What Works on YouTube NOW (2025) | Ep. 35

Every month inside Video Brand Academy, I host a "What's Working Now" meetup. I share strategies that are driving results for me or my clients and break them down so you can apply them to your channel and grow your video brand.

Recently, I flipped the script—I asked our members what's working for them. In this special end-of-year session, I’m sharing their answers so you can take these proven strategies and apply them to your channel in 2025. Let’s keep growing together!

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Transcript

Meredith  
Every month, inside a video brand Academy, I host a meetup that I called what's working now, a meetup, and that's where I bring something that's working for me on YouTube right now, or something that I see is working for my clients really well. I bring it to the group, I break it down, we discuss how you can apply it to your channel so that you can continue building your video brand. I recently did something a little different, and that is, I asked what's working for you all, and I want to give you some of the answers from members inside of video brand Academy as a little bit of a different episode here at the end of the year, so that you might be able to take something that's working for someone else and apply it to your channel as well. So this is episode 35 I think of video brand infusion. It's been a few weeks since I recorded anything for YouTube, but my name is Meredith, and I'm here to help you infuse the best video marketing ideas, strategies and plans into your business so that you can youtubeify your business and establish yourself as the go to person in your niche or industry. I want to do something a little bit different today, and I hope that you guys are up for it. I think it would be fun for each of us to share what has been working for each of us on YouTube, currently, right now, or, you know, something that's worked well for you this year that you're going to continue doing next year on YouTube. Who wants to go first? Any any volunteers?

Speaker 1  
I'll go first because I might have to leave a few minutes early. I guess what has worked for me this year recently is asking chat GPT to a fed a script from a popular video from last year into chat, G, B, T, and I asked it to make something better and longer, because my videos are all really short. So it did that. I recorded it not word for word, but, you know, you sort of using the same bullets, but it did a good job of adding some bullets that I hadn't thought of. I uploaded that, and I really didn't have to make any new B roll or anything, because I already had all the B roll. And that video has done well. I love

Meredith  
this so much because I don't love the idea of relying on chat, G, P, T to like, give you ideas always. But what you did is said, Here's my already existing, brilliant idea, my video, can you make it longer? And I think that's so smart. So when you say it's doing really well on your channel, describe what you mean. Like, how many views is that video getting

Unknown Speaker  
compared to that? It's around 11,000

Meredith  
compared to what you would normally get, yeah, which is

Speaker 1  
like 200 you know, I got plenty of two hundreds and some 1000 was great for me. So

Meredith  
it's doing really well. Meaning it's like more than, more than 10x that's awesome. I love it. Do you have the paid version of chat? GPT, are you doing this with the free version? Free, awesome. Love it. Thank you. Andrea, who wants to go next, what's working for you? I mean, if

Speaker 2  
you want to do what's not working, I have a pretty good list. Okay, let's hear it. I bought these wood veneer panels because they moved and I'm in Florida now, instead of San Diego and I, these were like $1,000 and literally, maybe two seconds after I had made maybe two later, like two days or two weeks after I'd made the purchase. I saw these exact same panels on temu, which has factories or facilities fulfillment centers here in the US, and I could have gotten them for, like, I don't know, $20 or something, the exact same ones on temu. Maybe they would have looked cheaper. But, you know, it's like, you like, you can't even really see the details anyway, so

Meredith  
that was okay. Can you like, hang things on those panels? Are they just sort of, like, for visual you

Speaker 2  
can hang stuff on them so they in between each of those wood slats. And they're not even wood slats. It's really, it's just like a super thin, microscopic wood that's kind of like glued on top, I think, the veneer, yeah. And then, yeah, like wood veneer, so. And then in between, it's like a foam. So if you had push pins I had, I did have to buy really, really long pushpins to push in to put those flowers up on that side. Oh,

Meredith  
man, you're making me actually think, how easy would it be to DIY something like that? Yeah.

