How James Rose Grew His YouTube Channel To 5,000 Subscribers
Hey there, I’m James! So, I have friends that have been creating content for their channel for years, and are frustrated with still having under 1,000 subscribers. At this point my channel has around 5,000 subscribers, adding around 350 per month without doing anything special to attract those people. While this subscriber base isn’t huge, when you’re in a niche market you don’t need a massive subscriber base to have a real impact on your business. In fact, my channel is one of the most common ways that people find me. It has plenty of benefits, like:- Continually growing my email list
- Driving sales of my Zapier course
- People booking paid consultations
- Offers from top brands to create paid content
Research Is The Key To Growth
Nothing has the power to demotivate more than creating a ton of content that you think is amazing, only for it to go nowhere. We’ve all been there. But the solution isn’t as hard as it might seem. You just need to create content around topics that people are looking for. But how do you work out what content people want? It might sound like you need to read minds, but actually it’s pretty simple. There are 2 main ways.Method #1: Keyword Research
Loads of people use YouTube as a search engine when looking for answers. (In fact Youtube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world after Google!). So just like blog post content, if you create videos and get them to show up as a result when people search, you’ll pick up tons of organic views. Even better, Google shows relevant videos in their normal search engine pages, so you’ll get many views from there as well. I keep my research pretty basic. I use ahrefs and Mangools keyword research tools, and just type in keywords in my niche. These tools suggest “related keywords”, which are often a goldmine for ideas. Editors note: You can also use keywords from articles that you have already written on your blog and simply repurpose article content into videos. This way it’s an easy topic to create a video on as you already know it and have a fairly good structure to follow for the video, and you know the keyword is good. You can even embed it later back into the original article to increase dwell time on your page, and the video and page can show up better in the SERPS 😉 Otherwise start with keywords based on:- Frequently asked questions by your audience
- Tools in your niche
- Keywords that competitor websites rank for
Method #2: Channel Research
Some of my best performing videos come from simply seeing what content is popular, and putting my own spin on it. (If you see a video that has a lot of views, it’s likely a good sign.) Let’s look at how you can find these high performing videos.Find Channels Creating Similar Content To Yours
Go to YouTube search and type in topics just like you would for keyword research, and then open a bunch of the videos that show up. Your goal is to see which videos are ranking for these terms and find out who made them. With those videos open, go ahead and open the channel page for each video, and then sort them by most popular. This way you can see topics that stand out and get the most traffic. Look through their videos and see how well they align with your industry. They don’t have to be a perfect match, but if there are a few videos that you can see yourself creating, that’s good.Then Identify Their Best Videos
You can start by ordering their videos by “most viewed”, but this is biased towards videos that have been around longer. If you do this, make sure you consider the date on each video – newer ones that are popular could be a good topic for a video also, as they could be a trending topic. The other way is simply to scroll through the list of videos starting with the latest ones. Look at the view counts and see if any are clearly more popular than the others. Here’s a random drone channel that popped up for me. Most of the videos have 6k-20k views, but a couple stand out. One has 63k views, one has 138k. They aren’t brand new, but compared to the videos posted around the same time, they have a LOT more views. So “learning FPV drones freestyle” and “low budget FPV drones” might be some great keywords to target… If you walk away with one thing from this post, I want it to be research. Creating videos based on what people are searching for is one of the simplest ways to grow your channel. Long after you’ve created your video, it will continue picking up more and more views from those searches. Of course you won’t rank for every single video you create, but you can increase your chances with what you’ll learn below. At first, you should go after smaller competition keywords, but as your channel grows and you send more of the right signals to YouTube, it’ll become easier to rank for more competitive terms.Tips For Creating Videos
Once you’ve worked out what content you’re creating, the next step is to create videos that:- Attract people to watch them
- Keep people interested
- Convert them into subscribers
Start With A Tight Introduction
Loads of videos ramble at the beginning. This is a great way to lose people immediately. (Youtube ads give you a 5-25 second window because they know the attention of their audience. You have 5 seconds to hook them before they are allowed to skip you, and this attention span is similar for organic content.) Instead, quickly and succinctly- tell viewers what they are about to learn,
- why they should listen to you,
- and launch straight into the main content.
Create Content That People Won’t Bounce From
This sounds so obvious, but it’s also not very common. If you want people to watch your videos, they have to be good. Tell them what they want to know, without waffling. I try to plan out each section of my video beforehand with dot points so I know what I need to cover. This helps plan a better flow for the video, and keeps me on track when recording. Once recorded, I often cut out sections that don’t add much value as I thought when planning the video. (Again, if you’re using previous blog posts as video ideas, the article itself should follow a pretty good structure that hooks peoples attention and keeps it. Especially if you follow the templates we use over in the Amplify Content Academy)Focus on Quality (But Audio Over Visual)
So it’s not just the content that you talk about that needs to be good, but the quality of the video is also important. I record my videos on the Canon EOS M200 camera (which also works as a high end webcam thanks to Canons free software), but it’s also great for talking head shots. For audio I use the Elgato Wave 3. Funny thing though? Audio is actually more important than visual when it comes video. It seems crazy but people will put up with a lower quality camera and stay, but will bounce if the audio is bad! If your budget is low then a good mic will make all the difference so get that first before looking at camera upgrades. (A Logitech C290 webcam will be good enough for now but up that mic game!)Ask People To Subscribe!
