There’s nothing wrong with virality or consistency, but virality cannot build your audience and consistency cannot build your channel. Growing your YouTube audience requires view attraction, view retention, and motivation to come back in a reliable manner. This is done by finding trends and consistently adding value with each post, video, or chapter.
Likes and view counts may get you excited, but neither of these things consistently build an audience. Growing your channel requires commitment to testing new content like value-adding posts and learning what your audience likes best.
Define Your Channel Promise and Target Audience
Viewers should be able to differentiate your channel from the rest in less than a minute. Your channel may have videos on gaming, meal prep, travel vlogging, and providing life advice. Viewers will likely enjoy the content you put out, but they may not have much of a reason to subscribe to your channel.
Pick a main topic cluster and a few similar subset clusters. A personal finance channel could have budgeting, paying off debt, and beginner level investing topics. These topics would pull in a similar audience and build off of each other.
A simple channel promise could be
“I help first-time freelancers organize their money and earn more from client work.”
This promise helps you build your content and also determine your audience as some of the users won’t come back to watch your content.
Study 5 to 10 channels that are most similar to your audience. Notice what formats they use, what types of comments spark the most interaction, what content is the most popular, and what topics they neglect to touch on. Don’t make the videos that other channels use, instead figure out how you can add more clarity, presence, and entertainment to your videos.
A channel that has a clear focus will gain the desired audience. 1,000 subscribers that never interact with your channel is less important than 10 subscribers that fully engage with your content.
Make YouTube Videos According to Viewer Demand
You won’t be able to make an amazing video if nobody actually cares about the subject. Before recording, go to YouTube and search the questions, struggles, results and stories behind the idea you plan to cover to see if users already search it.
Start with YouTube search autocomplete. Type similar phrases like “how to edit videos” and check the results below. Pay attention to those. Google Trends shows how much people are interested similar phrases and how the interest changed over time.
Use other tools like vidIQ and TubeBuddy. While they don’t do everything like the methods I mentioned before, you can get some ideas for keywords and user comments. Keep in mind that one of these tools doesn’t automatically mean you should proceed with the idea. Check the tool’s first page results. Pay attention to what other users promise to cover and what other users need the video to cover.
Different styles of content deserve to be mixed together. Search-based videos cover how-to questions like “how to create a YouTube video using Canva”.
Suggested-video topics cover a follow-up, comparison or response to videos users watch.
Content that attracts users varies in how long participants are interested. Evergreen videos answer how to questions months from now. Popular videos attract attention for a short time.
Take existing videos with a higher than expected number of views and adapt them to a sharaper angle, better examples, etc.
Rather than isolated videos, think of a connected video series. A three part video series covering how to start a podcast creates user flow.
Stand Out With Better Titles, Thumbnails, and Hooks to Gain More Views
Attention is fleeting, but once it is earned, it can work wonders to grow your channel. This is the reason we focus on the importance of titles, thumbnails, and hooks.
Creative and attention-catching titles work best – take your video’s title as an opportunity to set the correct expectations and tell your audience why they should care. “I Fixed My Bad YouTube Retention With This 5-Minute Rewrite” is a better title than “My YouTube Secret.” The former tells the audience what was fixed as well as the reason they should care, and the latter does not.
Thumbnails should be text-based with a simple graphic and bold, large text. They shouldn’t be word for word of the title. A thumbnail should ask a question or show a ‘reveal’ of the result of the action.
Eligible creators can utilize YouTube’s Test & Compare thumbnail feature to test out a variety of thumbnail options. Only change one variable at a time as you will likely never know what impacted the change the most.
Ensure you grab your audience’s attention within the first 3-10 seconds by revealing a key detail or showing the end result of whatever action or event you’re talking about. Long logo animations should be avoided.
Build Trust and Engagement With a Consistent Content Plan
A schedule that is too ambitious will be abandoned. Long-form content builds trust because it allows time for a complete explanation and/or demonstration. Consider an exhaustive content schedule as a short-term plan at best. Long-form content can be uploaded on a weekly basis while other content like shorts or live streams can be used to bring in a new audience and provide new ways to engage. Community posts help keep viewers engaged and active while waiting for the next long content upload.
Content if done right, provides opportunities to be repurposed. Repurpose long-form content into shorts. Consider using a key moment, tip, surprising mistake, before and after footage with accompanying explanation as shorts and then including a prompt to watch the full form content as a comment and pinning the comment to the top.
To provide users with the ability to run through the content efficiently, provide the options to:
- Pull-related content together in playlists.
- Provide recommendations for related content at the end of each video.
- if the recommendations are distracting to the content, use sparingly.
- clear and concise recommendations in the comment section.
A consistent content series like a weekly budget breakdown or editing lesson demonstration can provide content of value that keeps the users coming back.
Get Subscribers at the End of Every Video
You can’t say “Subscribe” before you earn it. The new user will decide if your channel deserves their subscription.
You should ask for a subscription after you have shared something helpful or after you have simplified something difficult. Let the user know what they can expect after they have pressed that magic subscription button. An example could be, “If you are building a home studio, subscribe because next week’s video will help you decide which microphone to buy”.
You should keep this tempting subscription button within your videos at the same strategic spots. The value point in your videos should have the verbal subscription prompt. In video editing, you can place an on screen subscription prompt to remind them to subscribe. Your channel art, community posts, end screens, and comment descriptions should also give the user your value.
YouTube views should also not be the only measurement. See if users come back or close the video after they pressed that subscription button. Users should choose to watch it again. There is no growth if a user clicks a subscription button and disappears.
To get more views and subscribers on YouTube, a solid social media marketing plan is a must. Snaphappen has a great option to buy social media engagement services. It will help you buy YouTube subscribers. This will not only help you build your online community, but also will make you more visible and give you more credibility in the online community.
Snaphappen.com’s engagement forms are of good quality, so you can be sure that you are getting what you pay for. Take advantage of Snaphappen.com to build your social media community and help your social media marketing strategy.
Use Analytics to Find What Actually Grows Your Channel
Don’t go to YouTube Analytics after a bad upload. Go after 28 or 90 days to see the bigger picture. Calm down. Don’t freak out about a bad day. Look for patterns instead of rushing to post a video.
Connect some common sense numbers. YouTube shows your video a certain number of times and you can see how many (if any) people clicked on it. You can see at what point people lose interest in your content. You can also see how people may have found your video and if they are coming back to watch other videos and/ or have subscribed to your video channel.
Here is a simple way of interpreting what your numbers mean.
1. High Impressions, low clicks…title or thumbnail issue.
2. Strong Clicks, weak retention…slow introductions, unclear presentation, or a big gap between promise and delivery.
3. Strong retention, low subscriptions… your channel promise or call to action needs work.
Find the videos that yield the most subscriptions and create follow-up videos for those. Example… if you make an overview for a beginner camera guide, you can create overview videos for beginner lenses, lighting , and even camera settings. The idea is to see what your viewers interact with the most.
Build Trust Through Promotion, Collaboration, and Community
Although love from YouTube memes can be important, recommendations from actual viewers can come from a lot of other places. Post your video to other platforms such as Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, etc. when it is appropriate to do so.
The following things should be done over the next 30 days: a set of focused videos (new videos, outlining key points, ideas, etc), test some new thumbnail ideas, check your data retention, review and follow-up with the video of most engaged viewers. Viewer satisfaction is the most important factor in creating a channel that is viewed on a regular basis.
Over the next 30 days publish a small set of focused videos. Test some new thumbnail ideas. Review your data retention and follow-up with the video that receives the most engaged viewers. Viewer satisfaction is the most important element in transforming a channel into a habit that is viewed on a routine basis.
