
good in the end.
It's a fun way to wrap up the story in the last few seconds that you
have the viewers' attention.

If you've seen one episode of Seinfeld, you've basically seen them all.
They come together in this predictable pattern of storytelling because it
works.
Each story arc hooks the audience and re-engages them, weaving
multiple stories that converge in the end.
 There's a clear setup, an unpredictable climax, and an excitement for
the extra content or hidden gem.
This pattern works for any genre and if you follow it, you're setting
yourself up for some really great content.
Make your content stand out

My hope with this chapter is that you will never watch YouTube the
same way. As you watch videos, you'll train yourself to analyze each
element, looking for storytelling and editing patterns.
You'll learn how important storytelling is and how to connect
emotionally with your audience.
But I also want you to recognize all the details that are part of the
video editing.
The details that help create content that really stands out, details such
as transitions, titles, camera movement, timelapses, zooms, audio
treatment, music and editing techniques.
Let me share with you examples of channels where you will actually
learn how to edit your videos.

Justin Odisho is a content creator focused on creativity, business,

entrepreneurship and social media who primarily focuses on digital media
such as photo and video editing.
Nathaniel Dodson is the founder of the channel Tuvid has a channel
with tutorials on Premiere Pro, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe After Effects,
Adobe Audition, and Da Vinci Resolve videos.

Speaking Spanish, you will undoubtedly be familiar with these two

content creators Rubén, whose Runbenguo channel with more than 50
million views already has its own online school and Edítalo Pro , where
Antonio Escudero teaches you how to use editing programs in a very easy
and enjoyable.
Look for content creators who teach you how to edit, Premiere Gal ,
Boone Loves Video , Mejorcine.com , Cinecom.net , remember that your
 video must stand out, you must be attentive and methodical with every
small detail of your content.
Plan all the elements of the title, the thumbnail, the story arc, the
camera work, and any other little thing a creator can think of when making
a new video.

Authenticity and Emotional Connection

There's an important point to make here: this video seems to work

because of sensationalism - MrBeast buys 12 cars and documents his silly
antics to reveal them all - but something happens outside of the sensation
and silliness.

We see the happiness and gratitude of the people who receive the free
cars, and we see that MrBeast feels really good about helping people.
It's genuine, and it turns out MrBeast is a really good guy.

When your viewers connect emotionally, you've told a good story.

By the end of the car giveaway video, you'll find that you've smiled,
laughed, and maybe even cried, so when MrBeast puts out his call to
action to purchase his merchandise so he can continue to spread good in
the world, he really wants to do click.

Whether you click on the merch button or MrBeast's next video, he's
got it.
Their masterful storytelling and content creation strategies worked
perfectly.
If you take a pen and paper and watch MrBeast's channel with content
creation techniques in mind, you'll end up with a really long list of
practices listed.
 You can do this with any great content creator; Everyone uses these
techniques meticulously and liberally for a good reason: they work.
Ask yourself what items you already use and if you can use them
better. Then take note of the elements you don't use and need to implement
in future content creation.

Sales Content

Some of you might be thinking, “But I'm not using YouTube to grow
my audience; “I’m using YouTube to sell.”

Whether you're making a video to build an audience or an ad to sell a

product, the formula is the same. Although, when you want your viewers
to buy something, you create content with a problem-solution formula in
mind.
You need to explain a problem that your viewers can relate to, and
when you offer a solution, you back it up with credibility.

The original master of direct marketing was infomercial guy Ron

Popeil, who coined the phrase, “But wait, there's more!” that people cite to
this day.

Ron followed the formula for creating good content by putting it

together into a story, even when his ultimate goal was to get people to pick
up the phone and buy a product.

It engaged the audience with a quick hook and a problem that many
people could relate to.

In the early 1950s, Ron filmed the first prime-time infomercial for his
food chopper called the Chop-O-Matic.
It started with a visual hook, demonstrating the ease and speed of the
"best kitchen appliance ever made"
(there is also the verbal hook).

He proceeds by telling people that the Chop-O-Matic will make

baking cakes, making candy, and topping ice cream exponentially easier.
These specific food preparation tasks were not drawn at random from
a hat.

Ron had asked the crowd at product demonstrations which kitchen

tasks were the most problematic, and most of the answers came down to
chopping nuts for those three reasons.

So he tackled the biggest problem first.

He continues to use the problem-solving strategy as the video
progresses, showing remarkable speed and ease in chopping anything from
celery to ice. He claims that the main feature of the chopper is that it cuts
onions so fast that it saves his hands and eyes. No more Tears!

Ron appealed to both women and men at different points in the ad,
appealing first to his number one customer (wives and mothers) and
second to his supporting demographic (men).

The visual sale worked on its own, but coupled with impeccable
scripting, a discounted price, and a bonus recipe book, the Chop-O-Matic
was a slam dunk campaign.
It made millions and launched Ron's extremely successful career.

Its content, like all great content, grabbed attention simply explained,
built to the climax, and had a payoff at the end.
To make the sale, you presented a problem, offered a solution, and
demonstrated your credibility time and time again.
Works across the board

You may be wondering if all of these content elements can really be

adapted to any scenario.

After all, a Seinfeld episode is about 20 minutes long, and the

MrBeast video was almost 17 minutes long.

How could I put all of these elements into a shorter, more focused
presentation?

Let's go back to the Wendy's commercial, which is only 30 seconds

long, but still has all the elements of good content:

• Hook : Three cute little old ladies are at a fast food counter. There's a
big hamburger on the counter. Behind them, boring restaurant tables
look a lot like boring office cubicles. The contrast is so striking that it
immediately draws you in .
• Reengagement : The women look at the burger on the counter and
start commenting on how big and fluffy the bun is .
• Setup : Ten seconds into the commercial, a woman removes the top
bun, revealing a small burger inside. Another lady says: "Where is the
meat? "
• Climax : Fifteen seconds into the commercial, the image changes to
show a close-up of a thick burger and a voiceover tells Wendy's to
"modestly" . calls the burger "simple" and that it has more meat than
Burger King. Whopper or MacDonald's Big Mac
• Goosh : At the 25-second mark, a woman holds the giant bun to her
ear, listening to it as if it were an empty seashell and she was trying to
listen to an ocean that isn't there. At the same time, another lady says
of the restaurant's seemingly missing staff: "I don't think there's
 anyone back there." That's a powerful combination of good comedy
while reinforcing that most burger joints don't care if you want a better
one. hamburger .
• Wrap-up : In the last seconds, the announcer says: “You want
something better. You're Wendy's kind of people. The company wants
to help you and the cute little old ladies, all while making you laugh.
Doesn't it make you feel good?

Simple narrative that can be explained in one sentence:

Wendy's gives you more meat.

Make a Lasting Impact

There's a pattern behind creating great content, whether it's a 30-

second commercial from the 1980s, a 17-minute car lot giveaway, or an
episode of a "show about nothing."

The best content creators are master storytellers who know how to
make a lasting impact on their audience.

They do this by following patterns and implementing tactics to

engage, re-engage, play with emotions, keep promises, have surprises and
unexpected rewards, and offer additional content before they leave you.

If they're really great, they'll leave you wanting more and wanting to
share.
These basic principles are universally applicable, regardless of
duration, target audience and purpose.
Action Exercises
Task 1: Go back to the list you made in the Action Exercise in Chapter 12.
Analyze the videos using Figure 13.1 to see if they use a narrative arc.
Identify the hook, the reunion, the setup, the climax, and the goosh .
Task 2: Create your next video using the story arc .

Get the companion workbook and find more resources at

www.ytformulabook.com
 11 Feedback Is Queen
You know how to make good content. Now you need to learn how to
unlock the power of feedback to truly grow.
We need to define the comments related to your YouTube channel.
Most people probably think of human participation when they hear the
word feedback. You receive positive and negative comments from your
partner, your boss, your mother, your friend and your friend's mother.
It's true that you should get human comments on your content, but I'm
also talking about YouTube data comments. Let's talk about both.

Human Comments

First, human feedback. When it comes to your YouTube channel, you

shouldn't really look for comments from your mom or your friend.

If your mom is like mine, she'll tell you that your video is great, even
if it's the worst video ever uploaded to the Internet.
Or maybe you have the kind of mom who criticizes everything you do,
and would criticize your video even if it's the best thing she's ever seen.

It happened with the Internet. Either way, she's the wrong person to
ask.

Because? Because she's not your audience.

This is why you don't start a new YouTube channel and then harass all
your Facebook friends and Instagram followers to watch your new video.

It is not the way to get the right subscribers and viewers. Their
viewing behaviors are not the same as your ideal avatar.

And his verbal comments will sound something like: "Awesome,

bro!" or "That looks great!" or "OMG, your hair and makeup were, like,
totally perfect!"

Many creators think that joining a Facebook group will be a good

place to get good feedback.

You have to be careful with Facebook groups, because many times

they sound like your mom; people are just full of encouragement, or
they're full of advice or criticism when they don't even know what they're
talking about.

Instead, join or create a mastermind group of relevant and trusted

people in your space.
You can chat weekly via a remote online meeting, or you can meet in
person if you live somewhere with similar creators.
I have a weekly mastermind group with a handful of people I trust to
share ideas and get good feedback.
We talk about new projects, the algorithm, the problems we encounter,
collaborations between us and everything related to YouTube.

My group coaching program includes private feedback groups for all

participants.
I use Discord, but there are many options for online meeting spaces,
such as Mumble, Zoom, TeamSpeak, MeetUp, or even Google Hangouts.
 Do some work and join or create a group that suits you. If your best
option is to start your own group, consider creators in your niche who you
trust or aspire to be like.
Or remove the good guys from a Facebook group and ask them.
It never hurts to ask. I love my private Discord group because they
share commitment and passion, and it's a safe place to be open to
discussion and accept feedback.
They love it too. Some great ideas came out of the conversations they
had in the feedback group.

I mentored a YouTuber named Steve Yeager (his channel is called

Shot of The Yeagers).
One of the first things I told him was to find two or three other
YouTubers that he could meet with weekly to talk strategy and share ideas.
Steve lives in Utah, where there is a large YouTube community,
thanks to Devin Graham aka "devinsupertramp" and other OG YouTubers.

Devin and others started a group called “UTubers” (Utah YouTubers).

I told Steve to start attending the monthly meetings and find some creators
to brainstorm with. He said:
“Derral, I only have 100 subscribers; No one will want to be the
mastermind with me.”
I told him I knew three other channels that would be ideal for him
(one had 1,000 subscribers, one had 5,000 subscribers, and one had 15,000
subscribers).
He approached them, despite his reservations, and the two smaller
channels were excited about the idea of starting a mastermind group.

The channel that had 15,000 subscribers passed up the opportunity,

thinking it was too big a channel to meet newbies.
Steve and the other two channels began meeting weekly.
They brainstormed, discussed videos, and most importantly, shared
data. They also began collaborating on videos.
There was real synergy. All three of these creators' channels exploded.

Today, Steve's Shot of The Yeagers channel has 4.9 million

subscribers and he owns four other channels.
The Ohana Adventure has 3.3 million subscribers and four other
channels. The Tannerites channel has 2 million subscribers and four other
channels. But do you remember the creator who rejected them? They have
45,000 subscribers.

There is real power in getting feedback and encouragement in person.

I highly recommend finding like-minded creators in your area and
meeting up regularly. Start a group like Steve did.

MrBeast released a video called “Anything You Can Fit in the Circle.”
The video wasn't getting as many clicks as a MrBeast video normally
would.
So he changed the video thumbnail to include fewer elements in the
circle and the video worked better.
But still not the way he wanted it done. He approached our
mastermind group for human feedback and someone suggested he leave
the circle empty.
So he went back again and removed all the elements from the
thumbnail to show the empty circle. Viewers responded very well to this
thumbnail and the video took off.
When you upload a video, MrBeast is a pro at watching your analytics
in real time and adjusting based on YouTube data feedback or human
feedback from your colleagues.
He course-corrected with the feedback YouTube was giving him in
real time, giving him a 6% increase in CTR.
Data Feedback

In addition to getting feedback from the right humans, you should also
listen to data feedback from YouTube analytics. Feedback kicks off the
“analyze and adjust” part of the Formula.
I can't emphasize this enough: if you don't study your analytics and
course-correct based on the data you see, you will never be successful on
YouTube.

The term "correct course" is important because it is something you do

while in transit.
It means that there is an immediate problem that needs attention,
because if you postpone the solution, you will end up far from the desired
destination.
Not sure how to course-correct in real time with your analytics? Let
me illustrate with a story.
I travel all over the world to speak at events or work in person with
my clients. Because I travel so much, I prefer to fly from my local airport.

However, I once had a concert in London and wanted a direct flight,

which meant I had to drive two more hours to the international airport in
Las Vegas, Nevada.
I took my son Thatcher so we could spend his birthdays together in
London and Paris.

The 10-hour round-trip flight took us to Las Vegas late at night, and I
was jet-lagged and ready to head home.
So I sped down the interstate as fast as I dared, when a construction
zone and its inherent reduced speed limit arrived.
Now, I already told you about the long flight and the jet lag and the
homesickness, right? Well, those things add up to me not wanting to slow
down.

The road was smooth and straight, so even with several signs warning
me that fines were doubled in a work zone and that the speed limit was
now 45, I kept driving.

It wasn't long before I saw those dreaded red and blue flashing lights
behind me. ARRESTED!
I had earned a hefty fine and a seat in defensive driving school.
Thatcher would have been better off driving, and he wasn't even old
enough to have a license at the time.
A month later, I was back on the highway in the same scenario
returning from Europe: in a hurry to get home to a smooth, open road.
This time, however, there was something besides the same old
construction zone signs. It was a flashing sign that said: “speed limit
45.” . . your speed 65.”
This sign gave me real-time feedback to correct course. Yes, I could
have looked at my odometer to see that I was going 65 miles per hour, but
I didn't.
I couldn't ignore the flashing signal, because I knew the consequences
of speeding in a construction zone. So I slowed down and they didn't stop
me.

YouTube provides real-time feedback just like that flashing speed

limit sign.
Every time you upload a new video, you get feedback in your
analytics to help you immediately fix what's wrong.

AI is very sensitive to your traffic sources. Track impressions and

clicks. The click is key in your adjustment strategy.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) lets you see what's happening in your
video in real time so you can quickly pivot as needed .
The Four Ws

YouTube has given creators incredible and invaluable tools in

YouTube Studio.
These tools help us really understand the viewer inside and out and
also quantify the successes and failures of our videos.

YouTube analytics helps you break things down into metrics so you
can course-correct. The YouTube development team has done a great job
here.
It seems like every week a new metric or tool is added to simplify
your reporting. I am delighted with the robust analytical tools and insights.

Numbers and graphs are intimidating to some people, so they simply

stay away from their YouTube analytics.

Don't let “analysis paralysis” stop you from learning. Knowing your
data is a crucial part of the YouTube formula.

To start, take a step back and don't overcomplicate what we're trying
to discuss.

We need the feedback that will help use the reach and connect with
the audience.
We need to consider the basic information gathering questions, which
we will ask with the Four Ws: Who, Where, What and When. (Who,
Where, What and When).
We start with Who (the Audience). This is much more than just
demographics.

We can break down your audience in your channel analytics to show

you your unique viewers, how many videos they watch, subscriber growth
or decline, when your viewers are on YouTube, and how many of those
viewers are subscribers who have bell notifications turned on.
You can view your viewers by age, gender, and the main countries
and languages represented among them.
See Figures 14.1 and 14.2.
The second W is Where. Your traffic source report was found in the
Reach tab.

It will help you find out where viewers are watching your video: from
YouTube, or from external sources or embedded on websites.

See Figure 14.3. You can see which traffic source generates the most
views, visibility, and watch time.
 Understanding what content YouTube loves to recommend (Explore
Features, Suggested Videos) will help you better understand your content
strategy and help you grow your audience.
 Figure 14.1 The Who: unique viewers

Figure 14.2 The Who: viewer demographics

 Traffic Source Types
Views • Last 7 Days

Suggested Videos 32.4%

Browse features 32.2%

YouTube search 10.5%

YouTube advertising 7.8%

Channel Pages 6.8%

Others 10.4%

SEE MORE

Figure 14.3 The Where

This is by far one of the most overlooked metrics on YouTube,

but it is crucial to your growth strategy.

The third W is What. The video What is your video? that

viewers are watching and clicking to watch.
Includes impressions, view time, CTR, average view duration
(AVD), and average view percentage (AVP). See Figure 14.4.

The last one is the When. I divide the When into three parts: real
time, date range, and when your viewers are on YouTube. the real time.
 Views Watch time (hours)

138.2K 10.8K
51 BK l^ss than usual 5 9K l^ss than usual

YouTube recommending your content

Compared to your other videos, a smaller group of people are

watching this video from recommendations

12.3%
Click-through rate (CTR)

DERR AL EVES...........................................................................
DERRAL EVES................................................................................
You know what your problem is?............................................20
Your Customer's Success is Your Success..............................24
Uniting People around their Passion........................................31
2 The............................................................................................43
Ecosystem....................................................................................43
from YouTube.............................................................................43
Beware of Copyright................................................................46
Advertising Revenue Distribution...........................................49
A Prosperous Evolving System................................................56
Going deeper into Machine Learning......................................63
A Machine at Work. . . and it is working.................................65
4 The Algorithm Breakdown..................................................67
 Part 1: Data Collection and Use...............................................69
Metadata Collection.................................................................71
Video Intelligence....................................................................73
Subtitle.....................................................................................73
Natural Language.....................................................................73
Video Title and Description.....................................................74
Part 2: Algorithms with “S”.....................................................75
Exploration: Home Page..........................................................76
Exploration: Subscription........................................................77
Suggested.................................................................................77
Trending...................................................................................79
Notifications.............................................................................79
Searches...................................................................................80
It's not YouTube's fault............................................................80
It's not YouTube, it's you.........................................................84
Become a data student..............................................................86
Course correction and consistency...........................................92
Get the right feedback..............................................................94
The wrong content...................................................................97
YouTube Superstitions.............................................................98
Exhaustion..............................................................................100
Focus -Focus..........................................................................102
6 Earn Money Association with YouTube................................104
Join the Partner Program........................................................107
The Logistics of Money.........................................................109
 Additional YPP Income Opportunities..................................111
Channel Memberships............................................................111
Live Streaming, Super Chat and Super Stickers....................112
Merchandise...........................................................................114
YouTube Premium.................................................................116
Earn even more with advertising revenue..............................116
Google Preferred....................................................................117
Case Study: Dan Markham @ What's Inside.........................118
Case Study: Jackie @ JackieNerdECrafter............................120
YPP AdSense is just the beginning........................................123
7 Formula Based on Data and Human Beings..........................126
YouTube Sixth Sense.............................................................128
Know your Objective, know your Why.................................131
Align with YouTube's Purpose..............................................135
Traffic and Impulse: decoding the viewer.............................138
Action Exercise......................................................................143
8 Identify your Audience...........................................................144
Don't make videos for yourself..............................................145
Find the sweet spot.................................................................148
Not all channels are the same.................................................152
AI Also Needs to Know Its Audience....................................153
But . . . How do I learn from my audience?...........................155
The Breakdown of the Person................................................155
Your viewer lives in Micro-Moments....................................158
Putting People Breakdown to Use.........................................160
 That's My People....................................................................163
Action Exercise......................................................................164
Recognition............................................................................170
Investigation...........................................................................172
The Last Unicorn: Jesus.........................................................173
Action Exercise......................................................................177
10 Content is King....................................................................179
Ads with Impact.....................................................................181
What is Content, Exactly?......................................................185
Narration Pattern: Storytelling...............................................186
The Hook................................................................................187
Reconnection..........................................................................187
The Setup...............................................................................188
The climax..............................................................................188
The Goosh..............................................................................189
The Recapitulation - Wrap-Up...............................................190
Make your content stand out..................................................190
Authenticity and Emotional Connection................................192
Sales Content..........................................................................193
Works across the board..........................................................194
Make a Lasting Impact...........................................................196
Action Exercises....................................................................196
11 Feedback Is Queen...............................................................198
Human Comments..................................................................198
Data Feedback........................................................................201
 The Four Ws...........................................................................203
Humans + Feedback Data: A Winning Combination............218
Action Exercises....................................................................220
12 Title and...............................................................................222
Drawing attention visually: The Science...............................226
The Rule of Thirds.................................................................235
Color psychology...................................................................239
Thumbnail Strategies.............................................................242
Thumbnails the Right Way....................................................249
Thumbnail Audit....................................................................250
Traffic Sources and Thumbnails............................................251
Video Titles............................................................................251
Your Title Must Satisfy the Why and the What.....................252
Create clickable titles.............................................................256
Downloadable Tools for Title Generation.............................261
Action Exercises....................................................................262
Respect your Viewer's Commitment......................................265
Engagement and Disengagement Triggers - Triggers............266
How to Read Metrics.............................................................267
Average Views per Viewer....................................................271
The 50% Rule.........................................................................271
The 30% Rule.........................................................................273
Maintain the Value Proposition.............................................273
First comment........................................................................275
Pattern interrupts....................................................................276
Domain Commitment.............................................................277
Action Exercises....................................................................279
Part One: Strategy for Your Audience...................................281
Create.....................................................................................281
To collaborate........................................................................283
Organization...........................................................................284
Know where viewers are coming from..................................286
Second Part: Strategies to take advantage of the Algorithm
................................................................................................288
Search.....................................................................................288
Recommended / Suggested....................................................292
Data Relationships.................................................................296
Video description...................................................................297
Playlists and YouTube Mix....................................................298
Community Posts and Stories................................................300
Video Cubes...........................................................................305
How to choose your buckets..................................................308
How to Create Cubes.............................................................312
Keep it Simple........................................................................316
Action Exercises....................................................................318
Creation Story........................................................................323
Creed......................................................................................327
Icons.......................................................................................329
Rituals....................................................................................332
Sacred Words/Lexicon...........................................................333
Not believers..........................................................................335
 Leader.....................................................................................336
Distribution............................................................................337
The Fundamental Ninth.........................................................338
People Are the Brand.............................................................340
Action Exercises....................................................................344
How to Upload a Video.........................................................345
How to Optimize a Video......................................................349
How to launch your content...................................................353
How to Promote a Video........................................................356
Promote Organically First......................................................357
Paid Strategies to Grow an Audience....................................357
Paid Strategies to Sell............................................................362
Action Exercises....................................................................365
17 Retouching...........................................................................366
Your Content.............................................................................366
Real-Time Adjustments vs. Long-Term Adjustments...........367
How to determine your Base lines.........................................368
What to do with your Baselines in Real Time.......................370
Have backup plans ready.......................................................372
What to do with your long-term baselines.............................373
Split Test................................................................................374
Small Adjustments.................................................................375
Just do it.................................................................................378
Action Exercises....................................................................379

60.7% of your total views 131 7K 198 7K

• This video • Typical
 Figure 14.4 The What

The metric shows the performance of your videos in the last 48 hours
as well as the last 60 minutes. These are live analysis. Figure 14.5 shows
the date range and Figure 14.6 shows when viewers are on YouTube.
With the Four Ws, you can start to see how viewers respond to Your
content. It will give you the data you need to correct course without
making things too complicated.
Figure 14.5 The When: date range
Humans + Feedback Data: A Winning Combination

One of my coaching students, John Malecki, has a channel of

wood and metal work.
His miniatures often featured only one object: the beautiful
finished product of his work.
John was very hesitant to put himself in the thumbnail, but I
convinced him to try it because data shows that thumbnails work
better with people's faces on them.

