Congratulations! You’ve created your Youtube channel, and now you want to grow. Growing your YouTube channel and subscriber count is a massive undertaking that requires a lot of thought, preparation, time, and effort.
New creators spend months, even years, trying to grow on YouTube but never make significant progress. What are they missing? Hint: A Strategy.
Here’s a detailed guide on how to grow your YouTube channel with a successful strategy, with insights from YouTube experts, Dan Currier and Erin On Demand.
The basic pillars of growing a youtube channel
It’s easy to be dazzled by the glamour of a successful YouTube channel. YouTube “stars” often make growing a Youtube Channel look so simple that it can be easy to forget how hard growing a channel actually is.
Whether you’re wondering how to create a YouTube channel or want to grow your subscriber count, it’s important to start with the basics first.
The marathon mindset: three keys to playing the long game to grow your channel
YouTube expert, Dan Currier from Creator Essentials recommends that you need to view your YouTube strategy not as a destination, but as a process that’s constantly improving. Here are three tips dan on the marathon mindset.
- Persistence
Once you get started, you want to continue creating content. Don’t get distracted or think that you’re not making any progress and decide to give up before results start to show.
- Consistency
Be consistent in the way you approach your content creation and how frequently you share it. You also want to show up as consistent in your branding and in the overall message that you’re sharing.
As part of this, you’ll need to decide what’s realistic for you in ensuring you can stick to the schedule for the long term. You don’t want to let your ambitions get the better of you, and end up burning yourself out trying to pump out a ton of content that saps away your soul. Remember, it’s about the long-term, not the short-term (i.e. the marathon mindset).
- Patience
Often people idolize the results they see other people achieve, without realizing the work, effort and time it takes to get there. In the case of YouTube content creators, it’s tempting to get impatient seeing everyone else seemingly grow their audience and monetize their channel.
Rather than playing the comparison game by obsessing over metrics such as subscribers and views, Dan recommends that YouTube creators focus on getting 100 videos out on the platform.
Related YouTube Video: How to grow with 0 views and 0 subscribers (secrets revealed!)
9 strategies that will make your youtube channel grow
There are 5 essential elements to consider when creating videos. They are search engine optimization (SEO), metadata, value, branding, and the call to action. Let’s look at how each one can help you grow your YouTube channel.
1. What does your target audience want/need?
The first step to offering value is understanding what your audience wants or needs. If you aren’t giving viewers what they need or want, they won’t stick around for the video and probably won’t come back. That’s why SEO is so important.
If you’ve isolated a list of long-tail keywords for a single topic, and they all have high search volume and low competition, then you already know there’s an audience for that content. The search volume indicates that your audience is searching for the content (they need/want it), and the low competition suggests that there’s room for you to move in and win over viewers with your title and thumbnail and then the video. Focus on content that solves problems and answers frequently asked questions. Once you’ve mastered that, you can branch into offering value in other ways.
Autience research templates
Here are a few Audience Research guides, with downloadable worksheets that can help guide you understand your audience better:
- How To Define Your Target Audience (+Templates & Workbooks)
- How To Create Your Ideal User Persona To Focus Your Efforts (+3 Templates)
- Customer Avatar Workbook
Turning your audience needs into evergreen content ideas
Using the insights you uncovered about your audience, make a list of all the questions your audience is asking, and answering those questions.
If you pick evergreen topics that people always search for, you will need to spend less time actively promoting your content to generate views and subscribers!
Pro Tips on determining demand for evergreen content from our course creation guide:
- Answer The Public is a helpful way to find out what people are asking about a topic
- Try searching your potential topic on Reddit or Quora or to see what comes up, and how often
- If you’re in any Facebook groups, or better yet, you run one – scroll through and use the search function to gain some insight into the challenges your potential audience has. (AKA social listening)
2. Optimize your content for search
People typically think of SEO when trying to rank on Google search. But Google isn’t the only search engine. YouTube is also a search engine, (TikTok, and Reddit are too!).
That means a complex algorithm runs behind the scenes and determines which videos to put in front of viewers.
If you put hours of effort into creating videos for YouTube, you want to ensure those videos get watched! And while this can’t make your channel followers grow directly, SEO can help you set a strong foundation and increase your chances of showing up within YouTube and Google Search to get in front your audience.
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