How I Grew YouTube from 0 to 75,000 in 18 Months
How to Get Views on YouTube and Grow a Channel Fast
If you're trying to make YouTube a full-time hustle, I've got three keys to unlocking massive growth for a channel.
It's not easy to grow a YouTube channel. Data from TubeFilter shows the average channel adds just 200 subscribers a month and it takes around two years to reach 1,000 subscribers.
But I've found three keys to unlocking massive growth on YouTube, three hacks that will help you get more views and grow your channel.
In fact, I used these three steps to build my community to over 75,000 subscribers in less than a year and a half and made over $50,000 doing it.
Click to reserve your spot at the FREE YouTube Quick-start Webinar! I'm sharing three strategies that helped me grow my YouTube channel and double my business income. I guarantee they WILL work for you. Seats are limited for the webinar, so make sure you reserve yours.
Can You Still Grow on YouTube?
Whether you're just starting a YouTube channel or have been on the platform for years, you know how frustrating it can be to grow a channel. I started my channel in 2015 just to host video summaries of blog posts.
Two years later and I had all of 22 subscribers!
It didn't bother me because I really wasn't using the channel, I wasn't trying to grow it as its own business.
After seeing the power of YouTube through a few friends with big channels, I got serious in December 2017. I started making videos just for YouTube and growing the community.
Less than a year and a half later and the channel had grown to over 75,000 subscribers and I had made over $50,000 in ads, sponsorships and affiliates.
How to Get Subscribers on YouTube
3 Secrets to Grow a YouTube Business
In this video, I'm going to reveal three of the keys that helped me unlock that growth, three steps you can use to get more views and more subscribers on YouTube.
The first key to unlock a massive YouTube following is branding. Now I know this is one of those vague ideas but I'm going to give you a few things that will make it easy to create a brand around your channel and the sense of community that comes with it.
Branding on YouTube is hugely important so don't avoid it because maybe you think it's just academic or theory. Branding is how some channels get ten or 20 percent of their subscribers to click through to videos when the average is closer to five percent. It's a ready-made audience waiting for every video you publish, waiting to watch and share.
Now look up branding in the dictionary and you get things like branding is your logos and slogan. That's not it. Branding is the emotions and feelings you can evoke when people think of your channel and that's a hugely powerful thing.
As an example, what do you think of when you see a Coca-Cola? Besides all the things you'd expect associated with soft drinks, maybe you think of polar bears, Christmas or even Santa.
But why in the hell would you think of these things when you think of a carbonated beverage. Of course the answer is branding, the decades the company has spent aligning its product with Santa, Christmas and Polar Bears.
And at face value, why would Coke even want to associate itself with these themes? What do they have to do with drinking a soft drink?
First, think about the emotions you feel when thinking about Santa and Christmas. You probably think of giving or maybe you feel a sense of joy and happiness. Pretty powerful emotions to be associated with a product right?
Even more ingenious is the fact that the holiday season would typically be some of the worst sales for a soft drink company. Monster Beverage books just a fifth of its annual sales in the fourth quarter compared to booming revenue in the summer months. This isn't a problem for Coca-Cola though which has built those triggers with the Holiday season. Now whenever someone thinks of Santa, they reach for a Coke.
Create your account on TubeBuddy for free to see the features that will help grow your channel!
So let's look at how you can create that same kind of brand around your channel, how to evoke those powerful emotions that are going to build a community.
First is to understand the opportunity in brand building through your background in videos. We'll talk about building your brand through what you say as well but I feel like visual brand-building is one of the biggest missed opportunities among YouTubers.
Through what I wear and my background, I'm able to tell viewers what the channel is about. The bowtie says it's a serious channel, maybe a little different. My Marine Corps shadowbox tells you a little about my past and the other pictures relate some of the beliefs I care about.
Now this doesn't mean you want to use the same background in every video but always be thinking about what your background says about you and the channel.
Next there are going to be three elements you want to use in your messaging, in what you say, to build your brand. These are going to be your creation story, shared beliefs and branding around an iconic leader.
Every super hero needs a creation story, right? Would we care about Peter Parker if we didn't know the tragic story of losing his Uncle and how it taught him to use his powers for good?
Your creation story helps explain the why of your channel. It helps build trust with your community because they know where you're coming from and they can relate.
Next, you need a set of shared beliefs among the community. Now this isn't something you manufacture, you can't just say, "Ok, our community is going to believe in loyalty and respect."
Your shared beliefs come naturally from yourself and your audience. What you can do though is reinforce them in your content. You call attention to the shared beliefs, include stories that demonstrate them. This way, your audience relates to you on a more personal level because they see that you share those beliefs with them.
Finally here is you can brand the channel, your mission around an iconic leader. This is someone that embodies those shared beliefs and values. Again, how you do this is by digging into stories of the leader's life to share on the channel. Moments where they faced a problem your audience can relate to and how they overcame it.
It's important here that you are not the channel's iconic leader. You are simply a guide for your audience, yourself also striving to be like that leader.
If you look at all these brand-building ideas, it's really about community. It's about helping your audience relate to you as a person and finding those things that bind you together.
How to Grow a YouTube Channel
How to Find YouTube Video Ideas
Now building a strong brand is one thing but I know a lot of YouTubers struggle with video ideas. I've found a way to hack YouTube for video ideas you know will be popular.
In every niche, every topic, there are just some video ideas that are going to be winners for every channel. These are the videos that everyone interested in that niche is watching so your goal is to find as many of these popular ideas as possible.
The easiest way to do this is just to look for what's working for other channels in your niche, what are their most popular videos.
