My COMPLETE YouTube Strategy For The Rest Of 2021
I ended 2020 with a YouTube strategy in place that was all about creating content surrounding creating content. And guess what? That didn't end up happening! In fact, when I implemented this strategy, I saw my numbers fall.
THIS is why it’s so important to know your viewer and understand your analytics! In this video, I’m going to share why my YouTube strategy has changed for 2021 and the things I’m doing to course-correct an experiment on my channel this year that did not work as planned.
If you don’t have a YouTube strategy yet, this is going to be perfect for you because I’m literally giving you my exact process for mapping out a YouTube strategy from now until the end of the year.
First Piece Of Your Strategy:
KNOW YOUR NICHE & DOUBLE DOWN ON THEM
This is where I went wrong. Okay, not really wrong but I wanted to turn around a massive ship that was already on a clear course
See, here's the thing.. whether you have a solid niche or not, YouTube has already decided where you belong. They know how to categorize you. And that's something they did to my channel. All of my top videos included the word YouTube in the title. So when I started posting content about content strategy, YouTube got confused.
This was reflected in my channel stalling out on me. Not only was YouTube confused, though, but my viewers were also. I had made a major pivot based on two decisions… what I thought you wanted to hear from me and keywords I thought I could dominate on.
But YouTube already put me in a box
This is why you hear from all the youtube gurus and experts, know who you are talking to… know your niche!
Last week when I did post a video with YouTube guess what, performed above average.
Second Piece Of Your Strategy:
THEMES
I talked about my monthly themes on my social media strategy video I did a few weeks ago but a new strategy I’m implementing in my YouTube strategy is themes. And there are a few reasons why!
Themes make viewers eager to come back week after week!
It allows for better end screen strategy.
You can create bingeable playlists!
You can turn your themed videos into a compilation video!
The truth is, it’s all about getting people to watch one after another after another.
Third Piece Of Your Strategy:
DON’T GET COMPLACENT
Many of you who watch me know I have a repeatable process for every time I film and plan Youtube videos…
Isn't that the definition of insanity... doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?
You can’t get comfortable, you need to try different things ESPECIALLY if you aren’t getting the results you want. I recently did an entire video on my cell phone and audience retention was the BEST I’d had!
Same with thumbnails and titles. Don’t just phone it in here. I’ve been getting help and input from my assistant with titles and we even create 2 thumbnails for every video in case the first one doesn’t perform as we expected.
Forth Piece Of Your Strategy:
Community engagement
There are 3 parts to this one:
Community Tab
YouTube Stories
Comments
YouTube LOVES when you use features they created like the community tab and stories. They will push your content if you use them! This means you need to start thinking about these features as a part of your social media calendar.
But there are definitely some ways to make it easier, like knowing what type of post you'll have on each day. Or repurposing. Out current strategy has us posting our Instagram content right onto YouTube in either the community or the stories section.
Now let's talk about comments. I’m bad at this just because I run a business with multiple clients, contracts, and now an employee so I didn’t have time. Now I make sure I respond to all the comments the first day a video goes live
Sixth Piece Of Your Strategy:
Promotion
While it may be tempted to post and run, the truth is that we need to promote ourselves. For me, this looks like posting full videos on social media. But it does look a little different on each platform.
On Instagram, I post:
A carousel post
A quote
IGTV
Multiple stories
Reels
That's a lot of content for each platform, right? We're really focused on Instagram because we're seeing that ROI from it.
Email lists are another great promotion tool - this is always HUGE for use and even our clients see a bump in their videos when sending to an email list.
