Get ANY Channel to 4,000 Hours on YouTube (It's Easy)

Key Takeaways

I'm confident that you can get to 4,000 hours of watch time on your channel but I know a lot of people are struggling with this for example this channel right here this is Dr Pat lass um she recently commented on one of her videos about how even though she's publishing long form videos every week and shorts every single day it's just not quite working and I know that a lot of you are in very similar situations so today let's dig into what it actually takes to get to those beloved and wonderful 4,000 hours of watch time for this Channel and for you I want to start with a question what is your unique ability what I mean by that is what's something that you can do because of your life experience uh the family you were raised in where you live the things you know how to do maybe education you have maybe just just job experience whatever it may be what's something that you can do that would be really difficult for basically anybody else to do on YouTube this is a question I can't answer for you when I look at her Channel I see a few things that definitely set her apart from most YouTubers but not necessarily most YouTubers in her space so first off she obviously has the education the credentials it's something that she mentions early on in basically every video that I've seen her make so far and I think that that credibility is important and it's really good but the problem is that other people that are making videos in the same space and in fact most of the people with really big channels they also have similar credentials so that alone isn't going to be enough so the question that Patricia needs to ask herself is the same one we all need to ask what's something about me that could help me to take my videos a step further in a direction than what most other people would be able to do even other people that are making videos on the same or similar topics so back to my original question what is your unique ability what do you think what's something that you can do better than most people or that you just have access or resources for that most people aren't going to have comment below I'd love to hear your ideas and your thoughts maybe we can carry this discussion further to help you refine that okay let's move on to the second thing that we need to help get these 4,000 watch hours cuz that first one is going to be incredibly valuable to make your videos first of all much more clickable make people want to watch them and give you a brand even early on it's important to develop you and your brand and make your videos exciting and engaging but this next one is going to be really helpful too in fact it's one of the most critical things on YouTube and that is consistency now consistency has multiple Parts a lot of people talk about publishing consistency and that is important if you publish weekly try to publish weekly don't leave a lot of gaps but it goes way beyond that consistency in the topics that you talk about on your channel consistency in The Branding consistency overall in the thumbnail Style having fairly wide swings in any of those areas is going to make it really hard for YouTube to be able to test your videos with an audience and get consistent results now I want to come back to this channel from Dr patlas Patricia here she has a lot of consistency in her thumbnails you can see they're not very different the background's very similar in all of her videos so the setting for the videos is very similar the way she presents her videos is very similar I can see a little bit of kind of an evolution on her channel of trying to make her videos a little bit more and more engaging over time but overall they are very consistent so I actually think she's doing the right thing here from that standpoint so the goal here with consistency is to help the algorithm to find your audience the algorithm is not pushing your videos out there the algorithm is actually taking videos that exist and pulling them toward people that it thinks will like those videos so if your videos are inconsistent in style tone uh publishing frequency and even days in time of day if it's dramatically different from one video to the next it's going to have a really hard time testing your videos and finding your audience so one thing that I would encourage for Patricia specifically here as well as for all of us uh who are maybe doing some of the same things is she's covering a lot of different things on her Channel they're all related to kind of mental and emotional health but we're talking about sleep generational trauma more sleep OCD narcissism I've seen several on borderline personality disorder lots of lots of different things that she's covering and I I think that's okay because they do all tie together but I would probably focus on kind of a couple or maybe one of these kind of particular aspects of mental health and become kind of the go-to resource for that and in the name of consistency I'm going to go ahead and interject in the middle of this incredibly helpful video and ask you to click the like button if you found anything helpful in this video so far that will help it spread to more people and we all want that to happen right anyway back to the main content now I want to talk about a couple of things that are a little bit more where the rubber meets the road and how you're going to get to these 4,000 hours so this next principle is really quite straightforward and that is that if you build a larger video library you're going to get more watch time that basically just sounds like publish more content it is kind of that but there's more to it than that now you can see here that you know Patricia she's Dr Patricia she's