If you’re planning to monetize your channel – or step up your creative game in general – you need to develop a YouTube content strategy.
A content strategy gives you a solid framework for producing videos.
More than that, it’s a tool for transforming your overall goals for your YouTube channel into an actionable plan.
Put simply, if you’re a newbie video creator just starting out on the platform, a content strategy can help you reach your goals.
Whether that’s becoming a full-time beauty vlogger, or monetizing your cooking channel into a side hustle.
In this article, we’ll be looking at why YouTube content strategies are so useful, and how you can develop your own.
🌰 In a Nutshell
- Content strategies help you organize and optimize your content. It aids consistency, which the YouTube algorithm rewards.
- You’ll have to tailor them to your niche, audience demographics, and monetization strategies.
- Content calendars help you create engaging serial content, manage your time, and create more and better content.
- Setting down a strategy and initial metrics lets you verify that what you’re doing works.
- This helps you regularly optimize your strategy.
Keep reading for the full scoop!
Contents
Why Develop A YouTube Content Strategy?
To start with, having a content strategy helps you keep your audience happy.
Ultimately, your goal is to build a community around your channel. The cornerstone of that is consistently giving people the kind of content they want or expect from you. In prosaic terms, this means getting high engagement rates.
To do that, you have to know your audience pretty well. That takes both planning and research, which your content strategy will reflect.
Other elements to include in your content strategy are SEO – to increase the visibility of your videos – and, in the long run, monetization.
To join the YouTube Partner Program, for example, you have to reach 3,000 valid public watch hours over 12 months (or 3 million YouTube Shorts views in 3 months).
If you want to reach that goal quickly, you can make that the focus of your content production efforts.
A strategy makes it easier to increase the quantity of your output, put a different spin on topics, and vary things like video length, thumbnails and end screens.
Just as importantly, it also lets you check whether those changes are actually working.
If you start with a strategy session – or a channel audit, for existing ones – then you can do comparisons later. Like: Your thumbnail design overhaul might’ve made them prettier, but was there actually a CTR impact? Did audience retention stay the same, or did you attract the wrong kind of viewer? (We’ll talk more about this at the end!)
Start By Defining SMART Goals for Your Channel
First off, take a deep breath. A YouTube strategy is long-term planning – it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
It’s the opposite of going viral and then dropping back into obscurity. That kind of one-shot might work for a corporation’s product launch.
But it won’t make you a living.
To start with, define general goals for your channel. What is it you want to do with this channel? Making a full-time living as a vlogger? Promoting an existing business? Raising awareness for an issue that you care about?
Then, think ahead and clearly define medium- and long-term goals for your channel.
One of the best ways of defining these goals is to make sure that they’re SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based.
Finding Goals
Goals are important for planning, and they’re also great sources of motivation.
It’s great if you can, say, post three times a week, as Ali Abdaal explains in the up-front video below, but goals give direction to that effort.
Posting content is ultimately just a way to get to your goals. What is it that you really want to achieve?
Of course, setting clear goals isn’t easy – you’ll have to think about them carefully. A good way of doing that is to ask yourself questions about what exactly you want to achieve.
Useful Goal-Finding Questions:
- How much content do you want to produce in the next 12 months?
- Where do you want your subscriber count to be in six months? A year? Or even five
- What avenues of monetization are you aiming for – ads, affiliate links, brands, channel memberships, merchandise? All of them?
Clearly Define Your Target Audience, Niche, and Content Types
Next, clearly spell out your YouTube niche and the characteristics of your target audience.
Your niche is the specific topic in which you specialize. Going wildly off-topic is sure to irritate the audience you’re trying to establish. Pivoting niches entirely can be done. However, it’s going to take a lot of focused work, because the YouTube algorithm rewards consistency.
At the same time, you should be very aware of who your audience is. What’s important to keep in mind here is that your audience isn’t random – it’s shaped by you and your content. A True Crime channel will attract very different audience demographics compared to a tech review channel or a model’s profile.
So, think about the kind of people you want to be talking to. The clearer you can make your target, the higher the chances that your content appeals to them. Bonus points for attracting fans with disposable income – that’s who you want as members, and what brands want for their deals.
