It can be frustrating to start a YouTube channel only to see that your subscriber count is not growing quickly. There is no shortage of gimmicks and cheap tricks that gurus claim will get you more subscribers. However, the tips I share below have been proven to work. I provide examples of them being used across some of the biggest creators (with large followings) on YouTube.
Some of these tips are relatively quick and easy to implement. Others will require you to play the “long game.” But all of them are extremely valuable if you want to build a resilient brand over the long term, and leverage YouTube as a powerful content marketing engine for your business or personal brand.
Here are 4 ways to grow your YouTube channel and subscribers organically:
1. Step Up Your YouTube Thumbnails to Boost Your CTR
Improving your thumbnails is a relatively simple way to greatly improve your Click Through Rate (CTR) which is something YouTube’s algorithm places a good deal of weight on. Unfortunately, too many people use a simple screen grab from their video as a default thumbnail. While this can still work, you’re missing out on way more clicks and views if you go this way.
Instead, you should be using Canva to create high-quality YouTube thumbnails. If possible, your thumbnail should feature a picture of YOU prominently in the forefront. You should also use large font, an intriguing headline, and heavy “shadowing” on your font so that the headline “pops” (remember, your thumbnail will appear relatively small once on YouTube, so err on the side of “larger” for both your fonts and pictures.
You can use free tools like Adobe Express to remove the background from an image, and thus place your figure at the forefront of your thumbnail on Canva. Here’s a good tutorial on how to do that:
2. Focus on What Moves the Needle (AKA: Content)
While some editing and professionalism (like creating a high quality thumbnail) is worth it for most channels, I also see people go the other way: spending way too much time editing and focusing on equipment, and not nearly enough time creating content.
You have to understand that what really moves the needle in content marketing is CREATING CONTENT.
If your content is good, your audience will overlook nearly all aspects of quality. Quality is just icing on top of the cake. If you don’t believe me, just look at Seth Godin’s blog. It’s extremely bare-bones and has zero frills, yet gets hundreds of thousands of readers a month because of the quality content Seth posts.
Similarly, many of the biggest YouTube channels DO NOT use fancy editing, b-roll footage, million dollar equipment, or anything else extraordinary.
Take a look at Sam Oven’s production:
Or Alex Becker’s:
Both channels are going on hundreds of thousands of subscribers, yet they mostly shoot one-take videos with very minimal editing. If your content is good, and you have a lot of it, and you utilize the other tips in this post, you don’t need to sweat the small stuff.
3. “Batch” Your Video Production for More Efficiency & Productivity
So how do you actually go about producing much more content? One key is to simply batch your content production. This means that instead of filming one video, once a week, for 52 weeks, you could instead film 5 videos a day for 10 days straight. Or 10 videos every Wednesday for 5 weeks. You can batch things in a way that feels right for you and your schedule.
The key thing here, though, is to leverage “flow states” and minimize switching cognitive/work contexts, which can quickly drain your bandwidth. You’ll find you produce way more content, and probably do a better job of it, if you schedule a way to batch it rather than haphazardly trying to generate and create new ideas and content once a week.
YouTube makes batching very easy because they allow you to schedule videos. So you can record a dozen videos, but then schedule one to be released each week at the time of your choosing. Thus, you can effectively create 12 weeks of content in as little as one day.
One YouTuber, Channel Makers, even has previously recommended a “52/24 challenge” where they push creators to create 52 videos in a 24 hours period. While a bit extreme, it’s pretty cool that you could create a year’s worth of content in one day:
4. Leverage SEO & Keyword Research for YouTube Search
I’ve said in previous articles that YouTube isn’t a social media platform so much as it’s a search engine. And yet while everyone realizes that keywords and SEO are important for Google, they hardly ever make the jump and conclude that these concepts are equally important for YouTube.
I recommend reading my posts on SEO where I reveal how simple keyword research can be.
But here’s a quick rundown on how to use SEO and keyword research on YouTube:
Essentially, you want to leverage YouTube’s autosuggest feature and have YouTube themselves suggest the types of videos and titles that you should be creating.
For example, if you had a cooking brand and wanted to see what chicken related recipes would do well, a simple starter search would be “how to make a chicken _____”:
In the photo above, we can see that any of these suggested recipes/tutorials would probably do extremely well. These exact phrases should be your video title, and perhaps even the headline in your thumbnail.
The reason this works so well (even though it’s ridiculously simple) is because YouTube has a vested interest in delivering popular, relevant search suggestions. So the fact that it is suggesting these topics and titles means that these ideas are already getting LOTS of traffic. Which means, for you, that this traffic can potentially translate into lots of potential views.
Bottom Line
Learning how to grow your YouTube channel organically can seem complicated, but it’s really quite simple. Focus on creating lots of helpful content first and foremost. Then step up your thumbnail game, batch videos for greater production volume/efficiency, and make sure you are using the power of YouTube autosuggest to create SEO-friendly titles with relevant keywords. If you do all of the above, you’ll have plenty of views and subscribers in no time.