? Your longterm YouTube strategy

It's been a crazy few weeks of traveling but now I'm back and got so many insights from some of the best in the industry.

This week I'm covering long-term YouTube strategies, something we often overlook when trying to get quick wins with the right video or style.

The right content for the right Audience

As I mentioned before many times, the YouTube algorithm is basically your audience. The better your video fits with an audience, the more YouTube will try and look for more people like that and then your video takes off. Yet this process is not as straightforward as it looks.

This is where I introduce Core, Casual, New. These are the type of people that watch your content.

Your Audience

Core

These are your true followers, anything you post they will watch and they will watch the whole thing. Even if you are a business. This is great and this is what you want everybody to be.

The reality is that there are a few of these. And to get more Core viewers you need to get them from the Casual and New viewers.

Casual

As the name indicates, people who watch your content when the topic is right. They are familiar with you and what you do. This group is bigger than the core viewers.

New

This group of people is the largest group, but they don't know you (yet). This stage is where most viewers start to become core viewers and eventually a buyer.

Total Addressable Market

Note that Core + Casual + New is not the whole wide world. You are usually operating in a niche so that is still capped.

Channel Strategy

Now the important part, how do you attract new viewers to your channel and how are you able to turn them into casual or even core viewers?

This is where our example comes in, Ahrefs and Sam Oh, VP of Marketing and the head of their YouTube channel. Last week I attended their conference in Singapore and the

the very first talk of the event was about how they grew their channel.

Spoiler alert, it wasn't quick and easy.

It took Sam since 2015 to learn and understand this strategy that took them to over 500k subscribers and the biggest channel in the SEO niche.

Foundation

What I'm talking about is mainly for channels of businesses and brands, for everyone who is trying to make money from YouTube, and for those who use YouTube as a marketing tool.

Majority of your content is gonna start out to be for your core audience or your evergreen kind of content.

• How-to's
• Case studies
• Tutorials
• Listicles
• ...

To be honest, it's not very sexy but your core audience will watch it and it will provide massive value to them. It gets you to the stage where you are top of mind for the core people in that niche. This type of content attracts search traffic, which is usually the smaller traffic avenue on your channel.

These videos are shorter tutorials more often. What Sam then experimented with was combining multiple of these shorter videos into one longer 2h course on SEO.

To his surprise, that outperformed every video on their channel, even more so, it's the most watched video on SEO on YouTube.

3 years later it's still getting 1000 of views per day. We all know that this format works very well in any niche.

Growth

So it took Sam 6-7 years to get this foundation right. Then when he did, the growth of the channel plateaued. He needed to attract New viewers to continue growing the channel.

Now this is tricky in a niche like SEO, how are you going to get people interested in such a technical and fairly complicated topic?

This is where we start looking at the more mainstream stuff like Ryan Trahan and Mr Beast. Their content from 1-star reviews and 1$ vs $1,000,000 yachts can come in handy.

Sam started combining these popular styles with the SEO niche.

• If I start over again I would do this
• Rank #1 [Insert challenge]
• News Updates
• SEO + AI
• Ranking viral SEO tips

This way he got in front of more people than he would with his evergreen content. Then some of these people would filter through the rest of his content and become more casual or maybe even core viewers

Experiment

To get to this point, Sam experimented a lot. Not every video did well; plenty tanked and was just a miss, but that's part of YouTube.

So even when you are starting or you want quick results, understand what quick results mean. Have a funnel or pipeline in place to nurture your viewers.

And a final note: This strategy from New to Core can be done in phases over time, or you can incorporate it in your uploading strategy in shorter timeframes. For example, two out of four videos you upload are Core videos, one is a New video, and one is a Case study video, or whatever system you go for.

Over time, these ratios can change etc.

PS. If you took away one helpful thing from this newsletter, forward it to a friend.

If you are that friend, subscribe here.

Read previous editions here.