Speaker 2  
I mean, I looked at that and I saw people doing it, but it looked kind of involved. I think buying the $20.01 temu would have been faster

Meredith  
and easier. Yeah. All right, cool,

Speaker 2  
yeah. I guess anything positive though, I did buy the Elgato teleprompter, and I absolutely love it. It's great. And I noticed too, like, the batch recording, like, if you're having a good hair day or makeup day, there's, like, so much pressure to like film. And then I like, I want to do some more things with the script or do a little more research. And then by then, I don't know about you, my hair. Has fallen, my makeup is kind of melting, and I'm like, Oh my God, I've missed my window. So, like, so now, so what I do, if I know, if I if I think I might film, is it's better for me just to do my hair and makeup every day, instead of, like, having that perfect day if I think I'm gonna film during that week, so that I don't panic over the falling hair and stuff, or that's for me, I wake up much more, much prettier. So yeah,

Meredith  
the same thing happens to me. I'm i It's like, there's a window of good hair, good makeup, and then I have to tweak things, and then I miss it. So do your hair and makeup every day, so you could just film anytime you feel inspired.

Speaker 3  
I love it. So I this year, I in June, I decided to up my frequency, my posting frequency, and I started posting. My intention was to do twice a week, and I actually did about one and a half times a week, so I wasn't posting quite twice a week. And I did that pretty I was very consistent, about one and a half times a week from June until October, and I saw pretty huge growth. And I had two videos go viral, an old video and a new video go viral during that time, floating more frequently. Definitely was a win for me and your thumbnail quadrant the quad chart. The Quad chart

Meredith  
helped me

Speaker 3  
so much figuring out my thumbnails with my or my thumbnail, my title combo, the way that you described it, and everything, has helped me tremendously to get my thumbnail and my title figured out.

Speaker 4  
So I don't know if it's a win. I guess it is a win. It's just being more consistent. So I started to really at the end of October, November. So November is really when I've started to post. So I still haven't seen I don't know what growth that's considered. I mean, I know what it means, but, like, it has high numbers, because I haven't had a huge channel or following, so all of November, I did a series. Just the win for me is I'm being consistent, and I'm realizing I'm already getting an ROI, getting more comfortable in front of the camera. You showed

Meredith  
up more consistently and started making more consistent content, and what you got out of that was, you're more comfortable and confident on camera. Would

Unknown Speaker  
you getting? You keep getting

Andi  
more comfortable? I feel like I have a middle aged channel, because I've been on YouTube now for five years, and I got a couple of those milestone emails from TubeBuddy. I hit a million views. I've got 600 videos in my library, so that's kind of it's been kind of steady growth. I looked on my analytics. I had a couple spikes when I started a new kind of brand partnership project. So that helped, I guess, you know, introduced me to a wider audience, some new people that had followed this brand that obviously I was a new a new face for them. So that helped growth, and I changed my live schedule. I had been going live for about a year once a month, and then I started this fall, doing weekly live streams, and that's been a boost. It's just, it's helping me build a community, to be able to recognize people that show up in my comments regularly. And it's, I think it's been really good thing. I did try an experiment just yesterday. So is, we're still seeing the results, but I think it was someone in this group had posted about using gyre to do a continuous stream. Gyre, I've

Meredith  
never heard of that. G, y, r,

Andi  
e, okay, and the concept is that they interface your video and do a continuous loop on YouTube so that it, you know, it's going to get you more watch time, obviously, having a stream Running for a long time, and I my main content is quilting tutorials, so I wasn't really sure how it would work, but they had a free trial, blah, blah, blah. I spent some time this weekend compiling a video that was 70 minutes long. Long, and I figured, you know, I ran a similar content, pieced it all together. I figured after an hour have that loop over and over, it wouldn't be too bad. Unfortunately, I didn't pay close enough attention to the setup instructions. So somehow, when I broadcast that yesterday, it only looped the first 10 minutes, which makes it a really choppy, weird experience for the viewer to have this content loop. But and so I thought I had hit stop, went on about my day, and came back last night and it had run for eight hours and had over 500 views, which is incredible for my channel, because most of my static content, you know, is in that 200 view range over a week. So I have some ideas for better content that fits more in that continuous stream idea where I can do a slide show of images with a sound, you know, a Lo Fi kind of jazzy background music feel. And I it's just something to experiment with and play with, because a lot of quilters will have TV on in the background while they're working at their sewing machine, right? And so if I can provide that content, then they get to know me, and then they could come back for my tutorials. So we'll see it's an idea for moving forward.

