Shattering YouTube Myths  ## Metadata - Author: [[TubeTalk: Your YouTube How-To Guide]] - Full Title: Shattering YouTube Myths - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/61ec7d5c-94bc-4697-8e98-3b01bc7f7326 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Subscribers Are Not Views** - Do not assume subscribers equal views; treat subscribers and viewership separately. - Focus on content performance, not subscriber count, to judge success. Transcript: Travis Something you need to understand from the very day one, you need to understand subscribers do not equal views. Tina You think, okay, well, I have to do what's working. But the thing is, in reality, we always want to ([Time 0:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/268fcbcf-76c9-4404-a8a2-d03ad6962d3a)) - **Schedule Strategic Experiments** - Bake experimental videos into your schedule to avoid stagnation and find new growth pillars. - Make experiments strategic and fun so testing feels sustainable and energizing. Transcript: Tina I think it differs depending on where you're at in your YouTube journey, because I've had this today. I spoke to two different people on this. One is a smaller channel, and she was already burning out from some of the repeated videos. And that's typically, whether you're small or big, that's typically the case. You feel like you're making the same videos over and over. Travis Yes, preach. Tina And I say, okay, well, that's, if it's working, it sucks because you think, okay, well, I have to do what's working. But the thing is, in reality, we always want to test new content, right? Because that's where even big channels, they get stuck in their growth stage is that they know what works and they only do what works. But the thing is, if you don't ever experiment, you can't get to that next level anyhow. So I always say, okay, so within your content schedule, let's bake in there the experiment content. And you could still have it be strategic, make it something that you'll have fun doing might as well, right? Because you're really testing out what could be the new content in your channel, a new pillar in your channel. ([Time 0:04:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/88d5a5b6-0669-456f-a201-17873f556a20)) - **Take Breaks To Prevent Burnout** - If YouTube isn't paying your bills, allow yourself to miss uploads to prevent burnout. - Use breaks proactively so you can produce consistently over the long term. Transcript: Travis And if Keck is doing that, great. You're halfway there. One of the other things they say is what are some tips to balance consistency and not burning out by not beating myself up about missing a week? If, if, if it's not paying the bills, it's all right to miss a week. It's okay. Tina That's so true. It's all right. Travis What's going to happen? I remember back when I used to work in corporate, corporate America, our VP, because we would get so stressed about some of the things we were doing. Our VP one time said to us, he said, did anyone die? And we're like, no, he goes, then it's going to be all right. And I feel like if you start thinking about a lot of things in life that way, things seem to be a lot more chill. It's like, oh, this is not that big of a deal. If taking an extra week off gives you the energy to then boost on for another three, four months, It's so worth it. Give that, give yourself that time, give yourself an extra week or two or three off. ([Time 0:06:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/169e0437-3831-4d0e-89eb-d1bbb4312558)) - **Growth Brings Hidden Operational Costs** - Privacy and operational burdens escalate as your channel grows and must be planned early. - Prepare SOPs and training if you intend to delegate editing or thumbnails later. Transcript: Travis Cause you're thinking that's not me. Why would I get burned out and make videos? I'll give you one. Privacy concerns. People don't think about this, but privacy goes right out the window if you're not protecting it from the get go. So that's one of the things like you could say, I wish I knew before I, you know, became a YouTuber. Like I wish I knew that at the beginning I should have protected my privacy even more than I did. What would be something that you think is something that a newer creator should know that they probably wouldn't hear about otherwise? Tina Oh, that was a really good one. That was a good one, right? Yes. I'm good at this. I'm really good at this. Okay. Something that, okay. Hmm. It's not going to be easy to hand off editing or thumbnail design just because you know your niche better than anyone too. So you're almost going to have to create an SOP process, a standard of operations process. It'll really be like a business. And then you have to handle it. And then there's training process, right? So it's going to take a while to train an editor or script writer or a thumbnail designer. And then maybe it'll work out. And then you have to worry about whether they'll stay, because you give them enough work to stay. So I think just every level, there's another devil is a true statement where there's always going to be issues going forward. ([Time 0:07:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/091a1d3b-6542-4469-9e77-db894a1f633e)) - **Use An Avatar Account To Study Promotion** - Create an 'avatar' account that only watches niche content to see what YouTube promotes in your topic. - Use that account to discover formats and creators to inspire new, strategic videos. Transcript: Travis And you can do that either with a new email. You actually can attach an account to your existing email through Google. Once you do that, what's interesting is the first thing that comes up on YouTube when you're not signed into anything is a search bar. Once they understand what kind of things you'd be interested in the first place, once upon a time, it just had a homepage of things and it just shotgun stuff out there hoping for the best. But now I want you to search for things. So search for a channel or a subject that's in your niche. Watch that video, then watch another video and watch another video and watch it a couple