Growing a YouTube channel is not easy so today we speak to Rob Wilson, vidIQ's YouTube channel master, who together with the team grew the channel to over 450 000 subscribers.
With over 500 videos on the channel and millions of views, Rob shares valuable lessons he learned along the way.
Don't forget to leave a review and subscribe in your favorite podcast app!
Any questions or comments? feel free to email me Liron@vidIQ.com
Growing a YouTube channel is not easy so today we speak to Rob Wilson, vidIQ's YouTube channel master, who together with the team grew the channel to over 450 000 subscribers.
With over 500 videos on the channel and millions of views, Rob shares valuable lessons he learned along the way.
Don't forget to leave a review and subscribe in your favorite podcast app!
Any questions or comments? feel free to email me Liron@vidIQ.com
Liron Segev: It takes a lot of talent to be able to take a channel and grow it to over 450,000 subscribers. Lots of videos, lots of videos, views, and lots of viral videos as well. So, today we're going to chat to Rob Wilson, who looks after the vidIQ channel, and he's going to share with us things that he has learned managing and creating content for vidIQ, tips and tricks that you can apply to your own channel and to get your channel growing. If you want to know what his tips and tricks are, what he looks for in his analytics, what he looks for when he's creating content, this is the video for you.
Speaker 2: Welcome to TubeTalk, the show dedicated to helping you become a better video creator so you can get more views, subscribers, and build your audience. Brought to you by vidIQ. Download for free at vidIQ.com
Liron Segev: And welcome to another episode of TubeTalk. My name is Liron Segev. I am the director of customer success here at vidIQ, where every day I help creators big and small level up their channels, get more subscribers, more views, in less time. So, today, we've got Mr. Wilson, the one and only, the one who looks after the vidIQ channel, who has grown it to insane heights, lots of viral videos. And I want to ask Rob, what has he learned from running the vidIQ channel? How can that help each and every single one of us? So, Rob, welcome to TubeTalk.
Rob Wilson: Thank you very much for having me on Liron. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. I think I started making videos on the channel in April, 2016, and I've been... Well, since everybody else has got a director's title here, I am going to call myself the director of video content, and I've been that since October, 2017. So, full-time, two and a half years.
Liron Segev: So, going full time on YouTube, essentially. This is what it boils down to.
Rob Wilson: Yeah. I used to have my own channel, a tech channel, and I was juggling two things at the same time. But when the boss here at vidIQ was impressed with the work I was doing freelance in vidIQ, they are for me the opportunity to turn my passion into a career, and I didn't say no, couldn't say no, really. And ever since, it's been the dream job and journey into YouTube.
Liron Segev: Well, and for those who want, we'll have a link in the description for watching Rob Wilson's animated video.
Rob Wilson: Yeah, I forgot about that. Good [inaudible 00:02:19] about that.
Liron Segev: You see how weave that in? That was good, right?
Rob Wilson: Very good.
Liron Segev: All right. So, Rob, speaking of being good, which is what you are in getting viral videos, getting the right topics, being able to do the right research, over your years of experience with your own channel and now bringing it across the vidIQ's channel, you've got a bunch of tips and tricks you want to share with us. So, let's hit it. What's tip number one?
Rob Wilson: Yeah. So, the first one I think is something that a lot of video creators when they first start out on YouTube they don't pay enough attention to, and that is the aftermath of the video itself. A lot of people, myself included, put in a lot of time, effort, resources, and mental energy into the creation of the video, but you have to get a potential viewer to click on that video. And that's only successfully done through a combination of title it, first of all for many creators, is keyword research discoverable and then enticeable to click on through a bit of a story in the title. The way people are going to stop scrolling through search results and browse and subscription feeds is the thumbnail. You want to be having a thumbnail of some kind that makes a person stop scrolling, and then the title entices them to actually click on the thumbnail.
At vidIQ, I continued what I was doing with my old channel, which was to have a template and then maybe change an icon on a bit of text. So, I might spend maybe a minimum of five, 10 minutes on a thumbnail. And back in 2018, we had a click through rate of somewhere in a region of like two and a half, 3%, so we knew we could do better. And through the course of 2018, moving into 2019, it was Jeremy Vest who's the director of marketing. He's another director at vidIQ. But he's also had a lot of experience creating thumbnails for clients on other channels, and he started to mentor me a little bit in improving our thumbnails. There's a lot of general practices such as making your thumbnails consistent, having a simple format, so less elements is actually better. You don't want a busy, chaotic thumbnail. Color and branding.
