What I wish I knew before starting my YouTube channel

📌 Need help with your YouTube channel? Learn how our YouTube Authority Engine works, from strategy to content to growth: https://go.healthpreneurtraining.com/youtube

If you're a health practitioner building on YouTube right now, there's a good chance you're making the same mistakes I made in 2007 when I started with zero strategy and no idea why nothing was growing. 

I've since built two channels with tens of millions of views combined and generated millions in revenue directly from YouTube. 

Here are the six things I wish I had known before I started.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Why Most Health Expert YouTube Channels Fail to Grow
1:19 Lesson 1: Consistency Without Strategy Is Just Noise
3:31 Lesson 2: Niche Down or Get Buried by the Algorithm
4:36 Why Chasing Views Will Hurt Your Coaching Business
6:14 Lesson 3: Subscribers Don't Pay Bills. Conversions Do.
10:27 Lesson 4: Your Title and Thumbnail Outweigh Your Content
13:33 Thumbnail and Title Mistakes Most Health Creators Make
14:48 Lesson 5: Stop Treating YouTube Like a Vending Machine
16:35 Lesson 6: View Velocity Is the Metric That Actually Predicts Growth
18:12 How to Maximize View Velocity From Day One

❓ QUESTIONS ANSWERED

Q: How long does it take to make money from a YouTube channel?
A: There's no guaranteed timeline. Revenue depends on whether you have an existing audience, a sales process, and a conversion system in place behind your videos. Without those foundations, treat YouTube as a long-term compounding asset rather than an immediate revenue source.

Q: How many YouTube subscribers do you need to build a coaching business?
A: Far fewer than you think. With 27,000 subscribers, Healthpreneur has generated millions in revenue. Subscriber count matters far less than having a conversion mechanism that turns viewers into clients.

Q: What is view velocity on YouTube and why does it matter?
A: View velocity is how many views your video accumulates in the first 24 to 48 hours after posting. The faster those early views come in, the more YouTube pushes your content to new audiences. It is the strongest single predictor of total long-term views.

📱 RESOURCES
Website: https://healthpreneurgroup.com
Instagram: https://instagram.com/healthpreneur
Podcast: The Healthpreneur Show with Yuri Elkaim: https://healthpreneur.buzzsprout.com

🔔 Subscribe for weekly strategies to grow your health coaching business: https://youtube.com/@Healthpreneur


ABOUT YURI ELKAIM: 

I am Yuri Elkaim, founder of HealthPreneur. For over 20 years I have helped health coaches, practitioners, and wellness experts build seven and eight figure businesses online. This channel is where I share the exact strategies, funnels, and frameworks we use with our clients every day. New videos drop weekly.

#YouTubeGrowth #HealthcareEntrepreneur #YouTubeForBusiness #ContentStrategy #Healthpreneur

