Your Story

Does Mike's story sound a bit like your story? It's unfortunately fairly common.

As a YouTube Certified consultant, I work with a lot of creators like Mike. Many of themapproach YouTube the same way he does: a successful channel needs lttle more thanpersistence, amazing content, and a stroke of luck. They think a successful video justneeds a couple visual effects, witty humor, several good looking people and bam, it's agold mine of subscribers, right?

Depending on your target audience and your content goals, these elements can be helpful at times, but they are certainly not what every viewer needs. I'm sure we can all name successful YouTube channels that don't contain any of these things.

So why do some channels seem to be a magnet for views and subscribers while othersremain stagnant? If it's not based on hilarious, mind-blowing videos, then what is it?

Here's a secret: what every creator really needs are a couple intentional, well-focusedstrategies to surround their YouTube efforts. Videos without a cohesive strategy is likeassembling a puzzle of blank puzzle pieces. It's possible to do, but it's very difficult and,in the end, what's the point?

What are the necessary strategies for a highly subscribable YouTube channel?

A channe/ strategy: How your YouTube channel presents itself to a viewer.A search and discovery strategy: How viewers find out about your channel.

An audience development strategy: How you intend to capture a viewer's interestand turn them into an integral part of your channel's community.

A video strategy: How you plan to execute the aforementioned strategies with yourcontent.

Think of it this way: Your channel strategy is how you setup your restaurant before

opening for business. You know it's important to make a good impression, SO youarrange the tables nicely, make sure all the dishes are clean, fix the bathrooms, andinstall a few speakers to play music in the background.

Once the restaurant is in order, it's time to open for business. Your search and discoverystrategy is how guests will find out about your restaurant in the first place. Thankfully, youput a lot of work into this part because you know that just having a restaurant doesn'tmean people will come. They have to not only know about it, but also be enticed tocome check it out.

You did a great job with the enticing part because the guests arrive! Now what? Well,you need an audience development strategy to ensure that they stick around, enjoy eachother, and especially enjoy your restaurant. So you serve delicious food that only

enhances your restaurant's amazing experience.

Before you know it, you have a few regulars who return every week for more. They starttelling their friends and, by the end of your first year, you've experienced growth monthover month for 12 months straight!

Congratulations! Your strategies have built a successful restaurant!

This is how we' re going to treat your YouTube channel over the next month or SO. Therestaurant is your channel and the food is your videos. A nice-looking restaurant meansnothing if the food is bad, and delicious food doesn't see nearly as many people if theexperience is poor.

Just like a chef mostly thinks about the food he prepares, most video creators think a lotabout their videos and end up missing the other important elements of channel design and audience development. We often think that our videos should perform based ontheir own merit, but most of uS have probably discovered that that's not entirely true.

Remember, most viewers aren't as emotionally connected to our videos as we are. Wepour our heart and soul into our content. We continually massage and craft our videosthrough hours of shooting and editing. We lay in bed at night and dream of ideas for future videos. We play them out in our minds and see the big picture of every video frombeginning to end一our viewers don't. In fact, the very first time they' ve even thought ofour video is a few seconds before they clicked play. Their investment in our videos isextremely low, especially if they are a first-time viewer.

So how can we make it easy for those uninvested, first-time viewers to be drawn in toour channels and become engaged subscribers? That is the big question that this bookwill help you address.

We'll focus mostly on the first two strategies一channel strategy and audience development strategy一with a hat tip to video strategy in a few places. Fortunately, we"chefs" already understand video strategy more than we think. A lot of it comes naturallywhen the channel strategy and audience development strategy are in place.