If I Were Starting A YouTube Channel Today

If I were starting a YouTube channel today, here are four things that I wish I would've known before I got started.

I know there are lots of flashy advice out there on how to grow your YouTube channel, but the fundamentals are actually pretty easy. So instead of telling you all the sophisticated stuff that other people are going to tell you in a 10 or 20-minute video, I'm just going to focus on the four main things that I wish I would've known before I was getting started.

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Tip number one, it's all about the first 24 hours. See, traditional marketing, like SEO and Google is, how well do you do in the long run? It's slow and steady wins the race. You got to build links slowly, continue to publish content, slow and steady wins the race. It's very rare that you publish your article and you just rank number one out the gates, no matter how much authority you have. YouTube is a little bit different. Videos that do really well in the first 24 hours, AKA go viral or have a lot of views, tend to keep doing well after 24 hours. This means you can rank at the top right away, you can get tones of views right away, and you don't have to have age on your account or your website, like you would for Google, to do well.

In essence, new channels, new videos that do well in the first 24 hours, can keep doing well years later. So what I would recommend is, whenever you have a video, push it out hard on social media, tell your friends to like it, engage with it by commenting. If you have an email list, do an email blast, if you have a push notification list through the tools like subscribers, do a push blast. If you have chatbot list through things like Minichat, send out a blast there as well.

So push it out as many places in the first 24 hours, and ideally, even the first hour, because that's what's going to get your video as many views and cause it to rank really high in the long run.

Tip number two, it's all about the thumbnail. See, everyone talks about titles. Yes, titles are important. But what we found is if your thumbnails aren't good, you won't get the clickthrough rates and your videos just don't get suggested as much because a lot of people don't read, they're just clicking on those thumbnail images that are appealing.

Tip number three, it's all about the keywords. Sure, titles are important, but if your titles don't have the keyword in there, you're not going to rank as well. So I want you to put the keyword in your title, in your first paragraph, your first sentence. When you leave a comment, you can leave a pinned comment, try to include the keyword in there. When you're recording a video, mention that keyword as well and you're more likely to rank for that keyword.

Tip number four, you got to ask questions. This is what I didn't do early on. When you film a video like this, you got to ask questions. So the question I have for you for this video is, what's your best YouTube marketing hack? Leave a comment below letting me know that. I'm sharing my four here. And what I found is when someone likes or share a video, it's not that powerful compared to them leaving a comment. You need to encourage comments. How do you encourage a comment? You ask a question during your video, that's what will get you the most questions or more so comments versus not asking people a question.

It's that simple. Now when I first started, I would actually ask questions that were yes or no, like have you ever been penalized on Google, yes or no? Have you ever uploaded a video on YouTube? Leave a comment below, yes or no. But what happened over time is the YouTube algorithm learned so when people leave yes or no responses, it's not that powerful versus them actually leaving a comment with a sentence or two.

So engage with your audience through questions within your video. You do those four YouTube tricks or tips, you'll start seeing much better results. A lot of people don't talk about them, they're fundamentals, they work.

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