I collaborated with a personal brand struggling to expand its YouTube presence in the highly competitive finance niche.
Despite having over 50 videos, their channel had only amassed 5,500 subscribers over a span of three years.
This slow growth rate was incredibly discouraging considering that the videos were high quality.
Their early attempts to promote the channel using Facebook ads had yielded lackluster results, failing to generate significant subscribers.
Despite their best efforts, the channel had not experienced significant growth.
So I joined the team as an editor on August 24th, 2021.
And notice some of the biggest mistakes many YouTubers make and try to fix them.
We grew it from 5500 subscribers.
To 15,500 subscribers in less than 3 months.
A massive increase over time.
Not just that, our videos now rank on Google search results which brings in a 5.8% increase in our channel traffic
So in this youtube case study, I will be revealing the Step-by-Step action plan I took that leads to the overall success of this channel.
How It All Got Started
The channel was in a highly competitive space, The forex/crypto niche.
Despite starting the channel in 2019, my client struggled to achieve significant growth. Unlike other youtube success stories, my client failed to experience similar outcomes.
After conducting a comprehensive audit, it became apparent that the channel lacked several critical features.
- Not Optimized for SEO
- Videos weren’t organized into playlists
- They’re promoting it the wrong way
- They didn’t leverage the Youtube built-in feature.
The first approach was to SEO optimize the older videos first.
And that leads us to the next section
SEO Optimize Our Channel
This Chapter covers every step I took in optimizing the channel for the Search engine.
The optimization process was done in the following area.
- Video Title
- Video Description
- Thumbnails
- Video Tags
- Channel playlist
The very first approach I took was to Optimize the video title.
Video titles are a great way to tell search engines what your videos are all about.
That way, they could easily rank the video based on its keyword.
So I generated a list of medium tail keywords with the vidiQ tools.
Why medium tail keywords?
When starting out, you hear a lot of YouTubers say stuff like “choose low-difficulty keywords when started out”
Yeah? That works pretty well but wasn’t what I aimed for.
The channels have 50 videos and none was created in the low-difficulty keywords range.
So I had to optimize them around potential medium tail keywords they were created and could easily rank for.
Moreover, the channel isn’t just a new channel.
It has 5500 subs making it relatively easy to rank for medium tail keywords.
So I generated a list of these medium tail keywords using vidiQ and added them to the title.
Added a few to the video descriptions.
And also to the video tags as well.
And that changes allowed us to rank for some of the keywords we optimized it for.
That leads to an increase in views and subscribers by 38%.
That said!
Reverse Engineer Our Competitors Most Viewed Videos
So I created a list of our competitors and I noticed a big impact in one of their most popular videos.
Most of our competitor’s most viewed videos are on the topic ” forex millionaires” which tends to do well in terms of views and is a bit lengthy.
Even channels with lesser subscribers than ours still get a decent amount of views too on that topic.
So I accumulated these lists and we try to make something better.
But one more thing:
Those online videos were basically about each individual’s personal stories on how they become millionaires trading forex.
Luckily for my client, he was a multi-millionaire and due to that, we try to be more specific when making our video.
So we optimized our videos on that topic and for a fact that the post was SEO optimized.
We ranked no.1 for the keyword “Forex millionaire” and that brings in 10,293 views.
And for the fact that it was a video keyword, also got us that sweet spot on Google search results and brings in 798 views which is 9% of the total traffic.
Even though that may sound small, it definitely worth it effort.
So now How did we achieve this?
Firsts activate the VidiQ chrome extension.
Pop any keywords you want to get details on in the youtube search bar.
Enable the Inline Keywords to feature offered by VidiQ.
Now here you have them at your fingertips, spying on your competitor’s video tags.
And we added a few of these tags to ours.
And a few from Google keyword planner tools to our video tags also.
Why Google keyword planner?
The Google keyword planner is a keyword research tool owned by Google that shows you estimations of the number of searches generated by that keyword in a month.
So it makes it easy for Google to identify these keywords tags when they crawl the video.