So I'm going to use a friend of mine's channel as an example. Kelly runs the Freedom in a Budget channel where she covers frugality, Weight Watchers, saving on groceries and a lot of the Dave Ramsey concepts.
What we're going to do is find four or five channels that cover similar topics, channels in the same niche. If you don't already know which channels these are, you can do a search for some of the video keywords you target and see which channels pop up frequently.
Now with each channel, we'll go into their videos and sort by most popular. Then we're going to copy down the title of the five or ten most popular videos onto a spreadsheet and we'll do that for each channel.
Looking at our spreadsheet of most popular videos, and you can copy down the top 10 or look to more channels to fill out your list. The first thing you'll notice is some ideas or titles that repeat across the channels. These are your niche-wide ideas, those video ideas that are going to be successful for any channel.
So just in these four channels, we see that ALDI haul idea repeated a couple of times, there's some Cash Envelope ideas here.
Now it's not enough to just make a copy of these videos. You have to make something worthy of ranking for these big idea videos. For that we're going to use what's called the Skyscraper approach, a popular blogging technique by Brian Dean.
With the Skyscraper technique, you look through some of the best articles and videos in the topic. You can do a Google search and see what questions Google says people ask and what related searches are being used. Basically, you're creating a list of everything you need to talk about and everything people want to know about that idea. You're creating a super-video.
If we do a Google search for Cash Envelope System we see all the suggested searches, all the popular related searches, so things like the cash envelope system wallet, categories, printables and planner.
When we look on the search page itself, we first see some videos and then the People Also Ask box. These are great questions to answer in your video and can even be entire videos to themselves. Pro tip here, if you click on a question, a new one will populate below it for more ideas.
You can look at some of these results to see what people are talking about and then scroll to the bottom for related searches so again we see things like how to start the system, an organizer and a binder idea.
Creating this super-video, an ultimate guide to the topic, you're setting it up for those likes and shares that are going to help it rank for that popular video idea.
How to Promote YouTube Videos on a Blog
This next YouTube hack, leveraging a blog with your YouTube channel, I feel like this is another one of those big missed opportunities by YouTubers.
Since growing my channel, it's amazed me how many big YouTubers don't have websites of their own. There a lot of ways your channel and a blog can work together and I think this is really how a small YouTube channel can get that fast growth.
Starting your own blog is a no-brainer. It's something you actually own and control versus social media and even YouTube. Within six months of developing my YouTube channel, YouTube was within the top five traffic sources for each of my websites. Not only that but the traffic was quality with visitors staying longer and reading multiple blog posts.
Going the other way, you can use your blog to boost a YouTube channel. Transcribe your videos and post them as blog articles with the video embedded. You can also link to videos in articles.
YouTube loves what it calls session starts. Anytime you can bring someone to your YouTube videos from another website, that's a golden signal to YouTube and it will reward you with more views. You do this through those links from your site or from an email list you collect on the blog.
Leveraging your blog and channel together is easily one of the most neglected opportunities which also means its your chance as a small channel to get out in front.
Make sure you click through to reserve your spot on that Free YouTube Quick-start Webinar. In it, I'm going to give you a crash course on starting your channel and everything else I did to grow from nothing to 75,000 subscribers in 18 months. The webinar is completely free but you have to sign up for your seat.
Consistency is Key in YouTube
In order to have a successful YouTube channel, you need consistency. Your content needs to be quality and enjoyable for your viewers so that they can enjoy watching your videos week-in and week-out.
That being said, if you want to keep people subscribed to your channel, then you have to create videos consistently, especially if it is a YouTube channel about games. The same goes for any other topic as well. If the content creator's videos are inconsistent in upload dates or times, then their audience will tend not to be consistent; rather it will be scattered all around, unable to "gather" under one video since there isn't really one main video. So by uploading sporadically, you make it difficult on those who are trying to watch your content.
Episode length doesn't matter, whether it is 6 minutes or 2 hours, it all depends on the value of what you are delivering. If you have a 20 minute video that destroys some common myths about gaming and interests viewers but only uploads once every two weeks, then there is no consistency for those who wish to watch you more frequently. You will lose them if they cannot find your channel easily because of inconsistent uploads. It's not always easy to make videos regularly, especially if time zones make it difficult for you to create during peak times (like early morning) since your audience may come from anywhere in the world. When this happens, try making videos at different times throughout the week so people can benefit from your content even though they may not be on at consistent times.
If you can't seem to upload as often as you want, then try doing a multi-video blog every time that you do upload. This way, those who cannot watch your videos before their scheduled publishing dates will be able to see some of your content then and there since it is already saved onto the site.
This will also help give them a taste of what more to expect from your channel if they subscribe. But aside from all these tips, the most important thing about being consistent is holding yourself accountable for yourself. You have to discipline yourself so that you can meet deadlines and keep promises – both of which are hard especially if life gets overwhelming or if boredom strikes along with creative block.
So hold yourself accountable and take a day to do a video at least, whether it's a blog or a commentary, you can keep your channel going by simply sitting down for an hour and making something. It doesn't have to be the best thing in the world – as long as it is quality content that is true to your channel , then that is all that matters.
Read the Entire Grow on YouTube Series
How to Start a Food Channel on YouTube
How to Hack YouTube for Viral Video Ideas
From 0 to 1,000 YouTube Subscribers in 19 Weeks
How Much Does YouTube Pay [5 Hacks to Make 3X More per View]
TubeBuddy Review: 10x the Growth of Your YouTube Channel
How to Recover from Your Holiday Spending: Smart Tips to Help You Out
Best Credit Monitoring Services to Stop Identity Theft