Our channel reached 100 subscribers on July 2.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQjOVgcoZvC6-EK0xgankpQ
I know it's not a huge number but I am proud of myself and my co-founder, @lucygliang, for having produced consistently 3 videos a week - we are at 56 videos published with 104 subscribers as of today.
Some learnings in case they're helpful to others / others have comments on what we could try:
Majority of our search traffic comes from people searching for product reviews, and then bleeds into other videos through suggested traffic.
I highly recommend looking for what [popular entity] people in your niche tend to search for. Like for entrepreneurship, books would be a thing.
TubeBuddy has been very helpful in directing us toward which topics to talk about. It has been on-point with its predictions so far.
But breaking it down in case you don't want to pay for TubeBuddy, I think it looks at is:
Search volume: can be found for free with Keywords Everywhere extension
Oldness of current top 5 videos: if they're all older than 2 years, you're good to go
Number of videos for your search term: if it's in 100k's, then good. Millions is too competitive
How optimized are the top 5 videos for your search term: you can install the free TubeBuddy version to see what tags the top 5 videos are using.
If you're also in the health niche, besides doing product reviews, I see that "how many __" and "how much ___" type topics do really well.
When we started saying "by the end of this video {unexpected reveal}", our audience retention shot up from 30s percent to 40s percent.
When we started adding B-Images and B-Roll over our videos every 20-60s, our audience retention shot up for the first week to over 60-80s percent.
Asking for subscribe right after intro + showing in-video text "remember to subscribe" about 2 minutes into video + not ending the video officially - just suddenly going into outro image with my voiceover asking for subscribe has increased the rate of subscribes on our channel (I think. At least it's correlated, if not causal).
We're trying a new format of videos which we call the "picnic" format where Lucy and I chill in a park, drink tea, and discuss (scripted) topics with the points we're going to touch upon listed to the left of us, so people can know what's coming. Let's see what it does to retention and engagement.
A bigger milestone has been that some of our video viewers actually bought our book! That's awesome validation of the power of trust through content marketing.
Our goal going forward is to continue making more videos on the topics we are seeing work + save 30% of our time for experimenting with new formats and ideas.
If anyone has any directional ideas we could look into, I'm all ears :)
Thanks for reading!