Transcript for:
YouTube Channel Discovery Strategies

How do you get discovered if you've got a brand new channel? I want to share three big strategies to start getting that momentum on your channel. The first one is our search-based strategy.

How do I actually know what people are searching for? How could I verify interest in my next video idea before posting it? As opposed to just posting random videos that nobody is looking for.

Let's hit strategy number two, the industry trends strategy. One of the reasons why new channels struggle to get views, they have generic topics, they have bad titles, and then the content is unclear. Here's why YouTube will never be saturated.

You gotta just press record. So how do you get discovered if you've got a brand new channel? Like if you have zero subscribers, zero views, how do you get those first few views? In this video, I wanna share three big strategies that you can apply right now to start getting that momentum on your. channel.

And these are really the three best strategies I've discovered. And I'm going to give some examples of how you can apply these immediately. But let's start off first with really the big problem.

And I love this quote. It sort of sums up a quote issue we have when it comes to YouTube. And it's this by Zig Ziglar said, don't become a wandering generality, be a meaningful specific. Don't become a wandering generality, but be a meaningful specific. One of the reasons why new channels struggle to get views is they're making videos that really don't have, they have generic topics.

They have bad titles. Like the title might be like, you need to know this, or like don't quit or just something that's just like two words, five words, like secrets of success. Like, okay, it's 2024. Like that video has been made on YouTube.

Like The topic is general, not specific. The titles are unclear. They're weak. And then really the content is unclear.

Like the structure of the video, the strategy of the video is unclear. So if you're trying to get discovered, maybe you're making these mistakes. If you're trying to get noticed and grow from zero, perhaps you are struggling. And so let's cover these three strategies. The first one is our search.

based strategy, search based strategy, what you want to do is focus on creating videos that people are looking for every day, every day. So if you could find video topics titled well, that people are actually searching for not, you know, sometimes people upload videos like, you know, day five, how I'm feeling today, like you're doing a vlog, like, you know, my weekly routine. Who is my? That's you.

But who are you? I don't know you. We haven't met yet.

You haven't got discovered yet. You don't have a personal brand yet. You haven't started growing yet, right? So no one's searching for that. One of the best ways to grow from zero.

Remember, this is not the only way to grow on YouTube, but if you're growing from zero or you have a small channel and you want to grow, the search-based strategy is really one of the best ways to start getting. views. And so focus on creating videos that people are actually looking for.

This is strategy number one. And let's look at our website called answer the public. Let's type in pro duck tivity.

And then here's what's kind of cool. You can, you can search on Google, but you can search on YouTube. See you will bang YouTube, Tik TOK.

I'm searching on YouTube. I'm going to productivity. Okay.

United States, English. Now you log in with like your Google account or your Gmail or whatever. And then you can get. a few free searches a day, three actually. So there's no real need to buy the paid version, although you certainly could.

Now check it out. Okay, so we know that people are searching for the topic of productivity, about 50,000 people a month, which is great. This is the data behind it.

But as we go down here into answerthepublic.com, which again is a, you can use it three times a day for free. So it's a free tool. We now have this wheel revealing to us what the public wants to watch.

So let's see how to increase productivity, how to study productivity, and how this little dark orange circle here in the center versus the light orange is how popular this topic is. Now, this wheel's a little bit hard to read, and I have it zoomed in so you can see it here. What you can also do is you could go to... You can rearrange this and say list. I like the list feature.

So now we have productivity music, productivity apps. You wanna know a good video? Best productivity apps.

So rather than like day seven, how I'm getting stuff done. you haven't been discovered yet. If you made a video on best productivity apps for 2024, people are actually searching for that, right?

And that is now a search-based topic. So when you're trying to get discovered as a new channel, a small channel, but look at all these ideas, productivity desk setup, productivity affirmations, hmm, interesting, pretty good. So that is using answerthepublic.com. We're using the list feature. But you can even dive a little bit deeper on this.

