Are you a small creator who is trying to figure out how to get people to start watching your videos? Or are you a more established YouTuber who is looking to grow his audience? Either way, this article is for you!
Here I’ll share 10 tips for getting discovered on YouTube, such as having a target audience, following trends, collaborating, and incorporating your website. There’s a whole lot more so let’s dive right in!
#1 Have a Target Audience
This is really important. You might think trying to get everyone to watch your videos is a good idea because, well, that’s a lot of people, but if you make videos for the whole world you’re not actually going to get that many people watching. Your viewers have to connect with you and your content. You want them to feel like your channel is perfect for them. So if you target a specific group of people, those people will think, “Hey! This is just what I’m looking for!”, and you’ll have gained a subscriber.
On the other hand, if one day you do a makeup tutorial, the next a movie review, then a travel vlog, people will think, “What does this guy even do on his channel?”, and move on to something else. He may have been interested because of your movie reviews, but when he sees that that’s only a small portion of the content you make, he’ll decide that your videos are not what he wants to watch.
That’s why it’s going to be very hard to grow when you start out with a vlog channel. But if you have a target audience, you can become an authority in your niche, and once you grow, you can start to expand the topics of your content. In fact, most big vloggers started out with a niche channel! Take Roman Atwood Vlogs as an example. Roman became famous from his pranks on RomanAtwood, and then started his family vlog channel, Roman Atwood Vlogs.
#2 Figure out What that Audience Likes
Once you have decided on a target audience, figure out what kind of topics those people are interested in. One way to do this is to look at channels that are in the same niche and have a similar audience. Check out what kind of videos they make, especially the ones that did really well! Maybe you can make similar videos or get ideas from them. Hopefully, it will help you to have a general understanding of what is popular among your target audience.
Another thing you can do is analyze your own videos. If a certain video blew up, consider making another like it! YouTube Studio can help you figure out what topics you should talk about more. If you click Analytics, you’ll be able to see your top videos based on watch time. The longer you can keep someone watching YouTube, the better your channel will do! If you’d like to learn how to increase your watch time, check out this article.
#3 Search Engine Optimize Your Videos
Remember, YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine! Make sure you’re treating it that way by optimizing your videos to appear in search results. Research what keywords have high search volume and low competition, and use those in your titles and descriptions as well as tags. I use TubeBuddy to help me with this, it’s pretty awesome! You also want to take advantage of the space you have in the description box of your videos to tell YouTube what your video is all about.
Remember though that appearing in search results is only part of it. Even if you are one of the top five videos for a search term, your video won’t get clicked unless your thumbnail and title interests the viewer! And the more you get people to click and watch your videos, the more they will be shown in search results, as well as in suggested videos and on the Home Page.
#4 Ask Viewers to Share your Videos
If you have built an audience that really connects with you and cares about you, they are likely to listen when you ask them to share your video. Tell them why and show that this is really important to you. Also, when you receive a positive comment, thank the person and ask them to share the video since they liked it so much. I have done this quite often and plenty of times they have written back saying that they would share my video!
If you want to make content that people want to share, you’ve got to connect with the viewers. That’s another reason why having a target audience is really important! Not everyone is interested in the same things, so there is no way you’ll be able to connect with everybody. Instead, creating relevant, valuable content for a certain niche will cause them to want to share your videos with like-minded people.
What if you don’t have a very large audience to ask? Well, go ahead and let your friends and family know about your channel! Your subscriber base will significantly grow from just them, but you can also ask those people to share your videos with their friends!
#5 Follow Trends
This one is a great way to get exposure to a ton of people who have possibly never heard of your channel before! A little while ago I posted a video reacting to a movie trailer I knew my target audience was going to be really interested in. I’m so glad I did! That video got 324K views, over 80% of which were from non-subscribers, and I gained over 4,000 subscribers from that video.
If I had waited to react to that trailer months after the movie came out, I would not have gotten such a good response. Your timing is important!
So, do some research. What kind of things are currently popular within your target audience’s community?
When something is trending, lots of people will be searching for videos on that topic, so your video will have a chance of being clicked on if it ranks. 16.7% of the views that my reaction video got were from search results.
But appearing in the search results isn’t the only place your videos can appear! Don’t forget about the home page and suggested videos! In that same video, 6o.9% of its views came from browse features! (Browse features include the Subscription Feed as well)
When YouTube sees that a person is interested in a specific topic, it will recommend related videos in the Suggested Videos and Home Page. If you make a video about a trend and your subscribers respond positively to it, YouTube will be able to tell that it is a good video, so it might promote it to other people who are interested in that topic.
Also, if you make content similar to a competitor, your videos could appear in the Suggested Videos after a viewer watches one of their videos!
#6 Promote your Videos and Channel on Social Media 
The important thing to remember when doing this is to make sure that you don’t use your accounts to spam people with information about your channel. Most people won’t want to follow that kind of account! Instead, build an audience on that platform and then share your videos and channel with them. Make sure to post quality stuff so you can build an account worthy of being followed.
