Can you guess what question we get asked the most? It’s pretty obvious: How do I get more views on YouTube?
The answer, however, is far from obvious; unless you break it down into a hundred jigsaw pieces. And what jigsaw pieces do you look for first? The corners of course.
So let’s look at four crucial pieces of the YouTube puzzle What Do YOU Love to Talk About? YouTube knows what its audience wants, so you need to think like YouTube. Let’s say your passion is videogames. Be specific. If you love Fortnite or Call of Duty or Fifa 18, make sure to focus on that topic.
The more passionate you are about something, the more you know about it and the more confident you will be creating and sharing content about it.
Passion is an invisible vibe, energy and presence that your audience can always see.
Who Should Be Watching and Why? Don’t stop at just your favourite game, film, beauty product or superhero either. Dive deeper. Popular topics attract thousands of video creators, so you need to provide the audience with something they can’t get anywhere else.
Ask yourself this question: who should be watching and why? If you can’t answer that question then your audience won’t understand or (worst still) won’t care about your content. If someone else can answer those two questions better that’s where the audience will go.
This is your target audience and your value proposition and you should be able to sum it up in a sentence. For example: Helping Video Creators Get More Views In Less Time.
A ‘niche’ is an interest that appeals to a small, specialized section of the audience. Let’s say you buy the latest iPhone and you want to do a general video review on it. OK great, but the chances are there is a tech channel with millions of subscribers that has more resources to produce something in a shorter time frame to a wider audience.
But is that massive tech channel interested in EVERY aspect of the iPhone? Probably not, they will have another big phone release to worry about. But you? You could have a special interest in how the camera works or the best apps for productivity or how to record the screen. The chances are, if you are interested in something, there will be an audience out there who is also interested in the same thing.
This is your niche. While there may be millions of people interested in an iPhone, there may only be a few thousand interested in recording the iPhone screen, yet still passionate enough about it to create guides and tutorials that spread a message of value better than anyone else.
Dominate Your Niche and Become the Authority With passion, a target audience, a value proposition and a niche you know better than anyone else, you will start to build an audience.
Usually, there comes a point where one video outperforms everything else you’ve published before: 2x, 5x, 10x, it becomes your viral moment.
When this happens, go all in on follow up content. YouTube is telling you: you have something of value and we want to share it with more people. Your stock rising, your authority is gaining momentum, we ALL want to see more from you about something you are passionate about and can trust you with.
Try this: search for ‘Record iPhone Screen’ and you may see a very familiar vidIQ face appearing over and over again. Who knew such a niche could bring in so many views?
Channel success stories usually start with a niche that builds trust between the YouTuber and their audience. They then take that audience on a journey through more topics that stretch that authority into new, larger audiences.
Try this: do a YouTube search for ‘How Big Is’. This search term is dominated by a YouTuber called ColdFusion. The channel was already successful with tech videos that got 10,000s views. The ‘How Big Is’ video brought in millions of views and now ColdFusion is the authority on the phrase.
If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level then make sure to download vidIQ. It will help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps click here to install now!
Rob started out on YouTube in 2012, building up a tech channel before joining the vidIQ team. He now educates over 450,000 subscribers on the vidIQ channel which has over 25,000,000 video views. Today he is hard at work sharing everything he has learned on the YouTube platform; educating video creators on how to grow their own channels and turn hobbies into careers - just like Rob did in 2017.
