How I managed to get #1 on YouTube

I just noticed that one of my video tutorials on YouTube is #1 for the search "google meet camera not working"! How did I achieve this? And why did I start a YouTube channel in the first place?

Mid-March, due to the pandemic, my customers and partners had to cancel all the trainings they had booked me for. Suddenly I had plenty of time at hand and was wondering what I should do with this extra time. And I was wondering how I should compensate for all the lost revenue.

After my initial shock, paired with feeling helpless, I decided to get off my bum and start doing something I had put off for a later day. I remembered that while I was reading the great book Entrepreneurial you by Dorie Clark before I started my own business, I had the idea of launching a YouTube channel.

In that book Dorie talks about having multiple revenue streams instead of relying only on one form of revenue. That really resonated with me as my only revenue stream, giving face to face trainings, was failing and I had no other means of earning money. So I decided on earning some money on YouTube. Easy, right?

How do you earn money on YouTube?

After doing some research on how to earn money on YouTube I quickly understood that it's not as easy as many professional YouTubers make it look. As a matter of fact, I haven't earned a single dime on YouTube and I'm far from doing so in the coming months. Below you see my YouTube channel stats as of August 28th 2020 compared to the goal for monetizing my channel.

But nevertheless, I decided on starting my own YouTube channel. I'm guessing, that as of today, it will require at least eighteen more months until I can start monetizing my YouTube channel.

Let's get started!

I must admit that when I decided to launch my own YouTube channel, I had no clue what I was doing. What should the videos be about? How professional / casual should I appear? How long should the videos be? What for software do I need? How do I get good audio quality? Do I need a jingle? Questions upon questions.

After doing my research (I never do anything without researching first!) I decided to stop thinking and start doing. On March 17th 2020 I published my first ever YouTube video on my newly launched saperis channel. (see image below)

And, as expected, it went viral...not! It turns out the YouTube community wasn't waiting on my video tutorials. In fact, they didn't even know I existed! So how could I make them notice me and my, in my own opinion, really mind-blowing video tutorials about everything G Suite?

Solving Problems and YouTube SEO

We all know that we should optimize our websites for search engines like Google, Bing, etc. This is called SEO and is one of the core competencies of Digital Marketing.

What I didn't consider when I started my YouTube journey is that YouTube is a search engine as well!

YouTube’s user-friendliness, combined with the soaring popularity of video content, has made it the second largest search engine behind Google. With 3 billion searches per month, YouTube’s search volume is larger than that of Bing, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.com combined. 

Forbes

Just like with websites you have to optimize your YouTube videos to be found by the viewers. This involves things like the title, tags, description, playlists, how consistently you post new videos and even the look of your thumbnail.

But the most important thing is: what are YouTube viewers actually searching for? What problems do they have that I can help them solve? This seems so obvious when writing about it, but I totally ignored this fact when I started making my first video tutorials.

This is really the foundation of all business. Why do people buy things? It's either to solve a problem or to fulfill a desire. So if with my YouTube channel I'm not addressing these problems or desires, why in the world would anyone watch my videos?

How I made a top-ranking video on YouTube

So how did I get my video Google Meet Camera not working to rank at number one for exactly that search term? Here's the exact formula:

R(esearch) * H(ard work) * S(EO) / L(uck)

I have learned that in order to be successful on YouTube, it takes lots of time and effort. And even with all of that, you still don't have guaranteed success. For instance, some of my videos have not even reached 20 views. What went wrong with those videos? Maybe I'm not helping solve an important enough problem. Or maybe my YouTube SEO was off. Who knows.

Many videos to come

Even though I'm not earning any money from my YouTube videos, I'll keep on posting new video tutorials every week. Why? Because of the following reasons:

• I'm helping people solve problems
• It helps me establish myself as a "Trusted Source" (a concept from "Entrepreneurial you")
• It's a great marketing tool (it's gotten me paid jobs doing IT learning films for one of my customers)
• It's an awesome learning opportunity for me as an entrepreneur
• It's fun!

Am I really #1?

The header image you see was taken on August 28th 2020 in a Safari browser window and me not being logged in with my Google account. This is so that YouTube doesn't serve my videos based on my browsing history, since I wasn't logged in and never use Safari.

Will my video also be number one on YouTube when you search for "google meet camera not working"? Let's try it out! And if not; oh, I could write books about trying to understand the "YouTube Algorithm"...