5 Mistakes Keeping Your YouTube Channel From Growing

Being a YouTuber can be a challenge. It takes time and effort to become a good creator, and it is frustrating when your channel isn’t growing as fast as you’d like it to.

In a video exclusively made for TubeBuddy, creator and growth strategies coach  Daniel Batal discusses the top five mistakes keeping your YouTube channel small. 

#1 Your Channel Doesn’t Have a Clear Value Proposition

What is a value proposition? It should be a simple sentence that answers the three W’s of YouTube:

• What?
• Who?
• Why?

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 create content that serves that niche. 

Who? Who is the target audience you’re trying to reach? 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? 

Why? Why should those users watch your video as opposed to any other video they might get served? 

#2 Not Understanding How YouTube Works

Some creators think that in order to grow, they just need YouTube to recommend their videos more, but that’s not how it works. 

YouTube will only recommend the content that it believes hits the right target audience. Whether those people choose to click and watch makes all the difference to 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, the more YouTube learns about who your videos are a good fit for based on that viewer behavior. 

#3 You are Fragmenting Your Audience

YouTube wants to learn the target audience for which your content might be a good fit. However, If your channel is known for gameplays, but you publish a video about a crazy vacation you have with your family, that becomes confusing.

YouTube will try to serve your vacation video to the same people who responded to your gaming videos. But if those viewers are only interested in your gaming content, they probably won’t click play. 

Your vacation video might be great, but you’re in trouble if it doesn’t serve the target audience’s needs.

Even worse, if your vacation video starts doing well, and you put out a gaming video next, you can have the same thing happen in reverse. People who loved your vacation antics might not care about gaming, and you end up hurting the content you wanted to be making all along.

#4 Your Channel Optimization Might Suck

You’re missing a trick if you’ve got your value proposition dialed in, but your channel itself has poor optimization. You are making it harder for viewers to understand why they should subscribe to your channel.

Maybe your channel’s messaging is unclear. Maybe your Playlists have awful titles or lack descriptions. So many creators fail to optimize their Playlists correctly. Naming them, ‘Uploads,’ ‘Popular,’ or ‘Reviews’ leaves all the hard work to the viewer. If you make them guess, you are just making it harder for your content to work for you. 

#5 The Thing That May be Keeping Your Channel Small is You

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.

Tackle the five mistakes head-on, and you’ll be on your way to faster growth on YouTube.