How to grow your YouTube channel: 6 steps to effective promotion

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

A detailed plan of action and regular work on the channel will lead you to popularity.

Pavel Dmitriev Senior project manager, BeGroup.

The popularity of any site is the result of routine and regular work. As a rule, a rapid rise is followed by an equally rapid decline, and there are no pills for success. If you are ready for the complexities and constant work on the channel, let's figure out where to start.

1. Decide on the subject of the resource

If you are creating a YouTube channel for business, then everything is easy here. Probably, the subject of the resource will meet the needs of your clients and correspond to the professional activity. For example, if you are engaged in renovation, the channel about how not to make 100,500 mistakes in the choice of paint and the team of craftsmen will be relevant.

If you want to shoot a personal blog, then things are a little more complicated. You need to decide what your channel will be about. Ask yourself: what can I film about? What do I know?

Here are the most popular channel topics:

• lifestyle / vlogs (filming our own life);
• games;
• interview (Dud, hello);
• business (has become especially popular in recent years);
• auto;
• show and humor;
• narrow-profile areas: cooking, home, and so on.

A complete list of categories is available on YouTube. It can be seen in the menu when uploading a video to a channel.

If any of the segments seemed to suit you, give it a try. Remember to keep your content interesting, genuine, and engaging.

2. Analyze your competitors

So, you've made up your mind, now it's up to the little! Joke.

First, you need to analyze the competitors' channels that you will be targeting.

Pay attention to:

• the quality of the content, the presence of headings;
• regularity of issues;
• average number of channel views;
• number of subscribers;
• involvement;
• general feedback from the audience about the content.

There are free analysis widgets like BeSeed Engage View or vidIQ Vision.

Competitor analysis should be done monthly. So you can be in trend and get ideas for channel promotion.

The opposite situation is also possible: there will be no competitors in your segment. Most often, this indicates that the chosen niche is too narrow and the topic of the channel is simply not interesting to the audience.

Remember that YouTube is a search engine, so you should always double-check the capacity of the selected segment. If there are no requests for your topic, think about what you want to get from the resource. The issue of monetization will definitely be out of place, but simply being on the site will never cover the costs of producing and promoting content.

3. Design a content grid

We decided on the direction of the channel and studied the competitors. It's time to move on to practice.

Before you start filming your video, be sure to have a content plan. Without planning, the filming process will be chaotic. It's boring, but who said it would always be fun?

Ask yourself questions:

• How often can you post videos?
• What will each episode be about?
• What video formats will be on the channel?

Regularity is very important, the viewer should get used to your channel. If you decide to publish content every week, stay on schedule.

In fact, Google did everything for us and came up with the 3H rule. It is simple, allows you to dilute the content grid and work on increasing the audience of subscribers. As you already understood, the rule has three components.

Hygiene content - content for key queries. It is the content how to ("how …"). We again go back to the capacity of keywords and shoot a video for them. What's the plus? In the future, we will receive free search traffic from the issue of video hosting. It is common to see pumped channels with over 500,000 subscribers, although the quality of the content is usually not impressive. They have one thing in common: the authors shoot videos according to the actual requests of viewers.

An example is Olga Papsuyeva's channel. How do you think we stumbled upon it? But they didn't guess, they just wanted to fry the zucchini.

Hub content - content that engages the viewer. It can be a show, the launch of new headings, and so on. Such content should be timeless and always interest the audience. Hub videos are essential for engaging the viewer and constantly gaining new subscribers.

An example is the "Evening Evening" show with entertainment videos on the Stand-Up Club # 1 channel.

Hero - content gun. It can be a viral video, a video that evokes strong emotions, a video with a celebrity. Such videos can be released once every 1-3 months.

Want an example? Review Nike ads.

By following the 3H rules, you will be able to:

• prepare headings and content grid for the future in SEO-promotion;
• use content for comprehensive brand promotion;
• work on attracting viewers.

Yes, yes, you still have to promote the channel and spend money on it. But first, let's create it.

4. Create a YouTube channel

You need to work out the corporate identity of the resource: the cover and the logo of the channel should be made in the same style. Video screensavers are best designed in the style of a channel with text and a frame from the video. They should in every possible way attract the viewer to view and increase the conversion from impression to click.

To optimize your videos, you need to think over unique titles and descriptions, as well as tags - both for the video and for the channel. There should be about 15 tags, and they should reflect the subject of the video. It will be useful if they will duplicate the names of the channel and your video.

You can put a trailer on the main page of the channel - a short video about the essence of your channel. If not, you can use the next issue.

Don't forget to prepare your channel subscribe link and run it through the link shortener. This will track the number of clicks and user subscriptions.

If you have a website, you can also link it to a channel. To do this, go to the "Creative Studio" and find the "Related Site" section.

Also in the video you can insert endcards - special clickable cards with links to subscriptions, other videos and resources. It is worth adding them at least to a subscription and to the most popular video of the channel (or to the previous video).

In the channel description, indicate your contacts, links to social networks (if any) and briefly describe what the resource is about. Everything should be short and to the point.

5. Promote your channel

So you're done: you have your channel, you have your content, you are amazing. But somehow popularity does not come. To speed up the process, you should stock up on a bag of gold and draw up a plan for promoting the channel using paid tools.

Let's take a look at the formats for promoting a YouTube channel that are most often used in practice.