And perhaps the most important thing I learned through creating thumbnails and spending time on them is that most of us crate thumbnails on a nice big, beautiful, 32 inch widescreen or whatever, but there's only one person who will ever see that thumbnail of that size and that is you, the creator. What you have to realize is that people see these thumbnails at five or 10% of their ideal size, and so you have to factor that in. That means that the thumbnail has to tell a story, a fraction of its size, and so you have less elements, only a few primary colors in there.
And when we started to implement those changes over the course of six to 12 months, we saw our click through rate increase from two and a half percent to five, 6%, and it's still not where it should be but we had a benchmark of a percentage and we wanted to improve on that. And through doing that, we didn't just improve our view counts by two, three, 4%, because we were, essentially, doubling our click through rate, we were increasing our view count by a massive amount, and that led into YouTube distributing our content to more users going forward. So, I think, right now, I think for the majority of video creators, whatever length of time you're spending on thumbnails, double it, potentially triple it. A lot of people will hopefully come back to [inaudible 00:06:06] anybody else who says it and say, "Yeah, you were right." I put in the same amount of work into my videos, but I'm getting so many more views because the thumbnail itself. The shop window, the shop front is more enticing for their potential customer.
Liron Segev: Yeah. And it's important what you said, it's the thumbnail has got the mission of just one thing: stopping someone from scrolling.
Rob Wilson: I'd say so, yeah.
Liron Segev: The more attractive your thumbnail is and the more eye catching that it is, the easier it's going to be to get somebody's attention. They simply scroll over, they look at your title, and together, as a unit, they pretty much sell themselves and then says, "Oh, wow, I need to click on this. I want to see what's going on." And that seems to be quite a big change on the vidIQ channel, particularly if you look at the old videos compared to the new ones, it made a world of a difference. Is there something that we should be paying much, much more attention to, would you say?
Rob Wilson: Yeah. So, at the beginning of the vidIQ thumbnails, I had this big, bright starburst with me in the foreground, but it wouldn't be zoomed into my face, and I'd try and have an action but I didn't have the right lighting wither. So, there was a lot of fundamental things that weren't quite right with the thumbnails. A good way to look at this is try and look at a foreign language channel and see if you can work out what's going on or what the video's about by just looking at the thumbnails.
And you'll tend to find that the most successful thumbnails very rarely rely on text, and then the thumbnail comes almost like a universal language. It doesn't require me to spell out exactly what's going on. And we actually have a Spanish vidIQ channel, and the Spanish channel manager uses, pretty much, our thumbnails. They may change a bit of text here and there, but generally speaking, because of how the elements are already in place, they don't have to do too much. I think that's a good indication of how a thumbnail, as you say, needs to stop the person from scrolling through whatever they looking at.
Liron Segev: Yeah. And a big tip here is also not to repeat your entire title in your thumbnails. It's just not a point in doing that. It's such a small real estate, use those elements to really grab attention, and get somebody to read your title.
Rob Wilson: Yeah. I think a good example of that might be, let's say the title of the video is, "How to Save Money Whilst Studying at College," instead of putting that entire title in the thumbnail, what you could do in the thumbnail is just have a figure that says, "Plus $500." So, the big headline statement of like, "This is how much you could save," and then a title just extrapolating about saying, "You could save $500 while you're at college."
Liron Segev: Okay. So, now we understand thumbnails. You've prioritized that, you've made that your mission to really understand the science of thumbnails and really dive into that. Does that give you those viral videos? I mean you seem to be hitting those nerves, dare I say, quite often, and your spiking those video views, and some of your videos have got a million plus views, if I remember correctly?
Rob Wilson: Yeah, often touching the nerves of our subscribers. So, how I've discovered success is by, whenever the YouTube analytics are telling me something of interest, that the video is getting way more views and the average video on the channel, it's something that you can't really ignore from purely like a... Let's say you're a business owner, and you suddenly see that one line of products is selling really well, do you just wait for that product to sell out and then you don't order anymore? No, you're clearly going to order more of that product in. It's a similar line of thought for a video creator in that, if YouTube really likes a certain piece of content from you, you should make more on that content. And just to give people a bit of context here, whether you like this story or not, back in 2018, 2019, PewDiePie vs T-Series was the biggest YouTube story for around about six months. And we did a bit of testing with it to begin with.
