🚀 The most important hack on YouTube
How to YouTube #35
Hey YouTubers,
I’ve now been running Ali’s channel for almost exactly 2 years.
During that time, I’ve spoken to lots of YouTubers, made lots of videos, and learned a lot about what makes a channel successful.
The short answer?
The best YouTubers do the things they know they should do, consistently.
F*ck.
How dare I drop into your inbox on a peaceful day like today and say something as obvious as that.
“They do the things they know they should do?”
Yes. I stand my ground in the face of your derision.
Success on YouTube can be broken down into these extremely complicated stages:
Generate lots of ideas.
Pick the best ones.
Make your title and thumbnail first, and spend time on them.
Make a great video, and spend time on the intro.
Get 1% better with every video you make.
Engage with your audience, and try to understand what they want to watch.
Play to your strengths, and differentiate yourself from other channels.
Ideally, choose a posting schedule and consistently stick to it.
It doesn’t matter who you are or what your channel is about, you’d benefit from doing those things.
Whether you have 137 subscribers, or 100,000,000, the foundations of YouTube are the same.
There could be another step about having a monetisation strategy, but in terms of growing a channel, the basics don’t change.
There are lots of tactics involved like viral replication, systemising the process or understanding which of the million pieces of gear you might need.
But ultimately YouTube isn’t complicated, and like most things worth pursuing, it’s hard (annoyingly). Most YouTubers quit because they can’t do the same things for a long time.
One of the earliest realisations I had when I started working with Ali, and was filming videos with him every week, was that there were no secrets and no shortcuts.
He didn’t always want to film, he spent hours recording and lost the footage, and he had slow Wi-Fi (honestly, 5m subscribers and slow Wi-Fi?).
So what’s the biggest YouTube hack of all?
Realising there aren’t any.
(Nice Tintin, hit the reader with an epic cliché).
The YouTube process is messy and there are basically no universal rules except that you actually have to post videos.
Every channel needs to carve their own path.
But I’d love to know, what’s your favourite YouTube hack? I might share the best ones in a future email. Hit reply and let me know 🫡
Have an epic week making videos!
Tintin 🧑💻
P.s.
The launch for Thumbnail Masterclass ends tonight at midnight (BST) in just 12 hours.
In total over 100 YouTubers have already picked up the course…🥳
And the price will increase when I release it again in a few months, because I want to collect feedback and improve it.
So if you want to improve your thumbnails, now’s the best time. Check it out here:
Excellent post Tintin, that consistency piece is key. To build on point 6, I'd say leveraging your audience and bringing them into the decision making process through the community tab is a useful strategy. Crowdsourcing opinions through A/B testing of titles and thumbnails and pushing out polls on future content ideas has been helpful for me. It also gets the audience invested in the content because they are like 'oh cool, I voted for that thumbnail' or 'I suggested that video' making it a win-win strategy. Cheer, Tom
Omg I laughed out loud reading this 😅
you’re so right, maybe I should tattoo this on my forehead 🙈