gone and done a great job of publishing a lot of content she has a ton of videos she's doing lots of shorts as well basically daily and so she should be getting watch time from that and the truth is she is but there are a couple of huge benefits to just having a bigger video library the first one is actually that you're getting a lot of really good valuable important practice every video that you make is another opportunity to hone your skills I can see a pretty big difference between the earliest videos that she published on her channel to the latest videos that she's published on her Channel they are getting better the reality is is that every video that she makes is going to get her closer to making really high quality video content but there's more to it than just the benefit of practice the reality is is that every video that you create and publish on your channel as long as you keep it public and as long as it's on topic YouTube is not going to stop experimenting with that video you see often times we look at a video and we say well I got some views over the first day or two and then it kind of leveled off the reality is is that level off is never totally flat YouTube's going to continue to try to find people that want to watch your content one of the big mistakes you could make is thinking that only your newest videos really matter in terms of views and watch time and that your old videos just aren't getting seen that much for most of us that's not the case especially if you create content where the information is relevant today and in the future and with more videos you can take advantage of more of YouTube's features to help keep people watching your channel longer and get them engaging with your channel I'm specifically talking about things like playlists pinned comments uh cards and end screens all of these things can help you keep people watching on your channel for a lot longer and that sends really good signals to YouTube to go ahead and spread your videos further because um session watch time is really the thing that matters the most to YouTube not just how long they watch one of your videos but how long your videos keep them on YouTube so some ideas might be to take videos that are related for example Dr Patricia you have a whole bunch of videos here about trauma about sleep about OCD take those videos and put them into playlists have an OCD playlist in fact even put them in order if there's a logical order to those videos not just when you publish them but if it would be better if people watched one before the next put them in that order then in every single one of the videos in that playlist make sure that there's an end screen that points to the playlist not just another video in that playlist but point to the whole playlist people are more likely to continue watching the videos on your channel if other really closely related videos are what's recommended to them so in in addition to putting the playlist in the end screen if you have another video already on your channel that would be great to watch next write a comment on your own video pin it to the top and include a link to that next video that they should watch okay I'm going to move on to the fourth principle now it seems like every one of these principles has a whole bunch of stuff in it so I hope you're taking notes if you're missing stuff go back and rewatch it because there's a ton packed into this video the next thing we want to do is well we got this bigger video library right and that's great and we can link between all of our videos but within the videos themselves we want to also make sure we keep people watching longer doesn't do a lot of good to put stuff in the end screen if nobody's making it to the end of the video and it doesn't do a whole lot of good to link to other videos throughout or to have pinned comments if people aren't really liking the videos we're creating in the first place so within the principle of keeping people watching longer I have three sub principles the first one is entertain we need to entertain people it's kind of like on television there are lots of really informational shows documentaries that I'm a huge huge nerd so watching documentaries is something that we do in my home and yet the documentaries also are entertaining maybe not quite to the same level as some television shows but likewise we can draw that analogy and we don't necessarily need to try to be as entertaining as Mr Beast or Mark Rober but we should learn from what they're doing and make our informational content or our other content at least a little bit more entertaining it's key it's really important that the first few seconds of every video be highly visually interesting as people scroll through YouTube they're going to see that little autoplay start and those first few seconds should capture their attention the first 3 to 15 seconds should really introduce them to whatever the problem is whatever it is that they're going to try to overcome in this video and make them want to get to the end the next thing that we need for every video is to try to have some sort of story arc this is something that I admittedly am working on because I make a lot of informational videos and I just want to teach you stuff I just want to help you get better but it's not a whole lot of fun to just sit and watch a video forever and just gather a bunch of content right if it just feels like a classroom lecture that doesn't help us a whole lot so we're going to talk about Patricia here for just a second as well but I do think that this is the step where she could make the biggest difference and keep people watching longer make them much more likely to subscribe and make them want to watch even more videos