But once we discovered that one or two videos had been getting like 50 to a hundred thousand views versus maybe educational content on vidIQ, which may get five to 10,000 views, we said to ourself, "Okay, we know what our core is at vidIQ, and we're not going to change from that. I'm not going to deviate from educating video creators on the YouTube journey. But what I'm also going to do to increase exposure of a channel is continue to make more of this PewDiePie vs T-Series content." And what I realized was that in terms of the elements you should be sending to YouTube, those being the title, the description, the tags, to a lesser extent, you can more or less keep those elements almost identical and have a little bit of a change.
So, it might be PewDiePie vs T-Series: It's Getting Close, might be one title, and then the next title might be PewDiePie vs T-Series: The End is Near, or PewDiePie vs T-Series: T-Series Fights Back, or PewDiePie... A lot of elements are the same. So, YouTube knows exactly what the content is, so it's going to serve it to an audience that already has watched the content before. But when you're getting to the thumbnails and a little bit of titling strategy changing, the audience knows that it's new content from the video creator.
Back in my tech days, when I realized that, for whatever reason, YouTube decided that I was the foremost authoritative educator on how to record your iPhone screen, most of the titles would start with How to Record Your iOS Screen or How to Record Your iPhone Screen, and then go into the specifics like new app available or fixing audio issues. But it was always hitting those same SEO keywords for YouTube to understand the content. So, yeah, I think we've titled this strategy, when you find your viral moments, and I do emphasize your, because the different creators, viral means something entirely different. It might be that you average 5,200 views on your videos and then you have one which gets 2000 views. Well, for you, that is your viral moments. You don't have to wait for a video that gets a million views. It's all relative to the size of your channel. Whenever YouTube is telling you through analytics that you're doing something right, you want to grab onto that bone and shake it as hard as you can. I'm sorry, I'm talking in dog metaphors because I've recently got a puppy. But yeah, you want to try drilling to that topic as specifically as you possibly can
Liron Segev: And ride it out. If YouTube is loving you for that content, and that content is being distributed not just to your audience, but to new audiences, and they love your content, well YouTube is telling you, "Look, make more of this. If you make more of this," you ought to see more YouTube love going even further with your next video and your next video. But if your next video is weird, it's back to your old content, you've now paused this entire train that you were on because now YouTube says, "Well, what do I do with this new content?"
Rob Wilson: Yeah. And you know as well as I do that there's so much resistance to this logic of doing the same thing over and over again. I don't want to be pigeonholed as just being that person who does that thing. And you've just got to change your mindset into, "Hang on, I'm known as a person who does this thing, and everybody on YouTube is being shown my content because I know how to do this thing." And I'm more than happy to continue making content on something that's working for my audience, because I'm thinking about, well, I'm thinking like, "How is YouTube going to grow my channel?" But I'm also thinking about, "How is my audience going to react to this content?"
I didn't imagine that. I would be a person making How to Record Your iPhone Screen videos on YouTube, but when you start getting hundreds of thousands of views, versus what you were getting before, it's like, "Okay, yeah, I love making videos. I'm going to take my creative passion into this topic. It's still about tech. It's very specific, I know. When I build up an audience, I will take those viewers on a, on a journey where I want to take them." But I think, to begin with, you do have to be a bit of a slave to the SEO and keywords that are working for your channel.
Liron Segev: Yeah, and until you find your own feet. And you can always pivot at a certain point. I love that example that you gave. It's like being a shop owner and a certain line of products is selling really well. It's the same thing here where you're going to say, "Well, I know it's selling really well, so let's go back to what we were doing last week." You would never do that. You would jump in on whatever's selling well and create followup and maybe an additional product. It's selling, people are loving it. Let's give the people what they want. So, this makes absolute sense.