O Publish time is not known to directly affect the long-term

performance of a video. Learn more
Figure 14.6 When viewers are on YouTube
Figure 14.5 The When: date range
As a former NFL lineman, John thought he was too big to be in
the picture. So he decided to try it anyway; He started making more
personality-based videos and getting into thumbnails.

Viewers started clicking more and watching longer. John had

made a video about a DIY lava table and the thumbnail only showed
the table.

Three days after uploading it to his channel, his CTR was low at
1.6%. So he changed the miniature for one that had him with the
table.
Some of his previous thumbnails showed John serving something
and he had gotten a lot of views, so we thought he should use that
tactic here.

He poured the "lava" into a bucket and an arrow pointed at the

finished product.

Then we looked at their CTR: it immediately jumped to 8.9%. A

video that was on its way to being one of your lowest performing
videos is now one of your best. . . all because John sought feedback
and human data feedback and made adjustments to both. See Figure
14.7.
Figure 14.7 John Malecki CTR

Don't worry if you've never seen your real-time analytics.

Don't worry if you've never made adjustments to your content
based on the feedback you receive from the data. The good news is
that you can start doing it right now.
I'll show you exactly how in the next few chapters. We'll cover
CTR and other metrics like ADL, AVP, and average views per
viewer.
We'll also go over your content strategy and how to categorize
your videos.
You'll be able to create amazing content and make smart, data-
driven decisions to help your content perform at its best. That's a
powerful combo that rules the channels!
Action Exercises
Task 1: Search your area for other YouTube creators. See if there are
already meetings, whether online or offline, and ask to join .
Task 2: If there are none, create your own expert group and meet
regularly.

Task 3: Look at the videos you have posted in the last 90 days. Write
down your top-performing videos and analyze each one using the
Four Ws. Look for patterns among them

Task 4: Validate your viewer's personality as identified in the Action

Exercise in Chapter 11. Are they who you thought they were? What is
the difference between them?

Get the companion workbook and find more resources at

www.ytformulabook.com .
12 Title and
Thumbnail: Success begins
with a click

What is the most important metric for YouTube success? This

is one of the most frequently asked questions I receive year after
year.
The answer is easy and goes something like this: it all starts with
a click. If people don't click, they won't watch it, no matter how
amazing your video is, end of story. How do you get viewers to
click? You earn their attention.

Getting viewers to click is the biggest struggle I see for both

creators and brands. You have to make people focus on your content
away from all the distractions.

My son Logan decided to run for student body president at his

high school, so he asked me to help him with his marketing. Of
course, she was happy to help;

I love new campaigns and talking about strategy, but this time it
was for my son. We talked about the importance of capturing
people's attention with a message or slogan.
 It had to be easy to remember and simple to explain and share,
and it had to stand out from other campaigns.

He said, “Dad, you know I hate attention. I hate being the center
of attention. It's true; since I was a little boy.

Logan always felt uncomfortable with the attention. I pushed

him a little, saying maybe he needed to get out of his comfort zone.
But then he said, “I don't want to be fake. "It's just me." Boom. I had
an idea.

His campaign message would be: "No slogan, just Logan." It

effectively captured people's attention and was easy to remember.

The slogan reminded his teammates that they liked him for who
he was, and that was what won him the election in the end, not the
campaign.

In previous chapters, you learned that YouTube's job is to

predict what the viewer will see.

The AI is really sensitive to everything viewers interact with on

the platform, and it actually starts with an impression.

An impression occurs when a viewer can see a title and

thumbnail for at least one second.

This could be on the YouTube home page, subscription feed,

search results, or suggested feed (below).
If the viewer skips the title and thumbnail in less than a second,
it doesn't count as an impression. If they click, that's what records
your click-through rate (CTR).

An important note: the higher the impressions and CTR data, the
better. That means YouTube is recommending your video to a more
general audience.
The more you recommend, the more impressions you will get.
The more impressions you get, the lower your CTR will be. So don't
panic because your CTR percentage is dropping when your
impressions and views increase.
That's good because YouTube shows it to more viewers outside
of its "normal audience."

Before YouTube gave us CTR data in Creator Studio, I knew it

was really important just because of how I thought the algorithm
worked.
The success rates of advertising campaigns focused a lot of
attention on CTR data.
I started split testing thumbnails and titles in AdWords for my
biggest clients.
We gave our audience demo charts and interests and created an
ad to see which had the highest CTR.
I was surprised when we changed the winning titles and
thumbnails and put them on YouTube.

The videos would explode! I started begging YouTube's

development team to give creators that data. I knew it was a huge
factor, so I continued to spend a lot of time, money, and energy
learning what titles and thumbnails worked because it was the only
way to make it work. people will look or buy.
Let me give you an example of how to do this. When Jeffrey
Harmon, Daniel Harmon, his team, and I created the Squatty Potty
ad, we created a Google Doc with title ideas and added every
variation we could think of.

There are no "dumb" ideas in brainstorming, because anything

can inspire a great title. We needed to figure out what was going to
pique human curiosity and make them click. Because more clicks
would bring us more people taking action to buy.

We knew we had to test our options, so we made 165 title

variations to see how viewers responded.
We all had our favorites, but we had to choose based on the data,
the data doesn't lie! And we really wanted to do it well because we
had a lot at stake in this campaign. Success was our only option.

The best way to see which title and thumbnail generated the
highest CTR was to run engagement ads on Facebook.
We created several Facebook ads to find out how our target
audience responded, running A/B split tests on different headlines
and scenarios.

Interestingly, the first title that came to mind eventually became

the final title,
“This Unicorn Changed the Way I Poop,” but it cost me a couple
hundred dollars to know it was the best-performing title.
The inspiration came from looking at a list of Daniel's titles and
brainstorming from there. That's the power of collaboration and
brainstorming together.
After selecting the titles, we needed to start testing the
thumbnails.

We also took 20 different thumbnails and tested them against

our top five title options, spent a couple hundred more dollars on
additional split testing, and made our final decision based on the
data.

Our final CTR was 10 times higher than it would have been
without the test. Ten times. Consider that for a moment.

Jimmy Donaldson, "MrBeast", has become a wizard at creating

titles and thumbnails for optimal click response. I love Jimmy's
process of creating the best title and thumbnail for every video he
makes.
If you can't find a clickable title and thumbnail, you won't make
the video, no matter how good the video idea is. Always! Trust me,
I've tried to convince him to do it.

Most creators only think after recording the video and right
before uploading it: "What should I do for the title and thumbnail?"

This is a big mistake and could cost you the potential success of
the video. Think long and hard about what people will want to click
on. This is essential because if they don't click, they won't look.

That's why Jimmy strategizes before making each video. We

have literally spent days thinking about the right title and nail.
Not hours, days. Let that fact make you stop and think about the
process and priority of creating titles and thumbnails.
Make it a priority.
You don't need to go to the extreme like MrBeast does, but you
should think about your potential viewer and what would motivate
them to click.
This will also help you when you are creating the video.
Spectator first!
Drawing attention visually: The Science

In my college biology class, I learned about the brain and the

visual cortex, and I was fascinated. My interest grew when I could
see the practical application in advertising.

I spent hours trying to figure out how to apply it to get people's

attention.
In short, the visual cortex of the brain is what processes visual
information.

There are four areas in the visual cortex called V1, V2, V3 and
V4.

There are also special areas of the visual cortex that process
visual information very quickly.

These are called "pre-attentive" areas because they process

information faster. Let me show you how this works.

Let's do a quick exercise called "the blink test." Close your eyes
and then open them for a millisecond and look at Figure 15.1.
 In other words, just blink and then keep your eyes closed for a
few seconds.
 Figure 15.1 Sizes and shapes

Notice where your eye was drawn. Was he attracted to the great circle
of ger? Let's try again with Figure 15.2.
Did the bar that had a different orientation catch your attention?
These examples are super simple, but they work. Science is cool!
You can't get the full power of the process in a black and white book
because it works best with color images.
The visual effect of color in miniatures is so important that I created a
free online course to accompany this book.
You'll find the best examples of color thumbnails, along with my
detailed thumbnail training, at ytformulabook.com.

Figure 15.2 Orientation

The pre-attentive areas of the visual cortex are not the only brain
connections we use.

Another area of the brain you can tap to capture attention on a

thumbnail is the fusiform facial area (FFA).
This part of the brain is sensitive to human faces and is near the area
of the brain that processes emotions.
Figure 15.3 Expressions
This serves as an explicit trigger in thumbnails because the brain has
circuits dedicated to faces.
When my daughter Ellie was four months old, I was reading a study
about how babies can recognize faces and emotional expressions starting
at three months old.

Of course, I had to put it to the test. I tested six facial expressions on

baby Ellie to see what emotion it produced.
See Figure 15.3.
 For weeks I tested my "crazy" faces on my baby. I was surprised to
see that each facial expression created a different emotional response even
in a four-month-old child.

I think I scarred my daughter for life (sorry, Ellie!), but it was in the
name of science. I still mess with my daughter by texting her crazy faces
to this day. Knowing how the human brain reacts to images can give you a
huge advantage when designing your thumbnails.

Netflix has some of the best thumbnails on the planet.

Figure 15.3 Expressions
They spent a lot of money trying to perfect the science of capturing
the viewer's attention.
I regularly browse Netflix to see the thumbnails that really catch my
eye.

I never click on it to watch, I just browse. It drives my wife Carolyn

crazy. She'll say, "Are we going to watch something or am I going to
watch you look at thumbnails all night?"
I am fascinated by what appears.

I also go to Carolyn's account and my kids' accounts to see what

shows up differently for them. I study miniatures a lot.
I even create test accounts just to see other types of thumbnails
displayed and what is recommended.

When doing research for clients, I ask them to list 20 movies their
viewers would watch, then I select them on Netflix and see what
recommendations and thumbnails appear in the AI.

Netflix. This always gives me ideas of what colors and image

positions really connect with a demographic.
Imagine seeing 12 images flash on a screen in a fraction of a second.

Do you think you can process each image? A team of neuroscientists

at MIT discovered that the human brain can process entire images that the
eye sees in just 13 milliseconds.

There is a Netflix research article called “The Power of an Image”

that reinforces the importance of an image in helping the consumer choose
what to watch.
 In its research, Netflix found that the artwork associated with a movie
accounted for more than 80% of people's attention while browsing.

The attention paid to the titles was secondary and lasted less than two
seconds.
It's not a lot of time to convince with words that this is what that
person wants to see. The image is the most important thing.

And it has to be good, because we see things in the blink of an eye

and make snap judgments without even realizing it.

As content creators, we only have milliseconds to capture people's

attention and draw them to our content.

If we don't catch them quickly, they will have already moved on to

look for something else that will make them click. How do we get their
attention? with curiosity

Curiosity is a basic human behavior: we are programmed to be

learning machines.

It is a natural human instinct that has been with us since the day we
were born. I never really realized it until my daughter Ellie was three and
she was always asking questions.
She asked classic questions like, "Why is the sky blue?" and, "Where
do babies come from?" but my personal favorite was, "Mommy, why is
Daddy making so much noise?"

Curiosity is a fundamental element of our cognitive functioning.

Figure 15.3 Expressions
Curiosity wins the click. Your thumbnail and title combination should
make someone pause long enough to consider clicking.

For example, when I saw a photo of a guy holding a loaded barbell

underwater, it caught my attention, so I took a quick look at the title, "Can
you bench press 1000 pounds underwater?", and I got hooked. See Figure
15.4.
Figure 15.4 Bench press

I had to click on that video. I inadvertently spent the next hour and a
half consuming content from creator Tyler Oliveira.

Tyler made clickable thumbnails with catchy titles that piqued my

curiosity again and again. Plus, their video content did not disappoint.

Let's look at some basic design principles that will improve your CTR
percentage.

The Rule of Thirds

To ensure your image attracts the human eye, keep it simple and
balanced.

A viewer feels more connected to a well-balanced image because it

feels aesthetically good.

An image that looks static will always look less interesting. One of
the first techniques a beginning photographer learns in a photography
class is the “Rule of Thirds.”
It is an effective technique for composing a balanced photo by
dividing it into thirds, both horizontally and vertically.

The subject of the image is placed at the intersection of those dividing

lines or along one of the lines themselves.

The dividing lines of the rule of thirds effectively divide an image

into nine parts, as shown in Figure 15.5.
Figure 15.5 The Rule of Thirds

Studies have shown that when people view an image, their eyes
naturally gravitate to one of the intersection points. It's easier for the brain
to process quickly.

It's good to learn about natural processes like these so you can learn
to work with them and not against them. Figure 15.6 shows three
examples of the rule of thirds.

Again, to get the full effect, close your eyes and then open them when
looking at Figure 15.6. Take note of what your eye naturally focuses on
first.
 Always ask these questions when taking photos or designing
thumbnails:

• What are the focus points in this shot?

• Where do you place that focus on the grid?

Having said all this about "The Rule", don't let it stress you out every time
you go to make a miniature.

Figure 15.6 Three examples of the Rule of Thirds

object
 As they say, rules are meant to be broken, not always, but sometimes
you'll get a better shot without the grid anyway.

You can always edit later with post-production editing tools if you
need to, cropping and reframing to make your image fit within the grid.

Color psychology

I watched a YouTube video about a 10-year-old boy named Cayson

Irlbeck who was born colorblind. Color blindness is widely
misunderstood. Many people assume that it means someone can only see
in black and white, but that's not the case.

It means that the brain cannot process different shades of color. In the
video about Cayson, his dad wanted to surprise him with something, so he
made him go out on a beautiful day.

The sky was bright blue and the grass was a lush green, but Cayson
didn't see it that way. His colorblind brain saw a blue or purple sky and
red grass. Cayson's father later gave him En Chroma glasses.

These glasses allow colorblind people to see colors correctly,

something Cayson had never experienced before. She put on her glasses
and tears began to roll down her face. His dad cried too, both of them
crying with joy.

I wish everyone could see Cayson's face. I am very grateful to live in

a world with color.

In 1665, Sir Isaac Newton was studying light and color at Cambridge
University. I was observing how the light reflected in various colors.

On a sunny day, Newton darkened his room by covering his window

with curtains, making a small hole to allow only a ray of sunlight to enter
the room. He then held a large glass prism in the beam of light.

He could see the entire spectrum of colors. This led to more

experiments with prisms, not only by him, but by countless scientists who
study color and light.

Color plays a very important role in influencing decisions. We call

this color psychology and it can be a powerful tool of persuasion.
I literally wear a black t-shirt every day of my life, but don't let that
fool you.

When it comes to YouTube content, especially thumbnail images, I

know that color can make or break the success of your video.

A poor color choice on a thumbnail will negatively affect the

clickability of your video.

A study published in the journal Management Decision by Satyendra

Singh says that color alone provides up to 90% of the information that
forms a decision.

Ninety percent? If this is true, it is extremely important to take color

into account when creating thumbnails. Color is essential to earn that
click.
Everyone learns about the color wheel in elementary school. When I
learned it, I didn't know how much it would help me in my career.
 Contrasting or complementary colors are opposite each other on the
color wheel and can be used together as powerful combinations to make
your images stand out.
Note that you can still contrast grayscale, but it would feel soft like
Cayson's color blindness. I'll show you the grayscale example in Figure
15.7, but remember you can see it in color in the free online course.

High- vs. Low-Contrast

Figure 15.7 Contrast in black and white

Color is an essential tool in the thumbnail image creation process
because it has a huge impact on how viewers think and behave.
This process has been studied and analyzed by marketing and
advertising specialists, as it helps predict human behavior.

Understanding it means you can make your content more impactful.

The V1 visual cortex that processes color directs the viewer's eye where
to look, what to do, and how to interpret something. You can also add
context to the content.
It helps us decide what is important and what is not. This is precisely
why, as a content marketer, you need to understand what colors mean to
people.
Thumbnail Strategies

We've covered some of the science behind why miniatures are so

important: how creators capture viewers' attention with photography
techniques and the right color combinations.

Now let's dive into the strategy. How do you use this information to
your advantage?
Before 2012, YouTube automatically selected a random clip from a
creation.

If the video creator didn't like the auto image, they had to re-upload it
until they liked the option YouTube chose.

I know, because I used to do this. I knew how much that thumbnail

affected my CTR, so I did what it took to get it right, tediously reloading
until I liked the thumbnail.

YouTube launched its Partner Program (YPP) in 2012 and quietly

added new features to help its YPP creators. Creators who were in the
Partner Program had a big advantage with these features, one of which
was being able to upload a custom thumbnail image.

YouTube sent an email to its YPP members encouraging them to use

this new custom thumbnails feature.

These select YPP members (there weren't many at the time) now had
a huge advantage over the general YouTube audience.

It didn't take long for many of them to realize that they could make
stunning thumbnail images to get lots of clicks and views.

That's when the "clickbaiting" tactic hit YouTube the hardest.

YPP creators used baiting techniques such as bright colors, arrows,

emotionally charged facial expressions, and high cleavage to get viewers
to click on their videos.

They were being deceptive and deceptive. Viewers took the bait and
clicked, but it didn't take long to realize that the content didn't show what
was advertised in the thumbnail.

YouTuber Romuald Fons has a video titled DANGER! Don't do

THIS with your MINIATURES with very good advice.

YouTube noticed trends in data from the new custom thumbnails

feature, so it started using different metrics to inform its suggested video
recommendations. This helped minimize the clickbait problem (see
Chapter 2 for more information on this problem).

Note: Clickbait can be good if your video content delivers on the

promise and does not mislead the viewer.
I saw custom thumbnails transform YouTube. As a marketer, I
noticed some things with thumbnails that I had never seen in advertising
before.

People became very good at learning thumbnail design strategies to

get people to click more.

These are simple strategies that any creator or brand can use, and I'll
show you how to use them in Figure 15.8.

Data has shown that the best thumbnails include an object and a
person. When you dig deeper into the Netflix research finding we
mentioned above, it shows that viewers engage with thumbnails that have
people in them. The miniature must be able to tell a story without words.

You can do this effectively with close-ups and complex emotions on

the face of the person or people in the image.
Figure 15.8 shows some of the most common types of thumbnails on
YouTube. Note that these examples are in black and white, and the color
really makes these things stand out and make sense.

I encourage you to follow the detailed training on thumbnails at

ytformulabook.com.
First the face Figure
In a face-first miniature, facial 15.8a
expression is the most important
thing. The best way to connect with
someone is through their eyes. So
make sure your face is close up and
your eyes are nice and bright.
Face and Object
If you have an object to display, this Figure
strategy is a great way to engage 15.8b
your audience. The emotional
reaction on your face along with an
interesting object will really make
your miniature stand out.

