Ask any YouTuber and they will tell you that generating significant views and subscribers isn't easy. But with the right strategy and tools, any video creator can build an engaged subscriber base when they understand what those subscribers want to watch.

Appealing to an audience to watch content you are passionate about making is just the first step, you need to know how to reach them and get your videos discovered. Our guides to how to guide more views on YouTube will give you the best tips to succeed on the platform.

How To Get More Views on YouTube

Do you want to make money on YouTube? Millions of creators are earning a very good living from the platform by uploading content that drives huge views and engagements. Whether that income is from advertising revenue, merch sales, or brand deals, we keep you updated with best practises and ideas.

How To Make Money on YouTube

Do you know how to do keyword research so you understand what videos people are actually searching for on YouTube? Do you know how to create a custom YouTube thumbnail? Do you know how to create a Playlist on YouTube?

vidIQ has a ton of tips that will help every creator maximise their video content. We publish content every week to keep you up to date with all the best practices.

YouTube Tips & Tricks

If you’ve put off creating your own YouTube channel because you’re overwhelmed with the choices you need to make or are panicking because you feel you lack the right skills to succeed, worry no more and welcome to the only resource you’ll need to fulfill your video creator dreams.

If this is your first time here, we have a 

 that aims to educate you on your YouTube journey. And if it is your plan to grow your channel, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, and click on our notification bell so you don't miss any of our latest tips, tricks, advice, and news.

How to Start Your YouTube Channel: 10 Top Tips

We promised 20 tips to kickstart your YouTube channel, so let's start delivering on that promise with 10 tips in this post and 10 tips in the 

. All the tips are covered in this video too:

So amazingly, there are still some people out there who are thinking of starting a YouTube channel and have been for months, possibly even years. My advice to you is, ready or not, start now. And I'm not telling you this as a New Year's resolution. Every moment you hesitate or procrastinate, there are thousands of video creators starting their YouTube channel today, and gobbling up all your potential audience. You don't want that.

Feel the fear, do it anyway. Start, press record. Record whatever you want today. It doesn't matter if it doesn't end up on YouTube. You need to gain experience in getting in front of the camera, getting behind the camera, using your editing program. You need to start creating content to find out whether or not you enjoy making videos before you know whether or not you enjoy being a YouTuber.

Tip #2 Learn How YouTube Works, No Seriously:

The chances are, that the first video you make is going to absolutely suck. Fantastic, you've made a video. You've made the first step, and in six months’ time, you'll look back at that first video and think yeah, that really was terrible, but you've gotta start the journey somewhere. And with that, you've gotta start your YouTube channel somewhere as well, even if you're not ready. Create a YouTube account, upload a video to YouTube. You don't have to publish it, that's the important thing.

You need to gain experience going through the workflow of uploading videos. The last thing you want is having a brilliant video ready to upload, but you don't know how the YouTube system works. Again, experience is going to trump any advice any of us can give you, so record a video, upload it to YouTube. You don't have to publish it.

Tip #3 Develop a Strategy you Will Actually Follow:

While getting some practical experience behind you is obviously a good thing, you also want some form of strategy. So, answer these questions:

What do you want your channel to achieve on YouTube

, and when you're answering this, try and answer it from a viewer's perspective, not your perspective. So I don't want to hear about hitting 10,000 subscribers, a million views, or whatever. If your viewers know that you're in it for your own self-gain, they will see through it and immediately switch off. Viewers want to know what they can gain from the content, and you want to sell that as much as possible in your videos.

 Again, try and be as specific as possible. What age range? What gender, if you are going to a particular gender? What type of demographic? What are they interested in? You need to know who's going to watch your content.

 There are millions of gaming channels out there, hundreds of thousands of Fortnite channels out there. How are you going to distinguish your content from everybody else who's already on YouTube making content? You need to disrupt the status quo, not join it, because you'll never be seen.

how are you going to deliver this content?

 Is it going to be every day, once a week, at a particular time of the day? Think about when your audience is most likely to watch YouTube, and how much YouTube they can watch per week, and then tailor your content to those watching habits, and think about whether you're going to do video on demand, live streams, what's going to be best for you and your audience?

