I Studied 7,400 YouTube Channels to CRACK the Algorithm

I studied 7,400 YouTube channels and found three secrets that I now use to make viral videos that go on to get hundreds of thousands of views and make tens of thousands of dollars.

Diving deep into top YouTubers data has bestowed on me the hidden formula to crack the algorithm and take a channel from zero all the way to 100,000 subscribers.

But only read this article if you actually want that silver play button. Because I'm on a mission to take 1,000 YouTube channels to over 100,000 subscribers. And it all starts right here, right now.

How to easily beat the YouTube algorithm

Content Funnel

The best advice MrBeast ever gave was make the best video possible. However, there is a darker path to beating the algorithm.

Sometimes specific niches figure out things before the big YouTubers and the business niche created something that they still haven't caught onto. It's called the content funnel. This is a way to trap new viewers and then release them into your videos.

The funnel has three sections. The first pillar is short form. Now it is hard to turn a person who just watches your shorts into a viewer who will watch a 10 minute video. But adding this one thing to your video will 10x the amount of people that convert. So then you can take advantage of the easy views on YouTube Shorts.

So here's how to make your content funnel for lazy people. You will have two pillars of content, one of which will be a fake podcast. Yes, I know, a fake podcast. Like what even is that? If you're famous enough to get on a real podcast and that is absolutely great, you should do that.

But most of us have to fake it. Sit down with one of your friends and have him ask you a bunch of questions that you wrote to go viral. This can be stuff like how did you actually start making money online? Or if you're a vlogger, you could do why did you decide to start vlogging? It's really simple questions.

You will then answer each question in two to three minutes and point back to your YouTube channel at the end. Do this for a few hours and you will have a ton of content to post on YouTube Shorts.

But the one thing that will 10x the amount of people that actually head over to your YouTube channel is a new Feature YouTube just announced. In the next few months, every single short that you make can have the option to add a button and when your viewers click that button, it will take them directly to your long form video, on the short.

That is absolutely crazy because that means there is a direct funnel from your shorts to your long form. And if you make these short form videos about Your long form videos, the conversion rate is just going to be insane.

So as you may have guessed, the second pillar of the content funnel is just long form content. We did this exact strategy with one of my clients and hit a hundred thousand subscribers in under six months.

It's difficult to track the exact number that came from Shorts, but we're assuming it's over half. And actually in the last two weeks we've gone from 130,000 subscribers to 195,000. I'm sure it's going to be over 200,000 when this video comes out.

So if you're not taking advantage of the short form platforms, it's going to be very hard to grow in 2024.

The the third pillar of the content funnel is what you're selling. If you're not at this point yet, then no worries. But it is an absolute myth that you need to be monetized to make a lot of money.

Right now, not a lot of people are taking advantage of the content funnel. So while it's still new, I recommend you take advantage of it.

Title Balancing

Alright, the second secret. We all know that title, thumbnail and idea are the 80 and 20 of YouTube. Meaning 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort.

Not many people realize that there's a system to guarantee a higher CTR and I've never seen anyone talk about it, but all of your favorite YouTubers do it. It's called title balancing.

I've written over 5,000 YouTube titles in my life and a balanced title always increases CTR. Think of your title like a scale.

Look to the five titles above. Pick which one you think looks the best. Now let's take a deeper look. You use capital text to emphasize a point in the title. This makes the viewer focus even harder on the main selling points of the video.

For this video in particular, we are selling the how, the make and the millions. So capitalizing these words can increase the emphasis.

But having capital words can make your title unbalanced if done incorrectly, think of capitalized words as weights. If you put a weight on one side of a scale, it becomes unbalanced.

So let's cross off the unbalanced titles for this video. And these titles can still work, but the other ones will almost always work better.

Now we are left with these three that are equally balanced. We can go ahead and cross off the first because it doesn't have any emphasis and therefore it's just too chill. Like how YouTube makes me millions. No one cares. If we want people to click on a boring business video, we need to make it sound exciting.

Let's sound out the other two. How YouTube makes you millions. To me, the first one makes more sense and just sounds better off the tongue. After writing over 5,000 titles, this is the exact strategy I use to make people click. But the title is only step one. There is one thumbnail strategy that is more consistent than almost any other.

Humans are naturally disposed to want more things, whether that be money, muscles, or women. See, we can only achieve those things through hard work.

And unfortunately, most humans aren't super enthusiastic about doing hard things. So how can we use science to increase the CTR? We need to show the results without the hard work.

And to do that, we create thumbnails to invite people into your videos. We can do this with business or investing videos to show people how they can go from broke to millionaire.

It works in the fitness industry too, because we're showing skinny to muscles. And if you're making a video about lifestyle, you could do a before and after of you being alone and then one surrounded with a bunch of girls.

Separating the image into two sides and then putting an arrow showing the transformation is simple but extremely powerful. In fact, I use this exact thumbnail strategy with my clients and it's generated them hundreds of thousands of views.

But we are still forgetting the most important part of the thumbnail. Do you remember this color wheel from first grade? It turns out that elementary school was teaching you to increase your ctr from day one.

If you go to Twitter and find this account "Thumbnail Colors" and you look through these viral thumbnail breakdowns, you'll see a content common theme.

Look at the two main primary colors from this one and then match them to the color wheel. These colors are close to opposites, our eyes naturally pay attention to opposite colors because they contrast. But we can use this fact to make our thumbnails pop out on the homepage by having these contrasting colors.

For example, in the business niche, we use the colors red and green to show the transformation from broke to rich. This catches the viewer's attention physically and emotionally, and that makes them so much more likely to click.

Are not Grown by Views

All right, great. You've increased your CTR. You've optimized your channel. Now is the time to tell you that most big YouTube channels are not grown by views.

Alright, hear me out. Let me explain. In 2020, there was a study done by Vidiq that will change the way you think about YouTube. They took 37 million channels and analyzed them to see how many videos it took to hit 1000-10,000-100,000 and a million subscribers. This is the average number of videos it takes to hit those milestones.

So in the beginning, instead of focusing on getting more views, aim to make more videos. This is because you're statistically pushing yourself close closer to that average.

But we all know that you don't want to make 151 videos to go viral. I won't go too specific, but the word average gives you a lot of power. So long as your videos are better than average, you will get 1,000 subscribers in less than 151 videos.

I got my first 1,000 subscribers in 64 videos because they were above average. But everyone starts off being below average. So you have to invest in education to counteract that. And don't worry, I'm not about to sell you a course.

One great example of this is my friend, Jenny Hoyos. She grew from zero to over 1.5 million in under one year. So to find out her secret, I asked her about her routine and it absolutely blew my mind. Jenny spends the first four hours of her day solely consuming YouTube education. Whether that's talking to creators, taking courses, watching YouTube videos, or working with a YouTube consultant. Her next four hours is actually creating content.

So focusing on improving your YouTube skillset will cut down the time to reach 1,000 subscribers significantly. If you can find and become friends with someone who genuinely knows what they're doing, it can be one of the fastest shortcuts to success. That's because you'll bring yourself from average to the top 1 to 3%. But most people are scared to invest money into YouTube education because they don't know if it'll work for them.

Well, that's why I created a completely free guide on how to grow your first 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. It's the exact step by step process that I use to take my clients from zero to over 100,000 subscribers. You don't have to pay me a single dollar and you don't even have to give me your email. It's completely free and better than most people's paid stuff.

All I ask is that you maybe even share this article with friends. And thank you all so much, and have a great day.