times. And if you're one of the type of people that likes to watch videos in their niche anyway, only use this account for that. Don't use this account for anything else. Don't watch anything else. And on your other account that you might use for everything else, don't watch the niche content. Just watch other stuff. So what happens is over time, YouTube gets an avatar of that, figures out who that person is, which you're creating an avatar for what is hopefully your perfect viewer. And then you'll actually see people surface on the homepage. I actually met a friend this way. There was a content creator that got boosted to my homepage that I had never heard of before. I'm like, wow, this guy's really talented. I watched his content. I came up with an entire series of videos that I became pretty well known for based on this technique by doing this, having it surface, finding this guy, watching his stuff, and then thinking, How can I reinvent this in my niche? Boom. And then I reached out to him and we became pretty friendly. ([Time 0:18:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0aba3499-9f17-4854-9365-3ac5a5cea13a)) - **Three Buckets For Traffic Sources** - Organize content into three buckets: Browse (stories), Search (how-to), and Shorts (promotion). - Repurpose one long episode into a browse story, a search-focused how-to, and multiple shorts. Transcript: Travis Specifically, I'm going to combine recent search and browse discussions with discussions about the three buckets. Okay, we'll talk about content buckets here in a second and what he's saying here, but I want to read through this first. When I realized the three buckets was more about variations of a theme, for example, 30-minute meals, Nana's cooking, and air fryer recipes, this is true, I'm going to apply it more Basically. Browse is a storytelling bucket. I like that. It's a longer video. Gives viewer insights but also establishes credibility and lets them into the community. The next bucket is search. Okay, I like this. People generally come to your video via search, not for you but for your video but for themselves. This is so true. This guy is preaching and their problems. They have a problem, typically how do I problem, and they want an answer. But they don't want fluff. This is so true additionally. We're going to break this down because this is so true. This is where we repurpose our video into shorter, three to five minute, more direct answers to questions. How do I? The third bucket will be shorts i know you love this yeah this is where we convert landscape videos into vertical video we will repurpose each episode into three to five shorts around 30 to 90 seconds so in one live episode we get three buckets we get a story for suitable browse a how-to for search and three to five shorts designed to brand build and cross- promotion. Amazing. By the way, I'm team Cadbury eggs all the way. Of course, of course you are because you're smart. All right, let's talk about these buckets and the different traffic sources and what they did. They've written this. What makes me so proud of this is that it's accurate. It's so much of it is so accurate that it's almost scary. Like they could do, they could do a show. They could do a podcast themselves. Let's talk about these buckets. So what are buckets? Content strategy buckets. What's a bucket? What do you think a bucket is? Tina A bucket is depending on what you make of it. Well, because he broke it down in a different way, which I really liked. And it could really be anything, but it it's basically categorizing your content because the problem people sometimes get into especially when you're a smaller creator is you see A bigger creator and they often have more buckets but they they usually started with one or two and then they built it from there so in head, three is the general good place to max it out. But I like the way he did it because the way he's doing it is, yes, the search, because the search could be shorts because a lot of shorts are search. It could be. And discoverable could also be shorts. Travis But that is all right. By the way, Tina loves shorts. In case you can't tell, we'll let her go off in a minute, but go ahead. But go ahead. Tina So, yeah, but I do. The way he's saying it is that he's promoting, he's using shorts as a way to promote his long form video, which I think is a great strategy as well. It's really just a matter of when he does content creation and maybe his content calendar, if he has one, or at the very least, he's thinking about, okay, I need to do this style, this style, And this style. And that's what I'm going to focus on and then look at the metrics, hopefully, and then see what's doing, see if I want to increase this 80%, decrease this based off of what's going on or Skillset gap, et cetera. I think this, this is a solid plan initially. Travis I like also the way he broke down the traffic sources because it's accurate. So browse is what most people call the algorithm. It's the thing that shows up on your homepage. It's what YouTube figures out a person likes that they might even not know that they like. I always say when you're on your homepage, you'll see different types of videos, videos from content creators that you've seen and watched before, videos from content creators you've Never seen before, but on topics you've watched before. And then you'll see the weird one about a topic you've never watched before and a content creator you've never heard of before. And I always encourage people to watch that one first because nine times out of 10, it's a banger for you. And it's something you would have never known to watch and you will become obsessed with it. Happens all the time. It's the YouTube rabbit hole that we all hear about. And that's browse. So he already has the thing set up where he goes a story. So a story is good for that because you're getting people engaged in a way that YouTube has already kind of figured out what they like. So a story is good search. He also talked about so accurately that when someone's searching for something, nine times out of 10, you just want an answer. They're not there for