Tip #4 Find Your Niche and Build the Hell Out of It:

live streams, you'll know this one off by heart. Niche down. Let me give you a quick example. What's your channel about? If you're giving an answer such as, "My channel's about beauty, and it's about travel, "and it's about vlogging," then it's about too many things. 

. It should be about one specific topic, when you start your channel, because you need to appeal to a very specific audience.

Once you've grown your channel, and you've got millions of subscribers who fall in love with you, you can take them on a journey wherever you want, but to begin with, the audience is only interested in the content. They have no investment in you. Try and remember that. It's a cruel lesson to understand, but it will help you when you first start out on YouTube.

Once you've thought about and answered all of these questions, I want you to wrap it all up in a nice little present, called your value proposition. This is your elevator pitch. Try and tell your audience who you are, and why they should watch you, in around about six words.

. It tells you the who, YouTubers, video creators, and why they should watch, because they will learn how to grow their channels. But we've managed to do that in four words. Now it's your turn.

Tip #6 Invest in the Right Audio Equipment:

If you've just started out on YouTube, and you're wondering what your first tech upgrade should be, it is 100% audio, and here's why. Bad audio is so much more distracting than bad video, and everybody hates onboard microphones. 

So if you can, get yourself a dedicated microphone for your camera,

 and if you're recording from a computer, you can't go far wrong with a Blue Yeti.

Tip #7 Create a Formula with Template Videos:

Videos need structure, so when you make your next video, try to think of how you will develop a show formula, that you can use as a template for your future videos. Remember at the beginning of this video, I literally gave you a hook. An introduction, a teaser to what's going to be going on for the rest of this video. Then we have the branded intro, followed by an introduction to who we are for new viewers, a call to action to subscribe to our channel, and then we jumped into the meat of the content where we are right now, and at the end of this video, you'll see how we round this all up.

Your show formula will take time to structure, and it will evolve over the course of your YouTube journey. Try and keep an eye out for this when you watch your favorite YouTubers. As rough and as random as they might appear, there is always structure and story behind each video, and that's why you watch them.

Some people love analytics, others hate them, but there are a couple that are crucial to keep an eye on, whether or not you want to look at that analytics. The first is 

This represents how enticing your titles are, and how clickable your thumbnails are. Check the click-through rate for your channel as a whole, and on individual videos as you test. I'm not going to give you all of the same target to reach. Check what your current click-through rate is, and whether it's two, four, six, or eight percent. I want you to try and improve that by two to three percent this year. It will bring in so many more views.

The other metric, as it always has been, is 

. Generally speaking, the more watch time you get, the more YouTube is going to promote your content. But if you make shorter videos, that doesn't necessarily mean you must make longer videos, because your audience might not react very well to those longer videos.

What I will say is maximize the value of your watch time in the videos that you have. That's by looking at relative audience retention. How does your video stack up to similar videos, in terms of whether people are still watching or not, and try and improve the relative audience retention. Having said that, if your average view duration is 60, 70, 80%, you're doing really well, and it gives you a license to try testing longer videos.

Verify your YouTube account. That will give you access to the most important tool on YouTube, which is custom thumbnails. We've got a video here on how to do it.

Tip #10 Create an Engaging, Interesting Channel Banner:

If I see another generic cityscape, or rolling hills in the channel banner when we do channel audits, I'm going to rip out my hair.

10 more tips or creating and growing your YouTube channel

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level and 

 then make sure to download vidIQ. Join over 1 million other users and use vidIQ to help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

Members of the vidIQ family that have upgraded to our Boost and Pro packages get immediate access to the Academy 

 so you can kickstart your YouTube success today! Access to the exclusive vidIQ academy will give you a huge advantage over your competitors from the get-go. 

Kick off your YouTube dreams with the tools you need to launch YOUR channel. We've got the top tips just for you!

How to Start a YouTube Channel: 10 Brilliant Tips

Did you know that you can confirm the number of YouTube subscribers that actually click on your notifications? To find out how just do the following:

We will begin where we always do, on the YouTube front page.

Click on your profile image and then go to the new YouTube studio.

Next, click on the Video tab on the left-hand side

When you mouse over a video, you will see some icons.

Click on the graph icon to go to the analytics for that particular video.

On this screen, click the ‘Reach’ tab at the top, and then halfway down the screen, you should see an analytics panel labeled ‘Bell notifications’ sent.