Let's go back to the wheel here. And let's look at, we have questions. We have prepositions. We've got numbers. We've got related.

Let's go comparisons. I like this one. So let's say productivity and time management, productivity and focus, productivity and motivation.

Here's what quickly happens too. You start to actually expand your vision for your channel topic. And so we're talking about this search-based strategy and Answer the Public is just one tool for diving into what are people actually searching for and how could I verify interest in my next video idea before posting it, as opposed to just posting random videos that nobody is looking for.

Let's hit strategy number two, the industry trends strategy. Focus on hot topics. in your community or your industry. As an editor for Think Media, I know how time-consuming video editing can be. One of my favorite tools for speeding up this process is with Gling AI.

Gling has completely changed my workflow by automatically cutting out bad takes, removing silences, and cleaning up my rough cuts. It makes the process super easy and saves me hours on each video. Now, if you want to fine-tune your edits, Gling lets you download the video or export it directly into Final Cut, Premiere, or in my case, DaVinci Resolve, for those final adjustments.

And the best part is you can get started for free by clicking the link in the description and see how much time Gling AI can save you. Now back into the video. Next question you should be asking is like, okay, inside of my industry, back in like productivity, let's say, because we started with that website, answerthepublic.com, we typed in productivity and we started getting all these ideas. You go, okay, in the productivity industry, which it really is an industry. A lot of people buy books and apps and they want to be more productive.

And it's a whole, some people call it a cult. It's the productivity cult or culture. People trying to time management tips. How do I be more efficient, more effective?

I'm one of those people. Guilty as charged. Okay. So what's like new or what's the buzz? Like maybe it was, it was like how to like get stuff done, the classic book and how to.

be like more productive. Then there's kind of like the ant. Right now, there's a trend in productivity called slow productivity. New book by Cal Newport. This big idea that humans are actually not robots, right?

We're not just like as many outputs as possible machines. We're much more about identify what's more effective. That's not the point of this video. Point is, slow productivity.

Cal Newport is one of the people in the industry. It's a new book in the industry. It's a new term.

He's kind of branding in the industry, slow productivity. Well, that would be not like a trend macro. It would be an industry trend. So what is a hot topic in your community or industry? If you were in keto, testing a new keto flour that has zero carbs, zero calories, is there a new flour in your industry?

Is there a new product? Is there something new, right, that you could cover in your industry? I posted a video about the algorithm as I am a YouTube educator, and it was about how the algorithm is really promoting small creators. And the video is at 217,000 views.

Now, again, you might be saying, Sean, easy for you to say you started years ago, like whatever. Okay, listen, every single day in our Video Ranking Academy. People are starting from scratch and getting discovered using the principles I'm sharing with you right now. But one of those things that you want to be covering is something new as opposed to just, you're like, you know what I'm just going to do is I'm going to cover something that people have been talking about forever.

That's good to evergreen content because at least it's proven, but what's new in your industry? So one of the things you could Google, I Googled fitness trends. And I came up with this article, nine top fitness industry trends for 2024 and 2025. You know, you always want to be thinking about what's happening in your industry, what's happening in your world, what's happening.

And it could be anything. It could be, you know, parenting. It could be faith.

It could be like people, there's a new Bible translation. There's a new controversy or something like what's happening in your industry. Why? Because you have a small channel.

Nobody knows you yet. And you're trying to get discovered. So when you jump on something new, you can get some views.

And here's why YouTube will never be saturated. And here's why YouTube will never, it'll be crowded. And competition is fierce. But why there will always be opportunity on YouTube.

Because new things always happen. I don't know if you've been following politics this year. It's been an interesting year.

I mean, it's been a while since a president's had an assassination attempt, you know, a former president. And it's been a while since a president's maybe, you know, resigned. And there's a lot of new stuff happening.

Like, there's always new. And there's new stuff happening in tech. And there's new stuff happening with AI.

