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

by Sean Cannell

When monetization opportunities come your way, always put your audience first.

if you’re a teacher, then having a digital product to teach additional techniques and skills might make more sense for you than doing a brand deal.

Just as financial advisors recommend diversifying your portfolio, we recommend you diversify your income streams.

The brick-laying system is more important than the whole.

the key to building momentum on YouTube is posting consistent strategic-quality content over time.

when you create consistent videos, it’s like hanging out with a friend. The more often you hang out, the closer you get to that friend.

Consistency is more than getting content out there. It’s about learning the process that creates success.

get regular feedback

Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.’

Creating a schedule is imperative.

YouTube rewards consistent channels by pushing them higher in the search ...

You never know which video might become the video that opens up the door to success.

You never know which video might be the one that blows up and opens your door to success. Sean was stacking the deck the whole time, and it paid off.

It took me four years to get my first 10,000 subscribers, but it only took me two years to get the next 700,000.’

Our strategy is composed of two essential things: Scheduling in advance Producing in batches

Prior planning prevents poor performance.

We’ll even change our shirts throughout the shoot to create the illusion of days passing.

we attend industry-related events and shoot ten to twenty interviews over a matter of days, giving us ten to twenty weeks of content.

Scale back the complexity.

Even the channels that now create big, expensive videos didn’t start off that way, so don’t stress about it. Just start creating consistent content.

YouTube prefers creators who post two to three videos per week.

It’s better to upload one video a week for fifty-two weeks and stay consistent throughout the whole year than to upload fifty-two videos in the first month and only upload sporadically afterward.

Remember, it’s the consistent creators who get rewarded by both the audience and the platform.

The best creators on YouTube always do research before they press record.

Outline the content of your videos. We don’t read from a teleprompter or script for our videos, but we like to work off simple outlines. We use Google Docs to create a bulleted list of things we want to make sure we include.

Shoot any B-roll. B-roll includes extra footage, clips, and transition scenes that could support the main content you’ve recorded.

In essence, Desi spent as much time on social media promoting her video content as she did creating and uploading the content, and she did it religiously.

When the YouTube algorithm sees a high level of engagement around a video, it tends to promote it more, skyrocketing views and helping more people discover that content.

social media sometimes influences your YouTube success more than the best practices on the platform itself because that exterior influence hacks the algorithm.

Once you know where they hang out, you have to figure out how to create compelling, relevant, and engaging content on the appropriate platforms.

One big mistake many creators make is to create videos for YouTube and then simply upload the same exact video on every social media platform.

Even YouTube has a hashtag function now. The hashtag is one of the easiest ways to find specific groups, audiences, and niches, and one of the easiest ways for people to find you.

The three most important aspects of video SEO for YouTube are your title, your description, and the tags you add to your video.

figuring out what people search for.

what the top ten to twenty questions are that your target audience might be searching for on YouTube.

figure out what your target audience is searching for by looking at the search bar predictions and create content that addresses those topics, questions, or inquiries in a relevant way.

create a title based on the exact phrase YouTube predicted

include variations of that same phrase in your description, as well as the tags.

For our channel, Video Influencers, YouTube suggested videos are responsible for 40 percent of the half a million views our channel gets every month.

YouTube also provides viewers with a list of recommended videos that they believe the individual viewer will be interested in. They base this list on each viewer’s watch history and the things they’ve searched for.

A huge mistake we see people make is recording videos and trying to optimize them afterward. We believe you should reverse that order.

This focus on video SEO needs to happen from day one,

What he did was focus on creating consistent quality content that was strategically positioned to leverage the power of YouTube as a search engine.

They act intentionally in cultivating powerful relationships and pursuing collaborations.

‘Collaborate with people that you can learn from.’

get familiar with their content and values.

creators love when you contribute to their channel.

Second, maybe you have special skills, knowledge, experience, or authority that will allow you to do things with their content that they can’t do on their own.

you can provide technical support. Just because someone is a full-time YouTuber doesn’t mean they know how to use all the tools of the trade.

the best chance for success typically comes from channels the same size as yours. Of course, everybody wants to collaborate with bigger, more successful channels, but those people get far more requests.