How do you grow on YouTube?
This article is the new guide on how to grow your YouTube channel without hassles.
No size fits all when it comes to growing your YouTube channel, but with the right mindset, you’re sure to thrive 10x and make money.
Let’s get started.
Table Of Contents
How To Grow A YouTube Channel And Make Money This Year? 12 Best Tips
You’re welcome to the right place if you want to grow a YouTube channel and make money. However, if you want to use YouTube as a money-making machine, you must carefully plan how to grow your YouTube channel because it takes more than uploading videos to YouTube.
So how do you grow your YouTube channel? Here are some tips:
- Build your brand first
- Create a YouTube video strategy
- Master YouTube SEO
- Use great thumbnails
- Engage your audience
- Network with others
- Promote your videos
- Use user-generated content
- Verify your channel
- Analyze your overall performance
- Stay consistent
- Use paid ads
1. Build Your Brand First
The first step to growing your YouTube channel is to get serious with your brand. You need a brand if you are considering how to make your YouTube channel grow.
Establishing your brand will allow the YouTube community to recognize you once they see your videos, logos, and the color of your channel.
In addition, your channel’s branding may even open valuable opportunities for you to reap the benefits of your effort.
Your brand will evolve as you continuously grow your channel, so don’t overwhelm yourself at the beginning, but you can’t also ignore it as a whole.
Pro Tip. You can get this right by writing a mission statement for yourself and following that mission’s principles. A mission statement is one of those factors that can help you if you’re looking for how to grow your YouTube channel fast.
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3 Tips For Building a YouTube Brand
A Good Channel Banner
If you want to grow on YouTube, your channel’s cover or banner must clearly describe your business’s true identity.
Like on other social media platforms, you should make it enticing for the YouTube community to interact. The banner shows the background of your YouTube page. The image is different on a computer, mobile, and TV display.
Captivating Profile Picture
Your channel icon, which is more like a logo for your channel, must align with your brand. It is this picture that people will see on YouTube when they first view your channel. So make sure it matches your channel banner and your brand.
A Channel Watermark
If you are considering growing your YouTube channel this year, you need a channel watermark. A watermark video is essential for computer users.
Viewers can directly subscribe to your channel when watching YouTube videos on a computer. Channel watermark is available in a landscape view on computers and mobiles but not clickable on mobile.
Link Your Handles
You can also link your social media handles to your YouTube channel. Linking your social media profiles together makes it easy for the community to identify your brand on other platforms.
For people to find you, link your Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and others. Also, consider using “Linktree” to link all your handles together.
If you want to grow your YouTube channel, linking your social media handles is your best bet. Your brand can make or break your YouTube channel.
Jeff Bezos always says: “Branding is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.” So get it right at the beginning, and you will succeed much faster.
2. Create A Video Strategy
YouTube video content strategy may sound counter-intuitive, but creating a written road map for your videos will put you ahead of the competition. YouTube video content strategy is a documented road map of how you plan, produce, and schedule your videos from start to finish. So if you are considering growing your YouTube channel fast, you need a content strategy!
Here is a step-by-step summary of how to create a YouTube content strategy.
How To Create A YouTube Video Content Strategy (In 6 Steps)
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Step 1: Know Your Target Audience
Knowing your audience is a great way to grow and monetize your channel. Do you want to reach everyone on YouTube?
Do you want to target only Americans or only Indians? First, you must identify and define your audience for whatever reason you’re starting on YouTube. So get your audience right, and they will help grow your channel.
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Best 4 Ways To Know Your YouTube Audience
Analyze Your Competitors: Firstly, if you want to grow your YouTube channel for free, you must know who you will compete against on YouTube. Check their channels to see what they are doing; by doing this, you can pick their mind and come out with yours. Take note of their content, how they make videos, how long their videos are, and the other stuff you can find on their channels.
Analyze Your Other Profiles: Most importantly, if you have the same niche on YouTube as on Instagram, it’s likely that your Instagram audience may have the same behavioral characteristics. So to find your YouTube audience, consider analyzing those on Instagram. Don’t be amazed that your audience on Instagram may seek you on YouTube if they find you have a YouTube channel! I have done this several times. One of the best ways to grow your YouTube channel from zero is by analyzing and knowing your audience.
Use Forums: One way to know your audience is to use forums and platforms to see what they are doing. Platforms like Quora and Reddit are famous for getting inside your audience’s head. Use them, especially Quora, to find out what they are asking. For example, if you want to grow on YouTube faster, you need to search on forums to find out what your audience is thinking.
Analyze Your Current Subscribers: If you have some subscribers on your channel, consider analyzing the audience to see their age, countries, and the devices they use to watch your channel videos. Most importantly, the best way to grow your subscribers on YouTube is to analyze your analytics and then make adjustments.
