If I was starting a YouTube channel from scratch

I started my YouTube channel in 2017, but I’d worked on a couple other channels before that (most notably Chase Jarvis) so I had some idea what I was doing.

But even so, there was a LOT I was totally clueless about. So today, you can learn from my years of painful mistakes so you don’t have to make them yourself…

Basically, my pain is your gain 😇

1. Decide on your overall strategy

Broadly speaking, you can either go for:

• High views/low intent, where “high views” means something like 10-100k views per video. But since it will be a large audience, they’ll also be low-intent (meaning, more casual viewers who aren’t looking to buy anything massive).

So your goal is to build a very large audience, and offer them some kind of simple, accessible product.

• Low views/high intent. You’ll get less than 1k views per video because you’re covering some niche topic, but that’s OK if it’s a very targeted audience and you can sell them a high-ticket ($5k+) offer.

Either of these can work, but in general I prefer the high views/low intent strategy… the second option is more of a gamble, and only works if you can actually get people to buy your high-ticket offer.

2. Focus on topic, title and thumbnail

The combination of these three things drives probably 80% of a video’s performance.

Topic determines the total potential audience for a video. For example:

→ Elon Musk: big audience

→ B2B SaaS marketing: small audience (on YouTube)

This goes back to the first point about strategy… if your goals depend on getting high views, don’t make videos about super niche topics like CAC:LTV ratios and payback period.

Title and thumbnail determine how many people out of the total audience will click on your video.

Coming up with great titles and thumbnails is a whole other topic, but it essentially comes down to storytelling and emotion.

For example, the above title/thumbnail combination plays on the innate mistrust of the rich & powerful, and the desire to find out what they’re supposedly doing (fear and curiosity).

3. Stay consistent

I’m not gonna lie, YouTube is a lot of work. Expect to publish videos for at least a few months without getting more than a few hundred videos.

It could happen sooner, or it could happen later— but if you stick with it eventually you WILL break through!

There’s 7 years of YouTube knowledge in 1 email… thanks again to Omara for the great question!

PS - Here’s the part where I try to sell you something. If you want to talk about how you can use LinkedIn or YouTube to grow your business, reply to this email or just set up a call here!