How To Grow A YouTube Channel

Growing a YouTube channel can be hard and sometimes it depends on luck and topic. In fact, it can take some of us years to hit 10,000 subscribers while we watch other speed past us by multiple times. If you want to grow then there are some things you can do to increase your chances of growth and success.

Tips For Growing Your YouTube Channel

If you want to make more money from your small Youtube channel then the best way to do it is to grow your channel. The more people that find you the more money you will make.

Here are the ways I’ve learned to grow on YouTube.

Utilize Useful Youtube Growth Tools

I resisted using a paid tool like TubeBuddy for a while because I thought I was smart enough to do it on my own but when I finally caved and bought a subscription I kicked myself for not doing it sooner.

With TubeBuddy you can see EXACTLY what other channels are using for their tags and video data and compare their channels to yours. You can learn how to do a lot of title and tag work for SEO with TubeBuddy.

some of my other favorite tools I’ve used inside TubeBuddy while growing my channel:

• canned responses which is super useful for interacting with your audience
• upload checklist
• video topic planner

Those are a few of my favorite tools within my account to grow. TubeBuddy has a free version with limited tools listed here and paid accounts when you really want to grow (which are amazing for the price).

Learn About SEO

There are tons of videos on Youtube about how to use SEO on the platform. Watch some. Learn about what keywords are and how to use them. For many channels, search is the key way they are found and earn money.

To shorten your journey in learning and implementing SEO, I again recommend TubeBuddy because it’s like an all in one solution for YouTubers.

Here are the SEO tools you have access to inside TubeBuddy:

• view and copy video tags from another channel
• tag rankings so you can track where you rank
• suggested tags for your videos
• keyword explorer
• search rankings
• best practices audit

And even more! All of those tools help you get your video ranked on YouTube so you get more views. It seriously has more tools than I’ve even had time to use yet but what I have used above has helped take my videos to the next level.

Since I’ve been using TubeBuddy my SEO has improved and my search traffic has doubled. Seriously, it doubled! TubeBuddy has been an incredibly helpful and the first month I used it I actually doubled the views on my channel going from 45,000 views in a month to 110,000 in a month.

Build Community

Having a community around your channel and your videos is another great way to guarantee successful video launches and continued success. Building community can be done in a few ways:

• commenting on other youtube channels
• responding to all of your comments
• referencing viewers and comments in your videos
• giving shoutouts to people in your community
• giving your viewers a nickname and expected phrases

Those are just a few ways I’ve found to build my community but you can find what works for you! The most successful YouTube channels have an element of community around them.

Those are just some of the ways I’ve learned how to grow my channel and consistently doubled my channel size each year I’ve been on Youtube while still keeping consistent and engaged subscribers.

Make Good Videos

Seriously, making good videos is how you grow on YouTube. There are a lot of additional factors but you won’t grow if you make bad videos.

You should be making videos that you know are good. If they make you cringe when you are rewatching to edit, how do you expect anyone else to enjoy them?

Here are a few of the best tips from successful creators I’ve followed about making good videos:

• Get to the point in your videos. Don’t ramble on for a long period at the beginning where people will fall off.
• Make your videos provide value. If your videos are educational then make them very educational. If they are entertainment based then they should provide value by making your viewer feel something. Think of each video and consider what value it is providing someone.
• Audio quality matters the most even over video quality. You can have top notch video but if your audio is bad people will stop watching.
• Focus on your presentation and story telling skills. When you first start making videos you probably won’t be very good at this but it’s something that makes the best YouTubers connect with their audience.

Remember that these are all things that you can work on and you can’t compare yourself to other creators. You should work hard to improve your skills and tune out the distractions of others.

Provide Unique Value

This is similar to the idea of making good videos but even good videos won’t get you anywhere if you aren’t providing some sort of value to your audience.

Every video on your channel is providing some type of value. That value might be education or entertainment or just a feeling like someone belongs. You need to recognize what value you are providing and then put your own unique spin on it.

Make sure your video has a value driven purpose and you are delivering that value for each second of the video. You don’t need to ramble or go on tangents that don’t deliver on that value.

Experiment With Ideas

You likely won’t know what will succeed on your channel until you try some new things. Growing on YouTube means you will have to constantly experiment with ideas and trying out new things with your content.

When you experiment and try something new you need to do a couple things:

• be clear to yourself what is different
• study your analytics to see how the video performs differently
• double down on experiements that are working

That is basically the way to succeed and grow on YouTube. When you have a video go viral? Make another similar one in a similar way and provide similar value.

Experiment until you find something that works and then double down on it.

Similarly to video types and ideas, experiement with all of these things:

• thumbnails
• call to actions in your video
• titles
• descriptions
• video length

Try out new things and constantly track how the experiments perform. You won’t know what works and what doesn’t work for your channel until you try. There are all sorts of pieces of advice out there “use your face in thumbnails” or “don’t use your face in thumbnails” but you won’t know until you try it on your channel.

Learn From YouTube Experts

Another great way to grow on YouTube (and save a ton of time) is to learn from experts who have already done it.

You can book one on one time or take a course like my friend Erika’s course Mastering YouTube for the Busy Professional (affiliate link).

She went from 0 subscribers to over 70,000 and $100,000 earned from YouTube in just one year. I’ve learned a lot from her about both getting views from trending topics and outsourcing to grow faster.

Taking a course like this or from any big YouTuber will help you learn faster and grow faster because you will make less mistakes.

All of these things will help you grow faster after you’ve hit your first 100 subscribers. Best wishes on growing your channel to a huge success!

Find Ways To Be More Efficient

If you plan to grow on YouTube then you need to find ways to be more productive, use your time more wisely, and be more efficient overall. YouTube can be a lot of work and a lot of really tedious work that can be time consuming.

You may want to try out a number of different things:

• Using TubeBuddy to batch process tasks
• Hire an editor too speed up your editing
• Hire someone to make your thumbnails
• Outsource any number of tasks to a VA

Find ways to make tasks faster and more efficient so that you can scale up with your content and growth.

Keep Going

I’ve heard time and time again from people who blew up on YouTube that they had their biggest success right after they had considered giving up… but kept going. That means that all the people who quit at that stage likely quit right before they would have seen success.

There are a lot of fears, excuses, and reasons why people don’t continue to grow on YouTube.

I recommend you examine those and find ways around them so you can keep going and keep growing your channel. Consistently post videos and work on improving your skills so that you are able to become a pro at YouTube.

Making Money On YouTube

Making money on YouTube is not a fast process, but it is possible!

I started YouTube as a hobby and quickly fell in love with the platform and how it allowed me to find a community, create content, and also make money for my time.

If you want to make money on YouTube I’ve written multiple posts about how do do earn money both directly on YouTube and with using YouTube as a traffic source to your products:

• How to make money on YouTube
• How to make money with affiliate marketing on a budget YouTube channel
• Complete beginner’s guide to affiliate marketing

I really enjoy sharing what I’ve learned about making money on YouTube, clearly! It’s an amazing platform that has completely changed many people’s lives by building a business or income from the platform.

You can see some of my past income reports on YouTube.

You can watch the video below to see how much YouTube paid me for 2 million views.

In that video I explain how YouTube pays for views and the amount of money they pay for videos with millions of views which is very useful to understand if you want to make money from your YouTube channel.