I do SEO and thumbnails for a creator, and this week I went through their whole YouTube Studio. Same mistakes I keep seeing everywhere, so sharing in case it helps someone here. Mistake #1: Junk traffic that kills your channel One video had 85% of views coming from random sites and apps (external traffic), avg watch time 0:24. YouTube sees people leaving in seconds and stops recommending you. Check Analytics > Traffic source > External. If you see sites you don't recognise, stop whatever is sending them. Mistake #2: Sending your videos to friends and family Feels like support, but if your channel is for a US/UK audience and your family watches from another country, YouTube learns the wrong audience. One video even got a search term from a school student. Share only with people who would watch it anyway. Mistake #3: No chapters + numbers that don't match Two videos had zero chapters, and one title said $19K while the description said £19K. Small thing, but viewers notice and trust drops. Add chapters to every long video and keep numbers consistent. Mistake #4: Targeting keywords nobody searches The channel kept using a phrase in titles that barely shows up in YouTube search suggestions. Type your idea in the YouTube search bar first: if it doesn't autocomplete, almost nobody is searching it. The good news: the videos with fixed titles and thumbnails got 6–8% CTR vs 3.6% before. What's the one metric in your Studio that confuses you most? Happy to help in the comments.

My subscription runs out for CapCut Pro on 11.1. I am tapped out on money flowing out so I have decided to switch up editing programs! The down side, learning a new program. I have decided to go with DaVinci Resolve 21 the free version. I have heard from others on here it is a good option. I have heard it said many times, YouTube is no longer the go to place to learn things. Me being me, I did the YT search on learning DaVinci. Well, to all the DaVinci gurus, you didn't help! You assumed I knew some stuff! I was so confused and discouraged after watching a few videos. In my frustration I ran to my friendly assistant, ChatGPT to vent! Oh my goodness, I can't say enough about the step by step process Chat laid out for me to follow in publishing my first DaVinci video! What I thought would take me a month of learning, and practicing took just a few hours! It was a very simple video with some B-roll and music added, no fancy stuff like transitions and text overlay. But still for this 67 year old woman, I was excited to get it done without all the frustration! Bottom line, Chat can be used for LEARNING as well as a rock polisher for scripting! Just wanted to share the tip!

Great excitement after lots of effort I've finally posted my first video. If you'd like a look here's the link https://www.youtube.com/@SelfAwareWomen If you'd like to have a look any feedback is welcome. I'm not sure why but when I search for the video my banner is not showing just the little icon which has to be changed (not tonite) . Frustration - any suggestions??

The AI content test that failed got my attention, because I ran the same test and got the same result. 100% automated drafts read like nobody. The fix was not better prompts. It was the 20 videos I had already answered for free in client emails, in DMs, in replies to comments. Every real question a customer asked me once is a video. I stopped scraping trending topics and opened my own inbox. I found 34 questions I had answered by hand over two years. Those became the outline for 34 videos. I recorded 12 of them in one weekend. The AI writes the description now, pulls the chapter markers, drafts the pinned comment. I write the answer because I am the only one who has it. That is the division of labor that holds up. Scraped topics get views from strangers who leave. Answered questions get subscribers who come back. What is the question you have answered the most times by hand in your own email or DMs?

For a long time my process was: sit down, think of something, record it, upload it and wait. The editing got better every month, the thumbnails got better, and the views stayed exactly where they were. What I changed was the order. Now the first thing I do in the week is look at what is already moving in my niche: which hook they use, which format holds, and how long it has been working. Then I record. That part I do with an AI app that pulls it together for me, but it works by hand too: open five channels that talk to the same people you do, and write down what each video promises in the first line. Three things I would do this week: - Before you record, write the one line someone gets from the title and the thumbnail alone. If that line is not interesting without the video, the edit will not save it. - Look at channels your size, not the big ones. What a huge channel does works because of the channel, not because of the format. - Keep a list of the videos that did nothing and look at what they have in common. That list tells you more than the one that worked. Last month I went past a million views and one piece hit 500k, and I record less than I used to. If this is useful to anyone, leave me a question below and I will go through how I do it.