Bell notifications are the number of subscribers on your channel that have switched on all notifications.

The notification click-through rate is the crucial analytic we're interested in here. It represents the number of subscribers who actually clicked on the notification to watch the actual video. As YouTube states, typical CTR on notifications is between 0.5% and 2.5% percent.

Here's what I'd like you to do now. Go and find one of the most popular videos on your channel, and take a look at the notification click-through rate analytics.

YouTube CTR Analytics: Why That Metric Matters

 metric is an extension of data that YouTube rolled out to creators last year. You can access the data by going to Channel analytics, and then clicking on the Audience tab at the top of the screen, and scrolling down to Subscriber bell notifications.

As you might expect, we did a full tutorial on that data at the time, so you can check it out here:

As a suggestion to YouTube, what I'd love to see here is the notification click-through rate for your entire channel over the last 28 days. Oh, and I'd also like to add it as a metric in the advance analytics for individual videos too, thank you very much.

Now, for me, these analytics have been somewhat of an eye-opener. We currently have 475,000 subscribers, and over 35,000 of those clicked on the notification bell, and yet that only generates 500 views. Doesn't really seem worth it, does it?

However, as with all analytics, you have to put it into the context of your channel as a whole.

Those first 500 views are valuable for the first couple of hours of a video's launch, to get that velocity on your content. However, through our experience with the vidIQ channel, an educational channel, we know that we're going to get the majority of our views, over the long term, from browse and search.

For other channels where the storytelling and the personality is far more important to the channel itself, then you would expect a higher click-through rate on notifications. But remember, it's still, at a benchmark level, relatively low at 2.5%.

So, ake these analytics from a few videos, and benchmark them. Let's say your average notification click-through rate is 1%, then aim to improve that to 1.2%, or 1.4% over the next three to six months.

And if you’re really serious about growing your YouTube views and subscribers, sign up for exclusive access to the 

 and learn how to launch a successful YouTube Channel in just 30 days.

Did you know that YouTube confirms just how many of your subscribers actually click on your notifications? Find out how to access this crucial metric.

How to Get More Views On YouTube From Your Channel Subscribers

If you're reading this blog post then it's a pretty good bet that you're ready to make the leap and start the YouTube channel you've been promising yourself to. While it's a cliche, there really is never a better time to do so than right now. We're making it easy for you with the tips and tricks all the successful YouTubers use.

 so you get all the help you'll need on this exciting journey!

How to Create Your YouTube Channel: 10 Amazing Tips

Check out all 20 tips in the following video:

Tip #1 Write a full ‘About’ section for your YouTube channel

First of all it addresses what the viewer is going to get from your channel. Introduce who you are a little bit, and then reinforce what the viewer is going to get with even more good stuff in another paragraph. YouTube does search these channel descriptions, so it also helps with your SEO.

If you're going to be filming outside most of the time, brilliant, you've got all the natural light in the world. However, if you're filming indoors, you probably want to invest in some proper studio lighting, because it will have a massive impact on the quality of your videos. Great lighting can really help with your videos, much more than say a new camera, at least in my opinion.

Tip #3 Go all-in with YouTube Custom Thumbnails

Now for a whistle-stop tour of some thumbnail tips and tricks:

If humans are going to be in the thumbnail, think of the three E's: eyes, excitement, and emotion. Connect the people with the viewer, and they're more likely to click on the thumbnail.

Use colorful backgrounds that help separate the foreground and backgrounds that contrast with competitors, so that you really stand out when people are scrolling through the search results, and their browse feeds, because your thumbnail looks so different to everybody else's.

Oversaturate the colors in your thumbnails, to give them more pop when they are reduced in size. You can also sharpen the thumbnails for exactly the same reasons.

Use the thumbnail to tease a story of the video itself. You want to entice people to click, but not to give them the whole story so they have no reason to click.

If you're doing tutorials, show the viewer the payoff in the thumbnail. They'll still need to watch the video to know how to get there.

Design small. Remember, you will create your thumbnail on a full screen, but all of your viewers will see the thumbnail in a different size.

And when you finish a thumbnail, take an objective look at it and say to yourself, would I click on this thumbnail? If you're not likely to, neither are your viewers.

