Your YouTube channel is buzzing, the comments are flowing, and your subscriber count is climbing. That's fantastic!

But, what if you could turn that vibrant energy into a loyal fan base that thrives beyond YouTube’s platform? By building a YouTube community outside of YouTube, you can grow your YouTube audience, strengthen personal connections, and foster deeper loyalty among your fans.

 off YouTube might seem counterintuitive, but it’s one of the most effective strategies to create long-term connections and a thriving fan base.

Interactions on YouTube, like comments and live chats, are great, but they have limitations. Engaging with your audience through off-platform channels or real-life interactions transforms casual viewers into committed community members. This personal touch fosters relationships that feel more authentic and meaningful.

Understanding YouTube Viewers: 6 Steps to Build an Audience Persona

When viewers feel personally connected to you and other members of the community, their loyalty skyrockets. This 

 translates directly into tangible results: More consistent views, enthusiastic shares, and active participation.

5 Strategies to Grow Your YouTube Audience by Building an Off-Platform Community

Here’s how to expand your YouTube community and strengthen connections beyond the platform.

Bringing your community together in person is one of the most impactful ways to build connections.

Organize Events: Consider hosting casual meetups, dedicated Q&A sessions, or workshops related to your niche.

Partner Up: Collaborate with local venues (cafes, community centers, co-working spaces) or complementary brands to host events. This can add value and legitimacy.

Foster Trust: Face-to-face interactions build trust and emotional connections rapidly. Finding opportunities to show the real person behind the channel makes the relationship feel more authentic.

Promote Attendance: Use your YouTube channel, social media, and newsletter to announce and promote your events.

2. Create Merchandise That Represents Your YouTube Community

colorful merchandise including clothing and water bottles

 can offer your audience a tangible way to connect with your channel and brand identity.

Tangible Connection: T-shirts, mugs, stickers, or pins give fans a physical piece of the community they belong to and makes their support feel real and visible.

Walking Ambassadors: When subscribers wear or use your merchandise out in the world, they are actively promoting your channel to new potential viewers.

Emotional Investment: Owning a physical item tied to your channel creates a different kind of emotional investment than consuming digital content alone. It’s a badge of belonging.

Get Creative: Design merchandise around channel-specific inside jokes, memorable quotes, or recurring themes that resonate deeply with your core audience. Take it a step further with limited-edition runs for seasonal items or to celebrate channel milestones (like subscriber counts or anniversaries). This creates collectibility and urgency.

Collaborate: Engage your community by running design contests or asking for input on merchandise ideas. This deepens their involvement even further.

An email newsletter is a powerful tool for direct, personal communication that bypasses unpredictable platform algorithms.

Direct Access: Ensure your most important updates reach your dedicated fans without getting lost in feeds. You have more control with this communication channel.

Exclusive Content: Share personal stories, behind-the-scenes glimpses, early announcements, or exclusive content not available anywhere else.

Personal Touch: Newsletters often feel more intimate and personal than public social media posts, strengthening the creator-fan relationship.

Build Routine: Consistent newsletters create anticipation and make interacting with your brand a regular part of your audience's routine.

Drive Traffic: Strategically link back to recent or relevant YouTube videos to boost views and engagement.

4. Build a Presence on Complementary Platforms

Extend your community's home base beyond YouTube to other platforms where they naturally gather.

Choose Your Platforms: Encourage viewers to join you on dedicated forums, a Discord server, a subreddit, or even follow along via a podcast. Choose platforms that fit your style and audience. For an example, you check out the 

Offer Perks: Incentivize joining these external communities by offering early access to content, exclusive Q&As, specific roles, or other unique benefits.

Share Some Content: Consider making Shorts from some of your longer videos as a way of spreading your content across platforms.

How to Build Your YouTube Audience on Other Platforms

5. Collaborate with Fans or Other Creators

Actively involve your audience in your content and community-building efforts.

Showcase Your Fans: Feature user-generated content (fan art, video responses, clips) or give regular fan shout-outs in your videos, community posts, or newsletters.

Co-Create: Work with your audience to develop new merchandise ideas, channel slogans, recurring segments, or inside jokes. Make them feel like true collaborators.

Engage with Challenges: Run contests or challenges that encourage active participation and interaction within the community.

Leverage Influential Fans: Consider collaborating directly on content or promotions with subscribers who have already established their own significant online presence. This can be a powerful way to cross-promote and grow your own audience more quickly.

How to Find the Most Popular Subscribers to Your YouTube Channel

Tracking the Impact of Your New Off-Platform Strategies

Measuring the direct ROI of off-platform activities can sometimes be indirect, but it's necessary to gauge their effectiveness.

