Is VidIQ STILL worth it in 2024? (honest review/tutorial)

navigating a YouTube channel can be a bit like trying to get a ship across the ocean the ocean is vast and confusing and it's easy to get yourself pointed in the wrong direction so what you need is a good Compass which in this case means you need a great keyword tool to ensure your videos Stand Out Among the 3.7 million that get published on YouTube every single day so let me tell you about my favorite navigational instrument how I used it to get monetized on YouTube in less than a year and how to leverage it

to help your channel do the same folks thanks uh for tuning in James here again and uh the two main leaders when it comes to YouTube development tools are as far as I can tell anyway vid IQ and Tube buddy now from what I can gather they both offer very similar services so they offer Channel analytics they offer keyword research tools they offer idea generators and this is done both via the dashboard on their actual site as well as browser plugins now here's what the dashboard looks like for my channel you can see it has

a bunch of information here like your views over different periods of time it has uh the optimal time for you to publish during the week it offers some education little mini courses here and then almost equally important is the um plugins that you get so here's a look at how the plug-in looks on my YouTube channel you can see where I've circled here on uh uh screen cap I took a while ago but uh this video's actually got about five six thousand views by now but uh you can see kind of what it gives you

an idea of views how many you've gotten in the last 30 days and then these analytics will also tell you where your video currently ranks for each keyword that you tagged it with so this is just a snapshot of where it was at the time obviously I post a lot of uh videos about writing on medium so um I have some success with those keywords early on and they're sort of flagged by vid Q as keyword opportunities for my channel so now for whatever reason probably because I saw an ad I did settle on vid

IQ first and settle on and stuck with it um I've had it for over a year now and uh vid IQ has been integrating a lot more educational content as I mentioned and AI tools into its platform of late um and I'll tell you about some of those first and then I'm going to get into the main tools that I actually use to get monetized on YouTube relatively quickly um and then I'll tell you whether or not I think it's worth it after all this time so um AI tools for YouTube monetization So at the

top of the dashboard there's an ideation Tab and that creates concept video titles and thumbnails using AI now I've never actually used any of these but it's kind of neat and I do keep an eye on them for good ideas I might want to pursue and make on my own so here's what that looks like on my channel just based on the topics that uh I typically cover on my channel and this is done automatically by drawing info from your videos from your Niche from your competitors but you can also insert specific keywords to generate

ideas as well and actually There's an actual AI content generator as well so you can enter what your you want your video to be about so let's say I wanted to create a video about dividend investing because I sometimes do videos about stock market stuff on my channel but I don't have any ideas which is not really a problem for me but some people might have trouble coming up with stuff and this is a demo so I would enter that term in the box and here's what would pop up so this is actually pretty neat

if you were into that sort of thing um so it gives you a video idea it gives you a proposed title and obviously all this stuff would need a bit of tweaking but it gives you a title it gives you actually quite a lengthy uh description of what you could cover in your uh in your thing and uh a possible video script and actually even a voice over so that's pretty crazy actually I I don't use it very much but it's kind of neat and it for people who are just starting out it it could

at the very least maybe give you ideas for how to write a video script or create thumbnails or even how to read a voiceover so before I move into the main tools that I use I should also point out that vid IQ allows you to Peak in inside other people's channels and see what they're ranking on so you can plug that in and see where the tools lead you so you can also track right on your dashboard how you're measuring up to those other creators in your Niche so for example I added some fellow writers

who also have YouTube channels now these are all medium writers I do most of my blogging work on medium so the medium writers that I know of who also have YouTube channels I put them into my dashboard and here's how that looks so you can have a direct comparison here of your views over time versus their views um and uh um I should give a shout out to Zuli rain Hudson renie Ela K Christina god um and Corey who writes these are just the people that I added at the time um and you can see

by these colorful bar charts sort of how you stack up with other people directly in your Niche and and you can you can really add anyone there if you're just interested in what top YouTubers are doing you can track that too but as you can see at this time I was trailing almost everyone like I wasn't really posting very much um and I also don't post shorts which really seems to pump your views and subscribers and I probably should get on that but um and there's you know if you're looking for more ideas too the

tool also can show you top videos from your competitors for the month so here's an example of a bunch here and Hudson is doing a great job on his channel and he's constantly putting stuff out that's doing pretty well so he figures in prominently here and then Zuli is probably the biggest name medium YouTuber that there is so let's look at the bread and butter stuff now that I use to get monetized on YouTube in less than a year so there's two actually in particular that I leaned on heavily in my first year and the