You are right in that we barely scratch the surface here, so check out our full 

YouTube playlist on custom thumbnails here

, and also check out the thumbnail courses in the 

Don't just record footage, make sure to edit it as well. It may often be the case that you have half of your footage on the cutting room floor that you never use, and that's fine, because you only want the best and tightest footage to put to an audience. You can also use editing to shave off those little pauses at the beginning, in the middle, the end of your talking.

And, also think about pattern interrupts. Have you noticed something different about this part of the video? It's because I'm not using any pattern interrupts. I'm just talking, and it's probably getting a little bit boring for you now, because I'm not doing any of the sound effects, and music's not playing. The camera's not changing, and shifting angles a little bit, and... You see, I've paused here, and I've got it wrong, and I'm not going to edit this out, I'm going to keep it in, because that's where you'd want to edit your wrong stuff out.

Anyway, where was I? Pattern interrupt. It allows you to keep the viewer engaged by changing something in the scene, every five to 10 seconds. Try that the next time you're editing your videos, and instead of a minute-long worth of rambly stuff, you'll get a clean 15-second footage that your audience will enjoy a lot longer.

This is something I have to constantly remind myself because it's so easy to change persona when you press a record button. Remember to be you. There's only one of you in the entire world unless you have an identical twin. Your audience wants to see something different, something that they can't get anywhere else, and they can only get that from you if you are uniquely you.

If you try to imitate somebody else, it won't feel authentic, and your audience will see right through it. When you start to relax and be you on camera, as hard as that can sound to begin with, when you press record, your audience will start to react to you.

Now, it could be that the audience loves you, or the audience hates you. The important thing is, is that they feel something about you. That's what you want from your audience. And you can ignore all of the people who hate you. You don't need to care about them. You need to put all of your love into those who love you back. Embrace your audience.

But, the moment you start to worry about the judgment of your audience, that's when you start to change on camera, and you don't be you anymore. All of the mannerisms, the way you talk, the quirks that you have, embrace them, and share them on YouTube because if you don't, that's going to leave a mark on your ego.

All right, time to get into some keyword research basics. Get into the head of what your typical target audience viewer is likely to search for on YouTube, and create content, and titles, and metadata around those search terms.

The YouTube Search bar itself is a super powerful tool because it auto predicts what people are searching for, depending on the time of year. For example, as I record this at the end of December if I type in just the word star, it brings me back all of the results for 'Star Wars Episode 9: Rise of Skywalker', because that is trending right now. Use it on your own topic, to find out what people are searching for, and again make content around those subjects.

 to find out what keywords have potential on YouTube, those being with high search volume, but low competition. And although tags are no longer important, it's still interesting to look at the metadata that other creators are using, because it represents the detail and level of research that goes into their content. I will still argue that it's much better to give YouTube as much information about your video as possible, rather than none at all. It may give you the marginal edge, versus other videos who are competing with you, who are a similar size.

And once again, that is a fraction of a percentage of the knowledge that we have about keyword research. We have even more information in an hour-plus course on the 

, along with this video and this post on 

Tip #7 Become part of the YouTube community

When you start to make videos on a particular topic, you become part of that YouTube community. Make sure to join it. And by that I mean watch other peoples' content, and post comments, add to the discussion.

People will start to recognize your name in the comments, and by adding value, not just trying to spam your own stuff, people will be interested in you and come to watch your content. And who knows, the video creator themselves might recognize you after a while, and you could potentially do a collaboration.

Try not to think of other video creators in your space as competition, but as collaborators. The nature of video creating on YouTube, forces it into a singular, sometimes lonely experience, and there are millions of video creators who do this, but they're all working towards the same goal, to make an impact on a shared audience. Why not share the creating experience as well? You get to share your audience with somebody else's audience, and vice versa.

Just remember this at the forefront of your communication with others. It's all about the value that you can add, not what you can take out of it. That comes afterwards, and it becomes a far greater reward when you achieve this.

Got some quick YouTube description tips for you now:

The first two lines of your video description are super important because they can be seen when people are going through the search results on a YouTube page. So try to write your description as if you are writing a traditional tweet of 140 characters.

Make it super valuable, full of metadata, and further tease the viewer into the video.

Somewhere within the description, try and write a paragraph that includes as many of the keyword phrases as possible for the video, but make sure that it still reads as a proper English sentence.

