YouTube Channel Not Growing (FOCUS ON THIS ONE THING)

Do you often check your YouTube channel stats from your phone while you’re out and about, and see a similar message to this, looking good your channel got about the same number of views as usual. This means your channel has plateaued and is no longer growing, it’s like trying to surf a wave but all you get is a flat sea.

In the video below, I’ll show you the one thing that you need to focus on to get your channel growing again so you can get more views and subscribers.

Click here to get The One Blueprint That Gives You Step-By-Step Instructions
On How To Grow A Profitable YouTube Channel

The secret weapon for growing your YouTube channel is knowing your target audience. Putting your audience first is the most effective growth strategy you can implement for your channel. If you put your audience first, there’s a greater probability that your videos will be recommended by YouTube which is what you want.

75% of all traffic from YouTube is recommended traffic, which is traffic from browse features and suggested traffic. Browse traffic comes from the home page, home screen, subscription feed, and other browsing features.

Home is what viewers see first when they open the YouTube app or go to YouTube.com. These are personalized recommendations based upon a viewer’s browsing behavior.

Suggested traffic are views from suggested videos that appear alongside other videos or videos that play after the video you’ve just watched. These are videos that are recommended to viewers based upon their personal browser behavior and their personal browsing history, so if you make videos that keep viewers watching, they’ll more likely be recommended to your viewers.

YouTube search is typically only a small fraction of all your traffic sources.

Here’s what YouTube says about getting recommended traffic,
“YouTube’s recommendation system, finds videos for viewers rather than viewers for videos.”

This means you’ve got to put your audience first so YouTube will recommend your videos to the right viewers.

One of the biggest mistakes YouTube creators make especially beginners, is not fully understanding who they’re creating the content for and this is a recipe for disaster. It’s like trying to surf a wave without fully understanding how waves work or how to ride a surfboard. You first have to study how waves work before you can catch and ride the waves. When you do catch a wave because your body, mind, and spirit are

in sync with the wave, it can be truly satisfying. It’s also personally satisfying when you see a growth spurt happening on your channel as a result of making one change.

So how can you identify your target audience?
You’ve got to create an avatar of your dream viewer, the definition of an avatar is an icon or figure representing a particular person in this case your dream viewer. You’ve got to get to know this person as well as you can which is really tricky when you’re first starting your YouTube channel.

Here’s a slide Derral Eves recently presented at the VidSummit conference, showing the persona breakdown of your dream viewer. He splits the persona breakdown into the four different quadrants, demographics, psychographics, online behavior, and offline behavior.

Click here to get Daryl’s book “The YouTube Formula”

Demographics includes age, gender, income range, education, location, relationship status, and children’s status of your viewers. If you click on the audience tab in YouTube analytics, you’ll discover the top geographies, age, and gender of your channel’s audience.

Demographics refers to the external traits of a person, whereas psychographics refer to the internal traits.

Here’s another slide from Derral showing the breakdown of psychographics. It includes the motivators beliefs, values, attitude, lifestyle, fears, vulnerabilities, goals, and aspirations of your audience. These are things that drive your audience and what they’re most passionate about. You can get some of the psychographic information by studying the comments under your videos or sending the comments on the competitor’s videos. For example, here’s a video comment from one of my subscribers that gives valuable insight into why my viewer appreciates my tutorials.

Hikaro says,
“I love how informative he is, it’s almost like I went to ask my teacher/mentor a question, and he spent time with me personally to explain over a cup of coffee or something.”

Another thing you can do to know your target audience is to conduct polls on YouTube. You can add a poll to to your community posts on YouTube. If you have a Facebook group, you can conduct a poll in your group.

For example here’s a poll question that I asked my Facebook group,
“Do you work your hobbies and personality passions into your YouTube videos? Overwhelmingly they answered yes.

Click here if you want to become a member of my Facebook group, Tube Video Boot Camp. You’ll be able to interact with over a thousand like-minded creators as well as get tips and tricks on how to grow a YouTube channel.

If you have an email list survey your list, keep in mind the information that you gather for your avatar is an ongoing process. The more information you gather about your dream viewer, the easier it will be to create the content for the right viewer.

Another way to understand their psychographics is to look at their online behavior. You can read the conversations and comments they leave on their social media sites.

Here’s another slide from Derral that breaks down the offline behavior, such as what does a day look like, what do they do, and the challenges they face.

What if you are your own target audience?
If you are your own target audience like myself, it will be easier and faster to come up with an avatar. For example, I have a family that includes a wife and three kids, I love to explore new trails with my bike or go hiking in the forest, I also enjoy surfing when I’m at the beach or skiing in the winter. I manage this YouTube channel called Drost Video, and one of my biggest challenges is to reach new audiences with my content.

I regularly check my channel stats first thing in the morning over a cup of coffee or while I’m on the go such as riding my bike. One of the main motivations for creating my YouTube channel was to help others generate traffic leads and sales with YouTube videos so they can share their talents, passion, and personality with others.

Let me know in the comments below why you started your YouTube channel.

Another way to know your target audience is to attend a video conference in your niche. I recently attended the VidSummit conference in California, and ran into some of the fans that watch my videos.

For example, I met a new friend during registration called Justin. What was interesting is that I kept on running into him several times throughout the conference even though thousands of people were there and there was a slim chance of running into somebody a second time or even a third time. As a result, we became great buddies and took a picture together the last time we met.

After you’ve created your avatar based upon all the research you’ve done, give your avatar a name, for example, I could call my avatar Justin so every time I create a new video I can picture Justin in my mind and create video content for that particular person.

Another thing you can do to know your target audience is to make a list of the top 20 channels in your niche that you’re interested in. Go to the channel’s videos page and sort the videos by the most popular, watch the videos that were the most popular in the last year. For instance, the ones that got the most views and subscribers.

Pay attention to which videos are recommended next after you’re finished watching the video. Particularly look at the suggested videos which appear on the right side of the watch page. Move to the next channel after you’ve finished watching the videos from the previous channel, look for similar patterns that appear across all the channels and videos.

Observe the structure of each video and how engaged the viewers are on each video and channel. You want to gather similar data to the type of content that you wish to create.

If you group similar channels together you’ll be able to see the patterns. Also make notes on the titles, thumbnails, views, likes, dislikes, and view duration. See what kind of hooks are being used by the creator to pull viewers into the content.

Also, look at how they end the video such as telling them to watch another video in the series. Keep in mind that this deep research takes a lot of time, so spread it out over several days or even several weeks. The information that you gather will be a gold mine to understand your target audience.

Here are some important things to keep in mind when putting your audience first:

Have a clear value proposition for your channel.
Rarely do your interests and your audience interests align perfectly? Be clear about what your channel is all about. Putting your audience first doesn’t mean that your needs aren’t met, ideally, you want to satisfy your viewers as well as yourself.
After you’ve created the avatar of your dream viewer, you need to create engaging videos that keep your viewers coming back to watch more of your content. The longer you keep your viewers on the YouTube platform by creating videos that keep the viewers engaged and watching other related videos, the higher the probability of your videos being surfaced to other people’s watch pages.

Watch this video on 7 ways to increase your audience retention rate on YouTube

Click here to get The One Blueprint That Gives You Step-By-Step Instructions
On How To Grow A Profitable YouTube Channel

YouTube Channel Not Growing (FOCUS ON THIS ONE THING)

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