What Top YouTubers Do: The Content Strategy That Leads to Success

Actually, we can't even bring ourselves to call this mistake annoying or stupid. On the contrary — it's usually made by thoughtful, meticulous, and hardworking bloggers. But that's exactly where the whole point lies — they overcomplicate their content, while YouTube expects the complete opposite from creators — it wants us to simplify.

Why the rules of the game work this way and not otherwise, and how to play by them and come out a winner — that's what we'll discuss now.

The harsh reality is this: the deeper you dig into your content and the more complex multi-layered videos you make, the faster you lose sight of the fact that most viral videos are quite simple.

Please hear this correctly right now: "simple" doesn't mean stupid in any way. These are videos that are easily absorbed by the audience.

People will always choose what is simple, understandable, and familiar. This explains why the same topics, titles, thumbnails, presentation style, and even editing work. It's all because the audience has simply gotten used to consuming exactly this type of content. So don't be afraid and simplify.

This doesn't mean you need to abandon your uniqueness or interesting topics. It means you don't need to pile on mountains of information, introduce a sea of characters, and figure out what the author meant with their "blue curtains."

People watch mainstream movies more often, and they bring in box office revenue because they always turn out to be simple, understandable, but at the same time interesting. Meanwhile, auteur cinema will forever remain festival-bound, as it will only interest a narrow group of connoisseurs of beauty who are ready to dig into deep meanings.

For your content to be interesting to the audience, it should provide value, not break viewers' brains.

Value in this context is a multifaceted concept: it includes both factual value, such as knowledge, and more ephemeral value, such as emotions. You'll agree that much more often you want to watch a creator who is capable of opening up not an entire World for you with each video, but certainly some country.

And it's at this point that a question arises:

How can you simplify a video without making it useless?

There's a simple, time-tested content strategy that came to us from marketing, and it was used for building sales funnels.

To attract an audience, you need to aim for broad reach in your videos, which means it's not necessary to dive deep into topics in every single video.

This doesn't mean you need to abandon your great, unique, and complex research, but you need to first attract an audience to your content as a whole and sort of prepare them, earn their favor and loyalty.

This is exactly why, for example, every educational channel simply must have content for beginners, otherwise how will you turn them into those who will watch more complex videos?

That's why content is divided into different levels, which also came to us from marketing:

• Viral, also known as Hero content: simple and accessible to most of the audience in your niche
• Main evergreen, also known as Help content: answers specific audience queries and makes up the bulk of content on the channel
• And videos for loyal audience, also known as Hub content: these are your deep research pieces and insider videos for viewers already immersed in the topic

And even in the case where you create videos on more complex topics, this doesn't mean they should be difficult to digest.

So remember: you're not making your channel useless by simplifying content for comprehension, you're building a smart strategy for attracting and retaining viewers.

Without this, you'll always have limited reach, because complex videos aren't interesting to the broad masses, and three expert diggers on your channel who will argue with you and appreciate your approach won't help you with promotion.

And in order for people to learn about your unique approach and deep topics, you first need to attract viewers to all of this, don't you?

Following up on the topic of simplification, let's add: be predictable, reliable, and consistent as a creator who maintains regularity and consistency on the channel.

If your content is simple, understandable, and comes out regularly, then there's a higher probability that your audience will find you faster and start pushing each new video. And to upload complex analytical videos three times a year at random times, like big creators do, you need to have the same base of loyal and regular viewers as they have.

And while we're not yet super popular on YouTube — the best thing we can do to win this game and break into the leaders — is to be useful to viewers and not complicate their lives.

We love ya! Good luck!