How Optimizing Old Videos Grew My Channel 300% Faster

do you ever feel an anxiety that you have to make another youtube video because if you don't your channel won't grow and you have this worry that if you miss a week or two youtube will punish you and it just makes you feel like you're on this hamster wheel of making content that never seems to end and it drains you what if i were to tell you that you never need to feel like that again because

i've discovered something that actually grew my channel 300 faster when i stopped making videos and not only that i even gave me a secret weapon which every time i use does this in fact this experiment has led me to believe that we're potentially all getting youtube wrong so this whole thing started eight months ago and even though i was ill and exhausted i was forcing myself to make a youtube video driven by this fear that i

had to feed the algorithm feed me until i finally stopped and realized that this could not be the way i planned on spending the next 10 years of my life there's got to be a better way looked at my channel in silence for a while as i slowly came to the decision that in order to get my life back together i needed a month of making content now this channel is my business i employ people and

these videos make sales of products and services and every time i make a video new sales come in so stopping making content is double scary but even with the risky nature of this decision it still instantly took one giant weight off of my shoulders until my brain decided to add another one almost instantly why didn't these videos get more views and that's when probably the best decision i've ever made on youtube happened wait why don't i

just try and make them get more views so i picked two videos and changed the title of one and the thumbnail of another the next day i jumped into my youtube studio and saw something marvelous one of the videos was already getting more views like i'd better do another one and when i went to pick my next victim and saw the title and thumbnail of an interview i did with hillia smith i was like you idiot

why would you call the video that and that thumbnail is so bad it's burning my eyes so i went to work on it even though there was actually a pretty big problem you see i decided to set some rules for this experiment around what old video thumbnail and titles i would work on and the first rule was they needed to be getting very few views so i didn't risk screwing anything up that was doing well and

this video was dead so it took that box the next was the comments they had to be really positive which also checked out and then the third was the the video would have to have good retention enter the problem it was uh bad but the comments were so positive i thought screw the stupid line graph just go by the people so i made the change and two weeks later nothing had happened and even worse the video

that had had an initial uplift in views was short-lived and it went back to being its lame cell now by now i'm two weeks in and i'm due to post another video and youtube just because it loves to wind us up decided to post this little hat icon in my youtube studio and i was like what is that and ran my mouse over it and oh it's a lovely message from youtube telling me that my channel

is getting less impressions than usual encouraging me to make another video to fix this problem and add fuel to the fire my channel was currently growing the slowest it had been in ages which just brought on tons more pressure and i'm not gonna lie i gave in i was scared so i hopped on my community wall and said i'm gonna do a live stream next week in an attempt to get rid of that stupid hat icon

tormenting me and to try and save my channel and then i went back to the hilliar thumbnail and stared at the stupid expression on my face and that's when it hit me you're not the star of the video youtube brony hilliar is so i deleted the most punchable face i've ever made from the thumbnail and went on a hunt for inspiration and that's where i discovered this video from leela and i thought whoa i really want

to click on that heavily inspired i made my own version and what happened next blew me away a few days after the change the video was getting hundreds of views an hour i was over the moon for 13.59 seconds until i glanced at my channel and saw this video about mr beast that had never really done as well as i'd hoped and the frustration cycle started again now this video was actually doing okay mr beast content

is pretty much the easiest views you can ever get in my niche so i decided to target that one next to see if i could make a video that was a three out of ten one out of ten and i thought for a while about how to fix it and then had this genius idea be lazy and just copy what worked in the hillier video now at this point there was a couple of days coming up

to my save the channel live stream so it was time to make the thumbnail for that too enjoying this new lazy half-assed life i just thought maybe i'll just use the same one again a week passed and i had what can only be described as the most smug face of 2021 the channel was growing the second fastest it ever done with 700 new subscribers a day flying in but it wasn't just the hillier video all three

of them with the same style thumbnail pop even the live stream and those things usually do awful and even better was the stupid hat icon it was gone and this is where it starts to get really silly so i've been running this experiment for about eight months now over 20 odd videos every few weeks i update two videos until they start to get the results that i want to see and i move on to another two

some i've never really managed to get to work yet some i've still not tried some have had what i'd call a nice result and they're no longer stagnant and some became epic channel growers and recently i got to the stage where there was a handful of videos left to play with and i'd kind of run out of ideas so we just decided to try the hilliar thumbnail star one more time and it flipping worked again i

have a magic thumbnail just don't tell anyone about this but the coolest thing about this whole thing is not just that i got old videos to hit the kind of views i'd always hoped they would or that i didn't go bankrupt it was golf you see nobody picks up a golf club for the first time or the second time or the 50th time and then goes and wins the pga tour in order to do that you

have to practice a ton and you don't practice in a tournament you do it before so you can win it problem with youtube is when we make a new video we're in the tournament and if you only ever practice your skills on new releases there's a lot at stake and you potentially have to wait a whole week until you can practice again and it's no coincidence that by updating old video thumbnails and titles suddenly my new

releases were getting more views than ever too because my old videos became my practice ground that taught me what worked and what didn't that bad which leads me on to why i think we're maybe you're getting youtube wrong there is no doubt that posting videos is important and if you're a newer channel it's even more important because making lots of videos is how you will learn the craft but i also believe that too many of us

are consumed by the fear that we have to keep posting videos otherwise we could lose it all our viewers our subscribers are income and it's unhealthy and because of this focus on you we forget that we potentially have tons of quality videos we worked so hard on if we learnt how to package them better could replace the results you hope your new videos might have with a fraction of the work and the stress the thing is

as much as changing titles and thumbnails will grow your channel if your retention is low or your content isn't creating the right kind of emotional response with your viewers it's game over and that's why you also need to treat your videos content as a practice ground too this video here is going to show you how to do just that and work out how to get the most views you've ever had because the clues are already waiting

for you