Prime Object
Sometimes the object is the star of Figure
the show. In this case, your object 15.8c
should be right in the center.
Really big, really bold and really
bright. Make sure your audience
doesn't get confused about what to
watch.
Two faces
If you plan to have two people in
Figure 15.8d
your thumbnail, you should have
their faces on the left and right of the
frame with the object in the middle.
Don't forget to show emotion!
 Figure 15.8e
3-Panels
A three-panel miniature is perfect for
TINY REGULAR HUGE
showing progression. Your eye goes

se
from left to right, so make sure you put
the "before" on the left and the "after"
on the right. Remember that
•3 L.
progression could mean time, but it
could also mean change. Different
colors can also help improve the
effectiveness of this miniature.

Figure 15.8f
2-Panels c J /8d9
The two-panel thumbnail is another
• Py
•4
way to show progression. The perfect
example is “before and after.” You can
also frame it as "right or wrong" or •and
"real or false." Juxtaposition is what is
important in this type of miniatures.
This type can not only be applied to
objects, it can also be applied to
people's faces.
Figure 15.8g

Text to Amplify DAY 2

Text can be super powerful when used
in moderation. Text should only be
used to help the audience understand
or pique their curiosity. Keep the text
.€
" 30
simple. If you can't tell a story with
just your thumbnail, use text to clarify.
 Figure
clip art 15.8h
Use red arrows, circles, hand gestures,
and emojis to redirect the viewer's
eyes to a specific person or object in
the thumbnail.
 Figure 15.8i
Perspective
Our minds are drawn to extremes, 2, ugzg dh eg}
*5 sic I
especially when it comes to really big
things or really small things. Showing
the scale on your thumbnail in relation
to you can help your thumbnail really
stand out.
Figure 15.8j
Organized Disorder
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If you have a lot of one thing, you can
use the "organized clutter" strategy.

30
Placing yourself in a uniformly
cluttered background can help you
stand out. Make sure there is a pattern
to your background and not just clutter;
The last thing you want is to have a ir-kia YAi
messy thumbnail.

85
Figure 15.8k
Showing Action
These thumbnails create the message “I
wonder what happens next?” effect.
Curiosity wins the click, and this
thumbnail strategy should always
generate curiosity. People love action
movies and action shots, so when you
can, show the action.
 Colors draw on the eye Figure 15.8l
Each color has an emotion associated either.
with it, so the way you use it can 4"% " _VV2*9 N _
influence how your audience feels g 14 c - ¿N e, =
about your thumbnail. Using the right
color combinations can also help attract 2 J
the viewer.
GREEN
Figure 15.8 Thumbnail type

When you're designing your thumbnail, always keep in mind that the
majority of YouTube viewers now watch on mobile devices. You want to
make sure your thumbnail looks clear when viewed on a mobile device.

Many creators design on a computer, but you need to watch on a

mobile device to see what most viewers see.

Ask yourself these questions: Is there any object that is too small?
What about things you can't easily tell apart? And do the blink test, closing
your eyes and opening them to see what catches your attention first. Super
tip: I always want to see how my thumbnail looks compared to other
thumbnails.

To make a mock comparison, take a screenshot of the search results

and Photoshop your thumbnail with the results list. This can be super
powerful to see how the viewer would view your thumbnails.

Thumbnails the Right Way

To make a thumbnail the right way, plan ideas before you even record
the video.

Ask yourself: "How do I explain what is happening without words?"

 Then review the thumbnail brainstorming list and think of ways you could
use two or three different methods to design images for this particular
video.

A combination of these tactics is often needed to engage viewers.

Remember that the more emotion you put into the thumbnail, the
more intriguing and clickable it will be.
Then do a photo shoot before recording the video. Take photos from
different angles and remember that simplicity sells.

An extra tip here: don't take a screenshot of someone else's thumbnail

with the intention of copying it onto your own. That's wrong! The more
you brainstorm consistently, the easier it will be to get your own creative
juices flowing.

Thumbnail Audit

You should have two or three variations of each thumbnail concept

you choose, because you need options to test or change quickly if you
don't get a good CTR.

Once you've completed the photo shoot and the images are edited and
ready to use, you can review the thumbnail options and ask yourself:
• Which image is most clickable?
• Does it really represent the content of the video?
• Does it excite or intrigue the audience?
• Would you really click on that thumbnail?
Traffic Sources and Thumbnails

I am known for creating various types of thumbnails for different

stages of viewer consumption. I realize this is super nerdy and tactical, but
I'm very sensitive to where impressions accumulate (traffic sources) and
what the CTR baselines are.

On some of the biggest videos I've worked on, we designed

thumbnails that would get
more clicks on the Explore feature (YouTube homepage and
subscription feed), then we would change that thumbnail to a different
thumbnail designed for a higher CTR for Suggested videos (Below).
Yes, there is a difference even at that granular level. I've seen a
threefold increase in views when using this strategy. It can help you by
taking a close look at those CTR numbers.
Video Titles

The Netflix study told us that once we capture the viewer's attention
with the thumbnail, we have 1.8 seconds to impress with our titles, so let's
not waste it.

This can be the difference in whether someone will watch your video
or move on to the next thing that catches their attention. So what makes a
good title?

In Chapter 11, we talked about how to identify your audience. We

talked about learning their offline and online behaviors.
This is very important when it comes to titles, because you don't want
to use words or phrases that turn off and confuse your audience.

I remember one time my son Kelton was talking to his older brother
Logan about skimboarding with some friends. Kelton told Logan about a
 "sick trick" he pulled off and how "dumb" it was.

My mom, a baby boomer, was in the room, and she turned to me and
said, “Is Kelton okay?
Is the sick? Are your friends using drugs?
After laughing uncontrollably for a few minutes, I had to assure him
that Kelton was healthy and that his friends weren't doing drugs.

The words he had used were disconnected from his baby boomer
audience. Certain words, like "sick" and "drug," meant something
completely different to her.

You have to consider the subconscious split decision a viewer makes

when looking at your thumbnail and then at the title.

In that split second, your brain asks:

• Is this video what I'm looking for?

• Do I really want to watch this video?
• Will this video be worth it?

Whether you like it or not, your YouTube titles help shape the viewer's
decision to click.

Your Title Must Satisfy the Why and the What

Your goal for your video title is to reinforce the thumbnail. It gives
additional context to what initially caught the viewer's attention. Make all
titles human-clickable and try to predict how your audience will respond.

The title should be easy to remember, simple to explain and easy to

share. I want to take you through an exercise I call Macro and Micro.
 This exercise has been very helpful in solving problems in my career,
but more importantly, it has helped me understand people's intentions and
behavior.

Let's first look at the macro level, why. Why does the viewer come to
YouTube?
Why do they scroll on the home page? Why are they searching for
videos on YouTube?

Why do they watch these videos or don't watch those videos? There was
a 2017 study called “The Values of YouTube,” which tried to validate some
assumptions about why people come to the platform.

I always get excited about any new study Google does regarding
YouTube, but geek or not, every YouTuber needs to see the study shown
in Figure 15.9.
The why of the YouTube viewer is simple and comes down to four
things: entertainment, education,
inspiration/motivation and de-stress/relaxation.

This is simply human nature.

The micro level is the What. What do they need to learn? What is the
solution to your problem?
What would they find entertaining?

What will inspire you? What will help them de-stress or relax? More
importantly, what would encourage them to click? What is your value
proposition to get people to click and watch?
 Figure 15.9 The value of YouTube

Why people turn to YouTube

To help me fix something in my home ex car mm 65% mm 57% m 56% • 54%

To be entertained
m 54% mm 50% ■ 42% | 39%
To learn something new
38%
To satisfy my curiosity about something

To help me solve a problem 37%

To see something unique

To relax

To de-stress
Think with Google
To get inspiration or motivation
2and2/ Google, The Values of YouTube" Study, (n of 1,006
To improve my school or job skills consumers between the ages of 18054, with 918 monthly
YouTube users), respondents were asked to choose which
platforms they turn to for a range of needs, Oct 2017.

Remember, these are people who come to YouTube to satisfy their

Why.
What is the keyword or phrase that will be used in the title to get them
to click.

This is also the theme of the video. The What is the final trigger that
clicks in your brain to take action.

The right keyword or phrase helps with the decision-making process

and makes the video more clickable. It's about people, not the algorithm.

The thumbnail and title are where I spend the most time in my content
strategy because I need to know what will make the viewer click.

I differ in philosophy from most YouTube educators in that search

volume is not my primary focus, but rather just one of many factors I use
to make a decision.

I would prefer not to spend hours researching keywords and use those
hours to focus on the viewer's What and Why, learn how people respond
to my content, and develop a YouTube Sixth Sense as we discussed in
Chapter 10.

I spend that time putting my titles and thumbnails up for testing,

keeping them easy to remember, simple to explain, and easy to share (I'm
emphasizing this concept for the third time because it's that important).
 I want to spend my time thinking about how this video or project can
produce a refreshing moment (a moment that people will use to talk about
the video with their family, friends, and coworkers).

I try to imagine how the viewer will talk about the video after watching
it, even creating imaginary conversations in my mind. “Did you see that
MrBeast video where he ate the world's largest slice of pizza?”

If the title is easy for the viewer to remember, simple to explain, and
easy to share, you have given your video a better chance of success.

This is powerful.

Make sure you take the time to imagine how the viewer would talk
about your video and see if it passes the test or not. If not, make up another
title.

If so, upload it and validate if people responded by looking at the data,

to see if the CTR increased.

The Macro and Micro exercise will help you dive in and get to know
the people and content of your viewers as we discuss in

Chapter 11. Understanding what viewers want or care about gives you
an advantage when they make the quick decision to click.
Create clickable titles

To create a clickable title, you must satisfy the Why by providing value
in the What.

This is something most creators struggle with for years.

It can be a major obstacle to getting people to connect with your
content.

I always have a brainstorming session on title ideas like what we did

with the Squatty Potty ad.

Then I refine the title to make it more compelling and clickable.

Below are some tips and examples on how to make titles more
attractive and attractive. Let's say I just created a new YouTube channel
called "Derral 42".

My content will be about space, exploration, and the wonders of the

universe, so my title examples follow accordingly. (By the way, 42 is not
my age! If you're my viewer character, you understand my reference to 42.
So don't panic.)

Use the active voice. Active voice titles are effective on YouTube
because they are clear, to the point, and can be easily understood.

You'll see that the examples in these tips use an active voice. Having an
active voice title also naturally creates a sense of urgency.
 I'll talk about urgency later in this list.
Be relevant, trendy and current.

Using current trends and events helps titles become appealing to the
right viewer.

For example, in the summer of 2020, SpaceX made headlines for

sending NASA astronauts to the international space station for the first time
in nearly a decade. So if I created a video on this trending topic, my titles
could be:

• SpaceX Helped NASA Astronauts Become Great Again.

• Elon Musk Helped NASA Astronauts Become Great Again

Use questions (both open and closed-ended) . People use YouTube as a

search engine and will ask specific questions. You can see common questions
viewers have about your topics and see what auto-populates in YouTube and
Google search results. I always try to search for a fact, a place or a person, to
expand the question and awaken curiosity. Video titles for my channel can be:

• How would you survive on Mars?

• Could you SURVIVE on Mars? Elon Musk's Genius Plan
• Why are Mars Sunsets Blue?
Include numbers for the video titles in the list . This is by far one of the
most powerful title and video strategies because it gives the viewer a clear idea
of what to expect, a clear time limit, and helps viewers remember. The chart
titles for my new channel could be:

• 7 Essential Reasons Why Humans NEED to Colonize Mars

• 5 Extreme FACTS about Black Holes
 Pose a problem and Offer the Solution . Problems always bring up human
emotions. This can amplify the desire to click if you can offer a solid solution.
The title would promise to show what the solution could be. Possible
problem/solution titles for videos on my channel could be:
• Space junkyard. This is how we clean it!
• Elon satellite internet is a disaster. That's how you fix it!
Create Urgency . As humans, we have a fear of missing out, or “FOMO.”
You want to be able to offer information that the viewer will want to see right
now. Creating a sense of urgency triggers the human fear of being outside. An
urgent title for my channel could be:

• We need to colonize Mars NOW before it's too late!

Use a Trusted Source . This can help those viewers who need validation to
push them over the edge for the click. For example:

• NASA says Pluto is NOT a Planet

Address the viewer. When you address the viewer in the video title, it
makes them more willing to click, because they feel like the video was
made for them. Plus, it adds another implicit emotional context to the title.
For my channel, I could use:
• Space Tourism: You can book RIGHT NOW
• The Chinese and the Russians will beat SpaceX on Mars
Use emotional drama or polarizing words: There's a reason people
become curious bystanders at car accidents, fires, and fights. Most people
are naturally drawn to drama, gossip, fights, injuries, controversies, sexual
advances, illicit behavior, and opposing forces.
Bringing up the drama inherent in your video title can trigger an emotional
response. Drama titles for my channel could be:

• Elon Musk Calls Jeff Bezos a Copycat

• Not Made on Earth, Pentagon Reveals UFO Findings
 Capitalize your titles or words . All All titles must capitalize the first
letter of each word, and sometimes you must use all caps. Using all caps is
one of the easiest ways to draw attention to your title. A word of caution
here: sometimes all caps feels like someone is shouting. Time your
capitalization so that you emphasize key words without sounding like
you're shouting the entire time. Notice how I used all caps in the title
examples above, as well as the following:

• LIFE ON MARS? This is what Neil de Grasse Tyson believes

• THE EARTH IS NOT FLAT
 Expand with attention-grabbing words . Expand the keyword or phrase to
push your title to the limit. Use words like: Latest, Worst, Best, Fastest, Crazy,
Wow, or good amplification words for educational channels include: Easy, Step
by Step, Simple, Amazing, Quick, and Now.

Downloadable Tools for Title Generation

Throughout my career, I have found several tools that really speed up

the process of generating keywords and phrases for titles.

These tools have saved me thousands of hours of research and helped

me with brainstorming.

I have a special section in the companion course to show you my

keyword and title process.

Get access to the course at www.ytformulabook.com . Don't fall down

the SEO rabbit hole; Use these tools to gain data and insights to focus on
the why and what.

TubeBuddy Shows you what search term you're ranking for, search volume
(searches per month), competition for the key term, and related searches to help
you drill down. TubeBuddy has saved me a lot of time! It is my favorite channel
management tool for the research and optimization phase. I also love the tools
TubeBuddy has for testing. Download TubeBuddy for free atfree
www.Tubebuddy.com/go .

VidIQ Boost is designed to help you find topics and keywords for your
videos. It has the most robust YouTube SEO features and competitive analysis
tools I've ever used. They also have a feature to help you optimize your videos
and give them a boost. Download VidIQ for free at www.vidiq.com/go/ .

Kickass Headline Generator is one of my favorite tools for generating

ideas. It can include topics, desired results, unintended results, audience, in-
content points, and helpful aids, and will automatically generate headlines for
your video based on your parameters.
Download this tool at www.sumo.com/kickass-headline-generator/ .

Portent Content Idea Generator is not as robust as Kickass will come

up with clickable title ideas. I use it more to generate ideas and think
differently. Download at www.portent.com/tools/title-maker .

Action Exercises
Task 1: Using what you learned in this chapter, brainstorm 10 new title
 ideas for your next video. Narrow it down to three possible titles. Make
sure your titles are easy to remember and easy to explain and share.
Task 2: Brainstorm three or four possible thumbnail ideas for each
title. Use YouTube and Google images for brainstorming to strengthen
ideas. Pick a thumbnail strategy and sketch it out (don't worry about
being an artist).
Task 3: Get human feedback on these ideas from your mastermind
group.

Get the companion workbook and find more resources at

www.ytformulabook.com .
13 Engage Viewers to See
More
You've created an amazing title and thumbnail and you've gotten the
viewer click, you made good content, you got comments and you know
where your viewers are coming from. you focus on one thing: retention,
retention, retention.

Retention simply means that if someone clicks on your video, they

should continue watching it for your content to perform at its best.
There is an idea still circulating that human attention span has fallen
below that of goldfish.
The number put on it is eight seconds.
This theory comes from a study conducted in 2015, but a quick fact
check leaves you wondering: Who comes up with this anyway?

A BBC article titled “Busting the Attention Span Myth,” written by

Simon Maybin, exposes all the holes in the goldfish theory.

He quotes Dr Gemma Briggs, professor of psychology at the Open

University, who thinks the idea of an "average attention span" has much
less meaning, because attention depends on the task.

She said: "How we apply our attention to different tasks depends

largely on what the individual brings to that situation."
 If the human attention span is shortening, there's one thing we can
probably all agree on: we live in a world full of distractions.

I woke up to 66 new text messages, 11 Slack messages, 4 voicemails,

128 Facebook notifications, and thousands of emails. The cell phone has
changed the way we handle the world, both for better and worse.

We have the world at our fingertips and can be super informed and
responsive. But this means that we are never disconnected. You may be in a
meeting or having a real conversation with someone or having dinner or
reading a book to relax, and all the time your phone vibrates or rings with
notifications.

What's crazy is that sometimes your phone didn't actually do anything,

but you've been so conditioned to hear it or feel it that you think it did. This
happens to me all the time.
These “phantom” rings or vibrations are so common that the condition
has been coined “phantom vibration syndrome” in an article written by Tim
Locke on WebMD. in order for your content to perform its best.

Respect your Viewer's Commitment

With so many options competing for people's attention (Facebook,

Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, TV, news, text messages,
hyperlinks, ads, and a million more), it's hard to ignore the noise as a
creator. content or business.

So when a person chooses to click on your video, they are making a

micro commitment to say no to everything else and yes to your content.
Respect that commitment.
 Even if the rumor of the goldfish's attention span isn't true, it only has a
short period of time to hook a viewer and keep them watching so they don't
leave for something more attractive.

That's why it's so important to capitalize on the quality of your content.

This is why you should spend more time making clickable videos that
keep your audience engaged.

Engagement and Disengagement Triggers - Triggers

When I look at a channel's analytics, I look for patterns across videos to

see exactly where people stay engaged, disengage, and why.

So we know what to recreate to make the AVD appear. There's

something that's extremely important to keep in mind here: every channel is
different.

Everyone has a different viewer and a different audience, so you can't

compare charts or expect similar patterns. Joe Rogan's YouTube channel
has incredible watch time because people watch his entire videos and then
watch more.

Don't worry about Joe Rogan or keeping up with the digital Joneses.
Just understand that the more people see your content, the more data you
have to work with.

Your goal is to find patterns and improve future content. Monitor your
ADL in the first hour of video after upload, the first day, the first week, the
first 30 days, and more. Ask yourself what happened in the most engaging
parts of your video. Did you use a call to action? Did you say or do
something funny? Did you add an end screen, suggest another video, or use
 an interesting filming or editing technique?

Did you say a trigger phrase? Trigger phrases can either re-engage or
disengage your audience, so make sure you do the former. Say things like
"Don't miss the bonus tip at the end of the video," don't
"That is all for now".

I always ask why while I'm analyzing. Why did people commit here or
why did people leave? Either you entertained them, you gave them value, or
they disconnected from you and left. Continually connect and interact with
people, and you will grow. If you tune out or disconnect from people, your
channel will stagnate or die.

This is simple to explain, but difficult to implement. It takes time and

patience to analyze. You have to commit to being dedicated to your data.
Become more obsessed with the analysis process than with the view
count.
My students, clients, and I delve into our analyzes at the beginning of
the month and again in the middle of the month.

This allows us to see how our videos are performing and what we can
do to identify patterns from engagement and disengagement triggers.

How to Read Metrics

YouTube makes it easy to track everything that happens on your

channel. To monitor how long viewers stay on your video, there is a metric
called average viewing duration or ADL.
If you have a 10-minute video and YouTube says your ADL is 2:30,
that means that, on average, your viewers watch 2 minutes and 30 seconds
of your video. In case you were wondering, this is not a good AVD.
 The second metric to look at for retention is called average view
percentage or AVP. This is the average percentage of the video that people
watch before leaving. So if your AVP says 63%, this means that, on
average, your viewers watch 63% of the total video before leaving.

AVD and AVP don't match up perfectly because of the way people
consume your video. For example, I watch all videos at 2× speed. So on a
10:00 video, my ADL would be 5:00, but my AVP would be 100%. For
long-term channel growth, these two metrics are key. The title and
thumbnail will get you views, but AVD and AVP will give you the right
view time and audience type.
The longer you can keep viewers watching, the more engaged they
become, which becomes a loyal audience. The goal is to balance these two
metrics and increase them together.

YouTube provides multiple metrics to help with this.

Take a look at Figures 16.1 to 16.3 for explanation.

