Want to grow your YouTube channel? Phil Nottingham breaks down the four S's of YouTube success: Subscribers, Suggested, Search, and Shorts.

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Hello, I'm Phil Nottingham, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Today, I'm going to be talking about YouTube success and what really makes a YouTube channel successful over time.

Now there's a framework that I call the four Ss of YouTube success, which I'll use with any new client or any company I'm working with to kind of determine how we're doing in terms of YouTube overall.

Now, essentially, YouTube works as a recommendations engine for video content, and there's lots of different ways in which you can generate views from the platform itself. And what you have to do to be successful is to make sure that you are generating views from lots of different aspects of that platform, rather than relying on just one or two.

And so within this, there is, I think, four different quadrants broadly that we can think of in terms of how we are generating views. 

And the first is one I will call subscribers. Now, subscribers are obviously a very important part of the YouTube ecosystem. They're really the thing that drives channels to greatness over time. If you can get people to subscribe to your channel, keep watching your content, that's how you're going to really win. But the way in which YouTube recommends subscriptions is slightly more complicated than that.

Obviously, you have the subscriber feed in YouTube itself. So when people go to the YouTube platform, load up the app, if they subscribe to your videos, they're going to get that content within their feed. They also may get notifications on their mobile device or in other areas. But most critically, the way in which you tend to get views from your subscribers is through the YouTube homepage.

And not only that, when you have content that seems to be appealing to your subscribers, that they're watching a lot, that has very good retention, high click-through rates, YouTube will then tend to recommend this content to other people as well, other viewers that it thinks have a similar interest based on their own viewing history to your existing subscribers.

And so as you grow that subscriber count and as you grow interest from your subscribers in your content, you tend to find that you get a lot more views from the YouTube homepage.

And when any video goes viral, whenever it has that kind of explosion of views, it's normally through the YouTube homepage as that primary mechanism. So this is often encapsulated in the YouTube platform under Browse features. But the YouTube homepage is where you will find that kind of real engine of fast growth for any particularly successful video.

And so what we can do here is think about subscribers as these three different areas in which you can get views.

And if you really start to think about creating content that's going to get people coming back for more, so repeatable formats, content that really meets the interest of a particular group of people, and keep creating stuff that matches those two things, this is how you're going to optimize for these particular areas. 

The second way in which you can generate views is through another S, which is suggested.

Now the most obvious method here is that we see a list of videos on the sidebar when we're watching something on YouTube on desktop, or we may also see videos that pop up at the end of videos through those end screens, through the suggestions there. And of course, in things like playlists, we may also get suggestions as well.

So here, through the YouTube ecosystem, is how we're going to get views from the suggested kind of bucket. And this is really optimized for by ensuring that your titles, your descriptions, and your thumbnails are extremely compelling. So when people see these things come up in their sidebar at the end of a video, they are compelled to watch them because you've offered something, you've teased, you've tantalized towards the idea of a really great video that they just can't help themselves but say, "I'm just going to watch this."

And so this is really about optimizing those meta elements as effectively as you can and also creating things that have that hook, that real interest in a sort of editorial sense, that are going to capture the interest of people who probably aren't familiar with your channel but nevertheless are interested in what you might have to say. 

The third is search. Now, obviously, YouTube search is a big part of the ecosystem, but also Google search.

YouTube videos often, if they are ranking very well, YouTube search can rank on Google search as well, and you can generate a lot of different views from both channels, sometimes even Google search more than YouTube search.

But here it's really about creating content that captures that latent demand. It's not really just about putting keywords in the title or anything like that. It's about making sure that you are working out where the demand is in the market and creating content to capture that. So this requires some research. It requires some understanding of what your audience is looking for and really doing a good job to build stuff that really captures the interest where that existing demand is. So that's search.

And then lastly, we have the fourth S, which is Shorts. Now Shorts is part of the YouTube ecosystem.

It's its own sort of separate thing that sits alongside the core YouTube longer-form videos. But they interrelate in an interesting way because not only can you get views from the Shorts feed itself, from where people log through and they're clicking, similar to TikTok or Instagram, and they get their short-form vertical video. So you obviously have that method of discovering your content if you've created content for Shorts.

But you also have Related Shorts, where you can tie a short video to a longer-form video and then really think about it in terms of being a clip or a trailer that advertises that longer-form piece of content. So when you have this working, you can actually use Shorts not only as a means of generating views itself, but also generating views for these longer-form videos. 

And so a really good, successful YouTube channel invariably has a good mix of views that it's generating from these four different quadrants.

Now, most of those views, as your channel grows over time, are likely to come more from the subscriber feed, from these elements where you are generating that sort of audience that are coming back regularly. And through that, YouTube is recommending your content to more people who they deem have a similar interest. So that's where your real engine of growth is going to come from.

Search is where you're going to get that kind of always-on level of consistent view counts because you're matching the demand that's latent in the market that people really want videos for, and you're creating to meet that demand.

Suggested is really a process of just iterating, optimizing, and improving all the metadata and the visual elements that go alongside your videos to make sure that people are interested and want to click through and watch.

And Shorts is creating those clips, those trailers, those additional short videos that are then feeding into generating views for the rest of your content.

So if you get all these four things working well, over time, you will find that your YouTube channel leads to great success, many views, fame, fortune, and other good things.

Thank you very much.