And if you can, try to add timestamps of your video, because they may end up on Google Search, which gives you another avenue of YouTube views.

Tip #9 Set realistic goals and be patient

If you're this deep into the video, you've probably got a lot of this in abundance, but it does bear repeating because YouTube can be a tough game.

To succeed as a video creator, you are going to need determination and patience. You may take all the advice from many sources, all good, put it into practice, and then you may see very little in return for a very long time. You could be 200 videos, and six months into this, and wonder why am I not gaining views and subscribers? And then, all of a sudden, it happens overnight, and you have a viral moment for your channel.

For a lot of creators on YouTube, overnight success takes weeks, months, sometimes even years. Just remember this, if you're putting in the hard work, and the analytics are telling you good things, as well as your audience, eventually, YouTube will stop ignoring you, and start to distribute your content to more people, but it does sometimes take a little longer than what you might think.

With that in mind, I want you to set goals that are achievable in the next month to three months. Rather than setting your first goal to monetize your content, try and go for something more obtainable, like 50 subscribers, 100 subscribers, 10,000 views. Those sort of step by step targets that you can celebrate on an incremental level until you reach those big goals.

If your first goal is to monetize your content on YouTube, again you're thinking about how you can extract as much as possible from YouTube, as opposed to providing as much value to your audience as possible.

“And that's it”, “thanks for watching,” “hope you enjoyed this video.” All words and phrases you should never use at the end of a video. The moment a viewer can sniff that you're trying to wrap up a video, using trigger words such as that, they will immediately switch off.

You should be keeping the viewer engaged right up to the moment the video ends. Yes, you can have calls to action, to ask people to subscribe to your videos, etc, but never tell the viewer that it's basically time to switch over.

Ready for some more awesome advice on how to create a YouTube channel? We've another 10 amazing tips for you!

How to Create a YouTube Channel: 10 More Amazing Tips

On this week’s episode of TubeTalk, we're going to unpack the world of blogging, YouTube, brand deals, and everything in between.

As a blogger myself, this topic is very close to my heart, and I wanted to get one of the industry's leading experts who's going to help us navigate those blogging and video world together. Kristen Hills of 

, not only created this amazing blog with her five sisters, but has also very successfully transitioned into the world of video. In this podcast you will learn:

How to use YouTube to provide invaluable content to your other audiences

How to diversify your revenue streams across different platforms

How it is absolutely possible to make a successful living from blogging

Subscribe to TubeTalk: The Video Marketing Podcast

TubeTalk has been informing video creators and marketers since 2014, and is one of the most respected and listened to podcasts in the online video industry. Subscribe today so you never miss an episode! You can find vidIQ's TubeTalk at:

Don't forget to leave us a review if you love the show!

From Successful Blogger to Successful YouTuber: Full Transcript

Liron:	So this is very exciting stuff, kind of the old blogging worlds and YouTube colliding. So, let's take kind of two steps back, and set the scene for people who don't know you. Let's talk about Six Sisters Stuff. Who is Kristen, in a tweet?

Kristen: Okay. So like you said, I have five sisters, so there are six of us. And we started a blog back in 2011 ,so one of the very first ones to start a blog. And then we started making content, and realized that people really liked food. When we made food, they would come, and come to our blog.

So we decided, okay, let's push food. So we always kind of jump on the trend of, okay, what's working for us? Let's go with that. And so Pinterest came about and we've made a lot of recipes, put them on Pinterest, and then we just started growing. So we were about, we were maybe at 2000 page views a day, we jumped to about 200,000 page views a day. Yes. In a few weeks. Yeah. It was unreal what Pinterest did for us.

Liron:	Wow. How long ago was this? Was this still in 2011?

Kristen: Right when Pinterest came out, we were one of the first ones. And so, instead of just like pinning a little bit, we literally had a system where we would pin almost 30 to 40 times a day at the very, very beginning. And so not many people were on Pinterest, and so they saw our stuff constantly. So, I mean it came with work, but that's kind of how we started.

Liron:	Unlimited content on a specific platform. And you kind of recognized that really early on, knowing that if you jump onto this, the likelihood is pretty good that people are going to see this. That was pretty smart. That just before you kind of carry on, you said you, you moved into food. What were you doing on your blog before you realized that food was your thing?