And the whole big pigeonhole thing, I never understood it. I speak about this often on the TubeTalk podcast, the audio version, where you basically say you don't want to be known as the best in the world for that topic. It's crazy. It's absolute madness to me. If you want to be known as the best in the world, of course you want to be known as the best in the world. That is being pigeonholed. Yes, please, give me more authoritative on that. It's crazy how people are shying away from doing what succeeds, what's works. But one of the things that I've really loved about the way that you do your strategy on the channel is been able to almost be first. You've got this competitive edge of being able to see the trend early on, jumping in on that. Does that help a channel grow just by being first, or do you see a different approach where it's more of what people are going to be searching for? You don't necessarily have to be first, you just got to be better or bigger.
Rob Wilson: I think this fundamentally falls back to the question of quantity versus quality, and I have an attitude of quality to a certain extent, that doesn't impede my speed of delivery. I've almost changed that concept on its head there.
Liron Segev: Yeah, a little bit.
Rob Wilson: For my own means, but let me try and put it in another way. I have built up a talent for getting content to a market or to YouTube viewers before anyone else by recognizing that there is a story to be had there and then spending a certain amount of time on turning it into a video. Now, it might not end up being the best video on YouTube for that particular story, but it will be there before anyone else or most creators. And certainly for trending topics, when people are for this trending topic, they just want to consume whatever's available to them. I fully accept that for certain video creators it's not necessarily true.
We take like a tech YouTube, where as MKBHD as an example, when the latest iPhone is released, he's not necessarily doing a live stream of them announcing it because that's just not his style. It's not the way he works as a creator. He will create the highest quality content, which you would literally cannot get anywhere else. The way he delivers a video content is unsurpassed, which is why he's such a successful tech YouTuber.
So, as there always is with YouTube, there's many different roads to take, and I think you just have to understand what works best for your workflow methods and be the best that doing that in a certain way. As a quick example, when YouTube released a new feature called hashtags, we made a video, and it came out in the first 24 hours. And I think today it's got maybe a quarter of a million views, and it's, I think, pretty much the only video that anybody watches because it's at the top of the search rankings. Now, for something that's so specific and niche, being first is so crucial, but I will accept the argument that doesn't work for everybody. But I think certainly in the search intensive area of YouTube, being first can give you a competitive edge even when you're a smaller channel.
Liron Segev: Well, especially since we all know YouTube is the world's second largest search engine, and the way that it's been integrated more into google.com, the search engine, things are being fed from YouTube, being fed from blog sites, being fed from websites. So, it's all about, what are people looking for? They're hungry for that information. YouTube wants to deliver that content to them. So, being aware of what's going on around you is pretty darn important. Do you look at those things like trending hashtag? I'm curious like how you would research a topic before deciding whether it's worthwhile going after. What is your process for doing that?
Rob Wilson: My answer is probably going to dumbfound a lot of people. And I don't know if I answer this because it's just through the amount of experience I've had with making videos because we were talking before, and I think I'm up to about 1800 videos now. And it seems to be that when I see a certain comment or I see a certain news story or just whatever's going on in YouTube, within five to 10 seconds, I already have in my head the genesis of what the video is going to be, and then I go about making the video. And I know this will probably sound like it's completely backwards to a lot of people.
And this is why I often stress that every video creator's journey is different, but it's not necessarily right or wrong. And then, once I've made the video, I will then start the process of saying, "Okay, let's have a look at how other people hae titled their videos or used meta data." And then, I will construct my content similar to theirs. And it's just the way I've always worked. You could well argue that maybe you need to do the other way around and do the research, but my argument would be, if I spend an extra day researching then my video is going to be the 712th video-
Liron Segev: It won't be the first. Right.
Rob Wilson: ... rather than the fourth or the fifth video out there. So, yeah, I think that's the best way to answer that particular question. I wish I could share that certain gift that I have to be able to have an idea and turn it into a video so quickly. I mean, obviously, then it takes a long time to actually make that video, but I always seem to be able to know whether I'm going to go after a video without too much thought. I mean, I say this to a lot of people, I say, "Stop thinking and start doing when it comes to YouTube." And I'm a very, very practical person. I like to get things done and learn that way.