Google Ads (In-Stream and Discovery)

In-Stream is a video that is embedded like an advertisement in other YouTube videos. Promotional video can be placed at the beginning of the video (pre-roll), in the middle (mid-roll) or at the end (post-roll). In which videos to broadcast ads, you decide only.

You can flexibly configure an advertising campaign by gender, age, geography, interests and other parameters. With the right audience setup, you will only broadcast videos to those who are really interested in them. Don't rely on good engagement rates if you're showing a pre-roll about financial services before an anime video.

The In-Stream format has a big drawback - the obsession with the user. You do not offer to watch the video, you burst into the viewer's life and forcibly show your ad. It is important to understand: for the In-Stream format to work, you need to choose the right audience, make the video useful, interesting and of high quality.

The Discovery format is devoid of this minus. Your video is in the Featured section and on other YouTube pages. Playback occurs at the request of the viewer - by clicking. This will reduce the percentage of uninterested viewers, and your video will be watched only by those who themselves wanted to see it. The format allows you to get a great depth of viewing and a high percentage of conversions to a targeted action (for example, to subscribing to a channel) with a minimum amount of negative.

But here, too, there were some drawbacks. The Discovery format is more expensive than In-Stream, sometimes the price can be 1, 5–2 times higher.

Sowing

This is the distribution of the video outside of YouTube - on various thematic platforms. Sowing can be manual or automated (through special platforms). The main plus of seeding is the ability to get a lot of organic and viral views in a short time, and increase the video's place in search results. Viral views can be from 10% to 200-300%, sometimes even more. The disadvantage of the format is the lack of clear targeting by gender and age and inapplicability for narrow niches.

Seeding has changed a lot lately and is only possible on websites. Placing a video with a YouTube player on the VKontakte social network will give nothing: views simply will not be counted on video hosting, and the post itself will rarely be displayed in the feeds of social network users.

Purchase of placements (Telegram, VKontakte and so on)

The advantages of buying placements in thematic communities include the following features:

• adapt the placement for each community, which will make the advertising campaign more native;
• redeem placements for a specific date and time, create detailed timing for placements up to a minute;
• to work out "narrow" areas, which may simply not be in the sowing;
• get higher CTRs and conversions to targeted action (subscription).

The disadvantages are obvious: this is a time-consuming, not always fast and financially risky process (admins can simply "throw money").

Collaborations with bloggers

Let's be honest. If you have a small channel, you may not even try to get a collaboration with large bloggers, hundreds of people like you write to them.

Working with bloggers can be expensive, but not really tangible. If you understand this and are willing to take the risk, we sincerely wish you good luck.

The process is in many ways similar to working with promo posts in VKontakte publics and on Telegram channels. The key to success is a correctly chosen blogger who suits your potential audience and is able to implement the promotion properly.

There are several formats for working with bloggers:

• Integration - a short insert with an advertising message about you and your channel.
• Exclusive - a separate video about you and how cool you are. The format has practically ceased to be used when promoting personal channels.
• Joint video. This format is the most effective, as it allows you to independently show yourself to the blogger's audience and encourage them to watch your videos. I urge you to be honest, do not make yourself friends by filming simulated videos. Anyway, people will find out the truth, and then you will have to disable likes and dislikes on the channel.

6. Analyze the result

Ready! You have done almost everything for your videos to achieve success and recognition. It remains to analyze the results of the promotion and use this data to improve efficiency.

Analysis tools

There are built-in and third-party services:

• Built-in: YouTube Analytics, statistics on Facebook, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki.
• Third party: LiveDune, Socialbakers, VidIQ, Dislikemeter and others.

Internal tools are as transparent and intuitive as possible. Most likely, you had to meet them even in everyday life. They allow you to track the number of views and interactions with the video (likes, comments, clicks), viewing depth, socio-demographic characteristics and geography of users.

External tools are usually used in addition to internal ones to check the "cleanliness" of a blogger's account or group: often, if KPIs are not met, they can increase clicks, likes, comments or views so as not to disappoint the client. Livedune or Dislikemeter can help with verification.

Important indicators

Let's analyze the metrics that you need to focus on:

• CPV is the cost of one view. It is calculated according to the formula: advertising budget / total number of views received.
• CTR% is the click-through rate of the video. The ratio of click-throughs to impressions or views.
• CPA - conversion into action: registration, purchase, subscription. The metric is relevant if there is data about user actions after the transition.
• Engagement Rate is an indicator of engagement. The ratio of the sum of all interactions with ad content (likes, comments, clicks) to impressions or ad views.
• View depth is an indicator of audience retention. Determines up to what point viewers watched your video. Measured in quartiles. One of the most important, but underestimated metrics: it is rarely included in the KPI of an advertising campaign, but it is the retention rate that allows us to assess the level of user interest in a video and a product.

In general, the success of your video depends on two factors: the quality of the video and the right audience (targeting). If the video has a low engagement rate, then the video does not make you want to interact with it, or you chose the wrong audience. Try changing the video format or experimenting with targeting. Test new hypotheses.

Let's summarize.

There is no magic hype pill, and the issue of promotion must be approached thoughtfully and strategically. Channel development makes sense only if it is a constant, regular activity, and not a one-time activity.

Therefore, analyze your competitors once again, draw up a content plan, consider all internal resources, stock up on funds for promotion and make a decision to launch a project.

A fascinating and controversial world of video distribution awaits you. You need to be open: both to experiments and to routine work with statistics. Creating a channel and each advertising placement is an invaluable experience that will allow you to build the correct and, most importantly, profitable strategy for promoting you and your brand in the future.