Step 2: Set Goals For Videos Strategy
One essential factor to consider if you want to grow on YouTube is goal setting. Setting goals for video content strategy will allow you to evaluate the outcomes of the videos you’re uploading on YouTube. Whatever your goals are, you’ll need to track KPIs like:
- Total number of subscribers within a few days of uploading a video
- The total number of views per uploaded video
- The number of sales at the end of a promotion
- Total number of downloads if it’s a digital product
- The total number of comments on your video.
Step 3: Decide On Your Video Types
Recently, YouTube released the beta version of “YouTube Shorts.” You can use the shorts for the first six months to grow your gaming YouTube channel. Research shows that shorts can increase your subscriber base faster than long videos.
For example, “Silicon Valley Girl” ( a channel with +535K subscribers) used “shorts” to grow her audience in a few months. You can try YouTube shorts if you want the best tip to grow your cooking YouTube channel.
Here are some of the video types to upload on YouTube:
- YouTube Shorts
- Live Streaming
- Long-form videos (requires quality equipment to produce, you can consider hiring videographers), etc.
Step 4: Make Videos That Stand Out
You can plan out how your videos would look with paper and pen. You can also use storyboards to plan how the video will flow. In addition, you’ve to consider whether the video will be:
- Listicles, for example, Top 10 and 10 best (maybe you have seen this on YouTube, they work; that’s why people keep creating listicle videos. So you can also grow your YouTube channel by creating videos in listicles.
- How-to videos example, How to do X and Y or any “How-tos.”
- Lessons and Mistakes: you can create a video around the lessons and mistakes you make along your entrepreneurial journey with your audience, etc.
You can outsource the creation to a video production company or do it yourself. Whatever path you choose, you’ll need to think about the following:
- Writing video scripts
- Editing videos
- Gathering the people to be featured( or use footage)
- Identifying needed video equipment(or using a DIY tool like Animaker or Animoto)
- Identify and check that the sound is licensed or goes with your brand.
After the planning, produce engaging, captivating, and appealing content for your audience. Offering value to your audience will skyrocket your channel in a short time.
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3 Best Ways To Make Good YouTube Videos
Good Lighting: Good video lighting is critical if you want to grow your YouTube channel and make money. Avoid recording videos in a dark room. High-quality lighting makes your videos safe for people to watch and makes them look professional. Likewise, you should avoid boring dark rooms when shooting YouTube videos to grow your gaming channel.
Texts On Videos: Put text in your videos if you want to make your channel grow. Texts on your videos give viewers a glimpse of what they’re about to see concerning the entire video. Most importantly, add subtitles to your videos and write a clever description so that viewers will understand what you’re trying to say.
Create A Playlist: Why not create a playlist for your channel? A playlist is a significant deal on YouTube. It allows your viewers to watch videos about topics they love to watch. Creating a playlist for your channel helps organize your videos in a fun way for your audience. To grow your YouTube audience, create a playlist that categorizes your videos into subtopics.
Step 5: Schedule Your Videos With Tools
Scheduling your videos will save you a lot of time to focus on other essential things. Social media tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, or Agorapulse will do the job. With tools like this, you’ll be able to reply to comments on YouTube videos in the dashboard. To organically grow a YouTube channel, you need one dashboard where you can respond and delegate other tasks to your team.
Step 6: Analyze & Evaluate Each Video
Analyzing each video you publish makes it easier to know what works and doesn’t. You need to track your outcomes against the goals you established at the beginning of your video content strategy. YouTube’s analytics will work well, but if you’re using third-party tools, their dashboard analytics will go the extra mile.
Utilizing a video content strategy is a sure way to succeed on YouTube. Try it, and the dividends will be yours.
3. Master YouTube SEO
Mastering YouTube SEO will grow your channel within a few weeks of creating it. Here are some SEO tips for growing a YouTube channel.
Tip 1. Do Keyword Research
Tools like Ahrefs and Wordtracker can help you find what queries people search for on YouTube within your niche. YouTube is just like Google. People are searching to solve their problems. Using keywords will help optimize your videos for discoverability.
Tip 2. Use Descriptive Video Titles
Your video titles are vital if you consider how to grow your YouTube channel quickly. In addition, your video title is the first thing users see when they find your content. Here are some excellent tips for attention-grabbing YouTube titles:
- Keep it short and sweet
- Front-load your keywords
- Use numbers in your title
- Use the current year in your title
- Include relevant hashtags, etc.
Tip 3. Analyze Top Performing Channels
This one is obvious. You need to look at and study the channels you want as role models. You can get the best ideas for your videos by analyzing most of the high-performing YouTube channels in your niche.
In addition, you can also create engaging, valuable, helpful, and actionable videos from the already existing YouTube videos. The most successful videos on YouTube are 1-5 minutes long. So keep it short and sweet.
4. Use Greate Thumbnails
You’d need to use nice thumbnails to create a channel on YouTube and grow your audience. Thumbnails are great for CTR (Click Through Rates). Thumbnails are static images that act as the preview of videos (it’s like a book cover).
Using awesome custom thumbnails will increase your views in the long run. Thumbnails matter more than titles because the first things you see on YouTube are images or visuals. Our minds are hardwired to notice visuals first. According to an MIT study, we process visuals in less than 13 milliseconds.