The “hockey stick” effect shown in Figure 16.1 occurs when spectators
enter and leave quickly. It's what happens when there's a disconnect
between the title and thumbnail and what the viewer expected to see in the
first 15 seconds of the video.
The “slow burn” effect shown in Figure 16.2 occurs when viewers
enter and leave slowly over the duration of the video. You want the line to
be as flat as possible, so you get closer to the most optimal graph.

Figure 16.1 Hockey stick

Figure 16.2 Slow burn

Figure 16.3 shows relative audience retention. This is a comparison

between your video and other videos of similar length within your niche.
You can analyze how your video fares alongside similar ones and analyze
what catches your audience's attention.
Look again at Figures 16.1 to 16.3.

Notice the little "bumps." Sometimes the hit is subtle, but it's still there.
 “Up” points are those where your content is performing well with your
audience.
Analyze what's happening at that point in the video so you can do
more. Then look at the “drop” points and analyze what was going on in
your content to make people leave.

In the Relative Audience Retention graph, notice the drop near the end
of the video.

Figure 16.3 Relative audience retention

This was where the Outro started, and the people left. (The ending is
the "summary" part where the person in the video can give a call to action
and add end screen elements like links to other videos or websites.)
Do you have retention charts that look like this? Find out why. Was
there a trigger word or phrase that made you leave?
Did you give them the promised reward so that they would have no
reason to stay until the end? What can you learn from this? These are the
things you need to analyze when looking at this data.

It will help you improve and connect with your viewer in future videos.
Average Views per Viewer

To know how well you connect with your viewers, you should study
your average views per viewer or AVPV.

AVPV is the average number of times a viewer watched any video on

your channel (in channel analytics) or this particular video (in video
analytics). This metric gives you a deep understanding of whether your
content is truly connecting with your audience.

When you focus on the viewer and create entertaining content that
connects, you can increase the number of videos a viewer will watch over a
period of time.

Think of this as a TV series that people will watch over and over again,
like The Office or Friends. Strive to make your videos so good that people
connect with you, the character.

In the 28-day view in your channel metrics, see how many videos you
released in that time period. Then look at how many videos the audience
actually watched. You can even see what percentage was viewed by a
single viewer.

This is a good way to understand who is watching on repeat and why.

The 50% Rule

In your retention graph, look for where 50% of viewers leave the video
and look at that part of your content to try to understand why people left at
that time.
 You literally just lost half your viewers. That's not good. You want to
retain as many people until the end of your video as possible.

So if you can figure out where you lost half, you can figure out what to
change or avoid in your next video. Look for patterns to see if it's the same
in similar videos.
Also look at your endings and outros.
Keep them short with the goal of getting viewers to watch another
video, preferably yours, quickly.

Have a verbal call to action and a link to another video that is relevant.
You can put it as a description, a pinned comment, or as an end screen
element; It just depends on the content.

Find out which method works best in your niche by trying it yourself
and seeing what similar creators have done successfully, and do it. Most
creators don't dig deep to find out where and why they lost viewers.

When you dig in, you can fix what you did wrong for future videos so
your content has better retention. And better retention gives AI more of
what it needs to find similar viewers to push your content to.

The more you understand your content, the better content strategy you
will have moving forward.

When you can move that 50% mark to a higher point in the content,
YouTube will recommend your video more because it will have a higher
ADL.
The 30% Rule

After looking at the 50% drop, go back and do it again where you lost
the first 30% of your viewers.

It is usually in the first 30 to 60 seconds of the video. Find out what

triggered this drop so you can see how to adjust based on the data.

Again, implement tactics like the ones I listed in the 50% Rule above to
re-engage the audience. If you include a timestamp of key points in your
content, you'll see a more engaging graph of where viewers went to those
specific elements.

Maintain the Value Proposition

In June 2015, I went on a retreat with our team that was creating the
Squatty Potty pooping unicorn ad. We finished writing the final script and
thought it was amazing, but we realized it was going to be much longer
than any other announcement at the time.

In general, most non-commercial ads are 15, 30, or 60 seconds long.

The long ads would have been a minute and a half. We spent more than
four minutes with our announcement.
As we moved through production, we thought we could reduce the
content to make it more digestible, but when we got to editing, we knew we
had something great as it was.

We asked a handful of trusted people in our field to view our ad.

and give us your opinion. These were people who were successful
video marketers or content creators.
 Everyone told us the ad was too long. But in my observation of how
humans interacted with content, I had seen that people would stay engaged
if the value proposition remained.

I had to provide value every step of the way, which I thought made our
long announcement.

Other ads cut to the chase, made the sales pitch, and moved on. Our ad
was different. We knew we could keep people watching because of the
unique content, even if they weren't planning to buy our product. Great
content will keep people glued, goldfish be damned.

If this were not true, Netflix Binge would not exist.

Jeffrey Harmon and I argued for days about what we should do. We
called his brother Daniel to help us decide on a plan of action.

Daniel was the creative director, and he also thought we had something
good enough that we didn't need to cut anything.

Daniel suggested we enhance it with sound design to ensure we

maintained engagement throughout the process, so he spent three days with
the sound editor to get it right.
We also speed up the video by 5% to make it just under four minutes.
We launched the campaign.

In the first full month, 92.6% of people who initially clicked on the
video stayed and watched until the end. We had more shares, engagement,
and sales because we kept people on the video, even while it lasted.
 Jon Youshaei is the IGTV Product Marketing Manager at Instagram
and the former Head of Creator Product Marketing at YouTube.

It landed on Forbes 30 Under 30 for Marketing and Advertising in

2020. He also has a cartoon series related to his career called Every Vowel.
(Did you notice he has "all the vowels" in his last name? So clever).

I was talking to Jon about the concept of maintaining the value

proposition when he said one of the most powerful things about finding
value for viewers in every video.

He said: "You must put in hours of creative effort for every second that
viewers consume your content." It has to offer quality and value, because
consumers' expectations for content are higher than ever.

First comment

However, I must warn you: do not marry your content. Put effort and
energy into editing, and don't be afraid to cut what doesn't work.

Get emotionally detached from your content so you can look at it

objectively and it doesn't make you feel bad when you have to cut
something.
For example, in that same Squatty Potty ad, Jared Mecham, a YouTube
creator and friend of mine, had a scene where he was a leprechaun
powering the conveyor belt to move the ice cream.

Jeffrey said we needed to remove Jared's scene from the ad. I argued
with him because I found the scene very funny; It was a huge pattern
interruption. Jeffrey stood his ground, and I'm glad he did, because when
 we cut the scene, the commercial was actually better.

Jeffrey lives by the sales rule: "Message first, content second," and it's
true 100% of the time. Never sacrifice the message of your content or your
brand for the sake of comedy or anything else. Not only do you miss the
mark, but you'll probably also lose engagement. For the

But for entertainment, the content comes first and the message comes
second.

Pattern interrupts

Pay attention to natural breaks when watching videos on YouTube.

Notice when you start to get bored or distracted. Do this in your own
videos too. That point where you start to disconnect is when you want to
implement a pattern interrupt. A pattern interrupt resets your mind to
behaviors or situations in the video.
You can do this with new information that shows what is coming later
in the video. You can interrupt by saying or doing something funny.
You can add juxtapositions like a clip of something else, add a sound
effect, or just clap or change your voice.

The most powerful technique is to change the camera position with

different angles or zoom.
Watch your video's peaks and valleys in your metrics and add a pattern
break in the valleys to re-engage.

MrBeast is one of the best I've seen at pattern interrupts. Go watch any
recent video on his channel and you'll see what I mean.
 His brother CJ is just starting his own YouTube channel, so he wanted
me to give him my opinion on a video he was working on.
CJ did a great job and had great content, but it was a long video and at
one point I said there was a bit of a disconnect. I needed a pattern interrupt.
MrBeast smiled and said that he had told CJ the exact same thing at the
same time in the video. The great minds of YouTube think alike.

Domain Commitment

The longer you create content and pay attention to the valleys, the
better you will recognize when you need to re-engage your audience. But
you need to be an active viewer and pay attention when people lose interest
in your videos.

Pay attention to what attracts you and what turns you away from a
video so you know how to use engagement tactics.

Always keep your hook and narrative in mind to keep your viewer
interested. If you're not sure where to add pattern breaks when watching a
video, the good news is that YouTube gives you the data to figure it out.
Look at the data to know where you need to re-engage.

YouTube's #1 goal is to predict what viewers want to watch. When

they watch more, you accumulate more viewing time and ADL.
People simply need to stay on YouTube as long as possible.
So if your content is doing this, the algorithm rewards you.
Creators always want to know exactly how much watch time YouTube
wants, but there's no hard and fast number. YouTube just wants more.
More viewing time. More ADLs. So create your content with More in
mind.
Action Exercises
Task 1: Review your top three videos when it comes to
AVD and AVP.
Task 2: Analyze using the 50% and 30% rules. How would
you make your video different knowing what you know now?
Task 3: Look at the bumps and dips in your videos and see if
you can find a pattern .

Get the companion workbook and find more resources at

www.ytformulabook.com .
14 Creating Content on
YouTube - Strategy
YouTube growth statistics change so quickly that any numbers I
provide in this book will likely be out of date by the time you read it.
According to current statistics show that there are more than 31 million
YouTube channels. Not videos, channels. (The number of videos far
exceeds five billion.)
Obviously, these millions of channels have topics or themes that vary
in variety across the board. There is a channel for anything you can
imagine. By millions.
The sheer volume of channels, plus their inherent diversity, makes a
one-size-fits-all content strategy sound absurd and impossible.
In Chapter 13, you learned general storytelling strategies and
storytelling patterns that work holistically. The same goes for your strategy
for making that content: there are things that work, no matter what type of
channel you have.
If you want your channel to grow, your content strategy should be your
top priority. While we talk about content strategy in this chapter, we will
talk about it in two parts:

1. Strategies for your Audience .

2. Strategies to take advantage of the algorithm.

YouTube growth depends on your understanding of how your content

 resonates with your audience so you can create more content like it. This
includes things like your metadata and re-engagement.
Growth also depends on your understanding of the data. YouTube
gives us so much data that sometimes it can be overwhelming to decipher
and use it as we make more videos.

All of that data is good (thanks, YouTube!), so try not to get frustrated.
I'll help you understand how to use traffic sources and data relationships to
your strategic benefit.

The goal is to figure out how to combine part one strategy and part two
strategy correctly, because when you do, your content will be primed for
massive growth.

Part One: Strategy for Your Audience

As a creator, your first job is to provide a smooth, predictable

experience for your current viewers and subscribers.

You want to create a sense of security for them, a "same time, same
place, same channel" environment. They need to recognize that it is you
every time they return. You must be predictable.
A consistent channel is a successful channel. Your viewers should be
waiting and anticipating your next video because they know your schedule
and expect it from you.

Create
YouTubers always want to know what content to create. I am often asked
questions like:
• What video content should I make to best engage my audience?
• How do I create content that is different or unique?
• How can I stand out while staying true to my brand?
Here's the hard truth about scale: there is no way one creator/brand can
create all the content needed to feed consumers' voracious appetite for
video, especially on mobile devices.

There is not enough time, money or resources. The trick is to build

content gradually and build an engaging library over time. That may sound
daunting with a traditional production mindset as a reference point.

But producing at scale requires rethinking that enormous production

process. You don't need a fancy production set or a huge technical team, in
fact you can literally use your smartphone and be successful by creating
engaging content.

Creating can mean that you make an entertaining video that catches
people's attention. But as you consider what your audience cares about and
will engage with, think about the micro-moments they might be
experiencing.

Micro-moments occur when people turn to their devices to find

answers, discover new things, make decisions, entertain themselves, or buy
something.

Create content that meets the needs of your viewers, whether that
means entertaining, informing, inspiring, responding, or selling. Also, think
about using videos to create stories that viewers become a part of rather
than telling them a story without commitment.
 With millions of channels, the call to "be different" may seem like a
joke. It can feel crowded on YouTube, especially in popular content genres.

Still, there's always a way to put your own spin on it and figure out
how to be different. For example, Kristen from the cooking channel Six
Sisters Stuff knows that cooking channels are a dime a dozen.

There are probably millions of cooking channels. Kristen has carved

out her own place among them by focusing on easy Instant Pot recipes, and
she has a really successful channel. I've heard all the excuses for why your
genre is hard to crack.
Someone else has found a way to be different in your gender, so put on
your thinking cap and do some research. You will figure it out.

But how do you stand out without changing who you are?
The short answer is to be creative without sacrificing consistency.
There is always a way to stand out! Yes, some creators have chosen to
sell out to stand out, but you don't have to change who you are.

To collaborate

Dan Markham wanted to make a football video for his What's Inside
channel. He bought three World Cup soccer balls from different years on
eBay to compare them.
He knew the video would be more interesting if he had a real football
player kicking the balls, so he collaborated with another YouTube creator,
Garrett Gee, who was a college football player. Garrett had lived in Russia,
which happened to be the location of the World Cup that year, so he also
had an interesting and relevant cultural input.
 At the end of the video, What's inside the World Cup Soccer Ball? Dan
opened the balls according to his characteristic question "What's inside?"
He released this video in conjunction with the World Cup tournament, and
both his and Garrett's channels got a lot of views.

In fact, it caused Garrett's highlight video to get over a million views,

his first million-view video.

Collaborations can generate traffic that might not have otherwise found
your channel. We talked in depth about the benefits of collaborations in
Chapter 16, so don't miss it.

Organization

To have a successful YouTube channel, you must be organized.

Make a content schedule. Define your target audience. Provide a value
proposition and deliver on your promises in your title, thumbnail, and in the
video itself.

Be consistent with your brand in everything you do. But don't drown in
your schedules and checklists; keep it simple.

Prioritize things that should never be neglected, but allow some wiggle
room when things come up, because they will.
Make a content calendar:

• What content are you publishing and when?

• What audiences are you targeting?
• What social channels are you accessing?
 I can't tell you exactly what your schedule should look like because of
course every channel is different and every creator is different.
But I did make a generic content scheduling template that you can
customize for your channel.
Go to www.ytformulabook.com to get the free template.
You need to know your optimal schedule based on your own channel's
impressions, click-through rate, and views.
One of my clients posts two videos a day, while another posts one a
week.

NASA scientist turned YouTuber, Mark Rober , posts one video a

month, and his channel is taking off because his monthly content is
incredible.

Use the tools available to help you understand where your traffic is
coming from to help you strategize.
As a friendly reminder, always prioritize your strategy for
recommendation as it accounts for three-quarters of all YouTube traffic.
Don't overthink your YouTube content marketing strategy.

With brand marketers, there is often a disconnect in their content

strategy between knowing what content to make and how to make it. Don't
waste time over-complicating it – video is what consumers want on mobile,
so optimize it for mobile.

Create videos that fit at the intersection of your passion and what your
audience wants.
Know where viewers are coming from

YouTube looks very closely at the audience, so what does that tell
you? Which you should too. Do you think about where your viewers are
coming from before making a new video? Each of you, even those with
millions of subscribers, needs to better understand your audience.

You need to know how they are viewing your content. My rule of
thumb is to optimize for mobile first, because that's usually where people
watch YouTube.

Mobile traffic accounts for 70% of daily viewing time. Most creators
don't take this into account when creating new videos. Go to your traffic
sources and see where people are coming from to view your stuff.

If they are coming from mobile devices and you are on your computer,
switch to your mobile device and back to experience your video the same
way your viewer experiences it.

When you look at YouTube from your viewer's perspective, you will
be very sensitive to how they behave and what works for them.
You'll probably notice things you can change to optimize your viewing
experience when you see how they watch.

As you create new videos, know what traffic source you're optimizing
that particular video for, because it will change how you create and what
you do with it. There are times when it works well to reach an audience
searching for videos on their own from a search bar.
 There are times when it works well to reach out to them in a
collaboration with another creator or business. And there are times when it
works well to reach them from your video description, cards and end
screens, playlists, community posts, and stories.

However, 75% of all video views on YouTube come from YouTube

recommendations.

The algorithm follows the audience to know what to recommend. If

you can develop an engaged audience, the algorithm will pay attention to
what keeps them interested and recommend more of your content, if you've
done the work to connect your content.

Let's take a closer look at how to connect your content by strategizing

the algorithm.
 Second Part: Strategies to take advantage of the Algorithm

As you've learned many times in this book, AI looks at viewers'

patterns and behaviors to predict what they'll want to watch.
Because of this, your second order of business is to help the AI
understand what content goes together. If you don't do the first part, first
strategizing your audience, the second part will never happen.
The consistency tactics he implements keep the audience happy.

But also give the AI consistent information that it will recognize and
group with similar content. The AI will recommend your linked videos to
each other and to viewers it has discovered would be interested in them.

When you've created a pattern with those videos or created a series of

videos, you've made YouTube's job of recognizing your content much
easier. AI loves predictable data patterns and related content.

A good place to look first when strategizing your algorithm is search

traffic.

Search

Search has been around since the advent of the Internet. “Search”
means that people go to the search bar of a website and type a query.

They don't just type in a keyword or two, they are good at getting
specific information about the laser to ask exactly what they need an answer
for.
 For example, someone might search "How do you use a septic tank
with a pool?" instead of searching, “pool septic tank.”

With every client of mine, I ask them to make a list of all the frequently
asked questions that people ask in their niche or business.
You need to do this too. Don't worry about arranging the list in any
particular order yet, just write your own FAQ.
This works for all YouTube businesses and creators.
I once had a client who wrote down a list of about 40 of the most
frequently asked questions. Forty sounds like a big list, right? Well, to get
the most out of this exercise, you need to go far beyond the FAQ.
So after she scored her 40, I asked her to think about all the possible
questions she had been asked and add them all to her list.
It ended up with over 250 questions. Now you can sort your list by the
questions that come up most frequently. Then you'll be ready to create
content that answers all the questions your potential viewer might ask in
Search, prioritizing the most frequently asked questions.

If your content appears at the top of the results, viewers are more likely
to click on your video and you're more likely to have gained another
viewer.

You should also consider that YouTube is owned by Google, so your

content should also appear in a Google search, because your traffic could
come from there.
Next, I want you to make a list of questions that people should ask you.
These are your SAQs, or you should ask questions. Your SAQs and FAQs
should be intertwined.
 As? Let's say you create a video to answer one of your frequently asked
questions. In this video, you should also bring a SAQ that relates to the
FAQ in question.
This strategy satisfies viewers' curiosity, gives them even more of what
they were looking for, and still provides a seamless viewing experience that
is digestible and provides value.

Also, another great strategy to use here is to create another video (or
two or three...) with the same line of questioning in mind. You can then
direct them to watch it next, either verbally or with an end card or both.

There is also a higher chance that YouTube will include it in suggested

videos. This is a great way to keep the viewer interested and watching more
of your content or purchasing your products.

When you do this, the AI is very happy and will reward you by pushing
your content to other similar viewers.

I like to think of Search as an entry point to your world of content.

Most YouTube creators and educators focus on search and ranking, but I
see it as a funnel to attract additional traffic.

When you get initial traffic to your content, you can convert it to
consumer traffic, which means you've turned your first-time viewers into
repeat consumers of your content.
Matthew Patrick, or "MatPat," is a YouTube creator who has successful
channels in a variety of genres. Use search well as a funnel.
For example, if you search "Do video games cause violence?" MatPat's
video “ Game Theory : Do video games cause violence? It's Complicated”
tops the results including serious science and news channels.
But what's important is what you see after clicking on his video:
several of his other videos are suggested for viewing below.

You now have a new viewer consuming your content. He did the same
with other highly searchable FAQs in his genre, such as "How does the
Force work?" and " What is a Yoshi? " (These are some of the most
important questions you could ask.

Anything to do with Star Wars or Super Mario Bros. should be at the

top of your list of things you need to know).
This works for businesses too. Gillette, the razor company, made a
video to answer the question: “How to shave.”

They made an entire series of videos to provide solutions for any type
of shaving problem a person may have. These range in topics from learning
the basics to more advanced shaving techniques.

Answer people's questions and make sure you've linked your content so
viewers can click next. Even when your demographic changes, you will
have a new generation and audience that will come and discover you
because they are looking for an answer to a question.
Recommended / Suggested

YouTube recommendations account for 75% of all views on YouTube.

Did you notice that this isn't the first time I've used this statistic? (Hint: pay
attention.)

You want your content to be where 75% of the views come from.
YouTube recommends videos in three places: on the Homepage and
Subscriptions, the Trending tab, and Suggested Videos along with a video
that's currently playing and what's happening next.

The Trends tab features popular geo-specific topics that have broader
appeal.

Take different approaches to your content strategy depending on where

your traffic is coming from. The algorithm of each traffic source has
indicators to know when the content is good and when it is bad.

YouTube takes the videos that indicate "good" and places them where
they are likely to get the best response.

Some creators think that posting as much content as possible gives

them the best chance of being seen. While this may be true in certain
situations, such as children's content and gaming content, it can be
detrimental to your own content.

