Expert Reveals Why Small Channels Don’t Grow

imagine meeting somebody who could tell you exactly what it takes for a video to go viral versus Fade Into Obscurity forever well that person actually exists that's Todd bupre he's the head of growth over at YouTube and if there's anyone on this planet who understands what it takes to make a video have success on YouTube it's him he's seen it all from the rookie mistakes all the way to things that take channels into super stardom what we've gone ahead and done is spent hours and hours going through old interviews and clips from Todd to try

and make a nice easy list that you can follow so you avoid common mistakes and try and actually do the things that are going to be beneficial to your channel in the long term this video is for you regardless of if you've achieved your first thousand subscribers or you're even going for that now very tiny silver YouTube play button so let's just start with the first thing the worst thing that you can do as a Creator and that's give up too soon I get it like you spend a lot of effort to like make a

video you wanted to you know reach as many people as possible and you're looking at it and you know I'm I'm always hearing from creators talk about oh this video was a 9 out of 10 what this comes down to is the thing that separates the channel to eventually reach their goals of say 100,000 subscribers or end up in small Channel limbo forever and ever and that's just the fact that you need to accept failure as part of the process when making videos that might seem like a cliche thing to say but even to this

day this is something that I personally struggle with but YouTube is not about avoiding mistakes if you upload a video and it doesn't do well that's okay everybody does that and that does not mean your Channel's doomed somehow people call YouTube a marathon but I think you really need to treat it like you're training for a marathon not many people could just run an entire Marathon like that they're going to need time to actually get better and better and build up their endurance also success is not as linear as a marathon might seem every video

you post could be a massive success or a total flop every video in that sense is a risk but each one is still worth taking and listen even if a video does flop on YouTube that's not necessarily the end we've seen countless cases of videos that take off months or even years after they've been posted that is something that I think is genuinely unique about the YouTube algorithm videos can kind of come back to life what I often try to say to creators to reassure them is like how many times have you seen where a

video started out as maybe a nine out of 10 nine out of your last 10 but then you know a few weeks later it ended up being a five out of 10 or four out of 10 so while I understand the focus on wanting to get the immediate uh excitement from the audience when you upload it one of the great things about YouTube is we don't limit recommendations to just videos that have been uploaded this week for example and so over time there's always going to be more opportunities for your video to get you know

connected again if if there's like renewed interest or just kind of a different Trend flows through the ecosystem we've seen other creators do this and we've even had it happen on our own channel as well YouTube is always re-evaluating and reassessing videos all across the platform if you have an older video that's still getting impression it's not too late to do something like change the title or the thumbnail if you kind of think of a better idea if impressions are still coming in YouTube is sharing it with somebody if Impressions aren't coming in try putting

that video in an end screen for the next video you make you could even do things like share that video on the community tab or things like that that way if you do test a new thumbnail but the video is not getting any Impressions you can kind of jump start it back to life so YouTube can try again so it is important to keep consistently posting because older videos can get recommended via new videos and vice versa on the topic of uploading a lot by the way there's a lesson that Renee Richie shared he actually

got this from Todd bue Renee is a colleague of Todd's here's what he had to say I got this tip from Todd Boe who runs Discovery and growth at YouTube and I restarted my channel from zero in 2020 and I really wanted to grow so I was doing a ton of videos and he said well why don't you stop and do two videos a week for a couple weeks and then three videos a week for a couple weeks and then do the four videos that you've been doing for a couple weeks and then go into

analytics and sort by videos published per week an average view per viewer and if they really are going up with more videos it means your audience is hungry and you can do those videos but if start going down it means like your audience is saturated they're coming back after two or three days seeing multiple videos and choosing between them in which case you're really just wasting your time and I found that to be hugely instructive in getting me to really understand that I didn't I didn't need to produce more I needed to have like a

better connection with my audience I think it's very easy to sit down and think yeah the more videos I post the more chances I have to grow my channel but as you've probably heard people say before quantity does not equal quality in fact quantity can simply destroy the quality of your videos if you're just focused on the SCH ual and not the actual content itself it's not necessarily about how much you produce but how well it resonates with an audience and even if you post a ton of super high quality videos because you have this

massive organization behind you there's a point in which that's kind of diminishing returns you just risk overwhelming your audience they can't possibly keep up with the amount of great content you're outputting that's a silly extreme example but my point is spend time making awesome videos one good video can make up for 10 kind of videos if that one video gets a lot of watch time because it's going to travel to more people it could introduce a whole new audience to your channel and yes watch time is an algorithm hack I suppose but Todd has said

this a million times replace the word algorithm with audience create content for a human audience instead of focusing on some computer algorithm that you actually have no real control over and changes all the time Todd didn't say that last part but I did and I think he would agree all right so this next mistake is one that a lot of creators have made and I think it's one of the worst things you could Poss possibly do Todd emphasizes this point in this tweet don't delete videos unless you have a very very good reason when you

delete a video you delete your Channel's connection to the audience that watched that video if you want to maximize your growth keep your videos public or unlist them if you must it's completely understandable that some creators want their channel to look polished and they only want to showcase their very best work here's the thing though unless that video really needs to go it can do more harm than good deleting it what Todd is basically saying is that when you post a video and someone watches it that person now has a connection to your channel and

the algorithm is basically the way I'm understanding him it's using that video as the glue that holds that person to the chance of the them getting recommended your content in the future if you delete the video you delete the glue that was holding that person to your channel and until I saw this tweet I never really thought of it that way but it honestly makes a lot of sense there's other reasons this matters as well for example the long-term audience retention on your channel maybe that video you made you don't like it anymore but people

