YouTube is the Holy Grail among all video streaming platforms that allow creators around the globe to get recognized for their art. Every new creator that joins the platform asks how to grow your YouTube channel as they want to rise among the ranks and become famous quickly.
Having an articulate plan that ensures your channel growth isn’t just vital for your success on YouTube but for your survival as well. Currently, there are 37 million YouTube channels for different niches, and as you’re reading this line, thousands of new ones are also being created.
It means that if you rush into your YouTube without a plan for growing your channel, your career might end before it even begins. Therefore, to solve this problem for you, here we have nine highly recommended tactics that will help you improve your video content, teach you to create videos that sell, and reveal factors that make the YouTube algorithm work in your favor.
How to Grow on YouTube?
In these times where video content rules all, there’s fierce competition going on among Youtubers for securing followers and views. As a newbie, it might not be easy for you to compete in this battle for survival, and that’s where we’re equipping you with these tips.
Tested and trusted by experts, these tips have the potential to boost the growth of a channel quickly, so have faith and apply them consistently once you’re done reading.
1. Post Consistently
With thousands of videos flooding in on YouTube daily, it’s easy for your viewers to leave your channel, which can affect your engagement rate and view count. To avoid this situation, you must stay consistent and upload YouTube content regularly.
The easiest way to maintain consistency is by making a weekly or monthly content schedule. Using this trick will help you stay on track and work harder to give your audience something new to watch. Also, you don’t just need consistency in uploading; you need to stay consistent in the uploading time too.
You can’t keep uploading your videos at 10 pm for a week and then suddenly change the time to 8 am. This abrupt behavior will make it harder for the audience to keep up. You need to find the time when your audience is most active and upload content during those hours. By doing this, your content’s reach will increase, and it will get maximum engagement.
2. Optimize Your YouTube Videos
Posting videos regularly is a good start, but it won’t do you any good unless you optimize them for search engines and the YouTube algorithm. Most creators don’t know anything about YouTube video optimization and keep uploading their content blindly, which unfortunately goes unnoticed due to a lack of SEO elements.
That’s why you must know the process of video optimization. Here are some steps that you can take and elements you can improve on optimizing your existing and upcoming videos:
Use Keywords in Video Title
Video titles are the primary way to communicate your video’s topic, and adding a keyword to them increases the searchability of your content. For example, if your video is about dieting and you add a highly searched keyword best dieting methods in the title, it becomes easy to find.
When someone searches for the term best dieting methods, the YouTube algorithm will pick up your video as it contains the exact keyword and presents it in the search results. In simple terms, adding a keyword in the title increases the odds of people watching your video.
Choose Title to Maximize CTR
CTR or click-through rate is the stat that describes how many people click on your video intending to watch it. Now, most people decide to watch a video after reading its title, so make sure that it’s attractive and exotic enough to make someone watch your content.
SEO Friendly Descriptions
Video descriptions are there to explain the content in detail, but they are also a perfect place to embed keywords and hashtags. Make sure to embed keywords and hashtags that fit the video and embed them in the right places while writing the description.
If your video is about dieting, throw in a couple of highly searched keywords in the description. Also, add a couple of hashtags like #fitnessgoals or #weightloss, etc., at the start or end of the description for good measure.
Use Tags on Videos
Video tags are one of the most crucial SEO elements on YouTube. If you embed the right tags in your video, it gets discovered by the algorithm, and it recommends your content to the appropriate audience, increasing its likes, shares, comments, engagement rate, etc.
Putting in the right tags also increases the searchability of a video, so do your research and always embed tags that fit the nature of your content.
Categorize Playlists
It’s best to divide content into categories to make it easier for the audience to find them, and playlists are the best way to do that. Make playlists of your content based on their genre, topic, or nature, so your viewers can come and reach the content they want to see right away.
3. Create Videos Based on “Watch Time”
When you talk about growth on YouTube, the common goal that most creators share is gaining 1k subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time. Now, getting followers is something that sounds doable, but gathering that many watch hours seems impossible.
That’s why experts recommend creating content while keeping your watch time in mind, which means that you need to create longer and more engaging videos that can increase your overall watch hours.
