PDF Summary:YouTube Secrets, by Sean Cannell and Benji Travis

What’s the secret to running a successful YouTube channel? Is it a matter of deciphering YouTube’s algorithms? Or of finding a magical formula for making videos that go viral? According to prominent YouTubers Benji Travis and Sean Cannell, actually the “secret” is that all it takes is a sound business model.

In this guide, we’ll examine Travis and Cannell’s advice on how to develop your YouTube business model. This begins with identifying a niche for your videos. We’ll also present principles for producing your videos and growing your audience, and we’ll conclude with suggestions on finding and implementing the most effective revenue streams for your channel.

Along the way, we’ll also discuss advice from other books on starting a business or business venture, which illustrate how Travis and Cannell’s advice represents a specific application (YouTube) of more universal business principles.

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CTR stands for “click-through rate.” It represents how often users click on your video when they see the video thumbnail. To maximize this, make sure your video title and thumbnail image clearly identify the value viewers can expect to get from the video.

AVD stands for “average view duration.” It’s the average amount of time viewers spend watching a given video before browsing to something else. The time that a viewer is willing to spend on a given video is a good measure of how engaging they find that video. Following the authors’ advice on how to make videos should help to make your videos engaging.

APV stands for “average percentage viewed.” This is the same as average view duration, except that it’s expressed as a percentage of the video’s length instead of the amount of time spent watching it.

AVPV stands for “average views per viewer.” It’s the average number of videos on your channel that someone watches in a row before going to another channel. How many of your videos people watch in a row provides a measure of how well your channel is engaging your audience, and how much they’re likely to want more of your content when they discover you. Maximizing this metric is one of the reasons the authors recommend ending each of your videos by recommending another video, as we discussed earlier.

Choosing Good Metrics

The metrics that Travis and Cannell recommend using represent another specific application of more general business principles. In The Lean Startup, Ries discusses how to choose the right metrics for your company. His discussion helps explain why the four quantities that Travis and Cannell selected are good metrics for a YouTube business.

Ries’s first rule for choosing good metrics is to avoid “vanity metrics” that inevitably go up over time and don’t really tell you much about how well your business is performing. In the case of a YouTube channel, the total number of videos you’ve posted or the total number of views your channel has gotten are examples of vanity metrics.

Ries’s second rule is to use “cohort metrics” rather than aggregate metrics when possible. Cohort metrics divide up users into groups based on when they became users, and track the behavior of each group to give you a more accurate picture of how people are reacting to your product. For example, suppose a lot of people sign up for your service because you’ve got good marketing, but then leave shortly thereafter because you’re not delivering on your marketing promises. Cohort metrics would make this trend obvious, alerting you to the problem. But if you just track your total number of users over time, that might hide the trend, because new people joining would make up for the ones leaving, creating an illusion of slow, steady growth.

The metrics that Travis and Cannell recommend work a lot like cohort metrics. They track individual users and individual instances instead of groups and time periods, but they give you real-time information about how your viewers are reacting throughout the user-experience journey: CTR measures how well you’re attracting people to click on your videos, AVD and APV measure how long the ones who click stay engaged on a particular video, and AVPV measures how long they engage with your channel. So they give you the same kind of information that cohort metrics would.

Build a Community of Viewers

While it’s crucial to create quality content, content by itself is not enough to make your YouTube business successful. Travis and Cannell explain that you also need to build a community of dedicated viewers who are united by their common interest in your content. Depending on your content, you might build a community from scratch around a topic that wasn’t previously covered on YouTube, or you might gather a following within a unique niche of an existing community.

Either way, as you develop your vision for your channel and come up with ideas for videos, consider not only what types of value you can provide, but also who it’s for. The better you understand your audience, the better you’ll be able to create a sense of friendship with them in your videos.

Particularly if there’s already a community of people united by a common interest in your topic, Travis and Cannell say you should find out who their prominent influencers are—especially what other YouTube channels they already subscribe to. It’s also good to know how many of them there are, what their level of income is, and what kind of things they’re willing to spend money on, as this will help you identify which revenue streams to focus on. (We’ll talk more about revenue in the next section.) Beyond understanding and keeping your target audience in mind when creating content, the authors recommend using several methods to build your community, which we’ll discuss in turn.