basically what I see when I watch these videos is it feels a little bit like I'm in class in college and there's a teach teacher that's talking to me for 10 or 15 minutes about a particular topic or you know 5 to 10 minutes in her case about a topic and just teaching me some principles and then we go home and that's just not something that keeps you really engaged if we can find a way to build throughout these videos and to have a little bit of a story line or a story arc where we build from the beginning we have a problem that we introduce and we build toward this Climax and then there's quick resolution and then we we're able to go home we're able to move on but we feel like we've accomplished something rather than just that we sat there and tried to absorb some knowledge the story should begin as early potentially as the thumbnail that even subconsciously introduces a little bit of the turmoil that we're going to face but it should build throughout that entire video and pull us through all the way to the end okay sub principle number two there was entertained now let's move on to engage in her newer videos you can see that Dr ptia is popping things up on the screen using sound effects our sleep stages into R which is the rapid so as things pop up on the screen there's a little Boop sound effect or something and those kinds of things are a little bit more engaging they do draw our attention back so having little sound effects throughout our videos actually can do a lot more than what most of us would think that it would do so in your case Patricia don't stop doing that and for those of you who aren't using visual elements on the screen and sound effects throughout your videos I would find a way to start doing that in a way that isn't over the top but that helps draw people's attention back anytime that they maybe start to get distracted or to zone out when watching your videos but I would also encourage you Patricia as well as the rest of you who may be falling victim to the same thing to try addressing the audience more directly when you're teaching it's like you're teaching a group of people I don't feel like you're talking to me and part of that is because you're looking I think at the viewfinder screen instead of looking into the lens when you're looking at a viewfinder off to the side or over the top it doesn't feel like you're talking to me it feels like you're talking kind of at a group of people and so there's no connection happening that one little thing I think is going to make a difference but beyond that ask your audience questions address them as if you were talking directly to them like you would if you were working with a client you can ask them rhetorical questions or you can ask them questions you actually expect an answer to and you can even invite them to comment with their response if they want want to it's a great way to build more engagement on your channel okay I'm going to move on to sub principle number three so entertain engage and the third one is connect now again there's a bit of overlap here with the engage but it's important for you to build a connection with the person on the other side of the camera talk at them directly talk to them as if they were there and could respond in the moment that takes a little bit of practice too it feels weird kind of sitting here in a room all by myself talking to you as if you were actually there but you can start to kind of shift your frame of reference to actually start to feel that way about the people you're talking to so that you can talk to a camera even though it's just a camera and Visually sort of see that there are people kind of on the other end through through that little circle um that you're actually there you're there because someone's watching these videos and you're a real person so connect with the people that you're talking to include more of your personality these videos as I watch them do feel a little bit flat to me again kind of like you're giving a lecture and what I could use more of is just actual personality actual experiences from Life yours or people that you've talked to or stories you've read things that will be engaging and make us connect like people like to connect now doing that in a real way also means often making yourself just a little bit more vulnerable letting more emotions show than just teacher emotion actually like letting real emotions come through whether that's happiness and excitement or sometimes disappointment frustration sadness whatever it is and that does require a little bit of vulnerability which is scary but vulnerability leads to far deeper connection and that leads to people really liking your videos engaging more watching them substantially longer and then all of this 4,000 hours thing that just kind of becomes like a little goal we passed a long time ago these strategies all go Way Beyond the first 4,000 000 hours watchtime specifically session watchtime is YouTube's most important metric it's how they make their money because they can show more ads to more people if they're watching longer so if we can increase the watch Time by increasing our engagement and all of these things we've talked about here in this video today YouTube's going to love you and they're going to spread your videos to more and more people and those people are going to love you and they're going to want to keep watching your videos for longer maybe even watch them a few times hopefully you got a lot out of this video and again if you didn't take notes you might have to watch this again give me a little bit more watch time but also take notes so that you can get a ton more watch time on your videos as well hope to see you in the next video here on channel makers