And some stuff is also... maybe less like new and trending stuff, but there's always, there might even be something, maybe you're more of like an ancient wisdom person. I'm kind of that way.

I believe that, you know, the, the, the most core human problems, a lot of that wisdom has been clarified. You know, we don't need to look for like new answers necessarily to eternal problems. So that's why I get a lot of my wisdom, majority of my wisdom from the Bible, right? one of our core values at Think Media is the Bible is our blueprint. What's the point?

But there's still new stuff. And sometimes maybe you're reacting to the new stuff just helps you reinforce the core thing you normally talk about. You might be like, bro, you shouldn't touch Ozempic.

I'm not making a statement there for everybody taking Ozempic right now. I'm just saying that might be your belief. You might be like instead, but because you talk about health and fitness, you talk about Ozempic for that reason, right?

So you can, you might be like, if you're at a faith-based channel, you might be like, bro, you might want to be careful with the passion translation. It's a new translation that you might want to be careful with. And then it anchors you back to your ethic and what you would normally.

So no matter what we're talking about, you got to tie to the new, tap into. The new, all right, let's hit number three. Number three, culture surfing strategy. So now you might feel like this ties into number two, but here's the difference. Cover popular topics that are making headlines.

We're going broader than your industry in this case, okay? So we're gonna go to like what's happening in culture tied to your channel. So what I'm not suggesting is that you start covering news when you're not a news channel.

What I'm not suggesting is, you know, like recently when there was this assassination attempt on Donald Trump, like I legit was like, do I go live today on Think Media? You know, I was like, and then I was like, nah, I mean, it's, you know, I was like, but it was a good question. Like, does this tie in, by the way?

And also, if I ever saw anything, all of a sudden my Instagram feed was like 100% one thing and then YouTube. And of course, certain channels could tie into it. And I'm not, it doesn't just have to be political channels.

It doesn't just have to be cultural. But there might be something that's happening. I think real estate, especially finance, business. If you're talking about, let's say business, of course you can tie into the fact that the feds dropped rates or is a recession coming and some of these other things.

It's a headline. And maybe your stuff about business is like leadership, finance, sales team. But if it's that stuff, then of course you should be tapping into culture. And so you might even say like, hey, this is an assassination attempt. How's that going to affect the economy?

You start making these connection points between culture and your content. It's called the culture surfing strategy. One of our VRA students on the Hard to Kill podcast, he covered news that was happening in Canada. And he also mentioned that nobody else was covering this story.

The mainstream media wasn't covering it. And he got 212,000, 220,000 views. And by the way, this was earlier in the channel, because again, some of these channels are more established now.

But the point of this video is how do you get discovered when nobody knows you, right? And so using these three strategies, these channels, either just starting or growing up, are getting views from scratch, from zero. Um, one rental at a time is a friend of mine, Michael Zuber. He brings a lot of guests on his channel, but anyways, you could, there's so many things beyond just real estate. You might talk about the housing market finance.

But you can see here that little 3.1 means it's a 3.1 outlier, meaning it got three times the average views on the channel. Housing market update, everything just changed. Now, again, that's industry news in his case. But what is happening in culture that you could tie into your channel?

That's something to be asking yourself. By the way, if you never saw my interview with Michael Zuber, we'll make sure to link that up in the description. And. Not only does he tap into these strategies that we're talking about, but he also doesn't do any editing.

If you ever feel like, man, video editing is so hard. He doesn't do any editing, like none. And he crossed 50,000 subs and you can see $80,000 a year.

Pretty crazy. And that's he actually his business online. His whole real estate business is bigger.

It doesn't matter. Side quest. But anyways. really cool results he's getting without editing.

If you've never seen that, definitely check out that episode. If you enjoyed this content and want to take your YouTube channel to the next level, just click or tap the link on the screen or go to tube1kchallenge.com to join our next live YouTube challenge. You'll learn our best tips and strategies that are working here at Think Media, and I think you'll love it.