NikhIl Jadhav
Entrepreneur, Filmmaker, Video Marketer
I started working with a Youtube channel called Sarphira this January(2019). Sarphira was creating comedy sketches around our daily life, I felt the content was really good but the traffic they were driving even after uploading some 15 videos back to back consistently was low, like really low.
This is what I was looking at two weeks in January. I was looking at a channel which has good content, which is consistent and is breaking their bone creating every video but barely getting any traction. The only question I had was where f#@k is my traffic?
In my first two weeks I vigorously tested for traffic, for content, for thumbnail, for niche and for relevant tags by making them upload very different videos back to back. The two spikes you see above are those uploads, Then in the third week I had a rough idea of what was going on , what will actually work and get us good traffic. And we uploaded one more video, It blasted, did 100k in a day!
Something worked, but what? so, I went in more deep and ran three more tests, one got me average traffic, one got barely anything and the third did the first million in three weeks of it’s upload date. I am not kidding, I have attached the screen shot below, check it.
I will tell you exactly what I learned working with Sarphira and helping them grow from 20k views to 4m views for next six months. First thing I learned was:
1. Understand Your Traffic
Understand what your traffic is watching, understand the most important difference between Google and Youtube, With Google you’ll grow fast if your content is unique in your niche while for Youtube you grow if you create content on basis of where “Your” traffic is heading, I will elaborate on that using a video we created around “Holi”, Indian festival of colors. Honestly, it was prediction that we were going to get good traffic for the Holi video.
How did we know that? We checked, how? using Google Trends, how? I will show you.
I went on google trends, searched for Holi keyword and checked when does the keyword starts gaining traction and how much traffic does it gain. Holi was on 2nd March in 2018 and Holi keyword started gaining crazy traction from 25th Feb. 2018 to 3rd March 2018 on Youtube, 25th March was 1 week prior Holi in 2018.
So, to gain good traction all I had to do was place my video under Holi keyword atleast 10 days prior, as we used to upload video on every alternate thursday, we had to upload on 14th March 2019 as Holi was on 21st March this year. What was the result? Check it for yourself!
2. Stop Sharing With Your Friends
But Why? Just imagine if all your traffic is just your friends? Yes, that’s definitely a good thing, you have good friend, now think of it this way, are you actually getting any traffic from youtube organically? Probably yes or probably no, how can you know it for sure? Eliminate all unpredictable factors from the equation. Yes, stop sharing with any unpredictable traffic source (including your friends & family).
3. Always Keep Your Eye On Your Analytics
This is the biggest mistake I made since we started gaining good traction. I did not track analytics for one of our recent video and guess what? I lost on a huge traffic bump, what exactly do I mean by keep a keen eye on your analytics?
Look at the above analytics, I recorded this a week after we uploaded this video. I was not checking it on regular basis, only if I had checked it we would have leverage on that major traffic bump. The conversion was barely 5% when I checked, I figured out what was the problem and the video blasted like crazy. I changed a few tags and changed the thumbnail. Look at it now!
4. Change The Thumbnail If Your Video Is Not Getting Traffic
With the above video the problem was the thumbnail. The Content Manager in Sarphira uploaded the video with a thumbnail which was not clear enough and we lost the game.
When we made the thumbnail change the traffic blasted, it grew five times faster.
5. Don’t Go Overboard With Tags
I have seen many accounts (even Sarphira) using tags which are totally irrelevant to the content they have created. I can understand why you may want to use all of the 500 characters but don’t do that, keep it focused on your content, your channel and your genre.
I will show an example from one good Youtuber called Vanessa Lau who grew really fast in the influencer niche. I haven’t seen any account yet who has more focused tags on their videos than her. Even my tags aren’t that focused majority of times, check out how she uses tags below and try as close as you can to follow what she does.
Look at her tags, she is ranking on every one of them and all of her tags are way focused than the tags you will find on any average video. I believe that is the only reason why she has grown her channel from 30k to 86k in mere 5 months. (the plugin I used to see her tags is called VidIQ, its free)
6. Your Description Matters
You might or might not have noticed this, the description is one of the way Youtube filters you content for the keywords you are trying to rank for. I will show you an example:
If you see the words I have highlighted, all of them are highlighted by Youtube too. Why? Because youtube has used the words in the description and matched it with my search query and then delivered them to me in search result. Use this tip to your advantage but again don’t go overboard with keyword stuffing, keep it subtle but don’t forget to include your keywords in the description.
7. Consistency Don’t Matter
Yes, It doesn’t. It might be hard for you to believe me on this one because majority of the big name on internet go hard on being consistent and uploading on a specified time and repeating it. But consistency drives traffic is the biggest myth for youtube, consistency don’t matter, I have uploaded in morning, at night, in afternoon and even in midnight at times. The traction I got for each video was totally irrespective of time. There was once when we didn’t upload for two weeks still the next video we uploaded got us around 8k subs. So, don’t break your bone and make a hole in your pocket in being consistent, trust me on this one consistency don’t matter. Create good content around where there is more traffic you ll grow leaps and bounds.
I hope this pushes you guys to either start a start Youtube Channel or helps you to scale on Youtube Faster. Let me know if this helps you, cheers!
Published by
NikhIl Jadhav
Entrepreneur, Filmmaker, Video Marketer
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