Is growing on YouTube still possible today ?
As a premise, I would like to say that not only is it possible, but it is perhaps also one of the best times to try.
Some of the phrases that I have heard repeated most often in recent years were:
“It’s too late, we should have started 10 years ago”
“The market is already saturated”
“Trying to grow on YouTube today is a waste of time”
Yet every year new creators are born who somehow gain their space on the market.
The world of television has continued to hold people’s attention high for almost 100 years.
Why shouldn’t the same thing also apply to YouTube?
The truth is that this is one of the best times to invest in this social network because its adoption as a means of entertainment/education is increasing more and more.
And we see it every day from the YouTube channels of our customers and partners, but also from my channel or that of Dario Vignali, co-founder of Marketers; a group of companies that focuses on accelerating business and training the new generation of digital entrepreneurs.
Generations raised on bread and TV are discovering YouTube right now.
And it works precisely because, at any time, you can watch what interests you most.
And what you want to watch.
And for creators it also represents a solid business asset .
Interesting right?
And precisely for this reason, in this article I will talk to you about how to approach this platform in the correct way.
In the next lines we will see the 6 fundamental points to know in order to grow on YouTube.
We will see what is the right mindset to adopt, what are the most important factors for the platform and some of the techniques and strategies that at Marketers we use and teach every day to grow on You Tube.
As in our YouTube Fundamentals course in Marketers Pro , our exclusive community to enter and grow in the digital market.
In fact, we will delve deeper into SEO on YouTube, the 6 assets to scale your channel up to the best strategies to reach 100k views on your videos.
Ready? Action!
Table of Contents show
SEO is important but not too much at first
As you well know, YouTube is from Google and consequently works according to the same dynamics.
This means I can optimize my videos to make the YouTube algorithm work in my favor.
In fact, anyone who has ever worked in the world of blogs knows that to ensure that your articles are shown in the search results you need to be very good at optimizing them.
This is what SEO (search engine optimization) deals with , i.e. that series of activities aimed at positioning your content on a search engine.
And YouTube works, broadly speaking, like Google works.
When approaching this platform from scratch, however, all the technical discussions related to SEO are worth relatively little.
SEO begins to have a certain weight when you have a channel with a minimum of visibility.
So in this article we will talk little about SEO and technicalities.
If you are interested in learning more about this topic, don’t miss our SEO guide for YouTube to optimize your videos.
And above all, go and watch our YouTube Fundamentals course now , the Marketers course that will allow you to acquire the main strategies for constantly growing your YouTube channel.
In the course I will explain how the YouTube algorithm works, I will tell you about SEO for YouTube and much more. If you are interested, you can find it in Marketers Pro , our exclusive community with which you can give a real acceleration to your skills in the world of digital marketing.
Well, now I’d say we can get started.
1) First step to grow on YouTube: create value
The first really important point when deciding to approach this platform is to understand how we can bring value to our subscribers.
Not only.
It is also the most important factor for any type of business you decide to pursue in your life.
Most people start a YouTube channel or Instagram page because they have the goal of becoming a YouTuber , living a crazy life, or not having to go to the office to work on Monday morning.
However, if we adopt this mentality we have a problem.
And big too.
In fact, all these motivations have a single subject: ME .
I want to become a YouTuber, I want to live a crazy life, I don’t want to go to the office.
And this is what we might call an egocentric or selfish mentality.
Don’t worry, it’s something we all have in common to some extent.
If we think like this, however, we have a marketing problem.
And growing on a social network is nothing more than a marketing question if you think about it. And marketing has changed a lot in the last 30 years.
We live in a world where every day we have more choices about what to watch than we have ever had in history.
Why should anyone watch your videos?
To realize your dream of becoming a Youtuber?
Here’s the hard truth of the day: no one gives a damn about you or your dreams.
No one will play your video to help you achieve your goal.
For people, their time is a cost.
And tall too.
The only reason someone will sit in a chair and ignore Instagram notifications for 10 minutes is because they think it’s worth it.
That person is subconsciously thinking that those 10 minutes they will spend looking at your face on their screen are a good investment.
You can’t disappoint expectations.
And how do you not disappoint them?
Simple: don’t think about you but think about your audience.
The #1 rule of growing on YouTube is understanding how you can bring value to your audience.
How can you create a change in someone?
What problems can you solve for your followers?
How can you impact the lives of those who follow you?
What role will you play in their days?
The key to any type of growth is to value others.
We need to start having a market-oriented mentality.
Don’t think about yourself.
Think about them.
This is the mantra.
Your audience is your compass.
Making this switch of focus from yourself to the market will allow you to always understand which is the best path to take every time you are faced with a choice.
Figure out what your audience wants and then try to give it to them in the best way possible.
