3 Tools To Grow On YouTube

If you are a creator or an entrepreneur who is looking to use social media to grow their brand, grow their business, then I believe the number one platform you should be focusing on is YouTube. It is mind boggling to me how powerful this platform is for growing a brand, growing a business. And I know this firsthand experience over the last year and a half that we’ve seen such amazing, incredible, explosive growth on YouTube. And at the same time we’ve been experiencing a lot of growth on all the other channels as well. On X, on LinkedIn, on Instagram. And it’s been incredible. But by far and away, the channel that’s had the biggest impact on the growth of the brand and the business in general has been YouTube. And there’s so many reasons for this.

The biggest reason, I think, is simply the fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine on the Internet, behind Google. YouTube is where everybody goes to find the answers to things and more importantly, find how to do things. So it’s such a great educational platform that the beauty of this, if you’re like, okay, what’s the point of having a search engine? Why does that matter? Well, the beauty of it is that with every other platform, when you put out a piece of content, it’s only going to live in the algorithm for maybe a couple of days at most. You put it on X, it disappears. Next day, maybe it comes up a week later. The beauty of YouTube is you can have one video go out today and then six months, nine months, a year and a half later it catches fire and it goes super viral. That’s the power of search engine optimization. If somebody goes and you have good evergreen content, that will always deliver value to somebody, regardless of when they consume it, there’s always a chance for that video to take off.

And then when it does, the reach that you have on YouTube compared to other platforms, I believe is so much deeper. So what I mean by this is if you’re reading something that I write on Twitter, on LinkedIn, we have a relationship and that’s going to hit you in a certain way. But there’s a difference in how the content hits. When you’re watching, when you’re listening, when you have that person’s voice and their face in your eyes and your ears, you build a deeper connection with that individual and with that brand. As a result, it builds a more ravenous audience that is very much in your back court. Like they have your back and they’re like, I support you, I like you, you’re my person, right?
All those things kind of combine to.
Make YouTube just incredibly powerful platform. And if you’re just starting off as a creator, YouTube is also very valuable because it has the whole monetization aspect, which is something that you can’t really get on the other platforms with the exception of x. But even there, it’s still just a shadow of what you can accomplish on YouTube. So in this video, I just want to share with you three of the tools that I use consistently as we’re looking at growing the YouTube channel. So if you’re starting off your channel or you have a channel already, these are three tools I recommend really diving in and learning how to master, because they’ll serve you very well. The first one is a site called viewstats.com. Viewstats.com. It’s very similar to Socialblade or TubeBuddy.
This was built by MrBeast and his team. It pretty much took an internal tool that they had built for their own purposes and then just gave it to the world and said, here you go. I use the free version of it. I just go there. And what I love about it is you can search different channels and you can see all sorts of information about.
How their views are trending over time, how their subscriber rate is trending over time.
You can dive into their videos and see how those have been performing, and you can get a deeper look into their analytics. Behind the scene of did they change their thumbnails? Did they try different titles with this video? And you can see the graph over time to see, okay, they made this tweak at this point and then the video took off. This is important because we’re trying to triangulate what works and what doesn’t. And when you just use the data that you collect from your videos, you’re not going to get a ton of.
Data points because you can only put.
Out so much content at a time. But if you can triangulate based off of your content, your competitors contents, and other people in your niche, what they’re doing and what seems to be working now, you can accelerate your learning and your growth. And so viewstats is a very, very powerful tool that I use for going and seeing other channels that are similar to me and what they’re finding is working and what isn’t working saves me a lot of time and energy. It also helps me quite a lot with the ideation process when I’m thinking, okay, what video do we want to do next? Because ideally we focus on doing videos that we know are going to perform well, that the audience really wants to see. The number one indicator of that is, has a competitor done a similar themed video recently? Did it do well? And if it did, there’s a good chance your audience will also want to see it. So that’s a way of thinking about competitor research to come up with topics and thumbnails and title ideas. View stats is awesome. Love that tool.
Next tool that I use is something called thumbnail test. What is it? Thumbnailtest.com YouTube says that they’re going to roll out later this year. A beta function for being able to do a b testing with your thumbnails on the platform natively. But until that rolls out, we’re kind of left to figure out on our own. So using a third party service like Thumbnailtest.com, what it allows you to do is go in there and load up multiple thumbnail concepts, multiple title concepts that you can then test in real time. And this is critical because you don’t necessarily know exactly what is going to hit until you put it out there and you see how it’s performing. But the analytics that you can get through YouTube aren’t robust enough to see hour by hour breakdown of click through rates and view time duration and how many people are liking when they see this thumbnail, how many people are subscribing when they see that title. Being able to get granular and do this type of a b testing makes you better prepared to understand what is going to work.
For instance, we just had a video go out a couple of days ago and I did probably 15 to 20 iterations where I swapped in this title with that title, with this thumbnail and then that thumbnail and just did multiple variations. I think I had four or five thumbnail concepts and two or three title ideas that all just kind of mixed and matched to see what was performing the best. And the difference between the best performing thumbnail title combination and the worst is the best one was probably doing a 5.2% click through rate with maybe seven and a half minute average view duration, which is like 35 37%. The worst was doing something like a 2.1 click through percent with like a five minute view duration. And so just by optimizing that one thing, I’ve over doubled the click through rate and almost doubled the view duration. So we know that the thumbnail title combination that we ultimately went with is the best one for what we had. There’s countless infinite options that we could run with. But of what we had available to us, we know that we have the best combination thumbnailtest.com is what allows us to do that.
The third tool that I use religiously our team relies on very heavily, is just YouTube studio. The amount of analytics that they give us access to is actually quite astonishing. It is remarkably robust. Now, you got to be careful because they give you access to so much data. It can be very easy to go down rabbit holes in pursuing data for the sake of data, but that more information isn’t necessarily making you better informed, right? So got to be careful that you don’t fall down the hole into putting together connecting dots that don’t need to be connected. So I do recommend though, spending time going through the studio and getting really intimately familiar with what those metrics are that really matter and then how to keep a finger on those pulses. Because that information in there can be the difference between finding a video and making a slight tweak that could have it go viral. If you just made that slight little tweak to, say, some ad placement or something like that, you don’t know until you go in there and you actually look at the data.

So YouTube studio has been immensely valuable, but again, you got to be really careful because you can just fall into the rabbit hole of endlessly searching analytics that don’t lead you anywhere. But those are three tools that I find have been very, very useful as we’ve been growing up, the YouTube channel. So hopefully they serve you well. Thanks for being here, guys. We’ll catch you in the next episode. Until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.