Didn’t get it? Basically, when you create longer videos, people spend more time watching them, thus increasing your watch time and eventually the watch hours. So, come up with more engaging and detailed ideas for your content to make videos that boost your watch time.
4. Make Great Thumbnails and End Screens
Most of you reading this article must know that we often decide whether to watch a video or not after watching its thumbnail. Why is it? Because thumbnails are the face of a video and give us an idea of what kind of content we can expect if we click on the video.
Therefore, if you want more eyes on your content, it’s best to create aesthetic and attractive thumbnails that make a viewer stop scrolling and check out your video. Once a viewer has clicked on your video and enjoyed your content, it’s time to cross-sell and give present them your next video by using end screens.
As soon as your video ends, add an end screen that suggests the viewer check out the rest of our videos. In most cases, this cross-selling works, and viewers end up clicking on the suggested videos, so it’s a strategy that you can use to secure a lot of engagement on your videos.
5. Engage with Your Audience
Even if your content is engaging and you are regular, your audience still might leave you if you don’t keep them close. How to do that? It’s simple; you just make sure to communicate with your subscribers regularly.
Read their comments and write replies, hold live sessions to talk to them, and try to answer their direct messages. These actions will reflect how considerate you are towards your audience, and they will stay loyal to you and won’t’ get swayed by other creators.
Another advantage of engaging with the audience is that you learn what kind of content they want to see. This data is hard to find in YouTube analytics, but it’s easy to figure it out through direct communication, so it’s best to keep this tactic in mind.
6. Collaborate with Other YouTubers
Another way of increasing video ranks is to collaborate with your fellow YouTubers. Find creators of your niche and send collaboration requests to them. Most YouTubers welcome these offers and probably invite you to their studio to make a video together.
Through this strategy, you’ll not only be able to expand your social circle on the platform but also get a chance to present yourself in front of a totally new audience (fans of the Youtuber you plan to collaborate with).
One creative advantage that you’ll get from this tactic is that you’ll have a chance to see the creative process of your fellow artist. What tools do they use? How do they edit their content? How much time do they spend on YouTube? You’ll be able to find all this information.
You can learn things from them and implement their methods to improve your content’s quality. See, collaborations aren’t just beneficial for the channel; they are beneficial for your future creative endeavors too.
7. Go Live on YouTube
Live sessions are an excellent way of keeping your audience engaged on YouTube. By using this strategy, you can communicate with your followers effectively and ask them questions about your content. You can hold a Q&A on YouTube live to allow the audience to know you better.
Use the live sessions to find out your audience’s interests and orient your content accordingly. There’s a lot more you can do by using this feature, so go live on YouTube at least once a month.
8. Reformat Well-Performing Content
Not all videos perform well, and while it’s vital to constantly improve the quality of your content, it’s also crucial to update your well-performing content so it performs even better.
If some of your videos are performing really well, keep updating their tags, thumbnails, keywords, etc., to increase their engagement rate to a new level. This strategy prevents well-performing videos from going stale.
For example, sometimes videos perform really well for a year, but after that, they stop getting views and engagement. That’s where the reformatting comes on. You just have to update its elements, and it will start bringing you more views and followers again.
9. Convert Viewers to Subscribers
You must’ve seen videos on YouTube with millions of views but only a few thousand subscribers. This happens because most viewers watch the videos without ever subscribing to the channel, and while your views increase, the subscriber count remains stable.
To prevent this from happening, you got to ask your viewers to kindly subscribe to your channel. Many Youtuber say a sentence like please make sure to subscribe to my channel for updates to convert their viewers to subscribers. You can use a call to action like this yourself in order to convince the viewers to subscribe to your channel.
Remember that it’s very important to have a good balance of views and subscriber count, which means you must apply this tactic to grow your channel.
Conclusion
Every Youtuber wants to see consistent growth on their channel, but it’s a goal that takes time to achieve. You need to improve your content regularly and keep applying these tactics to finally start seeing positive results.
Without putting in any hard work, this dream will never become a reality. On this note, we conclude today’s article and hope that you will apply these tactics to grow your channel. If you want to know more about YouTube, please check our blog for related articles.
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