2) Second step to grow on YouTube: focus on Watch Time
The second fundamental point to analyze is the Watch time (i.e. the average time that people spend on your videos).
In fact, to understand how to approach any platform it is essential to understand what is really important to it.
YouTube is in fact a social network and as with all social networks the most important thing of all is to keep people on the platform for as long as possible.
The reason is very simple: the more people stay on YouTube, the more YouTube earns.
So… what content will YouTube reward the most?
Those who have a higher Watch Time.
The more time someone spends watching your videos, the more YouTube will try to promote them.
Obviously it is not the only factor but since it is quite important it is worth analyzing it a little.
So…How do you get a high Watch time?
There are 3 main points:
a – Create content that is worth more than the time someone invests watching it
Always remember one thing.
Today human attention has effectively become the new currency of exchange.
Creators are no longer paid in money but in time.
When someone decides to watch one of your videos they are in effect making an investment.
He is subconsciously thinking that it is worth it.
He’ll watch it because he’ll think he’s spending his time well.
So the most important thing is to create content that pays off the investment.
How do you achieve this?
Studying your audience.
We need to know who follows us.
We need to know what they watch, what they look for in a video, what their values are, what they believe.
We must be able to create content that aligns with the values of our audience and offers them the value they are looking for.
There’s no point in making a video where I talk about my day if no one knows me.
First you need to gain the public’s trust.
b – Use hooks
Hooks are ways to hook the visitor into wanting to continue watching the video.
There are many ways to create effective hooks and I talked about them in more depth in my article on copywriting.
In any case, the most classic way in which they are used is very simple.
We need to specify in the intro what the output someone will get if they finish your video.
Example:
“In this video I will show you the techniques I used to reach the first 1000 subscribers in just 3 months after opening the channel. We will see step by step what I did and how these techniques can be replicated by anyone”
The important thing about hooks is that they immediately make the viewer understand that they will get something very important if they watch it all.
Always remember that attention must be gained second by second.
And we must be able to conquer it in the first seconds of the video.
Even those who are serious about storytelling or entertainment use a lot of hooks.
Have you ever noticed how many chi videos where we are told a story begin with a suspenseful scene?
Scene which will obviously be explained during the video and which we will most likely find towards the end.
The fact is that this way curiosity is generated.
And this is one of the most important levers for a content creator.
c – Use pattern interruptions
Another very important concept is pattern interruption.
Pattern interruptions are nothing more than ways to break attention.
If you have ever watched one of my videos you will surely have noticed how I often include stock videos in them.
Or how you edit videos by continuously inserting zooms, writings or photos.
The fact is that these elements serve to keep our attention high.
If we watch a 20-minute video with a fixed shot of a still person talking, we are likely to get bored very quickly.
And if someone gets bored watching one of your videos, the chances that they will decide to watch another one next time are very low.
Have you noticed how TV programs always have an amphetamine rhythm?
They never hold the same shot for more than a few seconds.
And also the music, the scene changes and the sound effects.
Everything is designed to never let you get bored.
Not even for a few seconds.
3) Third step: Keep people on the platform
The third point is a corollary of the second.
In fact, as we said, one of the most important things to grow on YouTube is to be able to keep people on the platform for as long as possible.
And how do you do it (besides working on Watchtime)?
Simple… With playlists.
Playlists are a tool that is often underestimated but can actually become a very powerful weapon.
Especially if we have a very vertical channel on a topic.
And this is because playlists, if used well, can create real paths for those who follow us.
They could become TV series.
If we structure them in such a way as to create a path, every time someone finishes one of your videos they will be encouraged to watch the next one.
If I talk about how to study better I could make 5 videos with 5 different techniques and put them in a playlist.
If someone is interested in the topic and if my videos are done well it is very likely that they will watch all the videos in my playlist.
And this, as we said, is a fundamental factor for YouTube.
4) Fourth step: increase the CTR
The fourth fundamental point for being able to grow on YouTube is the CTR or Click Through Rate, which is nothing other than the click rate per impression.
In other words: how many people who see my video then click on it.
If 100 people see my video on their wall and 10 click on it, it means that the video has a CTR of 10%.
This is very important data for YouTube. In fact, we have dedicated ample space to the topic and talk about it in depth in the YouTube Fundamentals course .
In fact, every day YouTube has to choose between thousands and thousands of videos which to show to users of the platform.
And obviously he can’t show them all.
So to select which videos to appear on users’ message boards or among the suggested videos, you will look at those that have a higher CTR and Watch time.
And what does the CTR depend on?
Basically from two elements: the title and the cover of our video.
We may have recorded the video of our lives but if we get the title and cover wrong our work will have been almost useless.
In this regard, the advice I would like to give you are 2:
a – Create a title with very precise output.
People need to immediately understand from the title what they will get from watching that video.