you. They're not there for your shenanigans. They want to know how to tie a tie. They're late. They're late to the date. They got to hurry up. Show me how to tie this tie. I don't want to know about your family. I don't care. It's your third video on the thing. I just tie my tie. And then of course shorts, uh, cross platform, cross platform too, by the way, he's not just saying just for YouTube, but also cross platform, which is good as well. Great strategy. I love this strategy. Literally you could use this for just about any niche. ([Time 0:20:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4bd6bcc0-99dc-4302-9a29-cda9bab7da51)) - **Find Gaps And Amplify Your Superpower** - Study competitors' comments to spot unmet audience needs and fill those gaps with your content. - Identify your personal 'superpower' and amplify it to stand out in saturated niches. Transcript: Travis Okay. Sure. Gaming is heavily saturated, but when someone says that, it also implies that there's no way to grow, which is also inaccurate. Sure, it's saturated. Of course, tons of creators. Yeah, but there's also a ton of viewers. There a lot more viewers than our creators um i always ask i turn the question around to the viewer or to the creator what would you want to watch like what sounds interesting what's the Last cool video you watched and how can you make your version of that what's the channel you like and what's the content they make that you watch every single video of? Like that's the type of stuff you want to do. Look at how they interact with their audience, read the comment section of other videos. You'd be surprised at what people will give away. They'll say, Oh, I found this video via this. I love this about it. Okay. Well just do that. And they really said, I like when you did this, I'm going to do that. That's the first thing I'm doing because for every one person leaves a comment, there's like 20 or 30 that didn't leave a comment and think the same exact way. So that would be another thing. What are some other things you would think? Tina I would also say the opposite of that. You'll often find in comments because I always, I always think, okay, what's your X factor? And maybe they're super charismatic. Charismatic and you know that you're just not that level of charismatic and that's okay. And then you see in the comments that it says, you know what, I really love your video, but, and it'll say, I really want to know more information as you're doing X, right? And so now you could be that person that's filling that marketplace of doing the same exact everything else, but then you're the person who has the knowledge and you'll spill out the Knowledge. So where you lack in one area, quote unquote, that the marketplace already loves, you can make up for it where somebody's literally asking for something, especially when you see a lot Of likes on specific comments like that. Travis It's important to know that your superpower is you being you. No one else can do that, right? You're the only, you have the market cornered when it comes to being you. So whatever it is that's interesting about you that it brings people to you, even as friends, like in regular everyday life, you could ask friends, like, what do you like about me? And figure out what are the things that are your superpower? Like, what is your superpower? I think my superpower is making people laugh, personally. ([Time 0:26:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5dfcc88f-7526-44cb-b3fe-98424d2db6d9)) - **Hiking Channel Led To Marriage** - Sean started Hiking With Sean posting local hikes and grew to 6,000 subscribers over nine years. - A fan he met through the channel later became his wife, showing YouTube's life-changing impact. Transcript: Travis Hey there, Travis and Jen, I've been listening to y'all for a while. I was searching for a good YouTube podcast and came across your show. And it's actually the reason I decided to purchase vidIQ as well. So don't you get a bonus for that? No, we don't. You should. Pre-2012, I smoked two packs a day and drank until I was drunk every night, alone and depressed, and did no form of fitness. I have a lot of teeth related pain from not taking care of them as a kid. In 2012, I needed to change because I was concerned about my health in my 20s. So I bought a bicycle. I fell in love with cycling, and eventually it led me to hiking. So I created a YouTube channel called Hiking with Sean. I started posting all my local hikes and bike rides, thinking that a few family members and friends would subscribe. Boy, was I wrong. People started subscribing left and right. That made me take my channel seriously and treat it like a business. I consistently uploaded frequently and grew my channel to over 6,000 subscribers in just nine years. And over the last couple of years, I've really started focusing on making it bigger. I upload a video every day, three longs and the rest are shorts. I have a total of 1.5 million views on YouTube. However, I receive 1.5 to 2 million views a month on Facebook with nearly 30,000 followers. I even run a related group with nearly 50,000 members. I've been on the local news, radio, and various magazines. I've even been mentioned in a book. YouTube has changed my life. The best part is I met a fan and we started hiking together. ([Time 0:31:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9be3b334-93bd-4670-87d9-1542eef24045)) - **Few Videos Can Unlock Big Opportunities** - A creator with five SEO-optimized videos landed a $250k job despite low views. - Posting content can create advantages that traditional résumés often don't provide. Transcript: Tina And and it wasn't even there wasn't even that many views on it and it just goes to show that oh it doesn't really matter how many views you get. Just even the act of posting it out there, it already puts you at an advantage that most people just don't have just by doing that alone. But I've definitely met some really, really cool people in my life. And yeah. All thanks to YouTube. All for sure. ([Time 0:36:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5a59db46-3fe0-45d8-85a0-410a48d4806d))