Multiple uploads too close together mean the algorithm has to choose
one to send. And when you choose one, what about the other? Bottling.
One passes, but the rest stop completely.
 The specific algorithm for Browse traffic tracks what the viewer clicks
and doesn't click so you know what to put in Browse the next time you visit
YouTube.
I recently clicked on a video that was recommended to me on Explore
because the thumbnail was so good I had to click to satisfy my curiosity
(plus my kids Bridger and Thatcher had already asked me to watch it).

It was called " Work Stories (Somehow) " by TheOdd1sOut channel.

After watching the video, I binge-watched that creator's content. So the next
time I logged into YouTube, who do you think they recommended me
again? Of course, it was that same channel, and I hadn't even subscribed to
them. (Don't worry, James, I'm a subscriber now.)

Navigating the YouTube home page is the fastest way to get views on
your video.
This is very attractive for obvious reasons; You don't have to wait to
get a lot of views and boost. If this is your content strategy, keep in mind
that it's easy to get burned.

If you focus on exploration first, you should also have a suggested

feeding strategy.

Most daily vloggers don't have a suggested video strategy.

After years of observing and working with many daily vloggers, I
learned that the most optimal browsing schedule is three times a week.
Many vloggers think that to succeed, they have to release a new video
every day.
 It makes sense that anyone would run the risk of burnout at that rate.
Luckily for them, it actually works better to have a natural break between
uploads, both to give the viewer time to watch the content and for YouTube
to figure out who to send the content to and what videos to suggest after
that video.

Instead of going through an endless daily routine, figure out how to tie
your content together. Make a series of videos so people have to watch
them all to get a complete story. Or you can have a recurring theme.

This will help you build a larger video library, increasing your
opportunity for growth in the Gold Suggested feed. Then you won't rely
solely on your browsing traffic to carry the weight of your entire channel.

Let me tell you about a channel whose content strategy includes having
a large video library. World Wrestling Entertainment , or WWE, gets
between 1.4 and 1.5 billion video views a month.
They have been known to upload 24 to 50 videos in a day. This crazy
schedule would overwhelm Browse, but it works great in Suggested.

If your channel has close to 50,000 videos (which WWE does!),

YouTube will place your new content in the Suggested feed.

However, don't forget to link this new content to your old content. New
content that has a data relationship with your old videos gives them a
freshness factor so they are suggested again, even if they are years old.
The longer your content is on YouTube, the more views you will
accumulate with this strategy. This can be extremely profitable.

We had a channel that we uploaded three times a week until we had

1,200 videos in our library.
We took a break from uploading for an entire month, but it continued
to get views and revenue from our library simply because there was so
much content there to still be recommended.

Amy Wiley, WWE's Senior Director of YouTube Operations, provided

great insights into her company's strategies. Amy said that if there is
another channel sending views to your channel's videos, it's helpful for you
to know about that relationship. You can go to your video and see why your
content is recommended along with it.

You may see topics that you're not covering that work well with your
brand and that you should be covering. Or you could have a possible
collaboration with the creator of that video. One month, WWE got two
million views that came from a single video on another channel.

“This shows the power of the algorithm,” Amy said, “and the power of
being part of the YouTube ecosystem.” She nailed him on the head.
You have to figure out how to make the algorithm see your content as a
contributing part of the system.
WWE is very good at paying attention to what other channels are doing
and modifying their own content to match. For example, they knew that
wrestling had been popular in the past, but they would not have considered
it a current trend.

Then they realized that wrestling was making a resurgence. So WWE

put together some wrestling clips in a new video.

It got more than 23 million views.

This topic hadn't been on their radar, but by paying attention to what
others in the space were doing, they added the same type of content to their
 own strategy, and it really paid off.

Data Relationships

Every new video uploaded to YouTube gets a digital ID. We talked

about the Content ID system in Chapter 2 and why it was necessary.
Identification is like a fingerprint.

Additionally, when you create a playlist, that playlist also gets an ID,
just like adding a video to an existing playlist.

When you add videos to a playlist, this tactic to get viewers hooked
works very well because viewers watch them in a specific order.

Also, YouTube notices the IDs that are grouped together. So if

someone is watching a video linked to a playlist, there is a higher chance
that the algorithm will connect that related video to the recommendation
source.

This doesn't always happen; it is based on what the viewer does next.

But if you have a small percentage of viewers who watch the videos
sequentially in the playlist, the chance that YouTube will recommend that
content based on its data ratio and view ratio increases.

Weave your content strategy so that your videos are related by theme
and nature. This will increase the likelihood that your videos will be
suggested to you. This is where the rubber meets the road, and your view
count will take off.
 It's what I call the "Goldilocks Zone." Remember how that girl with the
golden hair liked everything “perfect” in the house of the three bears? It's
like that.

A content strategy that caters to both the audience and the algorithm
“just right” gives your videos the best chance of being suggested, viewed,
and really taking off.

Another great way to create a data relationship between your videos is

to place your top performing videos as end screens and cards in related
videos. Even if only 2% of viewers watch the video to the end and click on
your recommendation, that's a lot from the algorithm's point of view.

YouTube can go out and find other viewers that have the same type of
data relationship from that 2% and recommend that video to those potential
viewers.

If these potential viewers engage and like your content, YouTube will
continue to recommend not only this video, but also more content from
your library.

That small percentage stimulates another look at your content from the
AI, which will continue to find viewers with similar viewing patterns and
send them your content as well. Every little push helps.

Video description

Video description is often overlooked because it doesn't produce quick

 or massive results, but using this feature can help you in smaller ways.

The description, in addition to providing good search keywords and a

summary of the video, also links to other videos and playlists.

Most people don't open the description, but some do. Again, although
this percentage is small, any additional viewer activity on that video creates
a viewing pattern for the AI to connect the data.

As they click on the next video, that relationship between the two
videos deepens. It also creates more watch time on your channel. Every
time those few people click the links in your description and watch more,
YouTube rewards you.

Additionally, viewers who click on the description tend to be the most

active viewers of your content, so YouTube watches their behavior more
closely rather than less.

Playlists and YouTube Mix

Playlists can be powerful tools for retaining and engaging active

viewers. As a creator, you have the ability to create playlists for your
subscribers and viewers to watch one after another.

Viewers can watch your videos with almost no interruptions because

the next video is not one that YouTube's AI suggests, but the next video
you added to that playlist.
 For those of you who were born before 1985 (or if you watched the
Guardians of the Galaxy movie), it's like making a mixtape, where you
record your own selection of songs onto a cassette. This is a great way to
enhance the viewing experience by creating content intended to be
consumed in the order you decided on.

It helps the viewer know which video from that video series to watch
next. I love playlists because playlist viewers contribute the most watch
time to your channel.

I have created many successful content strategies based on playlists.

Playlists emphasize the viewer's journey with your content.

Let me give you a quick example of how YouTube content could be

turned into a series.

Let's say I have a tech review channel where I feature the newest tech
products. You could create a video of the “rumors and speculations”

of the launch of a new iPhone and talk about its features and
projections. This would be a great video for this type of channel.

Then I could make a video about the announcement of the new iPhone.
For another video, I might show myself using the new phone for the first
time after it came out. Another video could be a teardown of the phone with
its components exposed.

Another one could be a video listing all the pros and cons of the phone
after using it or for 15 days (not the disassembled phone but a
 second phone).

You can add all of these videos into a playlist for a new viewer to
consume in a setting as if they were intended to be watched back to back.

Most creators don't use playlists this way; They release videos on
YouTube and add a title without rhyme or reason.

By creating a playlist intended to be viewed sequentially and tailored to

your viewer, you are creating an environment that will give you your best
viewing time.

Which means the AI will usually start recommending those videos to

be watched in that order like the following.

The YouTube discovery team looked at playlist viewing data and

decided to create their own definitive mixtape or playlists for viewers.

AI does a great job of predicting videos for viewers to watch, so they

tested a new feature called YouTube Mix. YouTube Mix is a continuous
playlist that AI adapts to the viewer. This feature has created incredible
watch time for YouTube.

Community Posts and Stories

The YouTube Community tab is a feature designed to help creators

engage with their audience outside of the videos they upload to their
channel. Community post types include polls, text-based posts, and images.
It's a great place to promote old videos.
 or merchandise or other products that you sell. It's also a great place to
ask your audience about ideas for different videos. Creators have found that
these ideas are very useful in satisfying what viewers want that they
wouldn't have thought of on their own for a new video idea.

Community posts can be found in a channel's tabs, usually between

Playlists and Channels or Store, if you have one. (If you don't see one, it's
because YouTube considers your content to be aimed at children or you
haven't reached the subscriber minimum.)

Stories are short mobile-only videos that allow you to connect with
your audience more casually on the go. Stories expire after seven days.

They appear on the home page and look like stories on other platforms,
with the scrolling view moving to the right as new stories come in and
settling to the left of the scroll. The story feed is like placing a banner or
billboard for your brand.

YouTube sends your posts and community stories to both subscribers

and non-subscribers. I've seen creators grow tremendously using these
features. These are subscriber-based recommendations, meaning the goal of
the algorithm is to send community posts and stories to viewers who have
viewed your content but are not subscribed to your channel.

It also means that the algorithm will send posts and Stories to potential
new viewers and subscribers.

Tent Poles
To accelerate visibility, use a “tentpole” strategy. Think about how a
tent pole supports its side of the tent.
 There is a "peak" effect at the top of the tent. The peak represents an
event or something relevant to the general knowledge of a group. This
could be a holiday.

It could be the opening day of a big movie. It could be the Super Bowl
or the World Cup of soccer. Align your video topic and content around one
of these tentpoles to accelerate your channel's visibility along with that
thing.

For example, when I was working with Matt Meese, the head of the
sketch comedy channel Studio C, we looked at a calendar and brainstormed
regional, national, and global events that would be taking place that year.

Matt mentioned an idea that he had always wanted to turn into a video
featuring a soccer game. So we looked at when the NCAA men's soccer
championship landed on the calendar, in mid-November, and set our sights
on a video release.

We use two great schools, Yale and North Carolina, as opponents in

our video. Matt wrote an incredible script. The goalkeeper, Matt , had the
unfortunate role of taking a soccer ball to the face again and
again (with the help of excellent visual effects, good editing, a
soft soccer ball, and good makeup).
Three days before the NCAA championship, we made a
subreddit post with Scott Sterling's video.

The football fans who saw it knew it was fake, but they loved it
because it was so funny. And because it was football. This
exposure and momentum helped the post reach Reddit's front
page, and it was shared again and again elsewhere online.

We got 12 million views in less than 24 hours. Catapulted the small

channel. A few days later, a rumor began to circulate that the goalkeeper
had died from his injuries.

Of course, this wasn't true, but it continued to generate excitement for

us.

This video release strategy had a double impact: we timed it around the
US national soccer championship, but we also appealed to a global soccer
audience.

Let's go back to the soccer video we talked about in collaborations. Dan

Markham used the help of his soccer friend Garrett to make an interesting
video about World Cup soccer balls, which he eventually cut at the end of
the video.

You know this was a successful collaboration strategy, but Dan's

content release strategy is very important to us, also as a central theme.

Dan had filmed this video in January, but the World Cup tournament
wasn't until June, so he let the video sit.

In June, you started seeing the Google Trends page. On day one of the
tournament, "World Cup" was really trending, so Dan knew it was finally
time to release his soccer video. He uploaded it at 1am where he lives in the
US, which was good timing internationally.
The US soccer team USA He didn't even make the tournament that
year, but the international hype around the event generated plenty of views
for Dan's video and for Garrett Gee, the YouTube creator he had
collaborated with.

Tent poling is a really smart tactic to add to your overall content

strategy, especially since content is typically evergreen, meaning that
content gets a boost every time that event reappears.

Pull out your video files to see what content you've already created that
could fit into a pitch post strategy, then create new content with data
relationships that connect these videos. I promise it works for topics other
than football!
Video Cubes

Once you have a good handle on your basic content strategies, you'll be
ready to take it to the next level with something I call video buckets or
content buckets.

Buckets are an associated grouping for related videos, keywords,

behaviors, and audience characteristics. Each segment is a similar topic or
topic that appeals to your target audience. Consider “bucket” the equivalent
of “category.”

Imagine you have a bucket. You put a treat in the bucket and put it on
your front porch. Meanwhile, your neighbor has set up a row of different
colored buckets and each bucket contains a different treat.

Every day, a group of neighborhood kids walk down your street and
choose the house's stash of goodies to raid. Which house do you think they
will choose? Which house would you choose? It's safe to assume that we
would all choose the house with many different types of treats.

People who frequent the YouTube neighborhood also want variety.

As much as they love that amazing video on your channel, they don't
want to see it every time they visit.

This is why it is important to have a variety of "buckets" to draw from.

If all you offer is cookie videos, your viewers will stop coming back for
more cookies, because sometimes they want a donut, a chocolate bar, or a
soda.
 When I was a kid, I loved a TV show called The A-Team . “The A-
Team” was a group of Vietnam veterans who were framed for a crime they
did not commit.
So they escaped from prison and decided to become mercenaries who
helped the good guys get away from the bad guys.

In each episode, the plot was the same: the good guys get into trouble,
the A-Team shows up, chaos ensues as the Team hatches a crazy plan, and
in the end they somehow accomplish the impossible.

At the end of each episode, a character named Colonel Smith would

say, "I love it when a plan comes together."

The episode always had a crazy build up to it and they were always
tweaking the plan.
Somewhere halfway through the second season, I got bored of the
series. Their grades plummeted because everyone got bored with it.

Every episode felt the same. It was basically the exact same plot with
different characters. You may have a great idea for content, but if you
overuse it, it will stop working, just like “The A-Team.”

Once you understand what niche you are in, you can break down your
own channel with video buckets. Breaking down your content into
categories helps your audience know exactly what they'll get with a
particular type of video, and they get their reward when you deliver. You
can then wash, rinse and repeat on each type of video.
 When you do it right, you'll have a low churn rate, which means you'll
lose fewer viewers.

To be clear, having categories or buckets is not the same as having a

variety channel. Variety channels don't work. The buckets are categories
that are related, not random.

Define your niche, but don't be so narrow that viewers lose interest
because you don't have variety.

For example, MrBeast is a master of video cubes. He has a very high

standard for himself as he creates new content.

If it doesn't fit into one of your video buckets, you won't put it on your
channel, even if it's a great video. Their buckets include categories like
extreme challenges.

When you create content segments, you will find that it is a great way
to systematize your channel's programming. It will help you schedule so
you know exactly what you are going to do in advance.

Create editorial calendars, schedule content, and craft copy with ease
knowing the various topics you need to address. This will save you a lot of
time and stress.

That being said, don't be too rigid with your buckets. Topics may come
and go depending on what is currently working. If something stops
 working, experiment with a new bucket. You should always be
experimenting anyway. If you don't, you'll be stuck and eventually canceled
like Team A.

How to choose your buckets

Choosing the cubes for your channel is a lot of fun. Go to your videos
and look for patterns among them. Give special consideration to your top-
performing videos and be sure to create a repository for them.

Group similar videos together and title each segment. Check out the
FAQ and FAQ lists you created earlier in this chapter to make sure you
cover the important topics.

I introduced you to Kristina Smallhorn in Chapter 10. She is a real

estate agent from Louisiana who came to me for help with her channel.
I had been creating content based on keywords and SEO. I helped her
categorize her top-performing videos into segments and told her to create
more content for those segments.
He plugged in metadata and video structure, and before long, his
channel took off.
A good deposit strategy was all you needed to take your channel to the
next level.
Observe their spikes over time after deploying cubes, shown in Figures
17.1 to 17.5.
 People watched your videos 93,653 times during the dates
you selected

Figure 17.1 28 days

People watched your videos 333,871 times during the dates
you selected
Views Watch time (hours) Subscribers Your estimated revenue

333.9K 26.1K +3.0K

Figure 17.2 90 days

 People watched your videos 1,180,400 times during the dates
you selected
Views Watch time (hours) Subscribers Your estimated revenue

1.2M 95.9K +9.7K

Figure 17.3 4 months

People watched your videos 2,157,897 times during the dates

you selected

Figure 17.4 6 months

 Look at the first small bump in Figure 17.5 (the arrow points toward it).
It is the peak that looked so large in Figure 17.1. You can see that the
segment strategy grows perpetually over time and as you publish more
videos in that segment .

People watched your videos 4,974,439 times during the dates

you selected

Views Watch time (hours) Subscribers Your estimated revenue

5.0M 408.7K +35.0K

120 OK 80-0K

40 OK 0

□ 000 □ □ EEE DE □ □ E HD •EE E

Oct 1,2-, Nov 22,2019 Jan 13,2020 Mar 5,2020 Apr 25,2020 Jun 16,2020 Aug 7....

SEE MORE
How to Create Cubes
How do you put a video "in the bucket"? Once you've
labeled your content buckets by topic or topics, make
sure the videos that are grouped together have similar
metadata. They should have similar titles, keywords,
descriptions, and tags. The videos should also have a
similar structure.

Framing, pacing, and editing must follow specific

patterns

YouTube used to recommend only exact content matches as

suggestions. But they found that to keep the viewer on YouTube longer,
they needed the viewer to follow one of three paths: rabbit holes, similar
videos, and personalized to the viewer.
“Rabbit hole” recommendations take the viewer deeper and deeper
into a topic or type of video.

Similar video recommendations include videos that would be very

related, but not super related like the rabbit hole type.

These videos have a natural relationship, whether it's viewing data or

topics.

The custom type for the viewer takes something that the viewer has
engaged with that is unrelated to what they are currently watching, but
are likely to watch based on their previous viewing and subscription
patterns.
 You want your content to be related enough for the algorithm to
recommend it together.

The connections you've made beforehand make it easier for you to

YouTube finds your material and puts it where people see it.

If you only have one bucket, your content might take off, but it will
eventually slow down because there isn't enough for YouTube to
recommend it in multiple ways.

People like all kinds of sweets, not just everyday cookies,

remember? This is why cubes do so well on YouTube today.

To use a real-world example, let's look at the Legal Eagle channel of

one of my clients, Devin Stone. Devin is a civil trial attorney in
Washington, DC, whose mission is to help explain everyday laws and
legal problems to everyday people.

You know your video buckets, and when you make a new video, it
always fits into one of them. Devin cubes include the following and are
shown in Figure 17.6:
 LAW 101! EXPERIMENTAL
Figure 17.6 Legal Eagle buckets
 • Real lawyer reacts to
• Reviews of real life and real law
• Real lawyer responds to
• Broken laws
• Law 101!

Go watch one of Devin's videos and scroll down the Suggested Feed.
The video below is probably another Legal Eagle video that fits into the
same category as the one currently playing.

The second position could be occupied by a playlist from your

channel library, and the third position could be another video of yours
within the current bucket.

In Chapter 11, I explained how Devin figured out how to reach a

broader audience than the law students he had been creating for. Bucklets
changed the game for him, helping him reach more than one core
audience.

It's easier to generate new ideas when you've written your content
and divided it into categories.

When lists are right in front of you, new content ideas appear more
easily.
You can also see where you may be missing content.

You can also create videos that fit multiple buckets. In fact, it's
amazing to have any crossover. MrBeast makes a lot of "challenge" type
videos that easily reach more than one bucket.
 This works great because you can use a keyword to connect the
buckets and get more recommendations for your content.

It makes sense that having a comprehensive content strategy holds

your viewers' attention better than a one-topic wonder, right? When
creating content lists, you may discover that your channel is not as varied
as you thought.

You may notice that you only have one type of bucket. You may
find that you have a bucket that doesn't really work. You might see an
obvious oversight and be able to create a new bucket that gives your
channel the boost it's been waiting for.

The purpose of all of this is to make your content creation strategy

easier and more effective at getting and keeping viewers.

A good deposit strategy provides all the elements that retain engaged
viewers. Engaged viewers become part of your community that is loyal
to your brand. What more could a YouTube content creator want?

Keep it Simple

It's easy for YouTube creators to get stuck in a content strategy rut.
Yes, it's important to plan and it's important to implement tactics to use
your data, but sometimes the answer is to keep it simple.

As long as you remember to strategize for your audience and

strategize for the algorithm, you'll be fine.
 Optimize for mobile devices and create data relationships between
your content so YouTube continues to recommend it to viewers.

And don't forget the first part of this chapter's title: Create. Keeping
your content fresh and interesting is always the best strategy.
Action Exercises
Task 1: Look at your video library and group similar videos
together.
Task 2: Label these groups of videos by topic. These have become
your cubes.
Task 3: Analyze your videos into your cubes using the Four Ws
(Chapter 14 Action Exercise).

Get the companion workbook and find more resources at

www.ytformulabook.com .
15 Building a
Community
around your
Content
I wanted to know why some content worked well and others failed.
It taught me to have a good eye for patterns that worked.
I started noticing that content from certain brands or people worked
almost every time, so I dug deeper to find out why.
Of course, it mattered that the videos were well made, but I found
that the most important thing had less to do with the video itself and
more to do with who was watching it. When content was built around a
loyal community, it performed better than content that was not.

Community is everything. Humans need each other; we long to

connect in all kinds of ways. We need to feel a sense of belonging.
 We want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. We like
being part of a team, becoming groupies in a band, meeting like-minded
people at conventions and sporting events, and talking to others like us in
online groups.

