How I’ll Grow My YouTube Channel In 2020

In this article, I want to share how I’m going to try to grow my YouTube Channel.

We’ll talk about what my channel looks like right now.

Why I want to change.

And how I’m planning on doing it.

• My current YouTube Channel
• Why I want to change
• How I’ll get more views
• How I’ll create more videos

Let’s dive in!

My current YouTube Channel

As I write this, I’ve done nothing special with my YouTube Channel.

I have posted 10 video’s over the past two years:

With 10.745 views in total & 564 hours watch time:

Not impressive, but not bad for zero effort.

And I’m still getting 20 views each day, while I didn’t post a video for the past 13 months.

Time to change that!

Why I want to change

Right now, most of my traffic is coming organically from Google.

Which is great, but I’ve got the feeling I’m missing out.

I already create a lot of video content, but right now I create most of these for my Facebook Groups, or for one of my courses.

So it seems stupid that I don’t repurpose some of that content for the second biggest search engine in the world: YouTube.

Plus, people seem to really really like my video content:

So I think my video tutorials would do well on YouTube.

How I’ll get more views

To grow my channel, I need to get more video views.

I don’t have a full plan for that yet.

But here are some of the strategies I’m going to try.

Strategy #1: viral video attemps

In first heard about viral video attemps in this video from Paddy Galloway.

In that video, he’s analyzing how Peter McKinnon gained millions of subscribers.

One of the strategies he’s talking about, is viral type videos.

According to Galloway, these type of video’s are:

• often in list/tutorial format
• high shareability
• make people want to click

And he gives these two examples:

I can see why video’s like that get a lot of views.

The viewer learns something new fast & those titles really want to make you click.

So maybe I can experiment a bit with video’s like this.

Here’s some ideas I came up with while writing this article;

• Why your email marketing sucks
• 5 awesome tricks in ActiveCampaign
• How to quickly personalize your website
• 5 tips to get better at Marketing Automation
• 6 HORRIBLE marketing tactics

I don’t really like how spammy they sound.

But I’ll give it a try.

Strategy #2: kick-ass youtube thumbnails

My current thumbnails are good, but they’re all using the same photo of me.

Here’s an example;

So I still want to stick to the same style, but with a different photo of me in each thumbnail.

The only thing that worries my is to make those photos freestanding every time.

So maybe I’ll add a white border like this:

It’s way less work with the white border.

But it looks a bit less clean.

What do you think?

.

.

When I created this thumbnail-style last year, I did a lot of research.

(they’re seriously an endless flood of information on thumbnails)

So let me share some of the things I remember;

• Don’t use red, as it blends in with YouTube their branding so it stands out less.
• Faces with strong emotion seem to work well.
• You want to use the thumbnail to make people click, but you don’t want to mislead people to click. So only include things that are actually in it.

But again, I’m not a YouTube expert.

So definately do your own research on how to create the perfect thumbnail too 🙃

How I’ll create more videos

Creating video’s is a lot of work.

That’s probably the main reason I didn’t post any video’s on YouTube last year.

So there are two things I want to do to make my life easier;

#1: Repurposing content

First, I want to repurpose more of my written content into video’s.

I write so many tutorials.

Mainly because they’re so easily to follow for beginners.

It’s all step-by-step with lotssss of screenshots.

But the other reason is that I want the articles to rank in Google.

And just a video on a page wouldn’t rank as well.

So I’ll definately stick to writing tutorials.

But the benefit is that I can easily repurpose articles into video’s.

The content is already there, I just need to make it into another format.

Which costs wayyyy less time than creating new content from scratch.

#2: Beating perfectionism

I’m still a recovering perfectionist.

I’ve been getting better at it the last two years.

But with YouTube, I still want things to be too perfect.

Probably because I follow all these creators on YouTube, and their production skills are just insane.

And I wish my video’s would look like that.

But learning those skills & purchasing the right gear costs a lot of time and money.

So for now, I really have to let go of that.

It’s allright if my videos are not perfect yet.

(you’ll still be watching them, right?! 😳)

Done is better than perfect.

But I still want some basic production value.

So here are my rules for new YouTube video’s from now on;

• Audio has to be great. I already have a good microphone, so that’s easy.
• For the first seconds of the video, I want myself full screen. This is a little bit of extra editing work, but I think it’s easier for people to make a connection with me instead of being super small in a corner all the time.
• Basic lightning. I have some small studio lights that are always mounted to the wall behind my desk, so it’s no work to use those. They’re not perfect, but I don’t want to hassle with big softboxes.

And then in the future I want to upgrade to;

• Great audio where the microphone is not in my face. Right now I’m using a Samson Q2U microphone that’s really good, but it has to be close to my mouth. I think a boom mic or something would be much nicer.
• Supersharp video quality. Right now I’m using a Logitech C922 webcam. It’s okay, but not as good as a ‘real’ camera.
• Awesome light. I want to learn more about how I could use light better.

Over to you

That’s it!

Now I would like to hear from you.

What do you think of everything I mentioned so far?

Is there anything I missed & should definately be doing?

Whatever it is, let me know in the comments below.