YouTube Growth Ideas for New Channels (under 1k) | Ep. 17

Everyone loves a good YouTube hack BUT these are legitimate strategies for growing on YouTube if you have a small channel (under 1000 subscribers). In this episode, I share 3 actual YouTube growth strategies that will help your channel grow faster and reach 1000 subscribers! 

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Transcript

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Meredith  
If your YouTube channel is stuck under 1000 subscribers, this

Meredith  
episode is for you. I want to give you my best tips for growing your channel from zero to 1000 or 10,000 or wherever you want to take it. And I know that the title of this episode has something to do with like YouTube growth hacks or channel growth hacks. I'm a little hesitant to call these growth hacks, because they are legitimate strategies, not hacks, but let's talk about it. This is episode number 17 of the video brand infusion podcast. My name is Meredith, and I'm here to help you infuse the best video marketing strategies into your business for consistent revenue without hacks. Let's just be honest. And you know, it's really easy to look at people who are publishing consistently on YouTube. Look at people who are saying, YouTube is such a powerful platform. This is the best place to be. It's so wonderful. This is a place that you want to grow your audience. Does that sound like anybody you know, like me, perhaps, and say, well, it looks like all she's doing is recording videos and then posting them on YouTube, and she's talking about how powerful YouTube is. It must be that easy, right? And I get why people would think that, because that's what you see me doing. That's what you see people doing. They record videos, they upload the videos, and then the algorithm just takes off with them. But what you don't always see is the strategy behind how successful YouTube creators decide what videos to publish, like what is the actual topic of the video, and what exactly should the title be, and what exactly should be in the thumbnail? There's a lot of decisions there that are very important and require some strategy in order to get your channel to grow really quickly. And I recently was discussing with a former client of mine whose channel has grown to I think she's over like 14, 15,000 now and since we started working together initially, and her channel has grown from almost nothing. She's been invited to speak at events. She is going to be writing a book. She's getting asked to speak on podcasts, and she's generating revenue, not only from ad revenue, but also in those other ways, in addition to her full time job, and now she's ready to develop like a suite of courses and programs so that she can generate revenue in that way. And one of the things that she said to me was the spiderweb strategy that we set up at the very beginning is working. It's still working. And you know, inside of my membership, thriving creator society, which is soon going to be rebranded to video brand Academy, we have little wins, right? We have somebody who just reached 100 subscribers. We have wins like, Oh, my video is taking off. It got like 10 times more views than normal, or my click through rate is really high, and those are all so worthy of celebrating, but it's also sort of easy to forget that YouTube is a long game, so it was great to touch base with somebody that I worked with over a year ago, who I helped set up a strategy that's still paying off, that like built a foundation, and it's still paying off, and it's just a great reminder that YouTube is a long game, and what you do on your channel right now today seeds the success of that long game for you into the future, and it's gonna sound really cliche to say this, but one of the most painful things to watch my clients or students or Even friends do is to not follow a strategy, especially a strategy that I've given them, that I've taught them, like you have the resources. It's really painful to watch people not follow it, because it takes just as much time and energy to create videos that don't follow any kind of strategy as it does to create videos that do follow a proven strategy. And so when you think about your time and effort as investing in your business, why would you not follow the proven strategies, right? So those are the things that I want to talk about here today. And that's not to say that you know. Don't follow what Meredith says to do you're a complete failure. Like that's not it at all. There are many YouTube strategies out there, and there are people who are probably uploading and growing their audience and seemingly not following a strategy, who are probably unknowingly following a strategy that that works with the algorithm, but the videos that you create today snowball for the videos that you're going to create a year from now. So if you're looking at your channel and you're going the videos I created a year ago aren't really doing anything. They're not contributing to my growth, or not bringing subscribers or not bringing views to my channel today, then that is a for sure sign that your channel could use a little bit of strategy love. So number one, you heard me mention the spiderweb strategy here in this episode, and I've talked about this before on my channel, and it's also the main, like the core strategy that I teach inside of my course 30 days to a thriving YouTube channel. But I started talking about this spiderweb strategy concept years ago, I think, like maybe even 2018 2019, and the way that I came up with this was I just looked back at what I did when I started my channel and tried to figure out, why did it grow so quick? Because I had, like, friends or colleagues or other people in the content space who were like, Why is your channel growing so quickly? And I was like, I don't know. I'm just uploading videos. Remember? I said, it's possible that you can find success on YouTube not following a strategy, but you probably are actually unknowingly following a strategy. That's kind of what happened to me. So I looked at what I was doing, looked at the analytics, looked at my data over time, and realized that basically what I was creating was a spider web. So when I started teaching the spider web concept to other people, and, you know, inside of my membership, and now inside of the 30 days to thriving YouTube channel, course it has kind of become the basis of starting a channel with a strategy, and it's like it's one part a planning tool and one part, like a legitimate YouTube strategy. So if you think about how your YouTube channel is, it's like you're weaving a web. A spider weaves a web to act as a net to catch bugs. That's what the spider needs to do to survive, and the tighter the net, the higher likelihood that the bug is actually going to get caught and not just fly on through and that's basically how the YouTube algorithm works. YouTube's goal is to keep people watching YouTube videos. So the algorithm is keeping a close eye on all of its 2 billion users, viewer behavior, what they watch, how long they watch for