Liron Segev: All right. So, isn't one way of achieving a goal. Maybe for some very, very specific channels you do need to do that research. You want to [crosstalk 00:22:28]. Versus another channel where maybe some of the bigger channels like the vidIQ channel is already authoritative, you're not going to struggle too much with YouTube algorithm. It's more about, does the audience actually want to see this piece of information? And that's the next point I wanted to bring up, where not everything applies to everyone all the time, and I think that's a mistake that you and I often speak about where people say, "Well, I've done all a hundred of your suggestions, and now what do I do next?" Do you find the people are maybe just doing too much at some stages or maybe trying to apply absolutely everything down a certain rabbit hole, square peg, round hole, it doesn't fit? Should people be listening to absolutely everything or take things with a pinch of salt?
Rob Wilson: So, I think, by all means, learn as much as you can from people who've been through the experience of growing their channel, but nothing beats your own personal experience on the platform. I guess the best way to maybe put this into a specific example is that we all say that watch time is the most important metric on YouTube and that the more watch time you get, the more views... Sorry, the more that YouTube will share content, and even YouTube say that. But I have certain videos, and these are tutorials telling people how to use very basic things in the YouTube studio, where I've purposely front loaded all of the information in the first minute of a video, and then as it goes into a bit more detail after that main bit, because my philosophy is when I want to know how to delete a YouTube video, I don't want to want to go through two or three minutes of preamble. I just want you to show me how to do it. And I assume that's what my audience wants, as well.
So, those videos have relatively low audience retention. It might be 30, 40% and the view duration might be like 50 seconds, which sounds completely counterintuitive to what the general advice is. However, because it's a very search driven topic and the videos seem to do really well, even though they're not watched for very long, they get to the top of the search rankings, that's an example of where I would specifically not do a longer video because I'm understanding that the video itself is a particular niche. And we can extend this to all sorts of things, like for certain people, thumbnails, it might be really handy to have text on the thumbnails rather than not much text because, again, when people are searching for content, them scrolling down and they may stop on a particular thumbnail that just spells out exactly what the video is going to be about. Whereas, if storytelling elements are in a thumbnail, you need a bit more intrigued in a bit more of a potential hook.
So, I think knowing the rules is brilliant, and you should continue to learn through whatever sources you want, whether it's through vidIQ or other growth experts. But just appreciate that sometimes you have to break those rules in order to succeed because you may need to disrupt what's currently going on in your topic, or you may discover that something works specifically for you, and that's fine, but you have to recognize that. Again, going back to the... not doubling down, making more of a content that works well for your channel, that's where you're recognizing where your strengths are, and I think that's what a lot of video creators tend to lose a little bit as they're trying to learn how the platform works for them.
Liron Segev: Yeah. I [inaudible 00:26:16] absolutely. I find that not only do you have to do what works for you, you also got to keep a view of what's working for everybody else, and then you have to make a decision. Do you want to be a me too? Do you want to be exactly the same as everybody else? Or maybe you want to get weird, maybe you want to taste something different. I know in my tech space, the people around me were making the exact same type of thumbnail, always you making the YouTuber face, holding some sort of a device, and that was the thumbnail. I decided to go and do something different. I did the still me in the video, still making that weird YouTube face, but then up with lots of color. Instead of going the black and whites route, I went green and pinks and reds to try and experiment because I want to be different. I want somebody to stop what they're doing, as we said earlier, stop what they're doing, grab their attention.
So, whilst we always teach a certain way of doing things, you do have to look at your own analytics, you have to look at your own channels, and then be able to say, "Okay, that bit works for me. I understand how that bit works, but I'm going to not use that because, for my channel, those aren't the right needs." And in your analytics, what would you say something that you would look for, some indicators, or some things within your channel with your analytics to say, "Oh, I'm onto something here," what should I be looking for?
Rob Wilson: Obviously, click through rate, which we've kind of alluded to with thumbnails. What I would also look at, as well, is what I call the resting heartbeat or the cadence of your channel. And that's when you analyze how your channel is performing on an average day, so when you've not released a video. Let's say it gets a thousand views per day, and then after you've made some videos, they'll probably spike on those particular days when you release a video and then it'll start to tail off again. When you start to discover that certain videos are bringing up the entirety of the channel, and this might be like a hero video, a lot of educational channels find this, that they have one video that's pulling the entire channel and that one will turn into evergreen content. And you suddenly go from a thousand views a day to maybe 2000 views a day.
