YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and Making Money as a Video Influencer

by Sean Cannell

Simple: it’s the second largest search engine, second only to Google, and recent stats9 reveal that over 1 billion hours of content are being watched on YouTube every day. Also, Google owns YouTube, so search functionality is at its heart. That makes YouTube distinct from other social media platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat aren’t search engines, so YouTube provides a distinct

In this section, we’re going to share the essential building blocks for creating a successful YouTube channel. We call them The Seven C’s: Courage, Clarity, Channel, Content, Community, Cash, and Consistency.

“Courage is not the absence of fear; it’s the willingness to act despite the fear.”

Tapping into your “why” can help you overcome your fears. Simon Sinek writes in his well-known book, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” Create a strong reason for being on YouTube. Who do you want to inspire, encourage, educate, or help with your products and services? Who are the people you want to entertain? Figure that out and keep those people front and center.

If you’re struggling to find an identity or purpose for your YouTube channel, we recommend building it at the intersection of your passion, your proficiency, and your profit.

When you combine passion, proficiency, and profit, you find your niche, and you’re one step closer to defining your end goal.

Ten Questions to Clarify Your Target Audience Are they female, male, or both? How old are they? We recommend picking a range within five years of your own age. What types of jobs or professions do they have? What are their passions? What are the top three websites they visit? What are the top three Twitter, Instagram, and/or Facebook pages they follow? Who are the top three influencers they might watch on YouTube? What is their social circumstance? Married, single, kids, no kids, family, etc. What is their yearly income range? What products or services might they spend their discretionary income on? (Books,

If you had twenty seconds on an elevator to pitch your YouTube channel to a stranger, how would you pitch it? Tell them what they can expect, who the channel is for, why they should be interested, how it will add value to their life, and why it matters.

Clarity is power, and a clear understanding of your end goal will help you reverse engineer the steps to get there.

Sometimes, people get too “me” focused on their “About” page. They write something like, ‘This channel is about me. It’s about my thoughts, and I think you should subscribe.’ We don’t recommend that kind of language. Use the word “you” more, so it reads something like this: “You can expect videos, encouragement,

‘Content marketing is the only marketing left.’ Seth Godin

The best content creators inform, inspire, educate, entertain, and build community all at once.

Content value matters more than production value.

always start with what you have and then work to improve it over time. That applies to both your content and your production quality.

Struggling to come up with ideas for your first few videos? We’ve got you covered! Check out a free video at TubeSecretsBook.com/Ideas.

Power Tip: YouTube now allows people to turn on notifications for your channel, so encourage subscribers to become super subscribers by hitting that notification button. They will be informed every time you release a new video. The button looks like a bell, so if you can convince people to ring the bell, it’s like going from the first date to dating consistently to getting engaged. In a business sense, getting married is the final step and would be if somebody becomes a customer of yours or invests with you at a deeper level.

Many content creators make the mistake of assuming that viewers know about subscribing, but the truth is, many viewers either don’t know or don’t think about it. The creators who ask people to subscribe in every video tend to have larger audiences.

Power Tip: Give viewers a good reason to subscribe. Don’t just annoy them with constant requests. A huge mistake we see YouTubers make is sounding desperate, begging people to subscribe instead of leading with value. A good way to encourage subscribers might sound like this, ‘And don’t forget to subscribe, so you never miss one of my brand new weekly recipe videos.’ Then you’re not just pleading for subscribers but providing a compelling reason.

On Video Influencers, we provide a question of the day for each video and invite people to answer in the comments. Doing this repeatedly over time has built an engaged community on our YouTube channel.

A great example of someone who makes deep connections with his fans is Justin Khoe from the channel ThatChristianVlogger.

“Content is fire, and social media is gasoline.” Jay Baer

“The best place to hide a dead body is on page two of Google.”

Google remains the number one search engine for just about everything, but very few people know what the second largest search engine is. Can you guess? Is it Bing? Is it Yahoo? No, actually, it’s YouTube.

The three most important aspects of video SEO for YouTube are your title, your description, and the tags you add to your video. Get these right, and your videos will start climbing the ranks.

the Seven C’s, which you must do continually as you go through the stages of growing your influence on YouTube—always tapping into a new level of courage, always clarifying and refining your message and brand, always improving your channel, always improving your content, always engaging with your community, always finding new ways of generating cash, and always staying consistent, realizing you must hustle your way to success. Then in part two, we shared some actionable tactics and creative ideas for growing your channel, including leveraging trends, ranking your videos, and collaborating with other creative people.