first is the keyword research tool and I know that a lot of people's eyes probably glaze over when I start talking about search engine optimization but let me tell you why you should fight through that and hear me out because keywords are one of the top three in my opinion most important things that you must Master to to get your workout and get it in front of people and then convince them to check it out and the other two factors are headlines and thumbnails so try to think about SEO and keywords as a fun puzzle

for you to put together I know that makes me sound a bit nerdy but I get obsessive about finding Ed and this tool actually gives you a massive Edge when you're trying to do that type of stuff so all right let's say your channel is about the stock market so once you put that in vid IQ spits out a ranking for the keyword you're interested in based on both search volume and competition so here I put stock market and you can see the search volume is uh about 767,000 a month and the the competition is

high and this is actually changed and it's kind of interesting looking at it now because when I started out this had a much higher score but it does appear that more people are trying to compete in this space now um as evidence by this High competition number and vid IQ also shows you the ratings for related keywords as well so here you can see we've got stock market um and then a bunch of related keywords and you can see it has all their ranking their overall score competition search volume and that sort of thing and

you know nowadays I actually know how to tag pretty effectively if I didn't use this all the time um I wouldn't be starting from nothing but when I started out trying to tag YouTube videos I was honestly completely lost and to be honest I didn't even really think about tagging it's one of those things where you're excited to try something new and that's part sort of seems tedious but really it is so worthwhile to take the time and figure that out but I did start thinking about it because I was not getting the track ction

that I wanted on some earlier videos that I was making so I started looking for edges and again vid IQ was such a huge Edge for that and there are literally endless possibilities for how to name and tag videos so this kind of at least gives you a framework that drastically increases your chances of being seen and it can also be useful for generating ideas so the second biggest keyword tool that I use on video or sorry on vid IQ is one that Flags keyword opportunity for your channel specifically and trust me this has been

super valuable for me so vid IQ figures out what your channel is about what tags have worked for you in the past what tags have high search volume versus low competition and then it suggests keyword opportunities that you should pursue so for example when I first started out I had a video about quitting caffeine that kind of took off so uh some of the suggestions were actually in that Niche so the this is again a bit of an earlier screen cap most my keyword suggestions are about making money in the stock market now but you

can see here um that it showed some just different options throughout um some different options based on what I made videos about and ones that actually resulted in traffic to my channel which is what you want you want to build on things that one there's less competition and two people are actually interested in seeing from you now when you're starting out on YouTube you actually need to find a way to differentiate yourself you know thinking back to how many videos I said you posted that get posted on YouTube every day and that starts with a

strong Niche and vid IQ can help you figure this out by identifying areas that have a lot of interest but low competition so then you can follow the same strategy I used to build an audience and made you know over 25,000 at this point on medium uh blogging so here's how I started doing that and how you can apply to YouTube so number one I would suggest that you start with a small sub Niche with really engaged enthusiastic followers and then you start moving slowly into bigger but related niches that won't alienate the audience that

you built on the smaller Niche and then once you have a big enough audience you can move into the big boy topics like General health and wealth which is really where you make the big bucks and it's those two topics really um that you know if you're not just a hobbyist then you should be thinking about ways that you can get in on the health and wealth topics because those are the ones that pay the most and have the biggest audiences but I will say that you cannot be impatient while you're doing that you have

to have enough time to build a reputation both as a Creator and as an authoritative figure in your Niche so think about it who are you when you're starting out right you're nobody but the more work you do and the bigger fan base you build the more credibility gain not only with real people but with platform algorithms now vid IQ is an amazing tool to find those early sub niches and also to know where to go next when you start finding that success so is it worth it I would say 1 million per it's been

worth it for me um there are several payment tiers that you can explore and you can actually use it for free if you want to do just the most basic keyword research and that may be enough for a lot of people I do the I think it's called boost and it's 10 bucks a month and that allows me to um do all the keyword research I want basically to automatically input those keywords um into my video descriptions and stuff like that and it helps me when I'm posting to make sure that I have the right

keywords and stuff on there and also I just like to use the tool a lot when I'm exploring other areas that I may want to make videos about so or write articles about so if I'm thinking about doing something I'll look in vid que and see what the search volume is to figure out if it's even worth pursuing so in that way um it's actually probably saving me a ton of time uh of not wasting my time writing and making videos about things that would not get me paid and that people wouldn't even watch so

folks I hope you found this useful and let me know in the comments if you use any of these tools or if you try them out and you like them or not um and please like subscribe all that good stuff and we'll talk to you again soon