Out in the business world, you might hear this called an avatar or a customer persona – a profile of your ideal viewer or customer.
Similarly, because consistency is important, also think about the content types and specific video formats you want to produce. Are you doing vlogs? DIY videos? Livestreams? Product reviews? Science experiments? YouTube podcasts? Shorts skits?
You can also think about cross-promoting on platforms like TikTok, Instagram or LinkedIn, or create goodies for memberships on Patreon and the like. Some of these will require different formats and tactics.
Which brings us to the next point: The actual content.
Generate a Series of Content Ideas
As a next step, it’s time to generate content ideas. Lots of them. (You’ll probably have to chuck plenty of them later.)
There’s a wide range of tools and strategies to help you come up with amazing ideas – from diving into SEO to doing some focus group research. With the community features YouTube now has, it’s easier than ever to just poll your fans. And you can of course check in with what your competitors are up to.
Generally, group your content into coherent units where you can. Plan ahead video series, future playlists, challenges, compilations, live streams, and revisits of older videos. If you’re making your content binge-able from the get-go, you’ll reap the metrics boosts later on.
For example, as a yoga channel, you’re almost required to do a 30-day beginner class starting January 1st. The same will probably work well for most topics around health, food, or skills you could teach. This kind of thing is great for audience building! And: It’ll goose up your watch time.
A whole series of content, plus a challenge, plus riding on the wave of New Year’s goals? This is catnip for viewers.
For much the same reason, doing daily vlogmas videos for their fans has become something of an annual YouTube tradition among vloggers.
If you’re doing tech reviews, you could do long-term reviews of gadgets you already shot an unboxing video for. That way, you can plan that video months in advance – and that’s always great for keeping stress and costs low.
A special note if you base your content on others’ ideas: You should keep track – and later mention in the video – of your sources and inspirations. So, as a philosophy video essayist, cite the papers. If you cook on camera, tell your viewers where your recipe came from. This is critical to avoiding plagiarism and copyright infringement, which could tank your reputation with your audience and any brands.
Besides which – it makes you sound more like an expert (or ups your street cred – it depends on the niche).
Create a Content Calendar
For many niches, there’s a rule of thumb saying you should upload original content at least once per week to keep your audience engaged.
A content calendar helps you stay on top of your game. Factor in how much time video production takes, and what elements you can outsource.
Then, you can schedule when you need to research, film, edit, and promote each new piece of video content before it goes live.
Ultimately, having a content calendar like this makes your life as a YouTuber less stressful. It gives you structure and a schedule to stick to. Among other things, that makes it easier to plan in personal time, events, and vacations.
Here’s The Bliss Bean’s tips for content planning.
Finally, content calendars are very useful when it comes to seasonal content. Let’s take Vlogmas as an example again. It’s become a well-loved annual YouTube tradition. Posting a video a day during it, as many do, is much easier if everything is scheduled well in advance. You can start shooting earlier, and you – or your video editing services – can block out time for editing it.
Implement Your Strategy and Check Back Regularly
Finally, it’s time to implement the strategy you’ve laid out.
At first, you’ll probably have to make adjustments as you go. For example, you might have to shuffle around your content calendar, depending on how smoothly production works.
Or you might find that you’d rather outsource some aspects of the process.
The most important thing, though, is to regularly check your achievements against your medium- and long-term goals.
For this purpose, YouTube analytics are your best friend. In Studio, you can deep-dive into the performance of your content. What is popular? What failed to meet the targets you set? And why?
Take a look at the most basic metrics first: Viwws, watch time, and subscribers. To get the most out of Studio’s analytics, consider hiring a YouTube channel consultant or manager.
Based on this data, you’ll be able to go back and tweak your strategy to achieve your long-term goals.
The Bottom Line
A great YouTube content strategy is an invaluable asset for your career on the platform.
It’ll help you put an end to your days of having to come up with video ideas on the fly and scrambling to reach your monetization goals.
Instead, it’ll give you a clear framework in which to work towards your goals, and help you cut back on the stress of the life of a content creator.
Ultimately, it’s well worth taking the time and investing the effort to make your content strategy the best it can be.