If you have few subscribers it makes no sense to try titles like “Here’s what happened to me today” or “You’ll never believe what I saw”.
These techniques can be good for a channel with 100,000 subscribers that already has a loyal audience that can’t wait for any content from that creator to come out.
But if we start from scratch, no one will give a damn about a video with a title like that.
b – Spend time creating the covers.
One mistake I made when I started the channel was thinking that the cover was the least important factor.
Once I had dedicated 2 days to preparing, recording and editing my video I was convinced that I had already done the bulk of the work.
The result?
My videos had a very low CTR.
Obviously this also depends on the fact that when you have few subscribers your channel has little social proof.
But certainly not having dedicated the necessary time to the covers also had its weight.
To learn more about covers, I invite you to watch my videos on my YouTube channel.
5) Fifth step: the 50 video rule
Point number 5: post at least 50 videos.
Well yes.
You may not like this point but it is fundamental.
One of the reasons why 99% of people who try to grow on YouTube give up is that they publish 5-10-20 videos, don’t see the results they want and then change direction.
Well, now I’ll tell you something that should motivate you.
MrBeast, one of the biggest YouTubers in the world, initially posted more than 100 videos without seeing the first 1000 subscribers.
In fact, one of the main problems is that within us we hope to reach the results of the great YouTubers in a very short time.
The problem, however, is that we totally ignore their path.
We tend to remember people for their successes more than their failures.
The truth is that anyone who has achieved important results (on this platform but also on others) has dedicated a lot of time to failing and not seeing the results they were looking for.
And 50 videos, although they may seem like a lot, are the minimum number of contents to learn to build confidence with the camera, to try to bring out our personality and to find our communication style.
We can’t think of being able to do all this in the first 10 videos.
If you look at my first 10 videos they are completely different from the ones I post now and in 50 videos I will probably be ashamed of the videos I’m posting now.
Content creation is a path to improvement.
And to improve significantly, it takes time (and the desire to always improve).
6) Sixth step: the 1% rule
The sixth and final point is the 1% rule.
This is a fundamental concept to understand to approach YouTube in the correct way.
The 1% rule says that on average only 1% of the people who see your videos will subscribe to the channel.
Yes, you understood correctly: only 1%.
This means that if 10,000 people watch your videos on average only 100 will subscribe to your channel.
Obviously this is not a 100% true statistic. It’s an average. And it depends on many factors.
Let’s say, however, that this figure can vary between 1 and 3%.
For example, my video which had 60 thousand views brought me around 1300 subscribers. Which is about 2% of those who saw the video.
The more the channel grows, the more this percentage should increase.
When we start from scratch, however, we will hardly have more than 1% of members.
What does this mean?
It means that to get to the first 1000 subscribers we will have to make around 100,000 views.
Considering that when a new channel opens, the videos usually don’t exceed 50-100 views, this might seem a bit discouraging to you.
The truth is this statistic is a rout. It is a tool that allows us to interpret data.
And it also allows us to understand why it is necessary to publish a sufficient number of videos before obtaining significant results.
And now, before leaving us, let’s see how you can get 100,000 views relatively quickly.
How to get to 100,000 views: the importance of timing
An important thing to speed up our views is the timing with which we publish videos.
By timing I mean publishing the right video at the right time.
In fact, there are some moments in which something happens in the sector in which we work.
That something can be news, a particular event or the release of new software.
And if we exploit that trend we can more easily create a video that gets many views in a short time.
When Club House landed in Italy there were a couple of weeks in which no one talked about anything else.
Since the platform is part of the market in which I work and since I had informed myself enough about it, I immediately recorded a video explaining how the company behind Clubhouse was born.
At that moment there were no more than 3 videos on the topic in Italy and mine immediately reached 5000 views.
Ok we are still far from 100,000.
But if we manage to exploit these trends well, our growth can accelerate significantly.
Conclusion
I hope this article has helped you clarify some of the fundamental points for growing on YouTube.
As we have seen, however, when it comes to growing on a social network, it is not enough to technically study the platform.
Yes, of course, SEO is important to organically position your video and the 6 steps we have seen are fundamental to grow on YouTube.
But the most important thing of all is to have created a good foundation for your project.
Who are you making videos for?
What value do you want to bring to the people who follow us?
What change do you aim to bring to their lives?
This is the basis of everything.
People’s attention is increasingly scarce today. And there is more and more content.
Getting someone’s trust and attention has never been so difficult.
Focus on your audience, on their dreams, on their behaviors and you will see that your work, sooner or later, will bear fruit.
Once you have achieved the first results I recommend you go and take a look at our updated guide to increase subscribers on YouTube !
And always continue to train and test, if you want to start off in the right gear, my advice is to start the YouTube Fundamentals course immediately , a concentration of strategies to speed up the growth and monetization of your YouTube channel .