like, what are the topics? What are they interested in? And tries to predict what else they might like to watch next or the next time they open youtube to hopefully get them to stay on the platform even longer. So your job as a creator is to create the content that makes it so stinking easy for YouTube to recommend that content to those right viewers. So to give you an example, if you create a video about how to plant carrot seeds that grow the size of monster carrots, or how to grow monster sized carrots in your backyard, and your next video is about exactly what fertilizer to use to grow monster sized carrots in your backyard. What do you think the likelihood is that if viewer a watches the video on how to plant carrots in your backyard and grow them into huge carrots, when they open up YouTube the next day or the next afternoon, whenever they get bored, they open up YouTube and they see this video. That's, here's the fertilizer that I used to grow these monster sized carrots. And I realize this example is very niche, but you get the idea, if a viewer watched the first video, they're going to be compelled to watch that second video. It's very tightly related. It's like the very clear next obvious choice to watch. So you want to create a spider web of your own content on YouTube to make it really easy for YouTube to continue driving viewers and driving traffic to a. Your channel. And the pushback that I get on this concept of this spiderweb method, or the spiderweb effect, is, well, what if I don't want my whole channel to be about growing carrots? Meredith, this isn't a carrot growing channel. This is a gardening channel or a hobby farming channel. That's fine, but you have to get some traction first before you can get more traction. You know what I mean? Like you have to get going in order to go faster. I like to say, in order to be known for more than one thing, you have to first be known for something. And like I said, I go in depth into the planning and the steps with the worksheets and all that stuff inside of 30 days to a thriving YouTube channel in that course, if you want this step by step of how the spiderweb strategy works, and I'll link to that down in the description or the show notes for this episode. And number two, a lot of people overlook this, and I feel like I've said this a million times, but simply do more of what's already working on your channel. If you have less than 1000 subscribers and you're making videos, you've got some data there. There's got to be at least one video or one topic that's doing better than the others. So you go into your YouTube analytics, you look at your top 10 videos in the last 28 days, or the last 90 days, and figure out which ones are doing the best make more videos on those exact topics. Now, I recently used this example in one of our meetups inside of thriving creator society. And I had a client who just recently reached 100 subscribers, and we started out doing a spiderweb on her channel, and then a few months ago, I could see that there was a particular topic that was doing really well. And it was actually an older video, but it was doing way better than the others. And I said, we got to capitalize on this. Let's make more videos on this one topic. So when we first looked at it, at the top 10, there was this one topic at the top, and that was the only video on that topic in the top 10. Now that we've capitalized on that topic. I think more than like half of her top 10 videos are on that topic, because once the algorithm identifies the viewers that are on your channel, it wants to put your content in front of those same people. So that topic has to be relevant and aligned to their interests. So to keep things memorable, I guess I came up with this sock acronym, spiderweb strategy outlier. Look for the outlier, capitalize on the outlier, and then keep doing the spiderweb strategy, s, O, C, K, spiderweb, outlier, capitalize, keep spiderwebbing. I like to say when in doubt, spiderweb it out that's the sock method, and I literally wouldn't do anything else, like strategy wise, I wouldn't do anything else if I had a channel under 1000 that's the strategy. Now, like I already mentioned, there are some things to consider when deciding, like, what the title should be and what the thumbnail should be. You know how to know when to branch out or what to branch out. So you're building an actual web, right? And I cover all of that inside of the membership thriving creator society. But if you are thinking, Well, I don't have time to just create a whole bunch more content, a whole bunch more videos. Meredith, it takes time to create videos, don't I know that this is where the three by four method comes in. And if you haven't heard about the three by four method on my channel yet, then you might be new here. And I'm not saying that to pick on you. I'm just saying that because this three by four method concept has been really popular here on my channel and in my course and in my membership over the last, like over a year now. So the three by four method is a strategy for creating 12 videos in the same amount of time it would normally take you to create just one video. And you might be thinking that sounds crazy, but hear me out, because YouTube is the most powerful way to build your audience online, right? And YouTube wants people to watch YouTube videos. So if you can create a channel that is binge worthy, meaning, once viewers find one of your videos, they binge the rest of your videos, then YouTube sees your channel as an asset to the platform, and it wants. Yes, it being YouTube, being the algorithm, wants to keep sending people to your channel because you are benefiting the platform, which then benefits you and your business. So that results in not only more views, but also more subscribers and more revenue, specifically,

Meredith  
if you have a funnel set up on your channel, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. We're just talking about growth hacks for channels under 1000 today, but I do have a whole video on the exact steps of implementing the three by four strategy so that you can, like I said, create a dozen videos really quickly and easily. And they're not shorts, by the way. I'm talking about regular, long form YouTube videos. But it's not just a matter of creating 12 videos really quickly and, like, banging them out. It's videos that you can create easily that actually do help your channel grow, because they're helping you build out that spiderweb and build your binge worthy channel. So I'm gonna link to that video down below. It explains exactly how to become bingeable on youtube so that you can attract new viewers and new subscribers and even new leads with every video that you publish. And you'll find that link in the description or the show notes, depending on where you're consuming this piece of content. And you can take the three strategies that aren't hacks, because they're legitimate strategies that I talked about in this episode, and plug those into the three by four method. And if you do that, come back and let me know how it goes.