There are a few KPIs that we pay extra attention to
KPI (Key Performance Indicator) - These are metrics you should track that are important to the growth of your channel. These are also typically associated with a person or group of people who are responsible for the metric
There are 3 main ways of getting views on long form YouTube videos.
Search, Browse, And Suggested.
Search - Views you get when people search keywords in the YouTube search bar and find your video. People that find your content from here are more likely to click on your content, more likely to watch your content longer, and are more likely to have BUYER INTENT (Meaning they are more likely to buy something because they are actively searching for a solution to a problem). Getting views from search is a “steady growth” process. You almost never see channels that blow up fast getting most of their views from search. It’s also typically easier to get views from search as people actively searching for a problem don’t have high standards when it comes to thumbnail/video quality. Getting views from search is also nice because it’s the closest you can get to “Passive Income”, I get over 1M views per month from search. Overall, this is my favorite place to get views.
Browse - This is where you get views from the home page of Youtube. This is my second favorite way of getting views. It’s much tougher to get promoted here as you’re competing against MrBeast and all of the other biggest channels on YouTube. People are less likely to click on your video, less likely to watch your video when they click, and less likely to buy things from you. BUT this is without a doubt the fastest way to grow a channel, and there many cases where they find you in browse then they end up watching a bunch of your videos.
Suggested - This is my least favorite and also least reliable way of getting views. This is where the viewer is watching a video and there are suggested videos on the right side of the screen and they click on one of them. I don’t really focus on this one as it’s pretty much out of your control whether something gets suggested here or not. This one is heavily influenced by how niche your channel is and also how “bingable” your content is. If someone watches one video are they going to watch 10 or 15? This one starts to get rolling over time, but there’s not much you can do to increase it until you have a library of content, so not something to focus on as a beginner.
My strategy: Try to get promoted in BROWSE during the first week of a video launch, and if that doesn’t work, try to get promoted in SEARCH long term.
Make a video where there is a CHANCE you might get promoted in BROWSE, but if not, you will DEFINITELY get promoted in SEARCH.
This is similar to the strategy they used for Baseball in the movie “Moneyball” where they would hire baseball players that are good at “Getting on base” (Getting views from search in our case).
So you want to hit the ball in such a way that there is a chance you will get a home run, but if not at least you will get on first base and have a chance to score. This is accomplished by using the Icahn Method to find video ideas and The Holy Trinity to come up with a Title, Thumbnail, and Intro.
(both for individual videos and also the channel as a whole)