Kristen: Oh, man. So we started the blog because my sisters and I, we moved to different states now. There were, there's six of us, but two of them were still in junior high when we started this blog. And so there was really like the three oldest, we moved away from each other and we needed a way to communicate with each other.

So our husbands kind of suggested, "Oh, you should look into blogging." So we started a blog to share our mommy tips, and what books we were reading that day. And yeah, it started out as a conversation with each other.

Liron:	That is so cool. And then people saw your food stuff, and they kind of really gravitated to that. And how did you know that they liked your food stuff over something else, for example?

Kristen: Well, so you'd write about your favorite book, and you'd get two views. Then you'd write about your mom's brownie recipes, and anyways, we'd get 200 views. So I mean 2 views to 200 was huge for us.

Liron: So blogging, did your food thing, understood Pinterest. What was next?

Kristen: We grew Pinterest, and then we jumped onto Facebook and started just pushing our Facebook. On each blog post we'd write about our Facebook. So we've kind of focused on one platform at a time, just slowly grow it. So Pinterest was first, then Facebook, and then the other platforms from there. So right now I think Pinterest, we have like 800,000 followers on there and Facebook is almost at 1.5 million. And so it's just a process, always a process.

Liron:	Well, there's always something going on. Okay. Where did YouTube come into play here?

Kristen: We actually started making a few videos in 2013 but he had no idea what we were doing. And so we just kind of made videos for Facebook, and just threw them on our YouTubechannel. And so we just, we did not understand anything.

Then 2017 came, and I knew that that's where the world was going, was video. Everything was video. And so I went to CVX Live in Salt Lake just to learn about it, and I was blown away. I was just in love with the thought of YouTube. And so I did a lot of research. I did a lot of podcasts. I slowly was learning, and then really started figuring out YouTube, and how it worked. And yeah, it just became a huge part of my life, a huge part of the blog. So now with our blog, each sister kind of has a job and my job is YouTube. So that's mostly what I focus on.

Liron:	Wow. Okay. And how many subscribers is your blog, has your YouTube channel got at the moment?

Kristen: Our YouTube is at, we just hit 234,000 this morning.

*Liron:	Nice. Kind of key message here. You started this in 2017 and that's not so long ago. *

Kristen: No, I started, so it hasn't even been two years, and I started with about 8,000 subscribers on there. But the channel was dead. There was nothing happening there.

Liron:	No. Of course obviously having the blog as your main platform, you already had an audience there, and Pinterest, and Facebook. So it was easier to direct that audience to yet another location. Do you have a specific strategy that you work with at the moment to move audiences around between the various platforms, or do you kind of see them all as completely separate?

Kristen: So that's a good question. At first I thought, yes, I am going to crush this YouTube thing, because I have a huge audience and I'm going to herd everyone over. And I'll tell you right now, that is not the case. Not even a little bit. Push people over, and get them to subscribe.

But they weren't my followers on YouTube. Like, once I found people on YouTube that watched YouTube , those were my good followers. But I did start by, I guess I want to say I jump started my channel. I did a big giant giveaway with Gleam, and I know YouTube doesn't really love that anymore. But in 2017 it was okay. I did a giveaway, and put it on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, on our blog posts, on our email list, and just to push everyone over to YouTube. So, from there I gained about 10,000 subscribers from that huge, massive push. But my numbers were still the same. I might've gotten to a lot of subscribers, but they weren't actually watching my content.

Liron:	Oh, so that's a great little nugget right there. Just because you have a number which is rather large, and that's your subscriber numbers. But that doesn't necessarily mean that those are going to watch your videos, not your audience. Would you do another giveaway of the same nature if YouTube said it was okay, would you think there's value in doing that?

Kristen: I think its value, this sounds ridiculous, but usually if a channel has, you know, a thousand subscribers, I necessarily don't subscribe, because I'm like, oh they're just tiny. And I know a lot of people don't think that, but for me personally, yeah. But if someone has 18,000 subscribers, I'll look into it more like, "Okay, people are following them." So in a way I would do it for the numbers but I'll, I mentally will know that that's not necessarily going to be watching my content.

