Nothing is as frustrating as pouring time, energy, and money into growing your YouTube channel only to see it very slowly grow and gain traction with views and subscribers. There’s a few common mistakes that lead to slow channel growth, which we’ll discuss in this video so you can learn how to get more views on YouTube, get more subscribers, and get more subscribers from the videos that you publish.

We’ve got a great question from 24 Frames of Mind who wrote and asked this:

“I have a channel and am reluctant to post content that is away from my niche. Is it a bad idea to be serving more than one audience on your channel by delivering different bits of content, as far as subject content goes? Any words on this would be much appreciated.” Great question.

Target Audience and Value Proposition

There’s a lot of things that can hold your channel back from growth, including bad titles, poor thumbnails, lame content, those types of things. But another way that I see a lot of creators messing this up is by posting content that is outside the scope of why their subscribers subscribed to their channel in the first place.

A really important question to answer for your channel is, why should someone subscribe to your channel? What value do they want from you? And who specifically is it that wants it? In business terms, they call this the target audience and the value proposition. So that is who is this content designed for, and then why should they care. What is the value that I propose to deliver to that target audience regularly and consistently over and over and over again on my YouTube channel?

So let’s make this practical. For example, you subscribe here to Video Creators, because you want to learn how to grow your YouTube audience and reach people and have the impact that you want your videos to have. But what if one day, I feel more like showing you like my latest gaming video clips, or I want to show you my garden and make a little gardening update?

You guys that are subscribers on this channel would be like, what? You’d be raising an eyebrow, because that’s not why you subscribed to this channel. You don’t care about that here. You would feel confused, because you subscribed for one value, but I’m delivering a different one.

But let’s say that I instead am showing you my gaming clips as examples for how you guys can grow your YouTube channel. Or maybe I’m showing you my garden and making a gardening video as an example of how you can grow your gardening channel. Now, that starts to make sense, because it is still the same value for the same target audience as my other content, but if it was just me sharing gaming or gardening, you would probably raise an eyebrows.

So I reckon that all of you guys know who your channel is for, who your content’s for, and why they should care. Now, this is the value you want to pitch to your audience. But there’s actually a deeper value that kind of goes unstated, which is what I call the relational value. That’s like the human connection.

People will start watching, because you’re pitching this one value. But they’re going to keep watching, because they feel like they like you and they feel like they want to hang out with you a little bit and they find that the value is consistently good. And they’re just going to start learning to watch every video you publish, because it’s always good.

Connection with your Audience

There’s a lot of channels on YouTube that do an amazing job of forming a really deep human connection with their viewers and making their viewers feel like, I’m hanging out with this person. I feel like that person is my friend. I feel like we’re having fun together. I feel like we’re having a shared common experience here together. A lot of vloggers, a lot of gamers are really good at that.

And when you get to that point with your audience, you can do almost any genre of content, whether it be gaming, whether it be skits, whether it be vlogs, whether it be tutorials. It could be whatever, as long as the viewer feels like they’re hanging out with their friend, which is the actual value of why they subscribed and what they’re expecting on that channel.

So if you can get to that point on your channel, you could do almost anything and people will still watch it. But just like in real life relationships, take time to build. And so that’s why sometimes having a hook value, like this is the stated value proposition of what I’m doing with the value I’m delivering on this channel, which kind of hooks them, brings them in.

They start, oh, yeah. So they’re getting that value. But then it starts translating into, I feel like I like this person. Then, you start building the human connection, the relational value. When you have that relational value really strong, that’s when people are going to watch every video you do. And that’s actually when you are going to be able to convert most of those people to a sale, either for sponsors or for your own products and services.

Because at that point you formed three of the most essential things that will really help you as a creator. Does someone know you? Do they like you? And do they trust you?

So the question I want to hear from you guys in the comments below is, why should someone subscribe to your channel. What audience are you specifically targeting? And how do you deliver that value to those people continually, consistently, in every single video that you’re publishing in your channel?

Maybe you’re picking up on the answer to 24 Frames of Mind’s question, which is yes. It is hard to grow a YouTube channel, if it’s a lot of different random pieces of content and different niches. Your channel should have one target audience and one value proposition. You should start a second channel or start another one if it’s a different audience that you’re reaching completely that’s really going to find that content valuable. Then, put it somewhere else.

If you really want to dig deep into growing your YouTube channel and you want a step-by-step guide on how to do that, I have an ebook. It’s called 30 Days to a Better YouTube Channel. And every day in that workbook includes, one, a teaching, something you need to know. Two, it includes action steps, something you’re going to do on your channel right then. And then, three, it includes links to further resources, if you really want to dig into that, that day’s task, that day’s teaching, and really take it to the next level.