The amount of content published daily requires consistent quality if you want to stand out on YouTube. While many people try to sell services to gain views or try to buy views from SnapHappen.com, you can build a repeatable system that will scale your channel.
A repeatable system will communicate your audience selection, the topical structure, how you structure your videos and how you maintain your audience’s attention. If you are consistent with this system, your analytics will begin to show you what works and what to create next.
How to Begin Growing Your YouTube Channel: Have One Clear Audience
Channels with a specific audience have an easier time gaining viewers. For example, creating a channel that is for beginner photographers to learn how to take better family photos would be better than creating a channel that talks about your life, travel, and cameras.
YouTube can suggest your videos better to your target audience depending on the clarity you provide. If every video targets a different audience, it gets confused and so does the audience. If you just shoot photography and then move on to talking about travel and then shift to talking about life, it creates confusion to the audience.
You should focus on one primary area and expand to three or four sub areas. For a finance channel, you can cover budgeting, debts, investing, and easy money saving techniques. For a fitness channel, it can cover short workouts with tutorials to explain how to perform individual workouts.
Think about the audience that you are will address. What is their skill level? What is the pain or problem that they are facing? What is their end result? What is the audience of a runner that is learning how to train for a 5K and what is the audience of a marathoner that is out training?
While successful channels can be good ideas to study, make sure to develop your unique ideas for your own videos based on your channel. Watch what video styles gain a lot of comments and repeat views.
Plan to publish at least 50 videos before worrying too much about your subscriber count. This will help the direction of your channel.
Find Topics People Are Actually Searching For
Captivating YouTube video topics fulfill a real need of a potential audience. Search-based videos become a constant revenue stream since people will continually search for that solution.
Type the first few letters of your potential search topic into YouTube, and watch the suggestions that appear. Look through the autosuggested search terms for the phrases “meal prep for” or “how to edit videos” and notice some of the longer search terms that may come up.
Look through the top results for those videos. Notice the view count, publication date, comment count, and what the author seems to be lacking in the video. Maybe all of the videos cover the same topic but in ways that are too complex for beginners. Maybe all of the top hits are outdated and the audience wants to see something more current.
Google Trends allows you to check on the interest for that particular topic over time. Other helpful tools are vidIQ and Tube Buddy, which can provide you with keyword ideas and additional viewing stats. Don’t rely too much on scores, since they don’t actually help you understand the topic or the audience.
Use the following types of videos as formats for your ideas:
1) How to videos for first time tasks (How to setup a YouTube Channel banner)
2) Comparison videos (CapCut vs DaVinci Resolve for Beginners)
3) Review videos (Is it worth buying?)
4) Case Study videos ( studying an injury or mistake)
5) Time sensitive videos (creating holiday or event videos)
A spike in numbers may be due to a trend, but if there’s no connection to your channel, a trend will never build an audience to make a channel grow. The first thing you should do to make your YouTube channel grow fast is figuring out what problems your audience has that you can solve in a better way than what’s already out there on the search results.
Create Clickable Titles and Thumbnails
Keep your subject at the start of the title. “How I Edited My First YouTube Video in CapCut” says why people should click better than “My Editing Journey.”
Stay away from overly general curiosity titles unless the context is known to the audience. “You Won’t Believe This!” doesn’t say anything to people who are not you. It means people will most likely be mad when the video disappoints them.
A strong thumbnail does one thing and one thing only. It gets the right viewer to stop. Use a clear unhappy face, a problem with a solution, a before and after example, or something clear and contrasting. Use only a few big words and space in between to convey your idea.
Take the example, “Fix Echo in Your Home Office”. In this example, you would pair a microphone and a frustrated face with the word “STOP ECHO”. The image completes the title instead of saying the same thing.
Take the time to optimize different thumbnails over time. The YouTube Studio and TubeBuddy extensions have some thumbnail optimizers which creators may use. Using the same winning ideas and lessons as your thumbnail style instead of copying your thumbnails is the best way to go.
Clickbait lowers your growth potential. High click-through-rates, low view-times, and overall poor feedback mean that you get it all wrong.
The First Few Seconds Matter Most
Being noticed is only step one. You also need to know if people think your video is worth their time.
The value of strong openings is about more than likes. The first few seconds are your opportunity to clue the viewer in on what they’re getting and why it’s important. Keep this in mind while you decide whether you need to include your logo, a greeting, a long backstory, etc.