Monitor Channel Growth: While not a direct 1:1 correlation, keep an eye on your overall channel metrics after implementing these strategies. Did meetups or merch drops coincide with spikes in views, subscribers, or engagement?

Ask Your Audience: Use polls or questions in your videos, community posts, or newsletters to ask how people discovered you or what prompted them to engage more deeply. Don’t be afraid to ask people directly. Be sure to take notes when certain comments or responses stick out to you.

Track Specific Links: Use trackable links (like Bitly links or UTM parameters) for promotions related to your off-platform activities (e.g., link to a video in your newsletter) to see how much traffic they drive.

Utilize Analytics Tools: Even for indirect impact, tools like 

 portal can help you monitor your overall channel health and identify trends that may correlate with your off-channel community-building efforts. Look for changes in audience retention, subscriber growth rate, and engagement patterns.

Final Tips for Long-Term YouTube Community Growth

Building a strong off-platform community is an ongoing effort. Keep these principles in mind:

Be Consistent: Maintain a regular presence not just on YouTube, but also in your newsletter, Discord server, or wherever your community gathers.

Show Appreciation: Regularly thank your audience for their support, participation, and loyalty. Small gestures go a long way.

Stay Aligned: Ensure your tone, values, and brand identity remain consistent across all platforms and interactions, whether online or offline. Authenticity is key.


By expanding your YouTube community beyond the confines of the platform, you're not just growing 

; you're building a loyal, engaged, and deeply connected group of fans who will support you for the long haul. Good luck!

Looking to grow your YouTube audience? Discover 5 powerful off-platform strategies, that boost engagement and long-term fan loyalty.

Grow Your YouTube Audience with These Off-Platform Strategies

There are many ways to get more views on YouTube, but researching your audience is the most underrated. After all, you can only chase viral trends for so long. Eventually, viewers will need a deeper reason to stay on your channel, like getting a problem solved or enjoying your personality.

We’ll show you how to build that foundation in six powerful steps. This article will teach you how to research your viewers, create a persona to understand them better, and use that information to sharpen your YouTube strategy. Best of all, we’ll do it using 

How to Find Your Target Audience on YouTube

 is the best place to learn more about your viewers, subscribers, and non-subscribers alike. It has almost everything you need to know, from viewer demographics to the type of videos your audience is watching.

Here’s how to find the YouTube Audience tab:

Analytics option on YouTube Studio navigation bar

Now you’re in YouTube Wonderland, aka Channel Analytics. This page has a dashboard that shows your channel's unique viewers, subscribers gained over time, and how many new viewers return to your channel.

Below that is a series of panels with even more insights, but more on that later.

Building a Persona for Your YouTube Audience

A persona is a fictional character that represents your most engaged fans, and it’s one of the best ways to understand your target audience. With a persona, you’ll create a snapshot of your viewers and why they take specific actions on your YouTube

Ideally, you’ll give this persona a name — Jack, Amanda, Bill, or something else. Then you’ll create a story for your character. This short narrative (around 200 words) summarizes your main viewer, from the videos they watch on YouTube to where they live. This becomes a guiding light you can reference later, especially when deciding which videos to make.

The Audience tab and all of its data will help you build an accurate persona. So let's explore it in detail, and give you the tools to develop a content strategy and make successful YouTube videos.

If you want to know your viewers better, always start with the basics:

When they’re on YouTube (days and times)

This will help you build the foundation of your audience persona. Knowing their age, gender, where they live, and more brings context to their YouTube behavior.

Which videos do your viewers watch when they’re not on your channel? This question is important because they interact with other creators’ content too — not just yours. To truly understand why they’re on YouTube, you need a broad understanding of what they do on the platform.

You’ll find this data on two panels within the Audience tab:

A list of other channels and videos vidIQ viewers watch

Here, you’ll learn which topics your viewers follow on YouTube and who your competitors are. It also answers a gigantic question: 

3. New vs. Returning Viewers to Your Channel

“New viewers” is a pretty straightforward metric, but what does 

 mean on YouTube? Overall, it’s the number of viewers who have visited your channel before 

, the breakdown of new versus returning viewers on your channel indicates your audience's loyalty.

If you have more new viewers than returning viewers

“This indicates that viewers may watch some of your videos but are less likely to return to watch more. It’s common to see this trend among channels that upload videos about different topics, which attract different types of viewers, or 'how-to' channels, where viewers watch a video to learn how to do something but aren’t likely to return to watch more.”

If more people are “returning” to your channel versus discovering it

“This indicates that a channel has a loyal audience who is likely to return to watch more. It’s common to see this trend among channels that upload consistent content about similar topics or in a familiar format, channels with consistent hosts such as familiar faces and personalities that viewers grow to love, or channels that create popular series to keep viewers coming back for more.”