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I've built two YouTube channels since 2007 that have amassed tens of millions of views in the health space and the business space. And I'm going to share six things that I wish I knew before I started my first YouTube channel that I think will really help you expedite your growth on YouTube. Hey, welcome to the Health Preneur Show. I'm Yuri Alcheim, CEO and founder of Healthpreneur. You are listening to this because you are a health professional or coach who is committed and driven to growing a successful virtual practice or coaching business online. In these episodes, I'm going to give you the best of the best when it comes to marketing, sales, mindset, business growth in general to help you achieve those goals. So without any further ado, let's dive right in. Big opportunity for you this year and beyond, more than ever before, is building on YouTube. Why? Well, it's the single most important platform for building trust, adding value before people determine if they want to work with you. And it's an absolute no-brainer if you're an expert who wants to share your expertise. But how you go about doing this makes all the difference. Just the other day, I was talking with a client of ours who we actually don't work with on the YouTube front, just in a different capacity of her business. And she was very, very excited about what she was doing with YouTube. So I said, Hey, can I have a look at your channel? And she showed me her channel, which, you know, is maybe a couple months old now. And I said, Hey, can I offer some honest feedback? And she said, sure. And I said, Hey, unfortunately, what you're doing is not going to grow. And she's like, why not? I'm like, well, clear as day. There are three things right off the bat that I can see that are stalling your growth. And she had no idea. So what I want to share with you in this video are some of those nuances that most people are not even aware of when it comes to YouTube, because you could crank out all of your time creating the 30-minute, 40, 60 minute videos that no one will ever see. And there's nothing more frustrating than putting out content that doesn't see the light of day. So let's not make that happen. So the first thing I want to share with you is that consistency without strategy is just noise. When I first started my first health channel back in 2007, I had no idea what I was doing. I was a noob. So I was just posting content like it was a public dropbox. I had no strategy, there was no thought, rhyme, or reason to packaging or anything. It was just like meh. And it took a very long time to grow that channel. Now with Healthpreneur, we have a smaller following as of the shooting us about 27,000 subscribers. And even then, when we started the channel, we didn't really consider taking it that seriously. Cause for me at the time, I'm just like, yeah, I'm just gonna post some videos, whatever. And then two years ago, we actually sat down as a team and I said, you know what, we should take this YouTube thing seriously. Cause I had previously done so in my other business. So I said, okay, well, we gotta move away from just randomly vomiting videos on YouTube and actually put some strategy behind this. And if you don't, here's the thing is that YouTube doesn't reward just random noise. It rewards a very specific signal and consistency. So for instance, you want to think about having a channel that's built around a very specific audience. If you are creating content that is, let's say, around gut health, and then you also start posting stuff around dog training, well, YouTube is gonna be completely confused about who to show this to. And so one of the mistakes that I often see is that people on YouTube don't, they're not, they're not willing to specialize. They're going too broad. And so when you don't have this type of strategy as a starting point, then like the content's gonna flow from that. And so what we want to think about is who are we looking to serve? Who are we looking to help? Who's gonna come and you know funnel into your business? And how do we build content around that? There are three things that we look at in terms of building content. If you think of a Venn diagram, we're looking at your expertise, like what do you want to be known for? Two is what are your patients searching for? Three, what does YouTube's algorithm actually reward? Now, this third piece you might be completely blind to because maybe you're not the expert in YouTube, and that's totally fine. But as a starting point, think about what do I want to be known for? What are my ideal people searching for? And if you can start there, that is a good starting point. Because if you don't have the right strategy, YouTube can be a very frustrating platform. It is an absolute godsend, but if it's not done right, it feels like a massive sandbox. So the second thing, just kind of following from that, is niche specificity beats broad reach if your goal is to actually generate business. Now, I want to be clear about this. You will get way more views if you go with broad general topics. You will get far fewer views if you niche down. So, as an example, our current channel, Healthpreneur, doesn't have tens of thousands of views for most of the videos. And that's because most of our videos are very specific to health practitioners. Our total address of the market is 2 million people in North America and the UK. Your market, which is whatever it is, women who want to lose weight as an example could be a billion people. So for me to create general content about how to stay motivated, right? I mean, sure, I could play that game and get lots of views, but is that actually driving business? Are the people who are watching that video actually the people that I want? The answer is likely no. So it's really, really important not to get caught up in the whole vanity metrics game, how many views you have, how many subscribers, because the thing you can't see behind the curtains is what's actually happening in the business. And what I can share with you from our business is that with a small subscriber base of 27,000 people, and I say small relative to my first channel, which is 300,000, we've generated millions of dollars in revenue directly or indirectly from YouTube. What do I say directly? Well, they directly found us on YouTube and they decided to do business with us after that, or indirectly, they saw our ads on Meta and they opened up a