You’ve probably had enough of your New Years goals at this point. Maybe you’ve cheated on your diet or just feel discouraged by your progress and are ready to just give up. Because of that, we wanted to give you a game plan to help you NOT give up on your goals for YouTube in 2023.

Creator Spotlight

But first, I want to introduce you to Dusty and his channel, . We did two consultations with him a year apart. After the first consultation, we made a goal list for him and a plan of how to reach it. Now, a year later, he has been checking off his goals: He gained 75k new subs with his niche audience, earned his silver play button, and left his 9-5 to teach Tig Welding on YouTube full time which has allowed him to have more time to spend with his young kids.

Getting that fresh perspective from a strategist can really help you step back and re-evaluate what tweaks to make like Dusty, but also to feel more confident in a strategy that will deliver results like it has for him. But you are also fully capable of doing it yourself! We will show you how.

Where to Start

Start by asking yourself, “If you could have ANYTHING that you want, what would that be?” Look at the big picture. Write that down and then keep going: What else? What else besides that? You need to dig deeper than surface level. To know where you are going, you need to step back and see what’s most important to you.

Then ask yourself, “If you got that thing, what would that do for you?” People often have the goals of views and subs, but WHY you want them is most important. Views and subs are not the goal. They are a tool to get to a deeper more underlying goal. – Such as making sales, promoting your book, enrolling in your courses, etc.

Roadblocks

After identifying what you want, figuring out your challenges is super helpful. What have you tried in the past that doesn’t work? Let’s not do that again. What are your common excuses? What has gotten in your way in the past? Having this in mind is super helpful to make a plan that will actually work.

Objectives and Key Results

Next WRITE THEM DOWN. Writing it down as an objective makes it crystal clear what your win actually looks like.

Then, you write down the Key Results: The things that need to happen in order for this objective to be met. Now these must be very measurable so that it’s obvious if you did it or not.

Forbes did some research on this and they found that if you don’t write your goal down, you have a 33% chance of meeting it. If you do write it down, you automatically have a 10% greater chance of reaching it. If you write down your goal and then action steps you need to take to do it, you have a 64% chance of reaching your goal. And if you write that all down, PLUS you give a weekly update to someone else, then you are 76% more likely to reach that goal.

BHAG

Those goals need to be achievable for you within a certain time period. – Like yearly, quarterly, monthly, etc. But there is also a place for your BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal). In Jim Collins book, , he looked at the differences between good businesses and great businesses and one of the things he found is that the great businesses had a BHAG. This is the “fly to the moon” goal. Others may call it a 10 or 20 year or lifetime vision. But this big mission can keep you driven to reach your smaller goal each year.

Establish a Baseline

Just like when you were a little kid, it’s hard to feel like you are actually growing until your mom started making marks on the wall where you could look back to where you were a year ago. For a creator, you need to get yourself a zoomed out picture of how you are doing. Compare how your channel did overall in 2022 vs 2021. Go to advanced analytics and change the date range from 2022 to 2021. See what was your best performing videos. Are there any patterns? Have you grown year over year? You need to know where you are coming from to know where you are going. With our clients we always start with a “benchmark report” so we know where the creator started and then can track how they are progressing.

After you look at this, look at the last 90 days. Seeing how your newer content is doing is helpful to see your current patterns. Look at viewer signals such as impressions, CTR, watch time, average % viewed, end screen elements, etc. You are tracking the viewers progress from click to end. Throw it all on a spreadsheet and keep tabs on it every month.

Starting here helps you see progress in all these areas. This helps you know where you need to focus your attention and where you are making progress.

Establish a Process

Starting something new aways feels really awkward after a bit. We lack confidence and think, is this really working? This feeling is normal. But establishing a good system is incredibly helpful to solidify your process. It takes more work upfront to establish the process, but once you have it all spelled out, it becomes incredibly easy for you (or someone you hire) to do this process over and over again and get the same results. You don’t have to think thru each step each time, but simply do it and tweak it as you go.

Rewards

Now that you know what you are working towards, it’s important to know how you are going to celebrate that win. For your own mental health, you must prioritize acknowledging the work that you’ve done. Reaching that goal should be a reward in itself, but we naturally focus on the negative. Focusing on the positive must happen for you to acknowledge where you have come from and give you the resolve to keep pushing forward.

So now that it’s almost February, don’t be afraid to totally reassess and change up your plan for 2023. We want to see you succeed this year, so make a point to periodically step back and see where you are on a whole a few times a year. Oh and don’t forget to celebrate those wins!

Power Tip

We have a hack for YouTube analytics because sometimes the filters can get glitchy.

We have found that it really is best to just do it the old fashioned way of using “Groups” when segregating content types. It still works flawlessly, when filters do not. Under your analytics click your channel name and make some groups. You can title the group “thumbnails with faces” and pick all the videos that apply. Then compare it to a group you make called “thumbnails without faces” and see what the difference is. You can really compare anything: 10 second hooks vs longer hooks or interviews vs just you talking, videos outside vs inside. The list is endless and it can really help you see some patterns you couldn’t see otherwise.

Keep changing lives!

Tim Schmoyer

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