Depending on what you find, it may be wiser to target new viewers (if your channel is stagnant) or aim for loyalty (if you’re new to YouTube).

4. Videos That Bring Viewers Back to Your Channel

Now that you’re familiar with new versus returning viewers, let’s take it a step further. Which videos inspire people to return to your channel?

A list of videos bringing return viewers to the vidIQ channel

Study this panel closely, and you’ll learn which videos turn new viewers into repeat viewers!

You probably know that most YouTube viewers don’t hit subscribe right away. There’s a little dance at first, where creators have to “prove themselves” by posting good videos, and viewers have to decide if the channel is right for them. Depending on the audience, you could end up “dancing” for months.

But you can end this tango by discovering which videos bring in the most subscribers. You won’t see this on the Audience tab, though, so here’s how to navigate there:

 below the YouTube dashboard showing monthly views, subscribers, revenue, and watch time.

4. See which videos attract the most subscribers. Write those ideas down because you’ll need them later!

top videos bringing in subscribers on the vidIQ channel

Lastly, check the Audience tab to see which videos get the highest watch time on your channel. 

 is the total amount of time people spend watching your content, both on your channel and individual videos.

Like the previous metric, you won’t find this information on the Audience tab. So here’s how to get it:

3. Next, you'll see a list of videos and the watch time they accumulated, starting with the highest amount. You can filter data by the last week, month, 90 days, year, or since the beginning of your channel. Be sure to write these videos down (perhaps the top 10).

Putting it All Together: How to Build a Persona for Your Audience

By this point, you should know a few things about your audience:

How many are new versus returning viewers

The type of videos they watch, in general

Which videos make them return to your channel

Which videos hold their attention (watch time)

After completing the exercise above, here’s a basic persona we could build for the vidIQ channel:

Matt is a 24-year-old male who lives in the United States. He likes to watch channels like Film Booth, VEED Creators, Creator Booth, and Channel Makers, which means his main goal is to grow a YouTube channel. He’s interested in several topics, like how to start a faceless YouTube channel, get more YouTube Shorts views, and grow his subscribers. That’s the type of content he watches, and he typically does that on Sundays between 7 a.m. and noon.

Matt is a loyal viewer of the channel. He often returns to watch videos about monetizing a YouTube channel, achieving 4,000 watch hours, avoiding the biggest YouTuber mistakes, and growing as a small creator. To make Matt subscribe, I usually have to post videos targeted to small creators.

Steps to Take After Building Your Persona

The next step is creating videos that appeal to the needs of that persona, plus using 

 that signal their deepest desires. On our channel, those phrases seem to be “small channels,” “4,000 watch hours,” and “get 1,000 subscribers.”

You should also take new versus returning viewer data into account. If you have an overwhelming amount of new viewers, maybe it’s time to “niche down” and post what they’re 

 interested in to build loyalty. If they’re loyal already, perhaps it’s time to experiment with other topics to reach a new yet similar audience.

When you’re ready, here’s how to test a video idea before you start filming.

A group of people watching a youtube video

Diverse group of young adults looking at a smartphone together in a casual setting

Want to get more views on YouTube? Create a persona for your audience, then use it as a guide for making relevant videos they can’t ignore.

Understanding Viewers: 6 Steps to Build an Audience Persona on YouTube

Many creators tend to focus on one specific platform at a time, and that's often the right approach. However, that isn't to say that you can't successfully repurpose that content to build new audiences and communities elsewhere on the web. Or use that content to drive traffic to another property, such as a website.

On this episode of TubeTalk, we talk to Stephen Farnsworth of 

 about how he and his wife (the actual stay at home chef in the partnership) have leveraged both YouTube and blogging to build an engaged community around the content they create. Click on the podcast link above and take a listen!

Subscribe to TubeTalk: The Video Marketing Podcast!

TubeTalk has been informing video creators and marketers since 2014, and is one of the most respected and listened to podcasts in the online video industry. Subscribe today so you never miss an episode! You can find vidIQ's TubeTalk at:

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level and 

 then make sure to download vidIQ. Join over 1 million other users and use vidIQ to help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

And if you’re really serious about growing your YouTube views and subscribers, sign up for exclusive access to the 

 and learn how to launch a successful YouTube Channel in just 30 days.

Smiling man in cap and sunglasses with fishing gear and TubeTalk logo on blue background

Having a great YouTube channel and an amazing blog is a sure-fire way of building an engaged and loyal audience. On this week's TubeTalk, we chat to a creator who has leveraged both platforms and found real success on both.

Posts tagged with “audience development”

Grow Your YouTube Audience with These Off-Platform Strategies

Understanding Viewers: 6 Steps to Build an Audience Persona on YouTube

How to Use Both YouTube and Blogging to Build Your Audience