Here are some tips for creating great custom thumbnails:
- Use captivating mixed colors, for example, white, red, and black
- Include numbers in your thumbnail descriptions
- Use the current year in your thumbnail headlines
- Include currency signs. For instance, dollars, euros, GBP, etc.
- Make your thumbnails relevant to your brand.
5. Engage Your Audience
YouTube rewards channels with significant engagements, watch time, likes, dislikes, and comments (try to respond to comments). You can use any of these to engage with your audience, including:
- Live events. Live events can transform and offer value to your audience.
- Contest. Contests would engage your audience. With a single contest video, you can gain a lot of subscribers and viewers.
- Include Call-To-Actions (C.T.As). Call-to-actions ignite your audience to interact with you and do what you want them to do.
- Ask them directly to subscribe to your channel.
- Host Q & A sessions; Questions and answers allow you to enter your audience’s mind and provide value to them. You can also request them to ask questions in your videos.
- Engaging with other brands or channels in your niche
- Ask for shares. Asking for shares to grow your channel.
6. Networking
Also, partnering with the right influencers will help grow your YouTube channel and open more opportunities for you. It’s like doing guest blogging in the blogging world. You can partner with channels in your niche, allowing you to tap into their audience. Find brands that are in your niche and add value to your subscribers. Here are some tips:
- Organize joint webinars
- Host joint Q & A sessions
- Teach tutorials with the right partner
- Host joint live sessions
Moreover, always be authentic and add value to your partner channel (give and take). For example, you can partner with makeup brands if you’re a makeup channel.
7. Cross-Promote Your Videos
Most importantly, consider using other platforms to promote your channel if you want to grow on YouTube. Promoting your channel on other platforms will widen your audience reach, whom you may miss on YouTube alone. There are several ways to cross-promote your channel. Here are some tips to try:
- Share it on other social platforms. Vimeo, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Quora, Reddit, and other social media are great places to share your content.
- Share it with your email subscribers. Neil Patel has used this to grow his viewers in the past few years. Include links to your YouTube videos and encourage your subscribers to watch with C.T.As.
- Blogging. Embed your videos in your blog. You have probably watched YouTube videos in blog posts. You can also promote your videos the same way others are doing.
8. Use U.G. C
Most importantly, User-Generated Content (U.G.C) is also one of the ways to grow your YouTube channel quickly this year. User-generated content is when you share or feature other popular videos on your YouTube channel, especially your audience and influencers in your niche.
If you see content in your niche that you think will be valuable to your audience, consider sharing it. Don’t be worried about copyright infringement because the video owner’s username and handle will be on the video.
9. Verify Your Channel
There are a lot of verified channels on YouTube. Getting your channel verified by YouTube gives you authority over your competitors. If you reach 100,000+ subscribers, you can apply to get verified by YouTube.
A YouTube verification badge is a gray checkmark or a gray music note shown next to the channel name of a YouTube creator or an artist.
This badge also shows credibility. Other channels with verification status include: “Neil Patel,” “Success Secrets TV,” “Silicon Valley Girl,” etc.
10. Analyze Your Performance
To up your game, you’d want to analyze your overall channel. YouTube has a powerful analytics tool that you can use to see what works and what doesn’t. If you find some types of videos are doing great, it’s a sign that you should do more of them.
You can use analytics to dive right into your audience’s behavior. Some metrics to check are:
- The languages they speak
- Their ages
- The videos they like watching
- Total time spent per video
Use this information to reinvent your video’s style that captivates their interests.
11. Stay Consistent
You must upload videos for several months to years to grow your channel. People have grown their channel from 0-2 M within two years of uploading videos. Also, you’d be uploading at least 1-3 videos weekly to grow and build a loyal audience around your channel.
However, your content also needs to be of good quality. You will attract more viewers with quality videos. Successful videos have attention-grabbing intros and clear background sound or audio.
12. Use YouTube Ads
You can also use YouTube ads to grow your YouTube channel. With YouTube ads, you can reach your potential audience wherever they’re watching videos on YouTube. In addition, you can share what makes your channel unique with a short YouTube video ad. Whatever skill level you have, you can create a YouTube ad that makes your channel stand out like other businesses are already doing.
YouTube’s free video creation tools make it easy to turn the content you already have into YouTube video ads that drive results. No experience is needed to create YouTube video ads; you can outsource it to a freelancer.
You must track your ad performance once it’s up and running; again, the free management tools provided by YouTube can help you understand what’s working and what to adjust for better results.
Grow On YouTube Summary
In conclusion, growing your YouTube channel is the recipe for making money on YouTube. Most importantly, you must focus on your brand so that when people see your channel, they immediately feel you.
In addition, Content strategy is one of those tips that can help you grow the audience for your new YouTube channel if you get it right from the beginning.
Furthermore, mastering YouTube SEO will benefit your channel in the long run. Master YouTube SEO and growing your channel will be a piece of cake.