Doing YouTube collaborations can be one of the fastest ways of growing your YouTube channel. But you got to do it with the right person and the right number of users and subscribers. Is that how it works? How do you find the right people?
LumberZackGC wrote and asked this,
“Hey Tim. I’ve been doing YouTube for a little while now. I’ve been working with some people and want to collaborate with them. Some of them have a ton more views and subscribers and some have a ton of subscribers but not so many views. My question is, is it better to collaborate with someone with more views or more subscribers?”
Develop a Relationship
I have a couple answers to this. One is that I have found that it’s valuable to collaborate with almost anyone of any size, regardless of users and subscribers because the value that you get out of it isn’t just like trying to extract value from that creator and getting their audience to your channel but it’s a relationship that you get to develop and start building with that Creator, which can have far more value to both of you eventually down the road than just trying to extract some value that you can get out of that person’s audience community and then be done with them. I don’t know if that’s how you think of it, like being done with them but you know what I mean.
Same Audience You Are Targeting
Then two, I don’t think that you should look just at how many views and subscribers they are getting to determine whether or not you should collab with them because you could work with someone who’s getting millions and millions and millions more views and subscribers a month than you are but it might not work out for you because, and this is the key to doing a really good collaboration, it has to be with a channel who is in front of the same audience that you are targeting with your channel. So if you are a dance channel, it wouldn’t make much sense for you to show up in front of a LEGO channel. Would it? Unless the LEGO channel is about dancing LEGOS or something like that. The thing is, find channels who are targeting the same people that you are and work with them.
So it doesn’t necessarily mean that if you are a gaming channel, you can only collaborate with gaming channels. If you’re a gaming channel, you could also maybe collaborate with a skateboarding channel, right? If you’re cooking channel, that doesn’t mean you just collaborate with other cooking channels, it means you could maybe collaborate with a fitness channel, right, depending on what type of cooking videos that you were making. If you’re a beauty and makeup channel, maybe it would make sense for you to also partner not with just other beauty and makeup channels, but maybe with a costume cosplay channel. You see what I’ m saying? So it’s not just what your channel is about, collaborating with those but it’s finding who cares about your content. I mean that in a good way. Like who actually does care about your content and collaborating with other channels that have those people in front of them.
So where do you find creators like that that would make great opportunities for you to collaborate with? How do you reach out to them, especially ones who are much bigger than you or are like influencers in your space? How do you start building relationships with them? How do you come up with ideas that will work well for both of you? And especially, how do you get someone else’s audience to quickly care about you enough so that they know that they want to come subscribe to your channel even before they’ve even left this other creator’s channel and come to yours to check it out? How do you do all that? I actually have a full blown video course about all those questions and more about how to accelerate your channel growth doing collaborations. Because collaborations are definitely, easily, hands down the quickest, most fastest way to grow your YouTube audience.
Now I do highly recommend that if you are interested in this, you should definitely first go through 30 Days to a Better YouTube channel, the ebook. Because what good is getting a ton of exposure for someone else’s audience if your channel and content itself isn’t already designed and highly optimized to convert viewers into subscribers? If that’s not the case then you can get all the exposure you want and it’s not going to do anything good for your channel. It’s just going to bounce away and never come back.
So if you want to check out that book, I’ll put a link to it below. Check those out. I’d love to have you comment below about how would you answer this person’s question about collaborations? Do views matter? Do subscribers matter, the number that they have? Or is it more about the target audience and the value that they’re trying to deliver and the values you’re trying to deliver to those same people? Can it make a great fit? Love to hear all your thoughts about that in the comments below.