do maybe they've been sharing it with their friends maybe they rewatch it sometimes if you get rid of that video they might be less likely to engage with your channel in the future there's of course the overall algorithmic impact of deleting a video every video contributes to the data YouTube has about your channel and it's this whole recommendation system that's getting built through this web of videos you have so when you just start randomly deleting them now you're just taking out entire chunks of this web you're probably just slowing down your growth and then of

course there's the massive potential missed opportunity for future growth because even though you post a video today and it doesn't do well like we've said before it could do well in the future so instead of deleting a video you have a couple of options if you unlist the old video it technically still is on YouTube and technically still can be found as long as somebody has the link to it and this is also going to preserve the data that is attached to that video additionally if the video is just outdated and you really want it

gone you can unlist it but then you can revisit the topic again with an updated perspective the bottom line is don't just delete videos if you have an older video that you feel is bringing you the wrong audience unlist it there's really rarely a case that a video should be absolutely deleted next let's hear a tip from Todd about just getting views in general I think it actually took more years than it should have for creators to really understand that their views were determined by how well they packaged the video that it wasn't just about

making a great video but part of the job of being a Creator was to Market that video um such that people clicked on it because that's what you need to get views the great lie we're told in school is that you should never judge a book by its cover the truth is if that were the case then we wouldn't have an entire industry of people whose job it is to design book covers what Todd is emphasizing here is that packaging is a marketing skill and it's one creators need to master if they want to consistently

get views it's not just about the video itself which needs to be good but how people perceive it before they even click on it and notice I said marketing skill not necessarily graphic design or anything like that marketing is all about getting your message across to your potential audience you don't have to be a thumbnail graphic design Savant and you don't need to worry about the placement of every single character in the title is it the perfect length are you just getting your point across that's the main goal but here's the thing a lot of

people think packaging and they do think title and thumbnail but Todd doesn't really stop there when it comes to packaging not a lot of creators understand that now the person's decision is based in large part on what they deliver in the intro and what they deliver in the intro when there's no sound and how much time do you think most creators are looking at that Through The Eyes of the viewer trying to figure out is this worth my time and how long does that autoplay go 5 Seconds 10 seconds no it'll go it'll just keep

going it'll play the whole video because we talk about packaging now internally it used to be title and thumbnail was packaging and now when we talk about packaging it's title thumbnail first 30 seconds yeah what are you doing like what's your hook in that first 30 seconds seconds that get somebody to keep watching and this is key packaging doesn't just mean your title in your thumbnail it can also mean the first 30 seconds of your video and 30 seconds is a specific number because it actually is outlined in your retention graph this is a very

important moment for the viewer who is watching your video for the first time we see this as the point in the video where if you get someone to click away from a video in the first 30 seconds there's a very good chance you didn't package your video correctly it did not meet the person's expectations so that strong hook in the first 30 seconds keeps people engaged enough to potentially watch longer and longer hopefully the whole thing so just make sure your messaging is consistent your title and your thumbnail and your intro should all work together

to make sure that when someone clicks on your video they feel confident that when they clicked it met their expectations so think of the packaging of your video as the storefront right you have the title which is the name of the store you have the awning which looks pretty nice and inviting and when you walk in the door if the entrance way is full of mold and the ceiling is falling down and the rafters are exposed you're probably going going to run away so the front of your store is very very important so people actually

walk inside and see what you have to sell yes you can have a perfect storefront and entrance but if you only focus on getting people in the door and then shutting it behind them and trying to trap them in there you're going to find that it's not going to work super well what I'm saying is don't let your focus entirely End by getting people in the door the whole video still needs to be good we want to able creators to deliver Great Value to audiences and the way that that they do that is by doing

two things getting the users to click and getting them to watch the video um there is a danger by focusing too much on solely clicks that um creators could create thumbnails that attract audiences that are not actually interested in watching the whole video and abandoned abandon the video early um and that's not good for uh the Creator it's not good for the viewer it's not good for YouTube basically given its age now the YouTube algorithm is smart enough to know that if people are clicking on the video but leaving too early there's no point in

continuing to share it all over the place it's just going to kind of die on the vine so what should be your overall Focus well all of it honestly but let's start with balancing clicks with retention you want to spend some time having a good title and a good thumbnail making sure your her hook is really strong but you don't have all the time in the world either so you want to make sure that you balance this with the content inside the video so that if they do click the click pays off and they're willing

to watch the entire thing because it met their expectations and it felt worthwhile to watch to optimize for that watch time you need to consider a person's experience throughout the entire video what I like to do is edit a video and then before I render it I walk away for a day and I come back and I watch the video to see is there anything in here I just don't need does it sag in the middle anywhere and if it does can I just get rid of that and still have the video make sense what

you're looking for are those points in the video where someone could watch and feel like n I've seen enough and they simply click off of it it's nothing personal they just didn't feel like it was going anywhere else where they needed to actually stick around and watch or hey if you have the time you could re-record those bits as well and over the super long term you want to build a viewer's trust this happens by consistently making content all the time that meets people's expectations again and again so you build a really solid foundation an

audience that will watch no matter what you do because they trust that whatever it is you're doing they're going to enjoy it they always do those might just be some of the biggest mistakes to avoid on YouTube and it's nice that they come from YouTube themselves also this video is going to help when it comes to having the algorithm work in your favor to push videos for you once they are posted so that'll be some more information for you also hey I know this wall is like very blank this is my new studio let me

know in the comments if there's anything you think that should go back there see you