How I Organized Our Channel Layout Which Increased Our Overall
Channel Performace
By 1.8% (20,196 views)
1.8% may sound small but it is 20.196 views.
I can explain.
Most channels’ layouts look like this.
But this setup doesn’t make your videos well organized.
The Truth is, there’s nothing wrong with this setup nor will it make a break your channel’s success.
But these setups make it uneasy for our audiences to sort our videos by categories.
E.g we are in the forex space and we make videos about anything related to forex trading.
So I organized our videos in this format and classified our videos into well-organized playlists like this.
And added a thriller video
And that setup improved our overall channel performance.
Ps: (Our best performing videos were used as the thriller video)
Organized Our Channel PlayLists
I noticed 40% of our traffic came from audiences who search our youtube channel name (Brand).
And when they do, they only land on our channel lists like this.
Well, as mentioned earlier.
This arrangement isn’t a bad idea as it is usually the default way youtube lists videos on every creator profile as shown above.
But it didn’t convert the way we wanted it to.
Our audiences can just pick a random video and call it a day.
Over there, Youtube just shows a list of videos from the order of the date published to the latest videos.
So we updated our playlists to this.
And when clicked, it leads you to these arrangements
So our videos are categorized in this manner.
So when our audiences land themselves here, they just don’t watch a video and call it a day.
The youtube video playlist is customized in a way that it plays another video when you just finished watching one.
And that goes live a circle.
And that setup resulted in 2846 views in total.
Pro Tips: Categorize Your Videos Into Playlists
Video Promotion
When people think of promoting their YouTube videos.
They think of Stuff like sharing it on social media like
- Facebook.
- Twitter.
- Instagram and more.
Yeah!
These platforms are great to promote your videos but it’s not going to give you that brand recognition you want.
Because social media posts are usually buried way down their news feed.
That is because social media are usually designed in a way that they need to be updated frequently.
This section shows how we promoted our video the right way which leads us to our brand and channel recognition.
So let’s dive right in.
How I Promoted Our Videos The Right Way
My client has a telegram group with over 5k members.
Once he makes a new video…we share it with this audience.
Pretty cool and that usually brings in traffic which may sound pretty unrealistic to me, about 12-20 views for that day and the other day, crickets.
But we need a better way to keep it rolling.
And the best option was
Quora.
I quickly build up a quora profile for the brand and grew it to over 19.5K content views in 48 days by answering over 100 questions
That may sound like a ton of work but the results? it is definitely worth the stress.
For each question answered, I added our videos as a guide to our audience so they can learn more.
For example, this question had 929 views and our client video was added to it.
And that brought quite a few eyeballs into our videos.
Same process for other videos too.
That how good sharing your videos on forums like quora can be and it all resulted in part of our channel Growth and brand awareness.
That said!
How End Screens And Youtube Cards Increased Channel Subscribers By 0.2%
67% of our viewers who watched our videos till the end have not subscribed to our channel.
The other 33% were our subcribers and they usually watch almost half of our videos which is bad for Viewers’ retention signal.
So we wanted to turn those not subscribers into subscribers.
So we leverage the Youtube built-in features which are End screens and cards and that helped us increase our channel subscribers by 0.2%.
This chapter will show you how it was executed in this youtube case study.
Cards
So I ended up activating video cards close to 40% of the total video watch time and it resulted in 78 clicks.
That sounds small, but it just only a few portions of our videos we activated video cards for, and it redirects users to our old videos which were not performing well in terms of views.
So that alone boosted those old video views and it started ranking.
Endscreens
If they watch our videos to the end, then we needed that little push to turn them into full-time subscribers.
Am referring to the 67% who haven’t subscribed yet.
So Endscreens helped us achieve that.
So that way, when they watch till the end, a pop-up on screens will appear like this.
2 of our most performing related videos with a Heavy box containing the Subscribe Icon, which appears to enable them to subscribe.
And it brought in 149 subscribers.
Key TakeAway
Add subscribe card to your videos on your channel.
Now I'll Like To Hear From You
What do you thinks about this case study?
Or is there any strategy you found new from todays post?
If so, let me know in the comments below and i will see you there.
