One of the biggest mistakes you are making as a YouTube creator is feeling entitled to subscribers and views. This mindset makes most first time YouTubers feel frustrated from the failure of creating a worthy audience.
You probably also had this harrowing feeling six, eight, ten months after opening your YouTube channel. For most YouTube creators, it’s incredibly hard to achieve 4000 hours of watch time and 1000 subscribers to monetize your YouTube channel.
The number one reason for this failure is the assumption that as a creator, you deserve to be seen by the YouTube audience and paid for the content you upload. But, do you?
This is probably not the only mistake you are making as a YouTube creator. There are several massive mistakes that you make everyday even though you think that you are doing it everything by the book.
This past failure should not alarm or frustrate you anymore because this guide will highlight some of those critical mistakes that people make and help you build a greater audience on your YouTube channel.
Steps to Building an Audience on YouTube
Create Quality Content
You need to prove your value to your audience first before you imagine being entitled to anything. However, when it comes to getting an audience on YouTube, it is never black or white. You may create magnificent content that no one ever sees or repulsive content that goes viral. That is just how spontaneous YouTube is.
But the moment you assume that you should get an audience because your content is better than another creator’s content, you lose the winning mindset of YouTube. It’s always the audience first, then you.
So, the first step is to create the kind of content that will attract large scale viewership and keep the viewers coming back for more. By top quality, we don’t mean just using sophisticated software or a camera. Of course, you need a reliable setup when making YouTube videos. But having that alone will not build your audience or make your content any better than the viewers rate it.
You need to have content that commands viewership – new, creative and unique content that is not already out there. Viewers need you to satisfy a need for entertainment, information, escapism etc. and the best way to achieve this is by producing video content with the following format:
- Product reviews
- Tutorials / How-to videos
- Vlogs
- Q&A
- Educational
Focus on SEO with a Twist
Like other content marketing initiatives, YouTube seeks to serve the right content to the right audience and at the perfect time. As a YouTube creator, you won’t attract suitable viewers if you do not give thought to your keywords. Including SEO in your content using AdWords Keyword Planner will be a good start.
As you do this, it is essential to note that there is a distinction between how Google and YouTube serve content. Google gives content to visitors who are on their way as soon as they get what they are looking for. But YouTube is like a hotel. Visitors come to relax, unwind and have a great time. So, they stay awhile on the site as they do this.
While creating Google search content, creators try to come up with solutions that encourage satisfaction. The content is designed in such a way that searchers do not need to look for further information. However, success in YouTube is achieved when you create content that prompts viewers to binge-watch.
Make Use of YouTube Analytics.
Another huge mistake that most YouTube creators make is that they don’t use YouTube analytics. However, without these tools, YouTubers are often shrouded in darkness because you have to keep guessing which video topics are interesting to viewers.
Without using YouTube analytics, you may find yourself repeating the same mistake or missing out on valuable opportunities, primarily since people use about one billion hours watching videos on YouTube.
Understanding and using YouTube analytics such as graphs and numbers will enable you to make impactful decisions that will enable you to grow your YouTube audience.
How to Use YouTube Analytics
Understand your audience inside out, then create high-quality content that provides real value to your viewers and build a connection based on trust. To do that, you need to have a broad understanding of your niche.
Once you get a good grip of the reigns of YouTube data analysis, you will identify aspects that keep viewers glued to your content and do something about the stuff that makes viewers click off. You can also know which content is best for your audience by looking at the number of shared videos.
To access your analytics board,
- Click on your profile picture
- Click YouTube Studio.
- At the New YouTube studio dashboard, click analytics in the left sidebar. And, there you have it.
Powerful Metrics You Can Use to Grow Your Channel
Understand the Value of Watch Time
It is essential to track the value of time when determining the success of a video. But it’s not nearly enough for getting impactful; changes to your video strategy. Hence focusing on watch time is much more useful for you.
Watch time is the number of minutes that viewers spend watching your content. You can use this metrics to measure the performance of your video or channel. This metrics particularly measures how valuable and engaging your videos are.
Besides, your whole channel is ranked by watch time. Channels with a higher watch time show up higher in both search results and recommendations. So you have to create videos with better content for them to be rated higher.
Examine Your Audience Retention
To get viewers to spend more time on your YouTube channel, you need to understand how well each video holds their attention. This allows you to identify what is working and what you need to change or improve on.
This metric also enables you to see the quality of your view. It helps you discover the point at which viewers stopped watching the video and figure out what may have caused them to lose interest. This helps you to make improvements and avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
For example, this metrics may help you know whether people lost interest because you said something offensive that does not align with your audience’s taste. You may also figure out at which point the audience lost interest because the content was boring.
Once you identify this point, you can add a call to action to capture more leads before viewers check out. You could also replicate what you did in other successful parts of the video to hold people’s attention slightly longer in sections where the viewership veered off from a positive tangent.
This metric also enables you to gauge your relevance retention. This way, you can compare your video’s viewership retention level with competitor YouTube videos of similar length.
Keep an Eye on Your Real-Time Report
YouTube has for a long time been vague about the number of people tuned in during the first minutes after a video is published. Hence, the real-time report feature allows you to measure the views of your videos as soon as you upload them. This feature lets you see views from the last 60 minutes to the last 48 hours across the entire channel or specific videos.
The YouTube real-time report helps you to discover traffic spikes, which you can relate to real-time events. For example, if you post your video on Facebook, you may realize no spikes in views. After a while, however, you notice dramatic spikes in your content after posting the video on Twitter; this can tell you that that piece of content is more suited for Twitter than Facebook viewership.
This information can help you capitalize on creating video content for your Twitter audience. If you notice a dramatic increase in spikes that you cannot account for, your video content is being shared by a popular blog or influencer. You can increase your viewership or audience by engaging them together with your audience.
Make Content with Good Quality Audio
In YouTube, you can get away with a few dodgy visuals or lighting that is not perfect. However, viewers find it irritating when the audio is off. To ensure that the quality of your video is top-notch.
Check out Your Competition.
Before you create your content, explore other YouTube channels and know the type of content that the audience is interested in. This will save you the pain of creating stuff that no one watches.
Bottom Line
We hope that the tips above will help you produce compelling video content and grow your YouTube audience. However, it takes time and patience to grow an audience on YouTube. Many say that you should even have a 5 and 10 year growth plan in mind when starting a channel.
So, if you got the tips above but still feel like it’s too much work for you, we can take the burden off your shoulder by doing a lot of the work for you! It’s much less stressful and will allow you to focus on what’s important. Making great content!
