Being a YouTuber is hard.
It takes a lot of time and effort to get good at it.
But a lot of you may feel like you're working your butts off, but your channel
is still so small and doesn't seem to be growing the way you'd like it to.
My name is Daniel Batal.
I'm a silver play button content creator, channel Growth Strategies coach,
and I actually helped build some of the TubeBuddy tools
that you might be using right now.
But today I want to talk about the top five mistakes
that are keeping your YouTube channel small.
Get your pen because we're going to move fast.
The number one mistake the creators make that keeps
their channel small is having no clear value proposition.
A value proposition on YouTube should be a simple sentence that answers
what I call the three W's of YouTube The first W is What?
What's your channel about? What's your channel's niche?
Are you a cooking channel or are you a gaming channel?
Are you a music channel?
Know your niche and make sure you make content that serves that niche.
The second W is who who is the target audience you're trying to reach?
And I don't mean demographics or whether they're male or female.
Or how old they might be.
What I mean is what's the common interest that your target audience shares?
What's one common factor that connects all the different people who might enjoy
watching your video?
The third W is why?
Why should those users watch your video in any given
watch session as opposed to any other video they might get served?
Because the vast majority of views on YouTube don't come from search.
That means if I'm your target.
Audience member
because we both love playing first person shooter games on an Xbox console.
But I also enjoy learning about guitars and Harley-Davidsons
and really cool vintage American muscle cars.
Your video will most likely be served up against my other interests,
and at a glance, you need to be able to make me think, you know,
I can learn that cool guitar technique later, but this other video
really caught my attention and my interest over my other interests.
The number two mistake that might be keeping your YouTube channel
small is a misunderstanding of how YouTube actually works.
Some people think that YouTube recommends content, and that's how channels grow.
They think if YouTube would recommend their videos more, they would grow faster.
That's really not how it works.
YouTube recommends all content.
That's what impressions are.
Impressions are YouTube putting your content
in front of what it thinks is the right target audience.
Now, whether those people choose to click and watch makes all the difference
of whether YouTube
will continue to recommend your content to more viewers in the future.
The more people who respond, interact, and engage
with your content in your channel, the more YouTube learns about
who your videos are a good fit for based on that viewer behavior.
That's why larger channels drive a lot more views, right
when they publish those creators of built communities and help
to teach YouTube Who's the right target audience for their content?
So when it comes to teaching YouTube who the right target audience is,
we stumble on to mistake number three Mistake
number three is you might be fragmenting your audience.
As I just said, YouTube is trying to learn the proper
target audience that you're content might be a good fit for.
But if you make a video today about a new game that just came out,
but then tomorrow you make a video about a crazy vacation
you have with your family.
YouTube will try to serve that video
to the same people who responded to your gaming video.
And this they're like, Yeah, I really don't care about your vacation.
I'm here for the gaming content.
Those people won't click.
And to be honest, YouTube often is a bad arbiter of quality.
Your vacation video might be great, but if it doesn't serve
the needs of the target audience, it's being served, too.
They won't click.
They won't watch.
And that video will stop being recommended more often in the future.
Or worse, if your vacation video starts doing really well.
And when you put out a gaming video next week,
you can have the exact same thing happen in reverse.
People who loved your vacation antics might not care one bit about gaming,
and you end up hurting the content that you really wanted to be making all along.
Mistake number for your channel optimization might suck.
I know that hurts.
Don't worry, I used to suck to think about this.
If you've got your value proposition dialed in,
but then your channel itself has poor execution of the optimization.
You make it harder for the viewer to understand why they should bookmark
or subscribe to your channel and come back to it later.
This could be things like your channel
doesn't really help the viewer immediately understand what your channels about.
Or maybe your playlists have awful titles or no descriptions.
I see playlists all the times
that are things like uploads, popular, uploads, reviews.
Let me ask you a question.
Would you ever watch a video that was named only uploads?
Probably not.
So why should your playlist titles be any different?
Titles like that wouldn't give the viewer enough information
about what to expect or compel them to want to engage with the content.
What's this channel about? Uploads.
I have no idea what that means.
Oh, sorry.
Popular uploads.
And finally, mystique number five.
The last thing that may be keeping your channel small is you.
Maybe you haven't been doing it long enough.
Maybe you haven't improved your content to the point where today's video is
connecting with the target audience better than the video you put up yesterday.
You need to stop comparing yourself
to other channels and start comparing you to you.
Listen to your channel.
If a video drives ten more views today than the one you released last week,
that's your audience telling you that you did something right.
Solve those issues, and I promise you you'll be on your way to faster growth
on YouTube.
If you want to learn more about how to grow your YouTube channel
and how TubeBuddy can help you do exactly that,
Click on the video that's on screen now or the ones all linked down below piece.