It almost sounds too simple, but just asking people to subscribe to your channel makes a big difference. I have a quick sentence I say right before the main content, and at the end of videos that explains why people should subscribe. “If you’d like to learn more ways to automate your business and get more productive, hit the subscribe button” It doesn’t take much time and encourages people to subscribe. Why care? Because subscribers mean more viewers for new content, which means they impact and rank faster and means you can get your message out easier. (Not to mention more touch points for potential customers!) Also, if you’re looking to grow and possibly have sponsorships to make a side income from your channel, then they all care about audience size, so ask for those subs!Publishing Tips
The next stage is to publish your video. The way you do this is super important, as it makes a big difference to how many people will see your video…Create A Good Thumbnail That Gets Clicks
When your video shows up in a search, you want it to be clicked. Thumbnails need to draw attention so people notice the video and click it. Not only do you get more views, but YouTube rewards higher click through rates with higher rankings. It doesn’t need to be ridiculously bright or flashy – just professional and clear. Mine look like this and do just fine. The key things here are clarity and attention. You can see what the video topic is about, you get some context behind the topic, and the human face helps build trust and stands out. (We have evolved as a species to look for human faces- it’s why we see faces in plug sockets etc, and so they draw our attention.)Write An Optimized Description So Your Video Ranks In YouTube’s Search Engine
Just like if you were writing a blog post, make sure you get your keywords into the description. Also tell viewers what they’ll learn from your video.Add Chapters (To Help It Rank And Improve User Experience)
Chapters are part of the description of your video. It’s just plain text, but if you add timestamps in the format 01:23 (1 minute and 23 seconds), people can click them to go directly to that section of a video. They also add bars across the bottom of the video to tell people which chapter they are in. The amazing benefit of chapters is that it forces you to add a whole bunch of extra keywords to the description. If you describe what you’re talking about in each section, these can be picked up by the search algorithm to get more views. Just make sure you follow the YouTube chapter guidelines. Note: Another benefit of video is being able to promote your own products inside the content. The video above goes through several tools but ultimately helps promote our document collection SaaS.Add Search Tags
Add as many tags that make sense for your video, with more important ones first. These are generally the keywords you want to target. I use TubeBuddy to find related tags, which often finds many that I haven’t thought of.Add Cards & End Screen CTA’s
These are YouTube features that can link out to other relevant videos, or encourage people to subscribe to your videos. On my channel, the engagement with this is daily low, but every little bit helps. Use cards when you mention another of your own videos, and use your end screen to encourage subscribing, or to send them to another relevant video. Editors Note: This is actually a good idea also when embedding videos back on your site. Why? Well usually an article will have a CTA already, maybe to subscribe or take a trial. Having the video helps make that happen but it can also distract which is not great. Even worse though is if a competitors video is the CTA at the end of yours, simply because yours is missing an End Card. This way at least they watch more of your stuff vs jumping to a competitors channel or site…Add A Pinned Comment CTA
After publishing, create a comment and pin it to the top. You can use this as a call to action to your email list, or simple for people to ask questions in the comments.Promoting Your Video
Of course there isn’t much point creating content if no one is going to see it. While the goal here is to get organic views, a little initial content promotion helps. This will depend highly on what kind of videos you are creating, but here’s what I do.Send The Video To Your Email List
People who are on your email list are often more engaged with your content. Usually after I email new videos out, new videos end up with a few likes and comments. I don’t know how much this helps overall, but it can’t be a bad thing. Also, don’t forget the empty restaurant bias. This is where people don’t always go into an empty restaurant, and so smart owners will let their staff eat their lunch in the window seats to draw people in. Same here for initial comments from your best fans!Share It On Social Media
This goes without saying, but share your videos on relevant channels. For me, this includes my Twitter, LinkedIn and my two Facebook audiences. Even with a small audience or community, it helps to get some initial traction on the video.Create New Blog Posts Around The Topic (Or Embed It Into Previous Articles)
If you’ve done the hard work on keyword research and creating a video, converting it into a blog post has a lot of benefit. It’s normally pretty easy to do – all the content is already there, you just have to write it down. I take screenshots directly from the video and create blog posts from each video, like this one. These posts often rank for similar keywords, capturing the audience of people who use Google instead of YouTube for search. If you embed your video in the post, you’ll also get a bunch of extra views this way. On average my videos get 17% of their views from being embedded in my own blog posts. This has now become part of my blog monetization strategy as it results in direct YouTube revenue. Simple!Conclusion
So there you have it. A super simple process to follow to let YouTube grow your channel for your fast, without you having to publish content all the time. 5,000 subscribers (with a growth off 400+ a month) is not bad for a niche topic right? So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and follow this guide for yourself and let me know how it works. I know I’ll be using this tips for my own content asap.Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:
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