Meredith  
Wow, I have so many questions about that. Okay, I'm going to check that out. I'm very curious about that. The

Karen Wilson  
success that I've had on my channel this year is last year at this time, I think I had a couple 100 subs. Was my goal to take back my channel. I'm now sitting at 926 I feel like I've turned my channel around. I have not been consistent in the last two weeks or so. I just, I needed a break. I needed to just, like, kind of shake it out and do exactly what we're doing right now. What's working, what's not working. What can I get excited about? And I've had this intuition that actually the data from what I did, working alongside your Poppy video, pulled out of what's working on my channel, and it's more so come with me style. So rather than sitting as the the person that is teaching something or influence something, the vibe that the videos, the vibe of the video that people like, is when I'm taking them along a process with me as an equal instead of I'm sitting here as a talking head telling you what to do, I'm showing you the experiment that I did with myself, and we're experiencing it together. So that's what's been working. I'm definitely doing more of that in 2025 I wanted

Meredith  
to talk to Darren real quick. Darren, you've had something changes this year with your content with your channel. What I want to know is your big lesson or takeaway, I

Speaker 5  
think, from the whole experience, it showed me that working with brands that you feel are potentially out of reach as a small creator, I mean, I've got what, nearly 17,000 subscribers, which I would say is still relatively a smallish channel, and I would say that kind of like even, even on that case, because I I'm come across as genuine on my channel and provide genuine thoughts and processes that those brands have been wanting to work with. Me. Being able to work with a big brand is is amazing, and it doesn't have to be something that's feared. What

Meredith  
a huge breakthrough, I think, for you to, like, embrace, like, being your own creative. What's your tagline Be? Be

Unknown Speaker  
you also be creative. Be you,

Meredith  
like you, totally embraced your own tagline and were able to connect with a brand that also supported the embracing of that tagline. It really

Speaker 5  
does feel that way. I mean, you know, I did my first brand collaboration with them, and it's one of my best performing reels on Instagram already, and just being able to work with them and get the feedback to on the video was really good to kind of, like tweak a few things. There's a whole bunch of other videos that I'm working on at the moment, as well as new content on my channel. And I think that's just, I just, I just feel really excited for it. I've got that creative freedom again to. To start talking about the things that I want to talk about on my channel, because it's, I think we've said in the here before, it's it's YouTube, it's not them tube or something like that. I can't remember exactly what it was now. I feel, honestly, that I've got so much more energy right now than I've had for a long time.

Meredith  
I think it's true that like you, we have to consider like even if we're not creating, even if we're not super creative people, we're all creating YouTube videos, and that is creative, but like it's that's whatever you create your videos about is coming out of you. It's not, it's not like ideas you pulled out of thin air, and it's, it's a part of you, alright, and so, like, there has to be some element of freedom in how you approach every step of it, because it's coming out of you. And if it's, if you're not able to do that, then it would make sense that it's not really that enjoyable anymore. It's, I'm excited

Speaker 6  
for you. That was a great demonstration, like, how we just never know who's watching our content. Yeah, and that, like, the opportunity could be just around the corner, like you just and, and to your point, Darren, you have to be enjoying what you're doing otherwise, like motivating yourself is a huge lift, right? But if you just are kind of like enjoying the process and just sticking with it, you know you really have a true sense of how much influence you've created yourself, like in ways you don't even really understand. And this

Meredith  
is why I created video brand Academy, so that we can learn from each other. And I'm really excited about some of these tips. I might try to do my hair and makeup every single day, so I'm always camera ready. I don't know it's a new year, so why not? Thank you Andrea Lisa, Mimsy, Michelle, Andy Karen, Darren and gala for contributing to this. What's working now in 2024 and what we're going to continue doing in 2025 VBA collaboration video, I put a link to all of their channels down in the description below, if you want to check them out and maybe even hit subscribe. Happy New Year.