Without fail, almost every client that we work with at first is focused on growing their subscriber count.
And while that’s not a bad goal to have, it’s not everything.
Subscriber count doesn’t correlate to the amount of money you’ll make on YouTube or your success.
It’s also not something you have control over as a creator. Instead, what we tell creators to do is focus on getting attention.
Instead of obsessively refreshing your subscriber count inside your YouTube Studio, in our recent podcast, my team walks you through what you can start doing to organically get more subscribers on YouTube without actually focusing so much on the vanity metrics themselves.
Here they are.
- You need to know what you want and why you want it. YouTube isn’t for everyone and that’s okay. More and more creators are starting on YouTube because they read an article saying that video is the future and if they’re not on YouTube, they’re going to be missing out… but if YouTube isn’t a place you enjoy being, it’s okay to take a break and figure out why that is. To figure what it is you DO want to do as a brand or business (or hobbyist). D’Laina and Lennon talk through some valuable ways you can figure this out above.
- Figure out what your ideal audience wants. With 500+ hours of content being uploaded to YouTube every minute, why should people care about your videos? How are they different than everyone else’s? What value are you providing? How is it different than what someone else is doing? People don’t have the time to watch something that either isn’t useful to them or that they don’t care about. The way you can serve people well and get them to care about their content is by providing value in your videos that your audience WANTS to see.
- Figure out what they DON’T want. What kind of experience does your audience want? Maybe everyone else is making piano tutorial videos to teach people how to play the piano, but it’s not the way YOU would teach. Maybe you are a really good history teacher that can add humor and a more personal touch to learning history vs. the boring animations you’ve seen online. Maybe you’re a lifestyle vlogger that can give people hope during a hard time in the world (2020, am I right?). When you figure out what your audience’s problems are and what they don’t want, you can then define what kind of creator you’re going to be and who you’re not speaking to vs. who you are.
- Find out how to communicate what they want and don’t want. If you want to be an authority in your space, you have to be an ambassador for the problem as much as the solution. If you’re an authority in your space, you may have worked past whatever problem you were having. It’s easy to just offer the solution or value in your videos, but it’s important to talk about the problem too. This is how you’ll connect with your audience and speak directly to them and their pain points. It’s how you’ll know what language to use, what style of video to make, etc.
- Capture and keep attention. The things we recommend you pay attention to as you’re aiming to capture and keep attention in your audience is your titles, thumbnails, audience retention, and CTR. We walk creators through how to use these tools in depth throughout our programs and in our consultations, but as a general rule of thumb, these are the things you want to work on paying attention to and improving to capture and maintain your audience’s attention on YouTube.
It’s easy to get hyper-focused on views and subscribers, but when you do that, you’re looking for what you really need in the wrong place.
Those views and subscribers will come when you start focusing on these things instead.
I promise. 😊
Thanks for reading!
Keep changing lives,
Tim
If you want a tactical process that walks you through how to do the things we talk about here, step by step, check out our course “30 Days to a Better YouTube Channel,” here: https://videocreators.com/30days