How Do You Promote a YouTube Channel Without Ad Spend? (Recorded 2021)

How do you promote a YouTube channel?

Understand your avatar, the type of client you want to attract, and make videos that are genuinely relevant to those people, because otherwise anyone who does find you will not stick around and your channel gets penalised.

Vince's point is that if people leave quickly, YouTube notices, so relevance matters from the start. But even with that in place, if you cannot rank your videos towards the top of the searches, nobody will ever find you. You can have the best video ever made, with the best message to market match, and it is useless if it cannot be found. There are other videos in this course covering the actual ranking strategies in detail, so it is worth watching those, but the biggest tip is understanding what it takes to rank at the top, which is something both Vince and Simon help clients do successfully.

How long does it take for a YouTube channel to grow?

As Simon puts it, that is a bit like asking how long a piece of string is, but with the right, engaging content it can grow really quickly.

Being found is the hardest part, as Vince pointed out, but once a channel starts getting found and ranked, it begins showing up in other people's suggestions and effectively grows on its own. The real answer is to do it properly: understand the audience, get the content found, and growth can follow quickly. Keep putting out videos without being found, though, and you could still be there five years later with no following, whereas doing it properly can mean building a substantial subscriber base within a year.

What is the actual benefit of having a YouTube channel?

People are searching every single day, every single minute, for solutions to their problems, whether that is fixing a marriage, making money online, or losing weight, and a channel that solves those problems in front of them can build recognition quickly, as Vince describes it.

Andy backed this up with an example: his mum, who was turning seventy two that week, needed to fit a roller blind, went straight to YouTube, searched how to fit roller blinds, and two minutes later knew exactly how to do it. That, Andy said, cuts against the misconception that YouTube is just for younger people. It is used across all age groups now, effectively as a search engine, in the same way people treat Google.

Will YouTube win over channels like Facebook in the long term?

Yes, both Simon and Vince think so, largely because Facebook has become saturated with adverts while YouTube content sticks around and is increasingly rewarded for quality.

Simon raised Amazon's push into Twitch as a comparison, effectively buying influencers to pull gamers and younger audiences across to that platform. On Facebook, Simon's personal belief is that the boost button was where things went wrong, because it let every business on the planet boost content or run ads, which is great for Facebook's revenue but floods the platform. Simon is hopeful YouTube will stay more selective, in part because it already rewards better, more engaging content, and content on YouTube lasts, where something posted on Facebook today can be gone within three hours. Simon also pointed out that YouTube is not just a search engine, it is also a place people go to be entertained and educated, and because it is owned by Google, the targeting available to marketers is far better than what Facebook offers, which gives it more dimensions than a platform like Facebook.

What is a TrueView in YouTube advertising?

A TrueView, as Simon defines it, is a view of thirty seconds or more.

That matters because a platform like Facebook runs on a CPM model, charging per thousand impressions, and some of those impressions might only be someone scrolling past for three seconds. You get a slight brand impression from that, but nothing like the engagement a genuine thirty second TrueView represents.

Is Facebook or YouTube better for marketing?

Used together, according to Simon, though he leans towards YouTube being best for return on investment and for top of funnel and education work, with Facebook excelling at remarketing.

Simon was quick to say this is not Facebook bashing, noting that he has written what he considers one of the best Facebook Ads Manager courses available, still on sale, with a discount code available to anyone who asks. But the honest answer is that using YouTube and Facebook together is the way forward, with results depending on the industry. Vince agreed, describing this as becoming omnipresent online, since relying on a single channel is not enough any more: focus on YouTube for the top of the funnel, then remarket through platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Google Search. Simon added that a lot of agencies and organisations work in silos, whereas the approach here is YouTube first, not YouTube only, using other platforms at different points in the funnel. He also warned that YouTube needs a specialist: having run an MCC account with Google for twenty years, he said he is still learning something new about the platform most days, and that even some of the strongest PPC people he has interviewed do not understand YouTube audience management anywhere near well enough.

How do you get to four thousand hours of watch time on YouTube?

Through two routes, as Vince explains: organic ranking that gets your relevant videos shared and recommended, and driving targeted traffic to those videos directly.

Both, combined with making longer videos, get you there faster, since a ten to twenty minute video where people watch half of it delivers five to fifteen minutes of watch time per view, compared with only a fraction of that from a two minute video with the same number of views. Vince's own top tip is interviewing experts in different fields for twenty to thirty minutes at a time, because those guests then share the interview with their own audience, bringing in more viewers while also racking up longer watch times, which is effectively what this video itself is doing by being shared across both parties' channels.

Why might a YouTube channel not be growing?

Realistically, because the content is not engaging enough, it is targeting the wrong audience, it is not appearing in searches, or it has not been optimised in the description and tags, so it simply is not getting views.

Andy joked that it might just be rubbish, which the panel waved off, but the more serious answer covers those same points: relevance, discoverability and basic on-page optimisation.

How much can you earn from YouTube?

The real opportunity is not the platform's own payouts, it is using your channel to sell your own product or course.

There is a common misconception that once you are monetised the money starts flowing in immediately, and while a handful of influencers with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers do make a fortune, that is not the typical path. It takes hard work and good content over a long period, and the actual money making opportunity on YouTube is using it as a platform to sell what you offer.