That's when you start to realize that your channel is growing through just daily content. I mean, and sometimes it's not the subscribers that are important. Though, of course, subscribers are important for many different reasons. They are important in terms of value to different video creators. I think they're far more important to channels such as Casey Neistat, Mr. Beast, and Janell, who are very much storytellers. They're putting their lives in front of an audience a lot of the time. But I think for vidIQ, or channels like yourself, Liron, and other ones who are very search driven, you'll find that it's a lot more difficult to get those subscribers to begin with. And there are, of course, exceptions to the rule like the top of the tech industry, MKBHD and Unbox Therapy, where not only do the viewers find the content that they want to watch, but they also find the personality that they want to associate themselves with. And those are the real superstars of YouTube.
See, I think video creators tend to be good at one or the other to begin with. They're either really good on camera and really personable and likable or they're really good at bringing concepts and themes and explanations to content. And I think I'm certainly the latter, and I would love to be able to get to the former as well and be much better in front of a camera going longterm. But I know you're about to say you're already really good on camera. Yeah, I appreciate that.
Liron Segev: Well, you took the word out of my mouth. I got nothing more.
Rob Wilson: It's almost as if we've had this conversation several times in [crosstalk 00:30:11].
Liron Segev: A couple of times. How many videos have you done, like if you look at your own channel and then you look at the vidIQ channel, how many videos would you say you've done in total?
Rob Wilson: I think I'm up to about 1600 to 1800 videos now, 500 on vidIQ and then a thousand plus on the other channel.
Liron Segev: And the reason I bring that up, and I like to ask you this in public, which is what this is, is just to show that even with so many videos, there's still an element of, "I still need to get better. I still need to learn. I still want to improve a little bit with every video. So, I'm better at my editing. Great. Now, am better at my thumbnails? Am I better being on camera? Am I better delivering a concept?" And even with so many videos under your belt, you still constantly, constantly trying to improve. And a lot of the big creators that we speak to, they're saying the same thing, that they're constantly trying to get better and better and better.
So, Rob, as we're ending off, we said thumbnails are critical. You've got to pay attention to that. We said you've got to find your viral moment, double down, make more of that content that really, really works for you. And really listen to everybody, but then don't force yourself to be like everybody [crosstalk 00:31:23].
Rob Wilson: Don't try and do everything-
Liron Segev: Everything. Yeah.
Rob Wilson: ... everybody suggests. Yeah.
Liron Segev: Your channel's different. Look at your analytics. Look at your audience, see what fits, what fits your style, the way that you work. We all have different time commitments and time availability to make those. Don't be forced to do something a certain way because that's guaranteed success. That just doesn't work that way. So, great five points, five tips that you've shared from your experience. As you're about to leave us, what's one message that if you could give to every single video creator out there, what would that message be [inaudible 00:31:59]?
Rob Wilson: All right. I've refined it now. Okay, I think I'm going to say this perfectly. Okay. So, time, in my point of view, is the most important currency on YouTube because everything is already free. So, you can't persuade people to watch your content because it's cheaper than others. Your content has to be more valuable than anyone else's in the time that the viewer is willing to spend with you. So, try to think about how much value you can provide to your audience in a time that they have available because it is so precious.
Liron Segev: Ooh, you have refined it. That was very well done. It's like the 17th time we've done this.
Rob Wilson: Yes.
Liron Segev: Rob, thank you very much. This was really, really useful for someone who doesn't just do the theory of it, because we teach it, therefore we do it, we do it ourselves, we test a lot of things offline, we test a lot of things in the background. So, by the time we can go to tell people and work with people, speak on stages, we know we've done it from experience and that's why these kind of conversations are really valuable. And it was great to start the year having a video podcast for TubeTalk. [inaudible 00:33:07] video is what we do, after all.
Guys, let us know in the comments below if this is the kind of thing that you like. Give the video a thumbs up if you liked it. Don't forget to share this video with at least one other creator that may be struggling and trying to find their feet. These five tips are really, really going to help. Rob, thank you very much again for hanging out with us, and we'd like to end up by you saying your famous lines of enjoy your video making day. Go for it.
Rob Wilson: Pleasure to be on, Liron, and of course, as I say at the end of all of my videos, enjoy the rest of your video making day. Bye for now.
Speaker 2: We hope you enjoyed this episode of TubeTalk, brought to you by vidIQ. Head over to vidiq.com/tubetalk for today's show notes and previous episodes. Enjoy the rest of your video making day.