The Five Principles of New YouTube Success with Scott Simson

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Finding huge success on YouTube is absolutely possible - if you follow the five new principles to unlock new achievements and help monetize your content.

We spoke to YouTube expert creator Scott Simson who has used the five principles process to drive 300,000 subscribers, and 100 million organic views across his YouTube channels in just 18 months.

For the full show notes, head over to https://vidiq.com/blog/post/five-principles-youtube-success-tubetalk-156


The Five Principles of Success on YouTube

For anyone creating content on YouTube with the aim of increasing views and subscribers, there are a number of programming and audience development strategies they need to be aware of. YouTube expert Scott takes us through five of the most important:

#1 Find Your Focus Then Stay in Your Lane

Scott highly recommends focusing in on a topic or category that you are most familiar with, or are at a specialist at, and go all out on creating and promoting content about that theme on YouTube. At one time, creators could publish videos around a broad topic (for instance - family vlogging) and upload a wide variety of content from different angles. But as YouTube continues to refine its algorithm with the aim of surfacing relevant, quality content to viewers, creators need a single focus. In other words, you have to do one thing really, really well in order for the algorithm to like you.

Scott learned this lesson through experience last year when views tanked on his general ‘family’ content. While many other family-focused vlogging channels diversified and incorporated wider trends in their programming strategy, Scott made the decision to refine exactly what they wanted to offer their audience and double down, and triple down on content that has driven huge views and engagement. It’s a strategy that’s worked.

For any creator who is just starting out, Scott recommends that until you have established a base audience of people who are watching you, stick with one thing. Once you get into the hundreds of thousands, or even millions of subscribers and your daily views are in the hundreds of thousands or millions, then you can start to branch a little bit and do more of a variety because you have a core community of people that's large enough that will follow you wherever you go, whatever you do. At the beginning, the safest thing to do is to carve out your little niche on YouTube and focus exclusively on that for a good long while.

#2 Diversify Your Income from Video - Now

There was a time when you could predict your income from YouTube based off what you made in the previous year. Those days are long gone. Now, income can fluctuate month to month so YouTubers need to diversify where your income is coming in from. For Scott, that means not being reliant on Adsense income but looking at many other monetization opportunities including brand deals, product sales, affiliate links, lead generation etc. He advises any other creator looking to earn a passive income (or a more substantial income) to do the same.

Think of a product that you can sell and sell it from the beginning. Try and talk to brands early. Most companies now understand the power of influence on marketing, and so they're willing to deal with micro influencers, whether it be with product sales or with affiliate type of program or with just product trade for video time. Most brands now realize that's the power of YouTube and social video.

If you sell a product or service obviously your YouTube Channel is a great vehicle for sales or lead generation. Or, if there is a way to create a physical product around your channel (lik