Most likely you have a lot of friends on social media that you don’t see very often in real life. Let them know about your channel by sharing it on your social media platforms! And after they respond, ask them to share your videos too!
And once you do build an audience on YouTube and direct them to your other relevant social media accounts (or sosmed, as they call it in Indonesia), you can use those accounts to remind and notify them when your new videos come out.
#7 Collaborate!
This is an excellent way to find new subscribers, and one I need to do more often! Find a YouTuber who has a similar niche or a similar demographic and reach out to them! You can make videos together and cross-promote each other’s channels. Doing this with creators who talk about topics similar to yours will ensure that their audience is already interested in the kinds of things you make videos about, making it more likely that they will subscribe to your channel. Hey, there’s another reason to have a well-defined niche! You don’t have to collaborate with someone who is doing the exact same thing as you, but it is a good idea to find someone you share something in common with.
Reaching out to a YouTuber for a collaboration is kind of like reaching out to a brand for a sponsorship or brand deal. You want to be polite, personal, and convincing. Here’s an example of a bad way to contact a YouTuber:
Hey I’m Sarah, wanna collab? tx.
And here’s an example of a good way to contact a YouTuber:
Hi (insert name of YouTuber)! My name is Sarah, and I’ve been a fan of your channel for a long time. I really love what you’re doing! I do a lot of similar things on my channel, and I was wondering if you’d like to do a collaboration video together? Here are some ideas I had: (insert awesome video concepts). Let me know if you’re interested! Thank you!
While it’s not bad to try and collaborate with someone who has a significantly larger subscriber base than you, you’re less likely to be accepted. If you’re a vlog channel with 500 subscribers, how likely do you think it would be to be able to collaborate with The Atwoods? Sometimes it can work, but reaching out to someone whose channel is at a similar stage of growth as you will generally prove more successful. If you have friends who have a large following, by all means take advantage of that relationship and get on each other’s channels!
Also, don’t scorn working with channels who are smaller than you! Even though their audience might not be as large, you will still benefit from being exposed to a different audience. And that channel will probably be really happy that you want to collaborate with them!
You don’t have to live in the same area to collaborate with a fellow YouTuber, and you don’t have to travel to meet each other. While collaborating in person is definitely awesome, sometimes it just isn’t feasible, such as when you live on opposite sides of the world.
There are many ways you can collaborate with someone without being in the same location of them. Here are a few:
- Create videos for each other’s channels. You can start it off with and introduce your friend and then hand it over to them, or let them have the whole video.
- Record a video call of you talking to each other about a topic relevant to your channels.
- Let them record video clips that supplement your video.
Recently my friend and I did a long-distance collaboration. Veron lives in Indonesia and I currently live in Tennessee. I wanted to make a video comparing McDonald’s in Indonesia and America, while she wanted to make a video about 10 things to do in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. I make a video explaining 8 of the 10 places she wanted to talk about, edited it, and sent it to her. She did the same for me, talking about some things I wanted mentioned about McDonald’s in Indonesia, and also sent me some clips of the McDonald’s menu. Later I’ll edit her video and clips together with myself talking about McDonald’s in America. [Edit – I didn’t end up making the McDonald’s video, lol. Maybe someday!]
#8 Use Your Website
This is especially true if you already have a website that is getting traffic and deals with topics that are similar to what you talk about on your YouTube channel. If you don’t, you can definitely go ahead and start one! Do some research or take a course to find out how to build a successful website. Websites are a lot of work though, so it’s not going to be an easy way to promote your channel.
Once you have a website, link to your YouTube videos in your articles (have you noticed me doing that throughout this site?). If one of your articles discusses the same thing of one of your YouTube videos, tell your readers about it. Put your YouTube channel in the social media links on your site as well!
Creating a website can help you build a brand instead of just building a YouTube channel.
#9 Create Content That isn’t Super Crowded
When you’re a small YouTuber, it’s going to be hard to do the same thing everyone else is doing. Vlogging? That’s going to be an uphill battle. YouTube is saturated with that stuff. But making a channel about something like antique porcelain dolls probably has a better chance of being found through the search results quickly.
#10 Don’t Spam!
Have you ever been scrolling down the comments section of a video and saw someone asking for a sub for sub? Don’t be that guy. Please. There are so many reasons this is a bad idea.
First of all, it’s just annoying to both the creator and the audience who are reading the comments. Second of all, it makes your channel seem unprofessional. And lastly, even though you might get some subscribers from this tactic, they won’t be real subscribers. Most likely will just be people who have subscribed so that you will subscribe to them! You’ll both be dead subscribers on each other’s channels, which is not what either of you really wants. Remember that it’s not just about the number. Engagement is crucial to your YouTube success!
Instead of asking for people to subscribe to you, write meaningful comments! Have conversations with the creator and the other commenters. Keep this up and you’ll become familiar to them, and they might go check out your channel on their own. I know I have been curious about people based on their comments and gone to their channels before!
I hope the tips in this article will help you garner a larger audience on YouTube! Do you have any questions or helpful info of your own to share? Let us all know in the comments! Thanks for reading!