Liron:	So, you're setting your own expectations so it serves a purpose, and the purpose is to give you a nice kind of jumpstart on the channel. It gives you a nice kind of almost some sort of authority I suppose? But you know that these are not going to be your core audience into the future. You're kind of building from there essentially.

Liron:	Okay. So what do you do today? I mean, is the blog kind of your main thing? I know each sister has got her own responsibility, her own job, but you kind of, where do you guys focus most of your attention? Is it all on the blog, or are you kind of prioritizing the other platforms just as equally as that blog?

Kristen: Got you. So yeah, our main thing is the blog. But I want to say that YouTube is kind of a separate thing. They work together, but there they're such very different things. So, if you don't mind, I'm going to jump into this just a little bit.

So the blog is our main thing. We post seven times a week. Each sister takes a day, and then my mom also works for us. She takes a day also. And so we have blog posts going out. Then we're also redoing old posts with the correct keywords. Where we first started, we were just throwing up a picture, throwing up the recipe, and Google doesn't like that. They love, you know, helps people out, make sure you have the right words, that kind of stuff. And so we're going back and we're redoing all those.

Liron:	Kind of re-optimizing your old content.

Liron:	Do you know how many pages you have on your blog, or how big it is?

Kristen: We're close to 4,000 recipes now.

Liron:	Wow. Okay. Do you mind sharing kind of any numbers in terms of stats on your blog?

Kristen: Yeah, it depends on the season. Usually holidays, and fall, and Christmas, and even January do really well. Summertime kind of dies off because everyone's busy. So right now we're averaging about 3 million a month, which doesn't seem like a lot when it comes to YouTube numbers. But if you think about it, YouTube, you get one ad usually before each video. On our blog we have eight or nine ads. So we're getting that much more money from our blog compared.

Liron:	Absolutely. In the blogging world, that's huge. I mean that ranks up there with the best of the best. But that's a great point about being able to serve more than one ad. Look, I run a tech blog, and what I really like about the technology kind of world, and running my own blog is it's my own. I get to control it.

When you are on somebody else's platform, you're pretty much at their mercy. They change an algorithm. You've got to go with it. Your blog is your own. Right now when it comes to kind of revenue, and again, don't share anything, you're not comfortable sharing. Is the ad revenue more lucrative on the blog side just because of the volume? Or is it kind of other opportunities? I mean I know you guys have cookbooks, can you talk to some of those revenue streams?

Kristen: No. I would love to. Okay, so first off we'll start with ads on the blog ads. It used to be our biggest revenue stream. It's not anymore, but it's still a big chunk for us. So I don't know if average month is about, it can be anywhere from 30 to $60,000 a month, just from the blog revenue. It depends. It really depends on the month.

Liron:	Ads are passive income, after you've done the work obviously.

Liron:	So, we've got ads on blog, right? What else we got?

Kristen: Then we have, once we started getting an audience, we realized we can make a lot more money if we have our own product. And so that's what we've been starting to do. So we started something called a menu plan and it, it's a membership. So you can sign up, and every week we will send you six recipes and two side dishes and all the ingredients you need to make these recipes.

So all you have to do is you can shop online, you can go to the store, but your grocery list is already taken care of, like it's all done for you. Every week they'll get one of those and then they pay monthly. I think it's depending on what sales are going on. It's about $1,499 per person per month. So that's been our biggest revenue stream by far outweighing the ads.

Liron:	Oh, wow. Okay. So people are obviously wanting that customer-specific information.

Liron:	They're happy to pay for it if it's delivered to them, I suppose.

Kristen: Exactly. It takes me a good hour and a half to make a shopping list. If I can get one automatically. That is worth my time.

Liron:	Thank you very much. Absolutely. Do the same recipes, would they appear somewhere else or is that kind of more exclusive content to people who pay?

Kristen: No, because we have about 4,000 recipes, so lots of times we'll take old recipes that have kind of been buried, because there's a lot of them. And then we'll bring them back up. You can take a picture, fix it a little bit and put it in there. Majority of the time that people have not seen these recipes.

Liron:	And again it's not, it's about the convenience. It's about switching my inbox and saying, "There it is." Press print, it's done.

Liron:	Okay. Ad revenue, we got. Memberships, number two. What else have we got?

Kristen: We have published cookbooks. So, we have seven cookbooks out, and we actually have three more in the works.