These communities can be as broad as nations or as specific as men

who like My Little Pony and call themselves "Bronies" (see Chapter 12
for this fun story).

Belong to a small local service club that helps families in need

during the holidays, or you can belong to the million-member Rotary
International service organization. There is an amazing book about
creating an online community called Superfans.

It was written by my friend Pat Flynn. Pat's ideas are spot on when it
comes to developing and activating an online audience. I highly
recommend you read it after reading this book.

As YouTube creators, we need to establish our own communities, no

matter what genre our channel fits into. But how? What does it take to
build a community? When I work with clients, I always ask them to
develop a plan to build a following before creating more content.

Of course, you need to have content for them to share, but you need
to make sure you create the content specifically for them.

You can't do this if you don't know them first. How do you get to
know them? In previous chapters, we talked about viewer personalities
and how to really understand what motivates your viewers. Once you
know your audience, you'll be ready to turn them into a loyal community
around your content.

To help explain, let me tell you how my partners and I built a loyal
following around a television series about the life of Jesus Christ called
The Chosen, and it has nothing to do with religion.

Every client I work with is required to read a book called Primal

Branding that teaches the fundamentals of building a community. It was
written by Patrick Hanlon in 2006 and remains relevant through all the
changes in trends and technology to date.

When my new partner Dalas Jenkins and I connected, one of the first
things we talked about was building an audience. I taught Dallas the
fundamentals of Primal Branding and encouraged him to read the book as
we set out to create a culture.

Dallas was all for Primal Branding because building the community
would be the best way to raise money for the project, and we had a lot of
money to raise.

We're talking about brands that have loyal communities, like Apple
or Tesla, and even cult followings, like the Grateful Dead and Star Trek.
We needed to follow their model of acquiring dedicated fans.

In the book, my good friend Patrick reminds us that humans simply

want to feel included, recognized, and accepted. We want to belong
somewhere, knowing that there are people like us.
 We need to feel that we are not alone. Communities offer this sense
of belonging, but come with their own set of rules, language, and
identities.

Dallas and I broke down who our avatar was and listed the steps
needed to turn them into a loyal culture around The Chosen. We knew
how important it was for us to find “our people.”

We needed a passionate social army that could see our vision and
our mission and make it their own.

Once they took over, we knew they would donate money, but more
importantly, share and promote the project to other people who would
join in and promote the cause.

Let me take you step by step through the fundamentals of Primal

Branding as we implement them into our community building strategy at
The Chosen.

There are seven foundations: Creation History, Creed, Icons, Rituals,

Sacred Words or Lexicon, Non-Believers and Leader. (Don't miss the
bonus basics too.)
Creation Story

First, we needed to tell our Creation Story.

Patrick tells us that the creation story is the beginning of the brand
narrative. As human beings, we want to know who we are, where we
come from and where we are going.

As communities, the same is true. People want to know the story

behind YouTube companies, organizations, products, and even creators
to decide whether to become a follower.

Just because it's "business" doesn't mean people don't want it to be

personal. When people see history as part of history, it connects them to
something in a meaningful way.
It has to be personal.
Patrick calls the Creation Story a legacy, invoking feelings of
belonging to a family or group for generations. Legacy means leaving a
lasting impact, while history is only about the events of the past.

A well-known example of a brand with a good creation story is

Apple Inc. Most people have heard of the two Steves, Jobs and Wozniak,
who started the company in Jobs' childhood home.

They sold a calculator and a Volkswagen van so they could buy

parts and build the first Apple computers on the market.

They named the company Apple because Jobs had recently spent
time in an apple orchard in Oregon. People love this creation story.
 Dallas and I, along with our distribution partners Jeffrey Harmon
and Neal Harmon, wrote our thoughts, values, passions and our why.

If we were passionate about this project, then there had to be people

out there who could relate, people who had a passion for the same thing.
We knew that if they could see our vision, they would want to be a
part of it too. We already knew who our ideal avatar was, so we started
creating content that would spread our message and resonate with them.

The pilot episode of The Chosen told the story of the birth of Jesus
Christ through the lens of a disabled pastor.
It was received with a lot of passion and enthusiasm by people from
all over the world. Now that they had seen our work, we needed to show
them who we were and how we began to cover the critical number one of
building a loyal community.

Our creation story video, “The Story Behind the Chosen,” was nine
minutes long and began with Dallas explaining a raw personal moment.

He was sitting at home on the worst day of his professional career,

despairing over the failure of his most recent film, when he had a clear
memory of a Bible story. It was the story of Jesus feeding 5,000 people
with just a few loaves of bread and a handful of fish.

Dallas explained that he knew God wanted him to spread the

message of Jesus Christ, but he didn't know what it would mean at the
time.
 So he committed to bringing his loaves and fishes to the table, so to
speak, and he knew that God would multiply his efforts.

Not long after this heart-to-heart conversation with God (and his
wife), Dallas received a direct message from a friend about his job being
to “bring the bread and the fish.”

When Dallas asked his friend why he had said that to him at that
particular moment, the friend responded, “It wasn't that I . . . “I felt
guided to tell you at this moment.” From the beginning, Dallas told our
viewers how this Jesus series was born, leading them to our Why.

Later in our Creation Story, Jeffrey and Neal explained how they
were drawn to the project and came together as The Chosen's distribution
company, VidAngel.

Then I told how I joined the project and why it meant so much to
me. I said I felt like everything I had done in my life had been leading up
to this project, which I truly believe in.

To be clear, the content of our Creation Story was not a script

intended to compile numbers; it was genuinely 100% how we all fell in
love with The Chosen.

We wanted people to know that there weren't a bunch of uptight

entrepreneurs behind the curtain of the show. We became a team because
we worked with the sole objective of spreading our passion for the
message.
 Our project received more financial donations than we could have
imagined. Because of this, we repurposed our Creation Story video to
show our gratitude for the overwhelming response.
 This helped our followers see where the money was going and that we
cared. In the extended video, Dallas shared the results of the ongoing
crowdfunding campaign. He ended the video by saying that our entire team
had brought our loaves and fishes, the investors had brought their loaves and
fishes, and that God would multiply our efforts.

By the end of the video, the viewer knew exactly where we came from,
why we were here, and how they could become part of our passionate
community.

The Creation Story facilitates the inclusion of its viewers, bringing “my
vision” to “our vision.” They accept your passion as their own and want to
share it with their sphere of influence.

So your sphere of influence captures the passion and also wants to share,
and that's how the content and the community spread.

Good brands always tell their Creation Story. When people know where
you come from and why, they are ready to know what you are about, which
is the second fundamental.

Creed

The second fundamental is your Creed. This is your belief system. If

your values and principles are not clear to you, how will they be clear
enough for your followers to know exactly why they want to belong to
your community?

They want to know what you believe in and why you joined.
According to Patrick, “The Creed is a central idea that everyone wants to
associate with.” The first identifier of some communities is their Creed.
Think "Semper Fi" and the Marines, or Nike's "Just Do It."

If you know the mark, you can recite the Creed. Our creed at The
Chosen has evolved as our community has grown. It started as a war cry.

We didn't want anyone in Hollywood to control the creative process;

we wanted to have the gold to create the content because then we could
create according to our own rules.

That's why we needed crowdfunding to work.

As The Chosen community grew, our Creed changed based on

feedback and interactions with our followers. In episode 7 of the first
season, Peter opposes Jesus' call to Matthew to leave everything and
follow him.

Matthew was Peter's tax collector and needed him to stay. He tells
Jesus that Matthew's job as a tax collector justified him staying, that
Matthew's situation is different from his.

Jesus' response, "Get used to different," became a catchphrase that

viewers really responded to. Then it became a Creed. We have since
printed it on merchandise.

The same thing happened with the phrase, “Binge Jesus.” Our
viewers latched onto it and we integrated it into our Credo and also into
our products. Sometimes the Creed comes from the community and is
adopted by the brand or creator, and other times it comes from the top
down.
 It is an organic process that you need to be aware of as you bring
your community together.

Icons
Now that they know where you come from and what you represent,
they need to know how to identify you, which brings us to the third
essential element: icons. Icons are any representation of your brand.
Patrick's explanation is simple, but perfect: “Icons remind us that we
are in this place, not that place.”

For example, if you walk into a shoe and clothing store and see a
"swoosh" printed on every product, I don't even have to tell you that
you're in a Nike store, not Adidas or Reebok.
The Icon is so ingrained in us.

Mickey Mouse ears = Disney. The American flag = America,

patriotism, pride and more. As you can see in this last example, icons can
be associated with more than one place or company; They can represent
values, visions and feelings.
Shapes, sounds, smells and tastes can also be iconic.
Patrick also says that icons are "quick concentrations of meaning
that we instantly identify with and feel something."
These can be logos, packaging, product design, experiences and
environments.
For The Chosen, the phrase “Get used to what is different” reflects
one of our Icons.
In our opening credits, there is a sea of gray fish swimming in a
circle, while only a few turquoise fish swim against the current in the
opposite direction.
 This symbolizes Jesus Christ and his followers moving in a
completely different direction than the majority of the crowd.

This icon can also be found on our products. When our community
sees it, they identify with it and associate it with the community.
Dalas and I had discovered that we were both big fans of a graphic
designer and filmmaker named Saul Bass who had created iconic designs
for many popular movie posters and movie title sequences.
His work became popular in the 1950s, spanning four decades and
including works such as Psycho, The Man with the Golden Arm, The
Shining, West Side Story and Big.
We wanted to capture the essence of Saul Bass for our title sequence,
and Voltage's Eric Fowles was the right guy to do it.

It helped us create an icon that was simple and direct but evoked
depth and meaning. See Figure 18.1.

It was extremely important to us that this icon be done right. I had to

get our message across in the right way to the right people.

Eric did a great job meeting our criteria, and our community loves
this icon.

Our Icons list also includes people associated with the series.

When our community sees actor Jonathan Roumie as Jesus, in a

video or thumbnail, they recognize him as one of our icons. Dallas, as
the face of our social media presence, is also iconic.
 When our viewers see the faces of these people and other actors or
see the fish on the screen, they know it's us.

Figure 18.1 The Chosen

Rituals

Now that people know how to identify it, they need to know how it
operates and what it does.
The fundamental room in Primal Branding is Rituals. Rituals are its
processes, methods and procedures.
Patrick calls Rituals meaning in motion. In colloquial terms, Rituals
"how we roll."

People have seen what you do, now they need to see how you do it.
A fun classic example of Ritual comes from the 1960s Batman television
series.
At the end of each episode, the narrator would say, “Tune in
tomorrow! Same bat time! Same bat channel!” This Ritual was
anticipated and loved by fans of the show.

When it comes to The Chosen series, people know what to expect

from us and when.
We show them the creation process, how everything comes together.
We show a lot behind the scenes.
This is an unusual approach from creators during the creation
process, but it has worked extremely well for our community.

It has given us a way to share our successes and disappointments

with our people along the way. It has become an important Ritual for our
viewers.

We decided to have a Coding Ritual during the Covid-19 pandemic

where we offered a free episode every night for eight days.
 We would then do a live stream at the end of each episode with
Family Rituals that would maintain engagement and retention.
Dallas would welcome viewers, introduce the episode, tease an
interview with the cast member, show the episode, talk about interesting
moments from the episode, interview the cast member, tease the next
episode, and sign off.

It became a Ritual for our viewers, which continued to grow as the

week went on, and we even landed on YouTube's Trending page. This
was a big problem.

We basically didn't exist as a channel, then we gained 146,886

additional subscribers in 14 days.

Other Rituals for our followers include our crowdfunding, social

presence and promotion.

Each goal achieved and each milestone achieved becomes a Ritual

that we share with our community.

Sacred Words/Lexicon

The fifth fundamental in building community is how people talk. It

is called Sacred Words or Lexicon. The words identify us.
Whether you speak English, Spanish, Mandarin, or Klingon, that
language identifies you as part of a culture of speakers or citizens of a
specific place.
The same goes for communities in sports, businesses, games, music,
and online platforms.
 Patrick's favorite example of holy words is ordering a drink at
Starbucks: tall skinny iced vanilla latte.

You have to know the words to get your order right. Even families
have their own Holy Words.

If I said “I love you six times over” or “Be of good cheer” to

someone in my family, it would mean something specific to us that
strangers wouldn't understand.
Patrick explains that you belong to many communities at the same
time.
You could be a musician, banker, artist or poker player. . or you
could be all of those things.

The Creed and the Sacred Words can be combined, so our Creed
"Get used to what is different" also belongs to the Lexicon of Chosen.

People who don't belong to our community don't understand what it

means.
Knowing the right words shows that you belong. If you don't
understand it, you are a stranger. In fact, it's great to have outsiders:
when a community's Lexicon is shared verbally or virtually or on
merchandise, it gives outsiders the opportunity to ask what it means.

Community members can then spread brand awareness, attracting

more people to the group.

Dallas came up with a little jingle to encourage people to contribute

or share "The Chosen."
 Another thing Dallas sometimes does at the end of the videos is
remind our audience of our Creation Story and our Creed by saying, "It's
not your job to feed the five thousand, it's just to provide the loaves and
fishes."

Not believers

Sixth, what would a community be without the haters? At Primal

Branding, they are called Nonbelievers. They are the counterculture of
who you are, what you believe in and what you do.
In The Chosen, non-believers are not necessarily non-Christians, but
they do not believe in the project or the message.

Some of our biggest non-believers are Christians in name, but they

don't agree with our message or delivery. We've had a lot of backlash
about our poetic license.
Some people think it should be completely historically accurate
based on their version of the Bible or the teachings of their religion.
Our team has been extremely meticulous when it comes to The
Chosen's story.

We want to tell the life of Jesus Christ as found in the gospels of the
Bible, but we also refer to historical works and scholars and to leaders
and scholars of many different religions.

We are very careful to keep our message non-national. However, no

matter how carefully we navigate these waters, there will always be
enemies. And we're fine with that.
 When people hate, people defend. Polarization can often fuel a
community and help it prosper even more. People engage more with
content when they have championed it.

Classic examples of community versus enemies include Democrats

versus Republicans or Apple versus Android.

Leader

The last element of Primal Branding is having a Leader.

Someone has to be the voice of the community. Brands and channels
that perform well have a defined leader.

Leaders send out a battle cry and loyal followers will respond.
I finally convinced Dallas to become the leader/influencer of The
Chosen community, although he fought with me for a couple of years.
He conceded and went live, asking our followers to purchase
merchandise.

He sang his little jingle, and wouldn't you know we had a lot of
money coming in fast.

It was a powerful statement to Dallas that he needed to be the leader

of our brand. He is our leader in many ways: he is the director, he is the
writer; It just made sense that he needed to be our leader.

This was the trigger we needed to really grow and bring our message
to the masses. Other examples of community leaders include Bill Gates
for Microsoft and Elon Musk for Tesla and SpaceX.
 They are the face of the brand, and it totally works.
Once you put these seven foundations together, you are able to
create a narrative that people can relate to and connect with.

You can build a community around products and services, social

media personalities or influencers, among co-workers or employees, and
more.
If you have a belief system and can share your beliefs in a way that
builds community, then you have the advantage over your competitors
who are not effectively building community.

Distribution

In a medium.com article that Patrick wrote in 2015, he adds that

there is an eighth fundamental element of community building:
distribution.
You have to get your message to people. Where are you going to do
that? What elements work on what platform?
Do you tell your Creation Story on Facebook? How do your icons look
on both physical products and online?
Does your community spend a lot of time on Instagram? Twitter?
Learn where your people are and how to implement your brand
strategies there.

There are social platforms and online communities where your

target audience is already hanging out, so go where they are. This
concept seems obvious, but I want to reinforce it because it is extremely
important that you go where your audience is.
 If you have a gaming audience, you don't go to Pinterest, you go to
Twitch.
Many brands are still trying to fit a square peg into a round hole,
thinking that if they push it hard enough or spend enough money, it will
work. Don't push your content somewhere it won't work. Go where your
people are already.

The Fundamental Ninth

We've gone over the seven (or eight) fundamentals of community

building, but there's one important element we still need to address. It is
so important that I would even call it the ninth foundation of Primal
Branding.

When you've covered all the steps and built a loyal community
around your content, there should be an organic acquisition of people in
that community that take you a step further.

These people do more than consume your content; They become

superfans. They're basically your fan club president type.
They become evangelists, facilitators and organizers of your brand.

These are not the people who just “never miss an episode”; These are
the people who spend their free time preaching what you preach and even
creating their own content around your brand.

These are the people who make fan art and send it to you. They build
LEGO replicas of one of their icons or scenes from an episode.
 They organize events around your brand. They own your vision as if
it had always been theirs.

We reached out to a guy who had become a fan and supporter of The
Chosen and asked if he would help us moderate the comments.
He ended up suggesting that we create a Facebook group and auction
off signed The Chosen merchandise to help our crowdfunding effort.

It was a great idea that generated tens of thousands of dollars for us.

We wouldn't have made that money if we hadn't integrated this fan-

turned-advocate into the development of our community. Embrace them
and reward them, because they will help you grow.

The latest example of superfans is well known by their nickname,

"Deadheads." They are the loyal followers of the band Grateful Dead who
became an organic subculture in their own right.
They married communal ideals and rituals while following the band
on tour together, sometimes for years at a time. They even influenced the
band's song choices in real time on stage.

The band allowed Deadheads to record concerts, which was unique in

the pre-smartphone era.

Trading concert tapes became a Deadhead ritual that extended the

group's loyalty and longevity even after bandleader Jerry Garcia died and
the band disbanded.
Being a Deadhead was a lifestyle, not a weekend concert-going
activity.
 Not that Deadheadism should be your goal, but this is the kind of
super loyalty you want to keep in mind when building your own
following.

Let's look at it from the perspective of the story element. Do you

remember the narration pattern from chapter 13?

After telling a good story, its standout element is the “goosh” or

bonus.

It is the pleasant surprise at the end that hooks you as regular viewers.
If we relate their community building to their storytelling pattern,
superfans would be like "goosh."

They are the additional feature that makes the difference for your
brand. You'll know your community development campaign is a success
when you see these people take their place in your community.

When you convert these people, your movement continues without

the Leader; They are an organism unto themselves. If you continue to fuel
their passion with new content, including a variety of content across all
media, they will take your content and push it out into the world.

You have to feed the fandom. Validate and make them feel seen and
important to you. Say hello to your art fans, tell them you appreciate their
love and support. You have to recognize them, or they will tune out.

People Are the Brand

Your community is your circle of joy. They are emotionally attached

to you or your brand, your beliefs and your message. To be clear, you are
not manipulating anyone. In fact, it is contrary to traditional advertising
methods that manipulate.

When trying to build a loyal community, don't change who you are,
just listen to your people and respond by giving them more of what they
connect with.

Former clients Steven Sharp Nelson and Jon Schmidt, also known as
“The Piano Guys,” have an extremely loyal community.

His YouTube channel has 1.9 billion total views and his videos are
viewed more than 3 million times a day.

Their popular videos show them playing beautiful music in beautiful

settings around the world.

I saw them do an amazing performance for a video, and then we

decided to film a fun ending with a fight scene.

The cello bow was used as a sword and the piano was used as a face
hitting surface. It was really great content. However, when Steven and Jon
talked about it, they decided not to include the ending. I pushed to keep it
because I knew it was viral type content, but they rejected it.

They knew their community and they knew that this was the wrong
content for their community, even though it was great content. So they
made a regular "boring" ending. Kudos to Steven and Jon for protecting
their message and their fans.
 This taught me more about staying on brand and not straying from
your message, even when you have content that could be a big hit.

Communication in consumerism used to come from the top down: the

manufacturer told the consumer about the product.
But now it's overturned. Consumers are on top and saying, “Hey, I
have the money; come find me,” and the brand has to respond to get the
business.

Patrick says: "The biggest change today is that brands used to be

about products and services, but today 'Brand' is about the people who buy
those products and services."
It's about community.

Patrick spoke at an event once and there was a guy in the audience
who really took his message to heart.

He returned to his office and discovered how the seven fundamentals

of Primal Branding related to his business.

He transformed his company by building a community. The company

grew exponentially and was sold five years later for $12 million.

The buyer turned around and sold the company for $150 million nine
months later. They attributed the company's value to its community,
stating that it could not be replicated.

Primal Branding's message is clear: believe in what you are doing.

Know where it's from and what it's about. Find a way to identify and
declare yourself so that others can find you and identify with you.

Create a Ritual for others and a vocabulary or language for your own
community. Make sure people know what you are not. And guide the
way.

You don't have to have a community as big as Apple Inc. to change

the world, you just have to be unified.

If you have the right components for a community, you will be

successful and can really make a difference no matter how big or small
your channel is.

Some channels I just don't understand, so I'm not part of their

community, but there are a lot of people who understand them and want to
be part of them.
The same is true for groups I care about and others don't.
We all have a place; We all belong somewhere.
I encourage all of you to analyze your community. Have you
developed a loyal following? Are you using the fundamentals of building
a community?