More Reasons to Understand Your Audience and Their Influencers

As we discussed earlier in relation to Blue Ocean Strategy, you need to understand who your users are and what they care about so you can design your product to be uniquely valuable to them. Thus, getting to know your viewers is not only essential for building a sense of community around your channel, but also for identifying what content they will find valuable.

Kim and Mauborgne recommend familiarizing yourself with all the alternatives that your customers have—especially different products that provide other ways of satisfying the same needs or desires. Sometimes you can create a particularly successful product by combining features or capabilities that your customers normally get from different products into a single, unique offering.

When you’re running a YouTube channel, your viewers’ alternatives are the other influencers whom they follow. So studying these influencers can help you determine both what your customers value (based on the commonalities between them) and how you can make your own channel unique (by providing a unique combination of things that they value). For example, maybe your audience watches a lot of gardening how-to videos and also a lot of comedy videos, so you carve out a niche for yourself by making humorous gardening videos.

Post Regularly

According to Travis and Cannell, one of the most important ways to build your community is to post videos frequently and at regular intervals. This is because the more frequently and consistently your viewers see your face and hear from you by watching your videos, the more they will feel a sense of connection with you.

So, if possible, post at least one video per week. If you can realistically make enough good videos to post two or three a week, that’s even better. If your videos are very short (less than 60 seconds) it may even be worth posting as many as five videos per day. But if you only post one video a month and do so regularly, that‘s still better than only posting videos sporadically.

Exceptions to Posting Every Week

The principle that it’s important for your viewers to see you regularly so they can maintain their sense of community with you makes intuitive sense, but the optimal frequency of posting videos for your channel will vary depending on who your viewers are and what kind of value they find in your videos.

Some channels have experienced great success while posting less than one video per month. Generally, these channels post videos about big projects (such as building a complicated robot) or cinematic productions that take months to create. Because of the work that goes into them, these videos deliver value in a unique niche that more-frequently posted videos can’t fill.

Respond to Comments

Perhaps the most obvious way to build a sense of community with your viewers is to encourage two-way discussion in the comments section of your videos. You can stimulate discussion in the comments section by asking your viewers a question in your video or encouraging them to share their thoughts on a certain issue. Travis and Cannell emphasize the importance of responding to all your viewers’ comments, especially when you’re first getting started.

Dealing With Negative Comments

Beware that not all comments are well-intentioned. Sometimes “trolls” will leave comments aimed only at tearing you down or suppressing your message. Travis and Cannell acknowledge this and mention that you need enough courage to accept that “trolls” are a fact of life on YouTube.

Some YouTubers deal with trolls by responding to them in ways that deescalate the conflict and that even garner extra attention from followers. If you’re being trolled, consider finding a neutral and humorous way to respond to them—even if you don’t silence the troll, hopefully your other followers will find your repartee clever.

Engage Your Audience Live

Another way to build a stronger sense of community among your viewers is to engage with them in real time. You can do this within YouTube itself using the live-streaming feature. With live-streaming, your video feed is broadcast in real time, and your viewers have access to a chat window. So you can use it to respond to questions as they are asked, or receive instant, live feedback as you present information or entertainment.

Depending on your audience and where they congregate, you may also be able to engage with them in person by attending conferences or giving live performances in venues that they frequent.

(Shortform note: Travis and Cannell are basically applying one of Dale Carnegie’s principles of likeability to YouTube. In How to Win Friends and Influence People, Carnegie points out that people tend to be interested in themselves above all else. So one of the best ways to make them like you is to show interest in them. Giving your viewers a chance to talk about themselves, ask questions, and interact with you in real time shows that you’re interested in them. Carnegie also says you can build your influence by going out of your way to talk to people who are “beneath” you, like lower-level employees in a company you manage, or, in this case, viewers on YouTube.)

Develop Your Revenue Streams

Travis and Cannell explain that in a YouTube business, revenue comes third, at least chronologically. First, you create valuable content. Then you build up a community around your content. The influence that you have over this community is what enables you to make money.

