4 Mindset Shifts for Ranking on YouTube With a New Channel

Your videos aren’t ranking because you’re in your head! Let’s fix that. I’m going to give you the cheat codes on your YouTube channel and the mindset shifts you need to make to start ranking your channel even when it’s brand new.

Lessons You Need to Learn to Rank on YouTube

Let’s get into these mindset shifts because I’m telling you, I’ve had my channel since 2017, and I have gone through a few spirals already. I’ve been through times where I’ve posted and only received three views or posted and received thousands of views.

I just want you to know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and you must make sure that your mindset is tight!

Educational Content Ranks Well on YouTube – Not Vlogs

It’s not about you as much as the content and value you provide. When we first start out, I understand how enticing it is to make a vlog or to show behind the scenes because most of us come over from Instagram or any other platform where it is more about us and we have to share so much about our personality and our personal lives to get that relate-ability factor and to build that know, like, and trust factor. Whenever we’re thinking about YouTube specifically, we do not care about that right now, okay? What I want you to do is focus on educational content. YouTube is a search engine so when we are using YouTube for our marketing strategy we need to put out educational content first because that’s going to help us rank faster.

When you have a YouTube channel and you start out with vlogs, YouTube doesn’t know what to do with that, especially if you don’t have a built-in audience yet. In this case, I always recommend starting out with educational content first and then going into personal content later. For example, for my own channel I just recently posted a personal video that is really geared towards my pivot on YouTube. That video is doing well with audience retention because my built-in audience is watching it. That video isn’t made to rank out, it’s not made to go into the search engines and be ranked and found for keywords it’s a way for me to nurture the community I spent years building. That’s how I want you to think about this strategy.

I want you to start out with educational first because you’re pulling in those people to be part of your community and you’re getting them to subscribe because you give some bomb-ass content! After a while, you can start dripping in some personalized videos to show a little bit more sides to you. But at the very, very beginning, nobody cares about that!

The Difference between a YouTuber and a CEO

Now the second mindset shift we have to get around is understanding we are not influencers or typical YouTubers. We are coaches and CEOs of our businesses, right? We have a different goal in place than these influencers out there. An influencer’s goal is to entertain and keep people on the app for as long as possible. When they do that, YouTube can run ads for their account, and they get a piece of that ad money. Of course, I love a YouTube check just like the next person but understand when we are business owners, we are using YouTube for a different reason. Our job as coaches, consultants, and CEOs is to appear in searches and attract people who are ready to work with us. We really want to weed out the problem-aware people so we can get them off YouTube and into our marketing funnel. I want you to keep that in mind because our approaches are going to be totally different.

We Use YouTube to Convert Viewers Into Clients

Now, moving on to the next mindset shift here, I feel like this one is a little bit like, “well yeah Jamar!” but I think we tend to forget about it, but we are here to make money, honey!

YouTube is a marketing and sales expense, and we need to show our return on investment. When you’re using YouTube as part of your marketing strategy, I want you to make sure you are including a call to action in your videos. I don’t want you to just teach and give instructions on how the viewer can solve their problem because here’s the truth the video is probably just scratching the surface of whether or not their problem can be solved. Your offers are the real answer. Do not forget that.

We can be giving as much value as possible. If we’re not really doing everything we can to help them, we’re doing them a disservice by not giving them the actual answer to their problems. Our YouTube videos are there to just scratch the surface. It’s kind of like the band-aid really. We all know that our group program, the mastermind, the intensive, maybe even something up on the shop is going to be the thing that really solves their problem. Keep in mind, these people are already problem-aware, so they already know that this is a problem that they have. You gave them that quick win inside the YouTube video, but now where can they find the real answer to their problem? Where can they find the actual cure to this pain point?

There’s More to YouTube Marketing Than Editing

Now the final mindset shift I want you to consider is to focus your energy on the right things. This is something that messes people up the most and it even messed me up back in 2017. I want you to stop focusing so much on the editing component or the camera gear. We need to really be focusing on the discoverable content first. You can grow your editing skills and the equipment you need later but the goal is for people to find you. Figure out your primary keywords, what do you want to rank for? What content is going to help you be seen by your ideal clients? That is the most important thing!