new tab. And this is a very, very important point. Okay. They opened up a new tab and searched who's this Yuri Gaia? What's Healthpreneur? They found our YouTube videos and those YouTube videos then supported their decision and taking the next step with us. So it's been a massive, massive asset for our business. But again, the key coming back to the strategy is like, what are we building here? What are you trying to build on YouTube? And if it's just like the view game, then sure, you can post very generic content. But if you actually want those views to turn into like buyers, not just subscribers, but buyers, patients, clients, customers, you have to think about this very, very intentionally. So part of that is obviously niching down. So if you are whatever, a doctor, cool. Like what type of patients do you want to attract? Like, even if all of your patients right now are insurance based, but you want to move to cash pay, well, what type of clients or patients would you want to have come in? Right. Just because you've served this doesn't mean you have to serve that. You can attract whoever you want based on the content and messaging you put out there. So being able to narrow down is a very, very important piece of success in business in general. Focus on one audience, one niche, and just go a mile deep as opposed to a mile wide. Third thing there is you can have 100,000 subscribers and very little business, or you can have a few subscribers and a lot of business. So the videos you post on YouTube are one part of your business machine. When I get asked, Miri, how long does it take until I see revenue, money from YouTube? And my honest answer is I, in all good faith, cannot tell you that because number one, it'd be completely irresponsible and it varies. So I'll give you an example. So one of our clients, Ezra, he works in the ADHD space and he's got a very successful multiple eight-figure business. And he recently started posting on YouTube. So his YouTube channel is fairly early, early game. You know, he's about a month in. And then he had shared in our client channel that he was getting people enrolling in his program who are referencing how valuable his YouTube videos were. So that's one way this can go is people stumble upon some of your early videos, whether it's directly or maybe indirectly from ads, and they're like, man, this is legit. I watch your videos, I'm ready to go, here we go. And so in those cases, you can see faster returns. If you have a big email list and you post content on YouTube, email your list and let them know, hey, here's a video that might help you with X, Y, and Z. You're gonna drive immediate eyeballs to that video, and maybe a sprinkle of those people might take the next step with you. So it depends. If you don't have any of that in place and you're starting from scratch and you don't have a good sales conversion process, well, where are those people who are watching your content going to go next? If there's nowhere to go, then don't expect revenue coming in right away. When we started taking our YouTube channel for Healthpreneur more seriously a few years ago, I told the team this one thing. I said, guys, I do not care and we do not need any business from YouTube. Period. I don't care what comes from this. All I want to do is I want to feel good about putting out great content that is gonna help our audience. Period, full stop. Now I'm not saying I'm some special snowflake, but I'll tell you this like if you don't take that approach, you will struggle because what I see is a lot of health experts with YouTube channels, and their last upload was five years ago. And I asked them, like, well, what happened? They're like, Well, it just wasn't working. And I'm like, Well, it wasn't working. Number one, maybe the strategy wasn't there, packaging was not great, and you just stopped. So in our case, you know, we're fortunate that we had a very successful business that didn't rely on anything. Like, we didn't, if we never posted another video on YouTube or even started, we'd be fine. But if I needed YouTube to bring revenue in from day one, I'd be bankrupt. All right. So you have to have a good foundation that is bringing in some type of business, whether it's word of mouth or ad traffic or SEO or something. And then YouTube becomes this amazing asset that you layer on top. You have these amazing long-form pieces of content that help people. You shoot them once and you're done forever. Right. You should like think about this. This video I'm shooting right now, I will be done in a couple of minutes. And then it goes up onto our channel and it lives there for the rest of time. I'm done. Now, obviously, I'm going to continue creating content as I have ideas and things I want to share, but this particular video will live forever. Just like I had a video on our channel about how I work with my executive assistant. One of our clients asked me, like, hey, have you thought about doing a video about how you work with your EA? I was like, not really. He's like, I would find that very helpful. I was like, okay, I'll shoot it. So we shot the video and it becomes our second most popular video on the entire channel. Now here's the cool thing. In that video, I share our playbook of like exactly the executive assistant playbook I used with my assistant Becca. And then all of a sudden, we get all sorts of comments like, can I get the playbook? Can I get the playbook? Can I get the playbook? And I'm like, honestly, this is annoying. It's mostly for our clients. And I was like, you know what, Becca? Let's just put up a checkout link. So we put up a link. It feels like we're like, hey, if you want the playbook, just click below and you can buy it. And what ended up happening was literally every single day now, we get people purchasing this playbook from one video I posted like a year and a half ago that I didn't even want to shoot to begin with. That's the power of this compounding asset. So that's why, like, it's not about how many subscribers you have. It's about do you have a conversion mechanism on the back of it? And if you don't, that's fine. But just be realistic about the fact that you're probably not going to generate a lot of revenue right off the bat. But if you understand, like a lot of successful entrepreneurs do, that you are investing in an asset as you're building your business that's going to support this business and you as a personal brand for the rest of your life, then it becomes