Once you have enough influence, there are several ways you can make money. Depending on the type of content you create and your community’s interests, some of them will be more viable than others. So focus on the ones that fit the best with your community and with your vision for your channel.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense is an algorithm that selects ads to display on YouTube videos, monitors how often they are viewed or clicked on, and bills the company running the ad accordingly. If your channel is enrolled in the YouTube Partner Program, Adsense also pays you a percentage of the money it collects from the ads that it runs on your videos. Your channel needs at least a thousand subscribers to be eligible for the Partner program.

(Shortform note: Not all videos that YouTube allows on their platform are eligible for Adsense monetization, even after your channel has been admitted to the Partner program. To earn Adsense revenue, your videos also have to be deemed “advertiser friendly,” either by YouTube’s algorithms or their manual review process. For some channels, this can be a significant source of frustration, especially as the advertiser-friendly guidelines change from time to time.)

Product Promotions

Regardless of whether your channel’s enrolled in YouTube’s Partner Program and whether your videos are ad-friendly, you can make money promoting products that you know would appeal to your subscribers. Many online retail platforms (such as eBay, Amazon, and Shopify) provide “affiliate marketing” programs, to help their merchants connect with influencers who can promote their products. With an account in an affiliate program, you can get personalized links to products on the online marketplace that pay you a percentage of the profits from every sale that results from people following the link. Companies may also pay you a flat fee to promote their products in your videos.

However, Travis and Cannell caution you not to promote a product unless you genuinely believe your viewers will like it and benefit from it. Pitching products that aren’t good can hurt your YouTube business by undermining your influence.

Affiliate Marketing Regulations

If you choose to do any kind of product promotion, make sure to research applicable regulations. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires you to disclose any financial interest or personal relationship that you have with the company that makes or distributes the product you’re promoting. You can just explain in your video whether the company gave you a free sample, promised you a commission on products sold, or whatever the case may be. But your disclosure statement should be ‘clear and hard to miss’ according to the FTC.

The FTC also prohibits using false information in marketing. So don’t tell people a product is great unless you’ve actually tried it out and verified that it is great. If you haven’t tried it, or if you tried it and thought it was terrible, promoting it on your YouTube channel could not only damage your credibility with your audience, but potentially land you in court.

Merchandise

You can also use your YouTube channel to promote your own products. If you already have a business that sells products or services, you may earn more money indirectly from promoting them on your YouTube channel than directly through other mechanisms.

If you don’t already have products or services to sell, you can always start selling branded merchandise, such as T-shirts and coffee mugs with your channel logo on them. And there are services that will handle production and distribution for you, so you can create a new revenue stream without taking time away from video production.

(Shortform note: Another merchandising tactic that can be particularly effective for some influencers is to partner with an existing company. This works because both parties bring unique assets to the table: You bring your expertise about what kind of product your viewers want and your influence to market the product. The company brings manufacturing expertise and capabilities.)

Crowdfunding

As the authors point out, you can also fund your channel through direct patronage of people who appreciate your content. There are a couple of mechanisms for collecting donations from patrons.

Within YouTube itself, if you have over a thousand subscribers you can enable “channel memberships.” This allows viewers to support your channel with recurring monthly donations. YouTube keeps 30% of the membership payments and gives you the remaining 70%.

There are also third-party crowdfunding platforms, of which Patreon is the most popular among YouTubers. It, too, enables you to receive monthly donations from supporters, and it takes only 10% of the funds. But it lacks the convenience of direct integration with YouTube.

Principles for Crowdfunding Success

In his Success Principles, author Jack Canfield offers a number of tips on making crowdfunding work:

• Tell your story: Show people why what you’re doing is worth doing. In this case, that would mean highlighting the value your videos deliver.

• Ask for money: You might think that if you have a Patreon page set up for your channel and you’re delivering quality content, it’s obvious that you want people to support you financially so you can continue to produce more content. But Canfield says it’s still important to ask for donations explicitly. And when you do, clearly explain how you’ll use the money that people donate.

• Testimonials: Encourage other people to share how they’ve benefited from your work.

• Reward donors: Perks for supporting your cause help to incentivize donations. For example, you could offer early or exclusive access to certain videos. However, note that some platforms restrict what types of rewards you can offer.

• Post updates: Posting regular updates about your progress and plans helps to reassure your donors that you’ll deliver (or continue to deliver) the value you’ve promised.