A practical opening consists of:
- Introducing either the problem or the desired result
- Sharing some of the helpful answer that you’ll go on to provide, without giving everything away
- Stating the answer in clear steps and examples
- Inviting them to subscribe or click on something else after you have their attention (this is not mandatory).
If your video is about blurry phone photos, you should lead with the example of a fixed photo and the three blur settings or bad habits that caused the photo capture to be blurry.
Pacing matters and this same idea can be applied to your entire video. Dead air and over explained concepts should be removed. Change the image on the screen or provide backgrounds, screen captions, examples, position yourself closer to the screen, draw charts, etc., if it furthers the main point of the video.
Audience retention graphs can be found in YouTube Studio once a video has been published. If you notice a steep decline in audience retention, it’s likely the video’s introduction was unclear, you went on to provide extra details that did not relate to the video’s title, or you provided a detailed answer to an unrelated problem.
Posting Consistently, Easily, and Effectively
Puzzled by your posting options? Consider this: a publishing burst may be great for page views, but viewers will leave if you disappear after a flurry of posting activity. If you want to produce quality content, do so consistently. Figure out where you will be best able to dedicate your time; research, film, edit, publish and engage your viewers.
One quality long-form video each week may be ideal for a lot of creators, whereas others may be able to pull off publishing two. An aggressive publication goal may be one or two long-form videos with a goal of 15 to 30 Shorts per month. Regardless of your format, time the publication goal to inform your viewers of the posts without being irrelevant.
Useful content posted as Shorts may provide a way for viewers new to your content to find you. Although, Shorts must be derived from your long form videos.
Publishing videos through YouTube Studio is a time saver, and enables you to batch your publishing work. For instance, research many topics on one day; film two videos on a single day; edit one video each day for a week.
Analyze Your Videos and Create a Winning System Using YouTube Analytics
Use your data to guide your decisions, not play the acting guessing game. After enough time has passed for your uploads to collect significant data, figure out what’s working across different videos.
Weak packaging is often indicated by impressions with no clicks, so strong clicks that prompt the viewer to leave the video page quickly may be caused by an over-enthusiastic title, a slow or lengthy intro, or a video that’s targeted to the wrong audience.
Click-through rates (and benchmark obsessing) vary. You also have to consider the traffic source, the audience, and how YouTube tests a video. But 4-10% click-through rates are common and 40% retention is often viewed as a benchmark by many creator resources, not a guarantee.
Monthly reviews are critical. Determine the styles of your most successful thumbnails, the different sources of traffic, the best openers and formats, and your top performers (including your best-converting topics). Using this knowledge will help guide you on how to structure your next batch of videos to help gain more views to your channel the fastest.
Become Faster With Community Posts, Smart Promotions, and Collaborations
Start the publishing and feedback conversation. The first days of a video’s release are important. Take the time to engage with comments, and leave constructive and thought-provoking answers to encourage follow-up questions. Pin a comment to encourage your audience to give their feedback.
Posting within the community section of your channel, or hosting community polls, can provide you with ideas around what your audience wants you to make next. For instance, a poll on the hardest part of the editing process for your audience could inspire your next week of video topics. Live streams can also be used to increase community trust as users can engage in the stream by asking questions.
Collaborating with other channels usually boils down to having the same audience. A good example would be a productivity channel collaborating with a channel on study tips. Inversely, appearing on a random entertainment channel probably wouldn’t be beneficial for either channel.
Posting videos in other related communities (ex. Facebook groups, IG Reels, WhatsApp, Telegram or email newsletters) can help garner more views, but be sure to add a good description on how the video adds value to the group before posting.
While booking fast growth on YouTube may be tempting, buying views, manipulating metadata, available audience sub-for-subs, and sharing with uninterested audiences should be avoided. It may artificially inflate viewer numbers, but that doesn’t lead to actual engagement with your videos.
Final Thoughts
The most consistent users of YouTube have realized that the fastest way to grow a channel is by approaching community feedback and publishing with a clear goal of adding value consistently.
Give the process time to see patterns. Learning about 3 uploads of a channel is not as informative as watching 30 detailed videos.
Decide on one crowd, list 20 problems they need solved, and be consistent with schedule. Each video builds data to aid decision making, and that’s how a successful YouTube channel is built.