a no-brainer. Quick little break in the show for you. Are you in our Healthpreneur Hub Facebook group? If not, I want to hook you up. I share some amazing resources in there, including free reports, videos, trainings, obviously more connection to me. And we have thousands of other health professionals and coaches who are in that group actively seeking to grow their business online. If you'd like to join us, let me hook you up with a link. It's healthpreneurgroup.com forward slash hub. That's forward slash H U B. Once again, that's healthpreneur group.com forward slash hub. Go there now, join the group. And when you're in there, just drop me a little note to welcome yourself, let us know what you're up to. And I look forward to seeing you inside, connecting with you a little bit more personally. And once again, that's healthpreneurgroup.com forward slash hub. Now let's get back to the show. Okay, so let's talk about a little bit more tactical stuff here. And these are things that I wish I had known a lot earlier on. This is a big one. The title and the thumbnail make a huge difference and arguably are more important than the content itself. So let me give you two very important metrics that are very important to understand with respect to how YouTube is going to reward or punish your content. You have CTR, which is your click-through rate, and that's the number of people who click on your thumbnail, the video thumbnail, relative to how many people it's shown to. If it's shown a hundred times on the home feed or whatever it is, and five people click on it, that's a five percent CTR. The best videos on the planet, their CTRs in their neighborhood of about 10 to 12%. Now, if you're in the neighborhood of like four to six percent as a starting point, consider that a home run for most kind of health-related type of things. But CTR is important because it tells YouTube this video has been packaged properly in a way that intrigues people to want to click on it. Now, you get to click, which is more of an attention game. However, you have to maintain the attention. And this is where the content itself is very important. A second metric we want to look at is average view duration, and that can be looked at as a percentage and watch time in minutes. Generally speaking, the longer people watch your video, the more YouTube says this video is good. We're gonna show it to more people. And when you combine a high CTR and a high average view duration, let's look at percentages. I'd say anything over about 35% for an educational video between 12 and 20 minutes is a good sweet spot. YouTube will start pushing. Okay. We have to remember that like your expertise is great. Listen, I know a lot of smart practitioners who've gone to die by sharing amazing content that no one sees. Like their content's literally buried deeper than the Egyptian pharaohs under the pyramids because they don't know how to package that content. I hope you understand that this whole world of business and marketing, it's not a how good are you game. It's a how good are you at packaging game. And when we talk about thumbnails and titles, that's it. You don't need more degrees and more certifications. You need to get better at understanding how to package things so people actually pay attention, how they click, how do you keep them going through? As an example, I'm gonna share one more thing with you in a moment that will change the game for how you look at content. Okay, but before I get there, we have to look at do you see what I just did there? That's called an open loop. That's called building curiosity. The human mind goes crazy when we do things like that. We want to know what's coming up. That's why at the end of all of our favorite shows, what happens? There's usually a cliffhanger to keep you watching the next one. Things like that you have to learn when you are doing any kind of content delivery. It's not about being gimmicky, it's about understanding how to maintain people's attention. The content is very important as well, but the thumbnail and title earn you the right for someone to even watch the video to begin with. A couple mistakes that I see with thumbnails. Number one, they're way too busy, there's too much text. And if you zoom out, like just on your computer, zoom out to 50%. If you can't understand what this thumbnail says or what you're seeing in a second, it's not gonna do well. When it comes to titles, another big mistake I see a lot of people make, myself included, is over relying on search terms. So my first channel was heavily built on SEO, a lot of SEO search terms back in the day. YouTube doesn't work like that anymore. Yes, SEO searches definitely has a place, but it's not the primary driver of views. In today's day and age, YouTube drives based on suggestibility. And that means you have to understand how to work within this YouTube universe so your videos are more highly suggested. So even if someone doesn't type in best dentist Toronto, they will still find your stuff based on how YouTube is going to suggest it, based on other things they've watched, and if your video performs well. So nowadays, YouTube technically, I think, is a little bit trickier, but it's also a lot easier if you know how to package your thumbnails and titles and content strategy a lot more effectively. So remember that one thing I was gonna share with you that was gonna change the way you thought about YouTube and content in general. Well, let me share what that is in just a second. But first, I want to come back to one, see what I just did there? Again, it's probably annoying you now, but you want to find out what this last thing is, right? I'm gonna get there in just give me another minute. Remember when I was talking about how practitioners and a lot of business owners who are using YouTube, they think too short-sighted. They think of YouTube like a vending machine. I put in a video, I want subscribers and business right away. Remember, if you want to succeed on YouTube, you have to think about this long term. If you think of it like a vending machine, like a I press B1 and I expect the Snickers bar to follow tomorrow, it's not gonna work. So make sure you have a good business foundation and then you can layer this asset on top that will build for you forever. Because when you extend that runway, things will change. I also want to encourage you to think bigger just beyond patient flow, because there are things that will happen potentially from