Top Tips for Growing Your Following

The tips in this article will all help people to find your videos but there are also some basic marketing strategies you can opt to use to help your channel grow faster overall too.

Ask People to Subscribe

Watch any of the big YouTube channels and you’ll find that they end in pretty much the same way: with the creators asking their viewers to like, share and subscribe. This is the simplest way to get more subscribers and it works very well: a lot of people are more than happy to like your content it just doesn’t occur to them or they don’t realize quite how much it helps you! Just asking can make all the difference then by making it easy and reminding them.

Partner Up and Shout Out

Another very important tip when growing your following on YouTube is to look for other YouTubers that you can partner up with. If you watch any big channel, then you’ll find that it very often will work with other big channels and feature guest appearances from other creators, or just mention those other creators. A channel that does this very well is VSauce, which features answers to many fascinating questions.

Michael Stevens is the creator of this channel and he is almost always recommending other creators or having them come on to talk about their areas of special knowledge.This is essentially ‘influencer marketing’. It means that you’re finding an ‘influencer’ (anyone with a large existing audience) and then getting them to promote you.

The key to success in this arena is not to try and be too ambitious right away. In other words, you are probably not going to get a shoutout from VSauce unless you’re already pretty huge! Instead, try and find someone who is about the same size as you in a similar niche and then ask if they want to do a crossover video with you.

This way, you both stand to gain by exposing eachother to your respective audiences. This will give you a boost in numbers and that then means that you can try and reach out to someone even larger next time! If you don’t have any luck with this right away, then you can also try just giving people free mentions – you may find that those creators are flattered by it and see fit to do the same for you in kind.

Try not to view other creators in your niche as your competitors. Instead, view them as colleagues and think of the niche as a community of creators. This way, you’ll be able to ingratiate yourself into that community and work with them to help get yourself known while delivering something new for their viewers!

Advertising

Of course YouTube’s advertising platform is not just a way for you to make money, it can also be a way for you to spend money on your own adverts! This way, you can create an advert that will show at the start of other videos and bring people to your channel.

This costs money though and so it’s not going to be a good option unless you already have a good form of monetization set up – and that needs to be more than just advertising. If your YouTube channel is the start of an effective sales funnel, that leads people to buy a high ticket item, then you can calculate your LCV (lifetime customer value) and then decide how much you’re willing to spend on ads.

If you choose to go this route then it can be very effective – just take a look at the success of Tai Lopez thanks to his ‘here in my garage’ ads. Even if he is pretty much despised by half of the net…

Create Other Media and Cross-Promote

Finally, make sure that you aren’t doing all of your promotion on YouTube. The best way to look at YouTube is as one part of a much broader strategy to build your brand and build trust and influence across the web.

That means you should be on social media and this will give you a way to share your content as you build more followers. Think of this as a virtuous cycle and try to focus on the synergy between your social channels and your YouTube channel – you can ask people to follow you on Twitter and Facebook in your videos and then on Facebook and Twitter bring more people back to your channel and hopefully get more shares among the broader network.

This will help to make your brand feel more like a movement rather than a one man show and should help you to build genuine followers.Your blog meanwhile can serve a similar role and you can use this to add additional content to your videos.

This will make it easier for your videos to be found on Google and will give your fans a base where they can enjoy your content when they don’t have the option of watching YouTube. The key to good branding is to ‘be everywhere’ and just because YouTube is your focus, that doesn’t mean you should ignore other channels.