OUTDATED YouTube Tips you should IGNORE in 2023

 - If you, as a creator,

are trying to do nothing but go viral,

make long, boring intros,

focusing solely on search-based content,

and trying to beat some

mythical algorithm in 2023

I'm afraid you're doing YouTube all wrong.

So today we're going to go over

all of the outdated

YouTube tips and tricks

that you don't need to

waste your energy on.

And we're going to start

with a relatively new one,

separating your YouTube longs

and your YouTube shorts.

Ever since YouTube shorts became a thing

creators have been asking,

"Should I start a second

channel dedicated to shorts?"

Creators have worried that mixing shorts

and longs would damage their channel

and YouTube even admitted

TV problems with shorts.

So much so that they

disconnected the relationship

between shorts and longs over the summer.

But YouTube recently

reversed that decision

and they have now once

again bridged shorts

and longs together.

So much so they can work

on the same channel.

Over the last few months,

we have posted 20 to 30

shorts on our main channel

and they have not had a detrimental impact

on our long form content.

In fact, those videos are

performing as well as ever.

Admittedly, we haven't had a great success

with our YouTube shorts yet,

but we're safe in the

knowledge that we can test this

on our main channel.

As well as this, the new layout changes

introduced by YouTube

now mean that videos,

shorts, and live streams

all have their own dedicated

tabs on the channel

making things nice and clean

and easy to navigate for users.

YouTube shorts aren't going anywhere.

Monetization is coming to

that part of the platform

in February, and it is

one of the fastest ways

to grow your channel.

I'm afraid you can't ignore them anymore.

If you think that you can make shorts

that will appeal to and satisfy

the same target audience

as your long form videos, I

think it's time to experiment.

But what you don't need to experiment with

are YouTube intros.

Now, there is nothing

wrong in welcoming a viewer

into the video, but what

you don't need to do

is formally introduce

yourself, your channel,

what the channel is about and

why people should subscribe.

The moment your video starts,

it should be delivering

on what was promised in

the title and the thumbnail

and we call this the video hook.

According to a study from Microsoft,

people can lose interest in

something within eight seconds

and that is probably the mentality

of the average YouTube viewer.

Their time is precious

and you need to honor and respect that.

So in the first eight seconds,

don't waste time on you

and your channel, reaffirm

the value of a video itself.

Now you can if you want to

formally introduce yourself

and you can if you want

to ask people to subscribe

but do it after you've

engaged with the viewer

and offered something of

significant value to them already.

If you look at your

audience retention graphs

in the YouTube studio,

you will soon discover

that you lose a large chunk

of your audience in the first

30 seconds of every video.

For most creators, that is a

big problem that needs fixing

and it starts by getting

rid of YouTube intros.

Onto the next one

and we've covered this many

times before: video tags.

According to YouTube

tags play a minimal role

in video discovery.

In fact, what video tags

are most useful for today

are corrections of common

misspellings of keywords

or your channel name.

So in 2023, you should be spending less

than 23 seconds on video tags.

Now, I do realize some

irony in this statement

because if you have vidIQ installed

and you look at the video scorecard

you will see that we have

video tags in this very video.

Now, there's two reasons for that.

First of all, it's habit

that we can't get out of

and it literally takes us 23

seconds to put those tags in

by using one of our tools.

In the YouTube studio,

simply type in one keyword

and refresh vidIQ's tag suggestions

to give you hundreds of keywords

you can add to video tags

with a single click.

Or alternatively, you can

search for a video on YouTube

reveal all its video tags, copy them

and paste the ones you

want into your video.

You can get all of these tools

through the link in the description

and that took exactly

23 seconds to explain

how long you should be spending on tags.

And video tags naturally

leads us into our next topic

which is only making search-based content.

Now, don't get me wrong

search-based traffic can

bring in a lot of views,

especially for new creators

who are trying to get discovered.

However, over the long term,

YouTube puts the viewer first

and unless the viewer

has a specific intent,

a search-based content,

YouTube is based off of recommendations.

In fact, 70% of views on YouTube

are driven through recommendations.

The homepage, browse

features, suggested videos.

Now if you're a how to education channel

and you're wondering how

you're gonna get views

from browse features as opposed to search,

let me show you something.

The blue line here represents search views

while the green one

represents browse views

on the vidIQ channel.

And over the last three years,

the traffic sources

have basically flipped.

And the reasons behind this

are actually very intentional.

We shifted our strategy,

especially in thumbnails and titles

from an SEO approach to

a human emotion approach.

We're not trying to convince an algorithm

to show our videos through keywords.

We're trying to trigger

emotional curiosity in humans

to win the click and it's working.

So even though fundamentally

we're all about how to get more views,

how to get more subscribers,

how to get monetized,

go onto the vidIQ channel

and look at the recent videos

and you tell me if you see

any boring titles like that.

Search based content

may get you discovered.

But browse and suggested videos

keep viewers coming back.

Now let's talk about the

thorny issue of going viral.

Yes, it can bring explosive

growth to your channel

and it is an awesome dopamine hit,

but as for it being a

reliable and sustainable way

to grow a channel over

the long term, uh-uh.

Now this is especially true

if you're going outside

of your topic, your niche,

to create viral content.

Yes, you may get many, many

views and lots of subscribers,

but how loyal are they going to be?

Are they going to return

to your regular content programming?

And the pressure viral content

puts on a creator to repeat

can be unbearable.

Now, we have gone into a lot more detail

about the hidden dangers of going viral

and you can watch that video over here

after you've finished watching this video.

Now obviously in 2023 sub4sub doesn't work

but all the way back in

2018 sub4sub didn't work.

So there's nothing new here.

I'll just tell you what

I told you back then.

- Hey, you YouTuber.

- Hey.

- Fancy doing sub4sub?

- Absolutely.

- Great.

(sighing)

♪ Hello darkness, my old friend ♪

- I dunno, what do you think with

(scratching beard)

or without?

So a lot of creators have a problem

and it's something to

do with what they want.

They want to know how to

beat the YouTube algorithm.

Now, I will admit that we

have targeted that desire

in some of our thumbnails and titles,

but it's for good reason.

Because if we can get

you inside the video,

we can actually tell you what you need.

And in this instance,

you need to know the goal

of the YouTube recommendation system.

Now that goal basically

boils down to two principles.

YouTube is trying to find the

right video for the viewer

and their personalized

interest at the right time

and then to keep that

viewer on the platform

through more videos

and ensure they're

satisfied by the experience.

And that is why you need to focus

on making videos for your

audience and not the algorithm.

Once you start doing that

your videos will become

far more discoverable.

And now for a little bit

of a motivational push.

You are more valuable than what you think.

The creator economy is

growing at an exponential rate

and brands are starting

to realize the power

and influence of

creators, even small ones.

So you don't have to wait

until you have millions of subscribers

to start landing brand deals,

sponsorships, affiliates.

Nano influencers are creators

with less than 10,000

followers on social media.

Micro influencers are creators with

between 10,000 and 50,000

followers on social media.

And what brands are

wanting to do more and more

is establish relationships early

with these types of creators.

And the reasons for this is

because these influencers

can create very personal

connections with their viewers.

They tend to have higher engagement

and obviously a lower cost to the brand.

And you've already seen

case studies on this channel

of creators with less

than 1,000 subscribers

earning buckets of cash.

So start to think beyond

AdSense sooner than you think.

You've got to turn your

channel into a business

to make it sustainable

and turn your passionate

hobby into a career.

Now, while these are outdated principles

of YouTube channel growth

there're still plenty of

mistakes creators are making,

big ones by small channels

and this is how you fix them.