In Steem secret #11, we ask when publishing online how many views come within 24 hours versus how many come later and what impact this has on our posting strategy? Over 80% of my views on YouTube and on my blog posts on Steemit come after 24 hours with the majority happening after 7 days!
Meanwhile, most of us as authors, video producers, bloggers, podcasters and YouTubers get obsessed with the immediate response especially on Steem where we only get payout within 7 days of making a new post. This often blocks us from doing our best work and instead trying to always make whatever gets the most views or reads or opens right away which often minimizes our overall impact. According to my YouTube and Steem statistics, most readers and viewers are reading posts and watching videos much older than 24 hours or even 7 days.
This means the ideal content creation strategy is to aim for evergreen tutorials, videos, posts and podcasts because often it takes months just to get a video on YouTube ranked in search or a blog post showing up in Google organic search.
For planning video production, for writing blog posts, for making a podcast, this is extremely helpful information to know because it helps us be patient with our results and it helps us optimize, intentionally create posts, videos, podcasts that will be evergreen, that will be available and helpful for years in the future.
That's exactly what I do and I'll show you the inside of this system now where I go after the views that come a year, 2 years or 5 years after I've made a video. I want videos that are good indefinitely as much as possible because that's where the majority of the views are located.
If you’ve seen a lot of the comments on my channel or on my posts from people saying things like, “Oh Jerry, you're such a scammer, you just bought all your fans.”
I don't have to get upset with those comments because I understand what the commenter doesn't understand. I've made a video 24 hours ago, and yes it has 596 views right now.
I have 200,000 subscribers and you might call that video a total failure, a flop, a waste, “Oh my god, you’re such a … Oh, blah, blah, blah.”
You see, I optimize my videos to get a lot of views in the long term. If you scroll down, you can see my videos probably get a few hundred to a thousand or couple thousand views on each video within the first 24 hours, but then most of my videos continue to get the majority of the views going forward from there.
I made this cryptocurrency price prediction video last week or maybe it was this week, and it's got 11,000 views so far.
If I scroll back to find the previous video, that video is performing just about how the last one did and it has 86,000 views now.
I make videos that are aimed to get lots of views after 24 hours, especially things like tutorial videos. You might notice a lot of my videos don't immediately get many views right away, but if you go back you'll see some of these videos have a ton of views on them.
Here’s one with 7,500 views and a lot of these videos can just keep getting more and more views.
This video got a couple of thousand views the first few days and it continues to get more and more views.
I do my videos with the intent to just pick up views for at least a few months on many videos if not years.
This "What Do I Do Everyday" video has got 13,000 views. Now you might see that on a lot of the Happier People podcast videos I don't immediately get views, but those are good theoretically for the rest of my life.
If I continue scrolling down, lots of these videos just get a few thousand views, but some of them continue to pick more and more views up over time.
Now, if I go and show the very highest videos I have on my channel, these still continue to get lots of views today. I have this one video with 3.2 million views that I filmed in 2015, another one with 1.24 million views.
This League of Legends video, even though if I quit playing League of Legends and I haven't played in almost a year, this video still continues to get more views.
Then I have AdWords tutorials, Linux tutorials, that just continue to pour more and more views.
This "Ethereum mining" video I did just continues to get views. Even though it only got a few thousand views in the first 24 hours, it's now got several hundred thousand views after it's been uploaded about four months ago, it continues to just pick more and more views up.
The Facebook marketing tutorials that I do continue to just pick more views up. Here's one, "Best Facebook Marketing Tutorial," that I did almost a year ago and at the time it didn't get very many views, now it's got 147,000 views.
This applies also for posting on Steem. This is how I plan out everything I do. Let's have a look at my Steemit account.
A lot of us obsess about the payouts on Steem that all come within seven days, and most of the votes come within the first 24 to 48 hours.
It's easy to obsess over how much money a post is earning, but the real long term opportunity is to get views on the posts.
This is a post I made three days ago, and it has 1,613 views.
Now, I might even consider that a failure if I didn't look at it in the long picture.
Here's the same post format I did last month, this post has 25,000 views on it.
This is the "Cryptocurrency Price Predictions for September 2017" post compared to the "Cryptocurrency Price Predictions for October 2017!" post.
The idea is, I write posts that will pick a lot of views over the long term. I write posts that when users are googling, then my posts get found.
This allows me to essentially pull in ridiculous amounts of traffic when I keep doing this strategy over and over again.
The problem we have as content creators though, for the first several years in my business as you can see, my first video that has a lot of views is from 2015. Now, I was in business in 2011, and most of us get stuck in this constant trap.
We get stuck in this trap of trying to get the most views after just 24 hours right after we made something, and then we quickly forget, after that we don't even check it often.
I wrote another post like the one I showed earlier on Steem and it's up to I think about 40,000 views. I didn't even realize that it got all these views because I had to go back and manually check the post on Steem.
On YouTube, the same thing happens. If I show you my analytics right here, the videos that are getting the most watched time and the most views often are not new videos, these are older videos.
The most watched time is the video I made last month, it's got the most views.
Then, the second most watched time is the video I made a year and a half ago. The third one is a video I made last month. The fourth one is a video I made two years ago, then four months ago, almost a year ago and after that several months ago. These are the top videos on my channel.
Nearly almost every top video on my channel, most of the ones getting the most views are at least a month if not several months old. The problem a lot of us get into is we get trapped in this constant thing of wanting that immediate positive reinforcement.
We’ve got to have views right away and if it doesn't go viral right away we just forget about it.
For the first four years of my business, I was trapped in this mindset and I kept focusing on things that were not going to be helpful like I'd talk about some recent new story.
The thing is when you focus all the time on just today in terms of doing work without thinking, "How is this going to help someone in a year, or 2 years, or 3 years?" then it's hard to build a following, it’s hard to get the automatic traffic, it’s hard to get the ball rolling.
This is one big positive reinforcement loop. The more I make videos that get a lot of views over the long term, the easier it is to get those 24 hour views on my videos. Most of the watched time I get on my videos are from older videos and the videos I do today are designed to pick that watched time up the same way, to pick that watch time up over the long term.
Some channels do really well with getting a lot of views right away, but get almost no views after that first 24 hours. The key is to get videos that continue to get views indefinitely.
For example, I did this Bittrex tutorial four months ago and still within the last month, it's got 17,000 views.
What I aim is for just tutorials like this now as much as possible. The more I've seen this data, the more I try to optimize to just do more and more videos like this.
You'll see most of the things I create are aimed at long term views because this is essentially a luxury that most people with an established business get to do. Most of us hustle so much when we try to start a business and grow followers. We don't have the patience to aim for those really big long term successes.
I hope that in sharing this with you wherever you are at today, you can just start aiming at the same thing because this is the most powerful way to build a following over time, to make things like tutorial videos, to make posts on Steemit that have information that's really valuable.
Even within a few days, thousands of people are finding these posts on Google. Then give it a month and there are tens of thousands views.
This is the very best method, a huge power tip that works for me to get way more views.
If you see haters commenting about how little the views are in the first 24 hours, all you know then is that this knowledge is not there, and it's hard to hate someone when you can understand what piece of the puzzle the person is missing essentially.
I guide most of my videos towards long term usefulness rather than immediate watch time!
I hope this tip has been helpful for you.
I love you.
You're awesome and I hope to see you again soon.
Thank you very much for reading this post, which was originally filmed as the video below.
I appreciate you being here and I hope you have a wonderful day today.
If you found this post helpful on Steemit, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?
Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk on the transcript by GoTranscript
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