You may think you don't have the right genre or the right content to
gain a loyal following, but remember that even Squatty Potty found a
unique audience that would share its message. If Bronies can have their
own community, so can you.
Action Exercises
Task 1: Using your viewer persona, develop a plan to build a
community with your most loyal followers. Ask yourself:

How will you interact with your audience on a monthly basis?

What action steps will your community take each month?

Task 2: Recognize and reach out to some of your most loyal
followers and ask them to be moderators for your channel.

Get the companion workbook and find more resources at

www.ytformulabook.com .
 16 Optimization
Launch and
Promotion of
Your Video
Your #1 goal is to get the right type of viewers in quickly so the
algorithm can recognize them and know who to keep sending it to.

You should treat the upload as part of a sequence when you launch a
new video. Let's see step by step how to upload a video to YouTube. Then
we can get to the fun part of optimizing, launching and promoting your
content.

How to Upload a Video

In your YouTube Creator Studio, click the icon in the top right corner
that gives you the option to upload a video.

You can then upload your video in one of two ways: drag and drop, or
click Select a file. You can actually upload up to 15 videos at a time here,
which can save you a lot of time. How long it takes to upload obviously
depends on the size of your file and your internet speed.

Once you're done with the processing time, you'll need to change the
default title to a custom one that you carefully created from the exercise in
Chapter 12.

Next, you need to fill out the description, which is also important to
include. words that fulfill the promise of the title and video.

Next, change the automatically generated thumbnail to the custom one

you spent a lot of time creating (also from Chapter 12).

Once you've connected your awesome clickable thumbnail, you can

choose which playlist or playlists to add your video to.

You will then see a fairly new upload feature: choosing your
audience.

YouTube added this step due to its issues with the Children's Online
Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA).

They just need to know if their content is aimed at children.

In this feature, you can also designate whether your content is for a
mature audience. It is very important that you fill out this part correctly so
that you do not get demonetized.

At this point on the screen, many creators skip the next part, which is
"More options." Go ahead and click on that so you can designate whether
your content contains integrated brand offers, sponsor ships, or other paid
promotions.

Here, you also add tags. Include tags with keywords from your video
title and description, for beginners. You can then choose your language
and subtitle (CC) preferences.

The next option I usually skip, because it asks for the recording date
and location of my video, which doesn't really matter; It does not affect
the algorithm or exposure of your video.

In the licensing and distribution section, you can choose the YouTube
Standard License, which protects your content from copyright
infringement, or you can choose Creative Commons, which gives anyone
the freedom to use your content without legal repercussions.

It's important to make sure the next two boxes are checked so you can
embed the video on other websites, but more importantly, so your
subscribers receive a notification that you have a new video.

Now you're ready to choose your category and comment preferences.

If you would like to retain potentially inappropriate comments for
review or disable comments entirely, please check that box here.
You are done with the Detail tab at this point and are ready to go to
the Monetization tab.

If you have monetization available, you can choose exactly what type
of ads you want to run with your content, whether they are overlays,
display ads, or skippable/non-skippable ads. You can also choose whether
 you want ads to run before or after the video, or during the video if it is
longer than 10 minutes.

If you are a YouTube partner and can run ads with your content, this
next part is important.

It helps you reduce your ad gaming ability. Again, fill this out
correctly so you don't get demonetized.

You can specify exactly what is in your content in terms of adult

content, violence, harmful or dangerous acts, drug-related content, hate
content, firearms-related content, or sensitive topics.

There's an option here to click None of the Above, but don't click if
there's anything questionable in your content because the algorithm will
find it, and you'll likely get a Community Guidelines notice, which I
definitely don't want.

Again, don't risk being demonetized.

We're almost there! You can now specify which video elements you
want to add, such as end screens and cards.

End screens run at the end of the video, while cards can be added
anywhere you choose. Once you're done adding whatever you want
wherever you want, click the Return to YouTube Studio button.

You have reached the last tab: Visibility. Most of the time, you want
your video to be public, but there are times when you can choose one of the
other options to make it private, unlisted, or members only.
 You will also see the video link on this screen. You need to click on that
link and go to the video settings to check that it has been fully processed and
ready in high resolution.

After checking it, you can schedule your video to post on a specific day
and time.

I almost always schedule videos. It gives me the freedom to work on the

climbs when I have time to not be a slave to the clock.

An amazing service that I recommend to all creators is called

TubeBuddy.
TubeBuddy is an extension that provides many useful tools to optimize
your videos and save you a lot of time. When you sign up and install, you'll
see all the amazing things it can do to help you speed up the upload process
and optimize your video.

How to Optimize a Video

Optimization is all about humans and everything about the click.

I could say a hundred times that the algorithm's job is to predict what
viewers will see. Follow people to see what they click on and what they
don't.

When you have a higher click-through rate (CTR), that tells YouTube
that people are really interested in your content. Get people interested in your
content!
Ninety percent of all top-performing videos on YouTube use custom
thumbnails.
 That's why creating a good thumbnail should be your first consideration.
Put in the energy and time to make it great.
This takes more time than you realize. . probably more.
Use colors to make your thumbnails really stand out. Use words when
necessary. Use emotion, because it creates that curiosity you want in a
potential viewer.

Always be honest. Your thumbnail and title should really reflect what
the video is about, or you'll likely have a low average view duration (ADL).

Use catchy, clickable titles that hook humans (not robots).

A good rule of thumb for titles is to be catchy but concise. Place your
main or primary keyword as close to the front of the title as possible; This
helps it get ranked and suggested.

Of course, your title has to be relevant. Sensational and irrelevant titles

lead to low ADLs. And don't forget your cubes! Use words in your title that
connect a video to others in the same bucket, or category.

The right keywords in your description will help you get more views and
visibility in search. "Above the fold" is the most important part of the
description because it is what people see first and what the algorithm sees
first.

"Below the fold" means below the words "show more." People have to
click here to see below the fold.

You only have 200 words above the fold, but you can say many more at
the bottom of the page.
 In the description, tell people what to expect, but always write like a
human being. The algorithm likes humans, remember.

Below the fold is a great place for links to other videos, links to your
social networks, relevant tags, and timestamps. A word of warning here,
don't reuse the exact same description over and over again; the algorithm
doesn't like it.

Some creators don't optimize with end cards and displays, which seems
crazy to me. Why wouldn't you want to give your viewer more ways to see
more of your content? However, don't make the mistake of putting a card in
the first third of the video because you don't want the viewer to bounce too
soon and ruin their ADL.

On your end cards and screens, choose a video from your library that the
viewer is most likely to be interested in. I call this the destination video.

Think about your target video in pre-production along with your title and
thumbnail, because connecting your data and your cubes is your ultimate
goal.

I also use a feature on end screens called "best for viewer" that allows
the algorithm to choose a video from my library that it thinks that particular
viewer is likely to watch.

Use this to complement, not replace, your target video suggestion.

Also, take the last 8-10 seconds to use a verbal call to action asking
them to watch the target video.
 Even if the percentage of people clicking on the suggested cards and
end screens is low, the AI still observes the activity and will reward it.
And guess what happens when they click on your suggestion? The
algorithm recognizes the connection and places it in the Suggested feed.

Write relevant tags. Tags are less important than the title, thumbnail,
and description, but they still help, especially if some of those words are
often misspelled by people.
For tags, use your primary and secondary keywords and other
relevant words.

Stay under 300 characters in your tags. TubeBuddy is a great tool to

show you relevant tags based on your current video content.

Power Tip #1: Use Closed Captions (CC). But not YouTube Auto
CC, because it can hurt your ranking and CPM; It's just not very good.

There are services that you can pay to do your CC at a very low cost,
CC helps validate the work that AI does with video intelligence and
natural language. CC will also increase your viewing time.

Power Tip #2: Use default profiles on TubeBuddy. This has saved
me hours and hours of time over the years.

It allows you to save your most used tags and descriptions, which
you can enter and modify based on the current video, but you won't have
to start from the beginning.
How to launch your content
Remember Dan Markham's release strategy for his football video
release in Chapter 14? That was a great use of collaboration, trends,
tentpole campaigning, and even timing your release at the exact time to
maximize your audience and success.

That's great for launching a video, but you can take this further when
launching a channel.
I have used MrBeast over and over again as an example of what to
do. He just knows the Formula and does it well.

MrBeast's main channel is doing great, but he was ready to start a

gaming channel. He wanted to create his new content around Minecraft
and gaming, because that's where he started and spent most of his time.

We started doing our reconnaissance and research with comparative

analysis on similar gaming channels.

We were extremely sensitive to the YouTube formula and finding

the right viewer.

He was very careful not to push the audience from his main channel
to his new gaming channel, because they were different avatars. If you
get the wrong viewer viewing your content, you mess with the algorithm.

We started creating and testing content months after the channel

launched, and our ideal avatar ended up being different than what we had
thought it would be.
 We removed our previous strategy and content based on the data we
input, and reset it, creating content geared toward the ideal avatar based
on the data.

A month before launch, we had developed who the ideal avatar

would be and created relevant content with calculated title/thumbnail
combinations.

Our main goal was to get the right click. Our A/B split testing
helped us identify what might work. We were able to use people who
were very successful in the niche because of our YouTube connections.

MrBeast's regular pace and edits wouldn't work on this gaming

channel, so it was interesting to see him pivot and do something
completely different for this new channel.

We decided to release new videos three times a week, which is pretty

aggressive, but not for a gaming channel.
We knew we had enough content to start pushing, so we did it.

We needed to promote the content, but we waited until the third

video to start promoting.

All we did was ask some great game creators to share our videos on
their Community tab. These were creators we wanted to collaborate with.

When we did this, our views went from 200,000 views a day to 1.1
million views in one day. We took advantage of the algorithm and used
the YouTube formula, and it worked.
 The next day, we got 1.6 million views and the next day, 1.7 million.
We activate the algorithm to put our video in front of the right viewers.

The income also began to arrive.

This was for a channel launch, yes, but it also works for a video
launch.
Give the algorithm exactly what it's looking for.

Don't confuse it by pushing the wrong viewers in the wrong places,

including your friends and social media followers. Of the 10.6 million
unique viewers, they watched four videos each, and 1 in 10 viewers
became subscribers. These numbers are very good.

You need to understand:

• Your audience
• What makes good content
• Traffic and drive to generate a good CTR
• How to Capture Their Attention and Keep Them Engaged
• How to use the bucket system to recommend similar content to be
suggested

When you understand these things, then you understand the

formula to harness the power of YouTube.
How to Promote a Video

I've been on YouTube since 2005 and there's one growth question I
hear year after year: Why can't I run ads to grow faster?
The answer is complicated and I hope to simplify it in this chapter.
If you want to expand your reach, launch a product, or sell
merchandise, running ads can be really effective. But there's a lot more to
successful campaigns than spending money on an ad.

I've seen many big brands throw money at a problem and hope for a
magical solution. Your views may increase for a minute, but that video
doesn't necessarily convert.
This can be a vanity metric because the ad produces some results, it's
like a virtual pat on the back.

When I work with clients through my agency, I run split test after
split test running ads on organic content.

For any job I do, I want to create an ad that converts 100% of the
time and isn't a Band-Aid for a numbers problem.

I'm not advocating putting a paid Google strategy solely around one
piece of content. It's a tool that can amplify what you do, but you have to
do it right.

Market organically and supplement with paid strategies for a higher

chance of success.
Promote Organically First

When I helped produce the viral Squatty Potty ad “This Unicorn

Changed the Way I Poop,” we combined paid and organic reach
strategies.

We plan and test everything meticulously. Our final cut performed at

a higher rate after launch because we had conducted several tests to find
out what content worked with which audience. If you want to grow a
channel, you need to figure out who will click on the video.

To discover an audience, I like to look at where they congregate both

when they're online and when they're offline.
I also want to know what content and products they connect with.
This helps me know what will be relevant to get our content to more
people.

I also want to know what the client's end game is: when a client has
a goal to make a sale, I use paid strategies differently than when their
goal is to grow an audience.
I would rather spend money on 100 relevant channels to boost
organically than spend money randomly.

This is how you get dedicated people to engage with your content.

Paid Strategies to Grow an Audience

If the client's goal is to attract more viewers, I look for a similar

creator who can collaborate with my client and organically push the right
viewers to our new content.
In YouTube analytics, you can now see your cross-audience under
"Other videos your audience watched."

This makes it easier to see who you can contact to develop a

collaborative relationship.
See Figure 19.1.

I also look at previous content from the right influencers that is

relevant to my client's new content, and we pay them to add an end
screen, elements, links and mentions that refer their audience to our
content.
 Other videos your audience watched
Last 7 Days

I got a Quad.
Cboys TV • 412.4K views • 2 days ago

My First 3 Days of C8 Corvette Ownership Were Intense.. *ba...

Cleetus McFarland • 1.1 M views • 5 days ago

We Put Drag Racing Tires on Our C8 and the Launches are IN...
Cleetus McFarland • 845.2K views • 4 days ago

Is a Short Shifter Worth It?

Donut Media • 1.1M views • 4 days ago

$225 Injectors vs. $600 Injectors

Donut Media • 1.2M views • 1 week ago

Send us feedback < 1/3 >

Figure 19.1 Other videos your audience watched

When a loyal viewer of a certain influencer watches that person's

content until the end, and that influencer promotes your content or
product, you are much more likely to get what you need from that viewer
because it came organically through the YouTube ecosystem.

Also, use your community post or story to drive more views to your
new content. You should have a combined strategy like this to drive your
content to a diversity of traffic.

When the algorithm sees that the audience is finding your content
from multiple sources, it will recommend your content more.
Let me give you the perfect example of a great combined strategy.
 When BYUtv's Studio C channel was starting out, it was helping
with audience development, doing reconnaissance and research and using
every tool possible to try to figure out who would be its ideal viewer.

I reached out to identical twin sister creators Brooklyn and Bailey

about collaborating with Studio C because I noticed we had some
crossover.

The girls were actually big fans of Studio C and were open to a
collaboration. We offered to do a "one for one" collaboration, meaning
we would make two videos: one on their channel that we would produce
in their place, and one on ours.
At the time, Brooklyn and Bailey had 300,000 subscribers and
Studio C had 20,000.

By the time we were ready to launch our campaign, Brooklyn and

Bailey were already approaching one million subscribers.

Brooklyn and Bailey's video, "The Other Parent Trap," parodies the
film The Parent Trap, in which the twins discover their sister at summer
camp and switch places.

Brooklyn arrives at her dad's house and is welcomed with open arms
because dad doesn't notice, while Bailey is immediately arrested because
mom knows she's not Brooklyn. The Studio C video,

“Prom Dress Gone Wrong,” features Brooklyn and Bailey alongside

the show's actresses, all in ridiculous prom dresses, to the collective
dismay of their dates.
This video currently has more than 11 million views.
 In addition to the two videos that were released, I used a
Setting up a remarketing strategy: I took a clip of the girls talking
about how much they loved Studio C and used it in a paid ad campaign.
In 12 days, Studio C gained 162,000 subscribers thanks to Brooklyn
and Bailey's recommendation.

We also had campaigns to benefit the twins. It was a great win-win

setup.

We had a small budget to do another ad remarketing strategy, which

we strategically pushed to the right viewers.

Another 62,000 subscribers came from this push. So, we did it again.
Why not? It was working! We waited another three or four months to
generate data, analyzed the data and targeted another specific audience
with a paid advertising strategy, which attracted another 12,000
subscribers.

Fast forward one year. We decided to do another one-on-one video

campaign that was similar to the first collaboration.

We created two new videos and followed the same strategies. This
time, most of our budget went towards content creation. On Brooklyn
and Bailey's channel we made a video called "High School Boyfriend
Drama," with one of the Studio C actors playing the boyfriend who got
dumped by a girl and immediately found another girlfriend who looked
like the first one.

On the Studio C channel we made a video called "Dance Battle Boys

vs Girls", and we included Brooklyn and Bailey as part of a group of girls
 who have an awkward dance with a group of guys (all Studio C actors, of
course ).)

We released the videos at the same time and watched our views
grow to millions once again.

Brooklyn and Bailey drove traffic to us organically by making

mentions on their social media pages.

Our ads were specifically targeted at viewers who subscribed to

Brooklyn and Bailey, but not Studio C. This time we got more than
80,000 subscribers. The objective of increasing the audience was
achieved with a combined payment strategy.

Paid Strategies to Sell

When the goal is to sell products, most creators make mistakes.

They don't know how to push the product launch organically and at
the same time boost it with a promotional strategy.

Don't be so arrogant to think that your viewers will see until the end
of your video where the product push will be.

You need to give them various ways and places to view the product.

Spend your budget the right way, which is to develop and

understand your content and make it perfect for your ideal avatar who
becomes your ideal customer.
You want it to feel natural and organic even when you're paying for
it.

It's the best way to get people to do what you want them to do,
which is usually subscribe, watch more, or buy. In this case, buy.

One of my favorite examples of a successful paid strategy for selling

comes, again, from Studio C.

In 2014, they had a football sketch with a character named Scott

Sterling who took a football to the face over and over again in a shootout.

The initial video, "Top Soccer Shootout Ever with Scott Sterling,"
went viral. I tried to incentivize them from the beginning to sell
merchandise, but they didn't.

So they wanted to do a follow-up video with Scott Sterling in the

hospital, and this time, their goal was to sell t-shirts.
The video, “Scott Sterling Breaking News Update,” was released
nearly five months after the original.

In this video, a nosy news reporter breaks into Scott Sterling's

hospital room and begins asking him questions about his plans to return
to football in the future.

Sterling's coach intercepts the annoying reporter and defends him.

 The video is just over two minutes long and includes Studio C's
regular comedic timing, making it feel natural to your typical and ideal
viewer.

But 47 seconds later, you'll see the first "Click to Buy" call-to-action
box for the t-shirt.
The trainer then incorporates the call to action into the script,
keeping the viewer interested by adding the comedic element to the
CTA.

They finish the sketch and at the end, the call to action box appears
on the screen again.

The trainer adds sarcastic comments to the merchandise push, telling

viewers not to buy it for their friends and family, mentioning the quality
of the fabric and the reasonable price.
We spent a few thousand dollars on this promotion and made
millions in t-shirt sales.

As you can see, promoting with a combined organic reach and paid
push strategy produces the best results. This is true whether your goal is
to grow an audience or sell something.

You always want to do your homework with the people you're trying
to reach.
Then, you can find other cross-data creators or companies that can
help you reach those people organically.
I've done it over and over again with clients in all different genres.
Do it right and you will get the conversion you are looking for.
Action Exercises
Task 1: In your next video, use the strategies in this chapter to optimize,
launch, and promote your video.
Task 2: Look at your analytics to see what other videos your audience
watched. Make a list of 5-10 creators you'd like to collaborate with.

Get the companion workbook and find more resources at

www.ytformulabook.com .
17 Retouching
Your Content
In Chapter 19, we go over practices for optimizing and promoting your
video.
Now you're ready to learn what to do after your video hits the shelf.
Do you know what to do if your video is performing poorly?
Do you know how to tell if it is underperforming other than views? What if
it's taking off? How do you respond?

I have said it a thousand times: you have to analyze and adjust; analyze
and adjust.
In theory, this means you have to improve your content.
In practice, it means you look at the data in your YouTube analytics and
see what's happening and what you can actually do about it. You have to
evaluate your progress.

This is true for all YouTube channels, no matter how big, small, old or
new. This is where the rubber meets the road with everything you've
learned in this book.

Some content is good for gaining new subscribers, other content is

good for retaining subscribers, and some content

They are good for both subscribers and non-subscribers.

 Figure out what type of content you're dealing with and who it's aimed
at so you know what adjustments to make when it's underperforming. For
example, I was on a private retreat in Las Vegas with MrBeast and other
data-driven creators.

We were talking about the content of MrBeast and his viewers. I asked
him what videos he enjoyed making the most and he said he liked videos
where he helped people in need.

MrBeast had many videos giving away money and great things, but he
often gave it to his friends.
I looked at MrBeast's videos and his average performance.
I noticed that the videos of him giving things away to people in need
instead of his friends actually performed better. He got 4 to 10 times more
new subscribers from those videos.

He needed to make more videos like that, which was awesome,

because that was his favorite type of video to create anyway. This was a
small adjustment that brought a huge return in subscribers and viewership.

Real-Time Adjustments vs. Long-Term Adjustments

You need to analyze and adjust in two ways: in real time and in
strategizing future content.
To do this, you need to know how your content is performing relative
to its average performance. How do you analyze if your video is
performing well?

When you know how to analyze, how do you adjust to fix it? I'll show
you how to find your average numbers, also called baselines, so you know
how your new video is performing relative to the average performance of
 your content.
Then, I'll show you what to do to adjust for outliers: videos that are
above or below average.

As you learn to track your baselines, you will learn to recognize

patterns.
Patterns tell you what is working and what you need to change to make
your content work better.

We are not talking about big changes and adjustments. They're small
changes, so we call them "tweaks."

