Hi everyone,
This forum has been so eye opening in learning how strategic building a youtube channel is. I really did think you just upload and wait...In many ways, I am relieved that there is a strategy to it all.
After reading some of the posts, I am thinking that I need to start a campaign to get ahead in the saturated toy channel market. I'll continue to try to improve on SEO but it is clear to me that I cannot compete. I am also thinking my channel needs to be more focused so I plan to make more videos that are specific and create a playlist(s). After looking around, I think I am going to focus on "parking garage toys" because we have all the toys and lots of vehicles that can be grouped together into other other keywords, like "emergency vehicles", "construction vehicles". After I create a handful of these similar themed videos I am thinking of launching a campaign. Does this seem like a reasonable approach or are these keywords still too competitive for me to target? I got tube buddy and tonight I am going to play around with vidIQ to see if I can find better keywords. I'm also considering starting instagram or facebook, but I don't know that this is important for toy channels geared for younger children.
In the meantime, one of the leading toy channels has started to offer consulting.The price is kind of steep ($150 for 15 minutes - or maybe this is standard) but I can easily spend that much purchasing new toys.
Thank you for reading this through, I appreciate any feedback!
After advocating use of adwords and finding some results with it. I now advocate against it because in the long run it probably delays more than it helps. In other words i think it hurts you more than it helps.
You can definitely grow with it and find some success. But it will be a very meager growth with high dollar cost. The time you spend trying to figure out and test adwords is better spent working on improving your channel. It can take over a month to do mutiple adword tests and figure things out. At same time i have an uneducated guess that it probably takes about 3 months of "doing things right" on your channel to have a very good growth rate.
I see plenty of channels who were smaller than me and are now bigger or are increasing at a fast rate and its because theyre producing videos on only 1 or 2 toys, uploading regularly, the toys they upload are very popular, the thumbnails are great, and im sure they do other good things too.
I think i was at around 13k subs in march and i started to focus on disney cars 3 because of the upcoming movie and the toy fits my channel audience. After a little over 3 months im about to hit 25k.
The problem with adwords is it masks your real value as a channel. Its like using cheat codes on a game, you can do better with cheat codes but your real skill or value as a player is still not that great. All it does is hide the fact that maybe your thumbnails are unclickable, or content is unwatchable, or there is no interest or demand in the video topic. Its harder to see and work on channel problems if you are inflating it with paid views. Because maybe these increased views look like success but really its not. And again all that time is better spent improving your channel. No matter how much views you will pay for, it will shy incomparison to the loads of views youtube will give you for free after some time spent making the right choices. Adwords views = ants and youtube suggested views = elephants.
With all that said, if you really know what youre doing and your channel is on a righteous path, then it wouldnt hurt to do adwords.[DOUBLEPOST=1500410923,1500409557][/DOUBLEPOST]
I can completely agree with KTR on this. I'm spending currently $10 a day and it does bring views and some subs to my channel, but once ads stop, the AI is not on my side and nothing is being driven to my channel.
I attempted the learn colors, numbers, and animal names thing as well with a few videos and of course, can't seem to get on the suggested videos. Sadly, I hopped on this band wagon too late... and should have done this 6 months ago.
I'm currently, trying to figure out a way to revive my channel. As that even our videos that did ok, which were McD toys, are not even being pushed now.
Thats tough. I commend you guys for trying new things. You should do more research on where you videos show up in suggested. Because if you look at your homepage there are a bunch of happy meal channels in the related section. I dont know how accurate my assumption is, but i use that section to see what channel category youtube associates you with. So all your new topic videos might not be getting much traction in suggested if youtube still associating your channel with happy meal channels. It may take some time for your rebranding to take effect so theres goin to be a month or two ahead of trying to get associated with nonhappy meal videos. I guess in your case adwords would be beneficial.
But I really advocate focusing on limited keyword topics so that with the repetition of the same keyword youtube will eventually brand you as that keyword. So when i do fidget spinners or lava i am still having it disney cars 3 related so i have stronger prescence with any other cars 3 video. Smaller channels do not have the luxury of copying big channels like ryan toy review and expecting the same kind of success. Because any video they make will generate good views for only them and their established base. If you dig into ryan toy review channel further you will see they only started with limited toy topics too. Most of their early videos before they grew were thomas train and disney cars. If they did additinal keywrods like science project slime or giant eggs it was incombination with those repeating thomas or disney cars topics. And eventually they grew with transformers and paw patrol. So it probably hurts right now if youre doing too much variety of topics without a recurring theme/keyword. You have to make mutiple videos on one keywrod to get youtubes attention to associate your videos with that keyword in suggested. The goal is to show up in suggested.