your brand, from your channel, from your following, you can't even conceive. And I'll share a quick story with you. My first channel, I started in 2007, health, fitness, general wellness stuff. I had no clue what I was doing. So I was just like thousands of videos over time, right? But eventually it started picking up steam. And because of that, I was able to ultimately approach a publisher, Hey House, and write a book, The All Day Energy Diet. That book became a number two New York Times bestseller. I was on Dr. Oz, the doctors, all the big podcasts. That doesn't happen if no one knows who I am. That doesn't happen if I don't have this big platform of followers and email lists and so forth. Now, that was cool, but what was even better is because of the success of that book, I get a multiple seven-figure two book deal with another publisher afterwards. So if I'm thinking about what's the ROI on YouTube or anything I do, it's too short-sighted. I can't, you can't even imagine what could happen down the road. I'll give you another example. One of our clients, Joseph, builds a beautiful channel helping people addicted to medications get off safely and get back to life. So his channel is more than about 210,000 subscribers right now. Out of the blue, he gets invited by Tucker Carlson to do a two-hour interview. That's massive exposure. No one just reaches out to you if you don't have this type of presence. So I encourage you if there's anything you get from this video, and if there's anything I could share with myself from way back in the day, or kind of a lesson I have to share with my younger self, is just take this long-term approach with what you're building on YouTube. Now, that leads us to the final and sixth point, that one thing that's going to change the game for how you see your content, it's this view velocity is everything. So we've done some really cool analytics. And what we found, and this may sound surprising or maybe not, is that the faster you accumulate views on your videos, there's literally a cause and effect correlation or a cause and effect relationship with the total number of views on that video. What that means is, and I've noticed this across almost everything that I've done, whether we're running ads, whether we're creating content, whether it's long form or short form, whether we're hiring people, winners are winners out of the gate. Winners are winners out of the gate. Shitty content doesn't automatically turn into amazing content. It either works right away or it just fizzles away. So when I talk about view velocity, it's how fast, how many views, and how quickly are you getting those views within the first 24 to 48 hours? That is the single most important metric that you want to be looking at with your content. When you look at videos that get the most views on your channel, I promise you they have the highest view velocity. We have graphed this for our videos on our channel and we've done a couple of different associations. We've looked at average watch time versus total number of views. It's a weak correlation. Yeah, generally the longer people watch, the more views we get overall. But it's a cause and effect relationship between view velocity and total views. So if you want more views on your videos, you have to build your videos strategically to get the most views early on as humanly possible. How do we do that? Number one, well, the stuff we talked about earlier on, the right strategy, the topics you choose are very, very important. Two, the titles, the thumbnails, they have to be dialed. Three, can you let your email list know if you have an email list that you just published a video? Get more eyeballs on those videos early on. All of that is going to tell YouTube this is a worthwhile video for people to pay attention to, and YouTube will start pushing it to more and more people. But if it doesn't go off early on, it's not going to get the badge of you know trust from YouTube to push it to more and more people. So the view velocity is a metric that not a lot of people know about or talk about, but it is the big one for really growing, not just on YouTube, but for Instagram and social as well. Why that happens is because these platforms want to provide the best experience for their users. The best experience in their eyes is people stay on the platform longer because if they stay on the platform longer, we can show more ads to them. If we show more ads to them, we can make more money. So they're gonna reward content that encourages people to stay and keep watching. Make sense? So, all that to say, these are six things I wish I had known about YouTube when I started way back in the day, more than 20 years ago. And again, sometimes that needs to be reminded of these lessons, which is why I put these videos together for you, but also selfishly for me. Now, anyways, if you enjoy this type of stuff and you're a practitioner doing at least a million dollars in your practice and you want to add YouTube into the mix in a very strategic and long-term thinking fashion, and you want to do so quickly and easily without having to worry about all this stuff, our team can handle the entire process. If you want to learn more about what that looks like, you can click the link in the description to learn more about our YouTube authority engine. But either way, thank you for joining me today. If you've enjoyed this video, remember to hit the subscribe button so you don't miss any more videos coming your way to help you help more people and build a beautiful business in the process. I'll see you in the next one. Hey, thanks for hanging out with me in today's episode. Hope you enjoyed it. If you have, here's what I'd love for you to do next is if you're not already subscribed to the Health Prunner Show, go ahead and hit that button wherever you're listening to this to make sure you do not miss a single episode coming your way. And while you're at it, why not leave a rating or review? It would mean a lot to me. And here's why. Because I lay in bed awake at night wondering, are you enjoying this show? Do you get a lot of value out of this? And I never really know until I hear from you. All kidding aside, I would really appreciate a rating or review because, as you know, the more people know about this show, the more people we can help. And your ratings and reviews make a huge difference. So thanks for hanging out with me once again. And I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.