Small adjustments can translate into big spikes in metrics charts.

It's like the butterfly effect: it's the idea that a butterfly flapping its
wings on one side of the world can significantly change the weather on the
other side of the world.

Your small adjustments can significantly change the trajectory of your

video.
But you must know your baselines to know what to modify.

How to determine your Base lines

(Note: If you have a new channel and don't yet have the data you need,
reconnoitre and research and find another channel that is doing well in
your niche and analyze what is working to know what you should do.)

Most creators try to determine their baselines from the perspective of

an entire channel, but this is a big mistake.
A full channel approach doesn't give you accurate averages so you can
take advantage of who's watching from where.

To illustrate this point, let's say you go to school and have five classes.
You have very good grades in four classes, but you are failing one class.
If you just look at the average score of the five classes combined, it
looks like you're doing well.

This overall score cannot show that what makes the average
go down a little bit is actually a failing grade. But if you break down
the grades by class, you'll see that one class needs a lot of attention, right
away.
This is why you need to move from a macro view to a micro view
when determining your baselines and knowing what content to modify.
To do this, you need to break it down to the level of traffic sources.
YouTube does not provide baselines for you based on traffic source;
you have to go and find that data manually.

When you upload a video, you should track the most important metrics
by traffic source.

The most important metrics are:

• Clip Rate - Click-through rate (CTR)

• Impressions
• Average Viewing Duration (AVD)
• Average Percentage Viewed (APV)
• Playback time and views
 • Average views per viewer (AVPV)
I like to have data from at least 10 videos so I have enough data to
provide a good baseline.
To set your baselines, select a traffic source. Then select 10 videos in
that traffic source. So if you did this first with suggested traffic and CTR,
you would get your 10 videos, add those numbers together, and divide them
by the number of videos.
This is your suggested traffic CTR baseline. (Note: If you have set
your video segments, group your videos by segment and then find your
average.)

Repeat this process for the other traffic sources for CTR.
Then move on to the next metric and repeat the process of finding your
baseline on each traffic source, as you did with CTR.

CTR and impression baselines are the most important to establish,

especially for real-time observation. However, you also need to find your
baselines for ADL and APV for long-term observation.
This is important because even if you have a great CTR, if you don't
produce good ADL and APV numbers, the AI won't suggest your content
to a more general audience.
YouTube wants to bring your content to the widest audience possible
so that your content can get more impressions and more views.
The more impressions you get, the lower your CTR will be because
you will reach more viewers.
What to do with your Baselines in Real Time

Everything you do in YouTube analytics stems from knowing your

metrics baselines.

Don't fall into the comparison trap, always comparing your data with
that of other creators.
Other creators' numbers may not match yours because there are many
factors that determine those numbers.

Focus solely on your own numbers. There are dozens of ways to view
metrics in your analytics, but stick to the most important ones we listed
above.
Do the following with your CTR and impressions data:

1. Watch your CTR as soon as YouTube gives you that data, usually two
or three hours after uploading a new video. This is your real-time data.
2. If your CTR is below the baseline you've set, your next step is to look
at your Impressions data before changing anything. This is very
important because if your impressions increased, it means that the AI is
pushing your video to a wider audience. More eyes get a chance to see
the thumbnail and title, which is a good thing, so even if this makes
your CTR number lower, your video is actually seen by more viewers!
This is a difficult concept for many creators to understand. Change
your mindset from “Low CTR = Bad” to “Low CTR = Could be Good,
let’s dig a little deeper.”

3. If your CTR is low, but your Impressions are high, don't change
anything yet. Let your content simmer and see what it does. But if your
CTR is low and your Impressions are average or below, it's time to
adjust in real time. You should change a thumbnail or title now. I
recommend changing the thumbnail first because it's what catches
viewers' attention before they look at the title.

Most creators make a mistake here and look at things that don't even
matter, or don't look at traffic sources.
 Don't get overwhelmed or confused by looking too much.
You'll learn to look at these baselines and understand what you need to
do to adjust and get results.
Just remember that in real time, the most important baseline is your
CTR. Everything in the algorithm machine

Have backup plans ready

This is where I differ from most creators: I have a plan A, plan B, plan
C, and plan D all ready when I upload a video. Some people think this is
exaggerated.

Maybe it is. The point is that you should have thumbnail options ready
to change as quickly as possible if necessary. When you can correct course
faster, the algorithm will see that you have made a quick change and
respond accordingly. I worked with a client who had a great thumbnail and
a great video.
Before uploading it to his channel, he asked our Discord group for
feedback and received some great advice.
But when the video uploaded, it was below its baseline, so we changed
the thumbnail, not once or twice, but three times.

Eventually, the video took off and garnered 50 million views. Fifty
million.

Do you think we regret having four miniatures ready beforehand? The

same thing happened with another client: he uploaded a video and it just
wasn't working right.
He waited two days before changing the thumbnail and the video
 played, but if he had changed the thumbnail two hours after uploading
instead of two days, it would have worked much better.
Let me expound. When you upload a new video to YouTube, the clock
for that video starts ticking. It's "aging." Its coolness factor is in constant
decline from the beginning.
Kind of like that saying about buying a new vehicle: It starts losing
value the moment you drive the car off the lot.
That's why it's imperative that you respond quickly to incoming data
about a video's performance.

You won't be able to take advantage of the homepage, trending, and

subscription feed browsing features if you don't act quickly. These are your
“act fast” metrics.

What to do with your long-term baselines

When you start looking at your ADL and APV baselines, which are
typically available 48 hours after charging, see if they are below or above
average.
Then go to where you are losing viewers in the video or where there is
more engagement in the video and try to find a pattern of why that is
happening at that point in your video (learn more
on ADL and VCT in Chapter 16).
I've done it thousands of times and there's always a pattern to discover.
When you can identify patterns, you'll know what to adjust for future
content creation.
The suggested feeding requires slow and steady consistency and small
adjustments.
In your analytics, click Reach and look at your highest traffic source
over the last 7 days, 90 days, and year. This is where many YouTube
channels fail; they just look at the most recent video and what's happening
with it right now.
But when you look at how your content performs over time, you'll see
different patterns.
Even if your highest percentage of traffic over time shows Browsing
and Subscribe, guess what? You can make small adjustments that, over
time, will help your channel get more and more suggested traffic.

You don't need to be stuck as a browsing traffic-only channel, and you

don't want to be. Explore traffic (Home Page, Trending, and Subscription
Feed) is the most valuable group of viewers and you need to make
decisions to serve them.
They are your loyal followers. But if you're not also working to
improve your Suggested percentage, you're not doing it right.

Split Test

I've used a tool called TubeBuddy for years, and I 1000% recommend
using it with your channel as well.

You can download TubeBuddy at www.tubebuddy.com/go . It will

save you a lot of time and energy, not to mention help you figure out some
things with your content.

An invaluable feature that I love to use is A/B split testing. To run a

split test, click on a video in your library and add a secondary thumbnail
with a subtle variation, such as changing the background color.

It doesn't work as well if you use a completely different thumbnail

 variation.

After the test has run its course, look at which thumbnail performed
best and, more specifically, where the traffic was coming from.

Be careful not to take a quick look and make a hasty decision; The
numbers can be misleading if you don't look at them carefully.
Use your brain and dig a little deeper. See which traffic source is
improving and if that is your goal for this specific video.

Small Adjustments

We dedicated an entire chapter to how you get people to click or tap on

your video. You have to have good titles and thumbnails.
Getting people to click activates the data to start feeding your metrics.
You will then be able to see how this video compares to your
average performance so you know if you need to change anything.
Changing something usually means changing a thumbnail image first
to see if it works.

If you look at your baselines after the trade and it doesn't fix it, then you
can modify your title and see your baselines again.

If this still doesn't work, you can go back and swap another thumbnail.
Don't be afraid to do this.
I've seen it happen over and over again where the second or third (or
sometimes fourth!) thumbnail finally clicks and the numbers start to go up.
One of my students has a channel that is really taking off.
It's called Matt's Off Road Recovery. Matt documents his tow rescues of
people stranded in his geographic area.
 Matt came to me and my team for help with his channel, so we analyzed
his metrics and helped him determine his baselines by traffic source.

The first thing we did was focus on his miniatures. We found the baselines
for all the thumbnails that had the highest CTR and noticed a pattern.
Thumbnails that had Matt's face with an expression on the thumbnail
performed three times as well.

We did some testing and determined that our hypothesis about his face
with expressions was true.
Next, we needed to fix his AVD/APV. Look at Figures 20.1, 20.2, and
20.3 for Matt's channel. In Figure 20.1, the ADL of the video took a big drop.
We took all of Matt's underperforming videos and looked for patterns and
hypothesized why viewers were disengaged.

We then looked closely at the group of videos that were his best
performances. We noticed some patterns in their videos that had higher ADL
and APV.

We were able to test these hypotheses in some upcoming videos,

implementing strategies that we thought would work.
We then looked at where viewers were most engaged.

After looking at Matt's baselines, we were able to make small adjustments

to the content over time. Look at Figure 20.2. Our adjustments brought Matt's
ADL/APV back to the average line. Note that his APV went from 52.5% to
71.8%.
Figure 20.1 Matt's AVD drop
Figure 20.2 Matt's AVD recovery

Figure 20.3 Matt's video views

Matt's video views skyrocketed. Figure 20.3 shows what our small
adjustments did for your channel.

Remember, it's all about the viewer: from seeing your thumbnail and
title and wanting to click (impressions, CTR), to wanting to finish your
video (AVD/APV, View Time) and watch more (View Time, AVPV). It's
about always trying to learn and improve by analyzing and adjusting.

Just do it

The best way to find out how all of this relates to your content is to dig
deeper. Go to your analytics and learn how to read your most important
metrics.
Have variations of thumbnails ready to quickly change when one isn't
working. Know where your traffic is coming from and what your baselines
are.
It's almost impossible to fix a broken video if you can't read its data in
real time.
The more you practice, the better you will be at seeing patterns and
knowing when to act fast and when to let your content simmer. You'll be an
analytics pro before you know it, and your content will improve by leaps
and bounds as a result.
You will figure it out. It will take time and work, but I promise it is
worth it.
What do you have to lose? Some people pick up on patterns and data
analysis faster than others, but no matter how long it takes to learn it, the
end result is the same. You'll learn how to analyze your channel data so you
can make the necessary adjustments to be successful.
Action Exercises
Task 1: Find your video baselines in one of your cubes by following
the steps outlined in this chapter.

Go deeper into baseline analysis in the companion course to

this book.
Get the companion workbook and find more resources at
www.ytformulabook.com .
18 Test, Fail, Analyze,
Adjust: Your Success on
YouTube
"What's his name". It's a family vlog channel that provides a
comfortable lifestyle for the Bennett family, but it wasn't always that
way. In 2013, Jase introduced his longboard brand, jaseboards, to Costco
and other large retail spaces when a video of underwater skateboarding
went viral on YouTube.
Jase saw an opportunity on YouTube for his wife, Rachel, who had
been a regular blogger for many years.
Rachel liked the idea of starting a family vlog, and TOA was born.
Rachel started vlogging without much direction. At first, she didn't
even look at other YouTube channels to see what other vlogging families
were doing. But he did something powerful: he found his Why.
I wanted to be one of those families who could inspire others to
foster healthy family relationships by having fun together. It took nine
months to get views, and when the channel hit one hundred subscribers,
it felt amazing (as good as a million subscribers would feel in the future).
 One video in particular fueled TOA's success on YouTube. Raquel
made a "How to Shave Your Legs" video with her preteen daughter.

This sparked a monetization streak that made Jase decide to quit his
job and go full-time on YouTube with his family. The Ben Netts filmed
everything in a family's normal life, including the "ah-oh" moments, like
when a child hits their head or gets re-injured.

Then came the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)

and a super strict response from YouTube: all "questionable" children's
content was demonetized, including The Ohana Adventure. due to its
"ah-oh" content.

This was a huge blow to the Bennett family, whose livelihood

depended on their YouTube income.

I had a conversation with Jasé and Rachel at that time. We talked

about the importance of creating data relationships between your videos
and getting your content in the Suggested feed.

We talked about collaborating with other family vloggers.

They made a new plan based on these ideas and committed to it. Rachel
was determined to get her channel back on track, so she set herself a
deadline to restore monetization and got to work improving the content.

Jase and Rachel surrounded themselves with like-minded people and

made some great collaborations.
They even shared audiences, topics, and upload times with similar
 family vloggers.
They made sure their audience had good cross-data with the
channels they chose to collaborate with so the right viewers watched
their content.

Every Monday night for two years they did a live stream and played
family games. They knew consistency was important, so they never
missed a week.

This was a new strategy that gave their audience the opportunity to
connect more deeply. Viewers had great feedback that gave them ideas
for more videos and they listened.
The audience participation was enormous.
When they listened to suggestions and shouted, they attracted even
more of their ideal viewers to their content. Jase began doing a silly rap
at the end of each live stream where he would insert viewers' usernames
into the rap.

This gave him the idea of making a video with his daughter that
parodied

Taylor Swift's song, "Look What You Made Me Do." The parody
became his most viewed video with over 100 million views.
Due to the great success of this video, they created more videos with
data relationships to connect to that content segment and their overall
content.
They made videos of the parody bloopers, behind the scenes and
choreography. This strategy of creating more content around what was
working earned them $20,000 in AdSense in the first week.
 All YouTube channels make mistakes and TOA was no exception.
Jase and Rachel got caught in the comparison trap, thinking that if they
started copying what other successful creators were doing, it would work
for them too. Jase was stuck in an algorithm mindset, creating content for
the machine instead of his viewers.

They had stopped talking to their own audience and their channel
went from getting millions of views a day to getting 500,000 at best.
of the cases. His channel was dying, losing momentum and viewer
interest.

So they regrouped. They returned to their ideal viewership, which

was actually an older kid demographic, and slowly began to regain their
metrics.
They are now careful to tailor new content to the right audience.
Kids have separate channels from the family channel, and each appeals to
different audiences based on age and topics. Because they grew up on
YouTube, kids know
their audience well and do a good job creating content for their ideal
viewer.

Jase and Rachel chose YouTube as their family's career and main
source of income, but it's important to them to keep it fun for the kids.
They live and create by the mantra "Inspire, don't demand."

They have tried, failed, analyzed and adjusted to get to where they
are now. Their collective channels have millions of subscribers, people
who are inspired to have good old-fashioned fun and healthy family
relationships.
 The best part is that they went back to their original Why from when
they started on YouTube.

When I asked Rachel what advice she would give herself if she could
go back to when she started her YouTube channel, she said she would
tell herself to figure out what content worked best so she could do more.

She would be more consistent. It would have good metadata and

create data display relationships between your content.

But perhaps most important of all, she would tell herself not to let
mistakes get you down. Just go ahead and place a contained ter bet.

YouTube's own story follows the formula to try, fail, analyze and
adjust with data-driven decisions. Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley, and
Steven Chen started YouTube with the intention of turning it into a
dating website.

It didn't work, so they looked at what was working and changed their
strategy to match the data.

You have to follow his and TOA's example, if you really want to be
successful on YouTube.

Now you have the tools you need to be smart about your preparation,
creation, and monitoring—meaning you know what it takes to test, fail,
analyze, and adjust based on data.
 Using data to your advantage takes the guesswork out of your
YouTube channel and not only helps you succeed, but you feel incredibly
empowered.

You've done a great job on this book. You learned how AI has
changed over time and how each traffic source now has its own
algorithm to serve.
This was very important to learn, because it helped you take control
of your own presence in the ecosystem instead of blaming YouTube for
your failures.

Now you know there are plenty of opportunities: a whole world of

views to capture and money to earn. There are countless ways to interact
and succeed through community, collaborations, brand deals, and more.

As you advance as a creator, align your priorities and practices with

what YouTube wants. Put more importance on getting viewers to click or
tap on your video, because if they don't click, they won't watch it.

And when you make them see one, make them see another. Think of
the viewer as a person, not a number, so you can really get to know who
they are to anticipate what they might want to see. It's all about the
viewer! And remember that YouTube success is not a lottery.

Don't think Jase and Rachel Bennett were some of the “lucky ones,”
know that anyone can do this, including you, with the right mindset and
tools.
 I hope I've opened your eyes to the power of YouTube to change
lives and businesses: it offers a place for each of us to reach the world, no
matter where we live or what our circumstances are.

If you skin your knees from YouTube, just get up, brush yourself off,
analyze what happened and why, then continue creating great content
that you're passionate about, whether that's vlogging, quilting, or building
your business.

Find your audience and talk to them. Believe for them, listen to them
and never sacrifice your message for anyone or anything.
When something isn't working, review your data and make smart
adjustments to give your content the best chance of being discovered and
seen. This is the YouTube formula. Use it and watch the magic happen.
 APPENDIX: FREE BONUS
COURSE THE FORMULA OF
YOUTUBE

I couldn't write a book about YouTube without providing

video resources. So I've created a free companion course to
help guide you through the YouTube formula.
Includes additional video content, worksheets, and all the
resources and links mentioned in this book. I recommend
that you register. www.ytformulabook.com/go
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Derral is a video creator, and founder of VidSummit, an
annual event in Los Angeles for video creators and
marketers. He has helped 24 YouTube channels go from zero
to over a million subscribers and generated 54 billion
YouTube views.

Derral is founder, CEO and executive producer of The

Chosen,
The highest-grossing crowdfunded film project of all time.
He also executive produced several viral video campaigns,
including Squatty Potty's ice cream pooping unicorn ad.

Derral works with some of the biggest YouTube creators in

the world, including MrBeast, who has tens of millions of
subscribers and one of the fastest growing channels on
YouTube.

Derral has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning

America, NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, ESPN, FORBES, World
Religion News and more. Featured on Forbes' "20 Must-
Watch YouTube Channels That Will Change Your Business"
list.
Derral's professional passion and personal mission is to help
people, brands and businesses have a positive impact on the
world, but his greatest passion is his family: his wife,
Carolyn, and his five incredible children, Ellie, Logan ,
Kelton, Thatcher and Bridger.
 THIS IS NOT A
NORMAL
RECOGNITION

Let me tell you a quick story about our purpose: When I was
12, I went camping with my Grandpa Jack.

We were camping on a mountaintop next to a reservoir

overlooking the red rocks of Zion National Park in Utah. It
was the most beautiful place to camp.
Early in the morning, I was sleeping in our tent when
Grandpa Jack woke me up before dawn and asked me to go
for a walk around the reservoir with him. The still water
looked like a sheet of glass at that early hour.

It was so peaceful as the first light of day began to peek over

the majestic mountains of Zion.
Then a beam of light shot over the mountains, reflecting off
the water, and it was the most beautiful, serene moment.
At that moment, Grandpa Jack bent down and picked up a
rock. With the rock in his hand, he said: “Derral, you are like
this rock. You are stubborn, strong and a little rough around
the edges.

Water is the world. . .” and threw the rock into the water,
breaking the crystalline surface and sending ripples through
the reservoir. “What you do can impact so many people,”
Grandpa Jack said. “What impact will you have on the
world? Will it be good or will it be bad?” And he walked
away, leaving me alone to contemplate the life lesson he had
just taught me.

I had been camping with my grandfather many times in my

life and had never done anything like this before.

It felt so out of the ordinary that it left me a little

flabbergasted. Like I said, I was only 12, so the power of the
message didn't fully hit me at the time, but it continued.

This is not your normal recognition, staying with me over the

years. I have returned to it many times in my life. Thank you,
Grandpa Jack, for the most powerful lesson that impacted
me on every level.
It continues to influence the decisions I make in business
and in my personal life.
Now, back to YOU. You are your own rock. Your content and
your message will impact the world.

My challenge to you is to use what I have taught you in this

book to impact the world in a positive way. Entertain,
inspire, motivate, educate and uplift humanity with
YouTube. Surround yourself with people who push you,
motivate you, and help you impact people's lives forever.

I want to thank my wife, Carolyn, for her constant support,

love, and patience with all my craziness over the years.
To my children, Ellie, Logan, Kelton, Thatcher and Bridger,
for supporting a father who doesn't have the normal nine to
five job.

Hopefully, the perks of hanging out with your favorite

YouTubers and traveling the world have been a nice
compensation.

To my parents for always facilitating my unique way of

learning the way I needed to learn. You have been a constant
source of support and strength to me.
To Melissa Young for controlling my ADHD and corralling
my thoughts to write this book, and for constantly
supporting each of my crazy projects.
I also want to thank her husband and children for allowing
me the space and free time to suit my crazy schedule.

We had long hours and days away from our families, and we
couldn't have finished the book without their support.

Many thanks to my business partners and my amazing team.

To those who helped me meet deadlines and modified
meetings and tasks while I finished this book.

Lastly, I want to thank my third grade teacher for making me

stand in the corner for an entire week.

Even though you used it to try to humiliate me, what it did

was light my pilot light and fuel my fire to be who I am. It
taught me that I didn't have to conform to the standard to be
successful and got me to where I am today.