Kristen: We weren't expecting to sign three more, but they had some great ideas, and that's kind of where it's go on from there.

Liron:	It's funny, every time we speak, "This is the last one." And then it's six and seven, and now we have three more. Okay.

Kristen: I know I really thought this one was the last one. It's a great opportunity and we're grateful to have those published cookbooks. It's a little time consuming to make a cookbook. Thankfully there are six of us. Well seven of us cause our mom and so, yeah. Usually without a cookbook and about six weeks. It's a lot of work.

Liron:	I've got to ask this question because it has to be asked, do the hubbies contribute to this process?

Kristen: They, well my husband, he eats the food that counts.

Kristen: No. Yeah. We actually have a few that contribute. So, we have the sister who's in charge of the membership plan, the menu plan. Her husband kind of quit his job, and works on that full time with her. So he works for the company. And then we also have another sister whose husband is our accountant. He takes care of all our money, and all that fun stuff.

Liron:	Oh, the fun stuff. Keep it in the family. I mean, that's the one thing is that people really underestimate is the time commitment that this requires. And it definitely has an impact on the family. It's got impact on how you plan, or what you're going to be doing ,and who can and cannot do. So it's a business at the end of the day, and the business needs to be run like a regular business. It's got expenses, it's got an income, its got its ups and downs, and you've got to kind of bob and weave and adjust as you need to.

Kristen: Yeah, yeah. No, it's funny, we're purchasing a house right now and I'm the one whose name is on it. And when they ask what I do, "We're like, yeah, well I'm a blogger, and a YouTuber." And they just stare at me like, "And you make money from that?"

Liron:	Yes. Hence I'm buying this property. So where do you see this kind of all going? You've made a transition from the blogging world to other media, but you haven't left your backs. I mean your base is still the blog. What's the next step? Where do you see this going?

Kristen:	Well, that's a really good question. So for me personally, the goal is to get YouTube to a million subscribers. YouTube is a little bit different. Like we, we used to make just normal recipes on YouTube, and we just weren't growing. Like I was so frustrated it wasn't working. And then I did a random video about an instant pot, and it just took off. And so then I'm like, oh well maybe I'll do another instant pot video. Took off again. So, third video took off again. I'm like, okay, well we're not going to do other food. We're going to kind of focus on the instant pot.

So once I niche down on a food topic, which was not my goal, like I did not really want to do that. But now that I've done it and seen the progress that I've made, and the tight knit group that's come together to learn about the instant pot, and it's hilarious. It's a blast. And I've loved doing it.

So, we share instant pot recipes on the blog, transitioning back and forth from YouTube to blog, making sure there's instant pot on both. But the next step is hopefully to get some instant pot products, and kind of go that direction to try and push the instant pot more. It's one of the most purchased items on Amazon. And so I figured why not go with that? You know?

Liron:	Well, you've got, you've got the hottest thing that it's virtually impossible to get out there, which is an audience. So if your audience kind of loves you, they know what to do, they can see the quality. It's just natural for them to support you and take that step, which is kind of beautiful.

Liron:	I also like the fact that you've recognized, "Look, I want to do lots of things." Sit back ,and then you realize that's just not working well, because you're competing with literally every other food blogger, YouTubeare out there. But as soon as you did one that took off, you were smart enough to say, "Well hold on, we may be onto something. Let's test it again, and let's test it again. And then there we go."

Are you a blogger looking to build huge success on YouTube? On this week's TubeTalk we talk to a channel that has done just that!

How to Get More Views On YouTube From Your Channel Subscribers

Rob Wilson

How to Create a YouTube Channel: 10 More Amazing Tips

Carla Marshall

From Successful Blogger to Successful YouTuber: TubeTalk 174 Kristen Hills

Liron Segev

Recreating YouTube Success by Understanding Analytics: TubeTalk Episode 158

Liron Segev

YouTube Watch Time: The Secret Sauce to More YouTube Views and Subscribers

Carla Marshall

T Series Beats PewDiePie As The Most Subscribed to Channel

Rob Wilson

How to Start a YouTube Channel: The Ultimate Guide!

Carla Marshall

How to Grow Your Channel Fast By Understanding Analytics!

Rob Wilson

How to Delete YouTube Videos In The New Creator Studio

Rob Wilson