Are you trying to grow your YouTube channel, but it feels like it's taking forever?

I totally get it. It took me two freaking years just to hit 2000 subscribers, but then in just two months, I hit 3000 subscribers.

And now I'm growing it over 800 subscribers per month.

Today, I'm going to share with you the three things I did differently to see this growth so that you can explode your channel too.

So when I first started my YouTube channel, I had no freaking idea what I was doing.

I just knew that if I put in the effort and put out one video per week, it would pay off in the long run.

I saw all these creators making money from ad sense, sponsorship, and selling their own physical products or digital products.

And I just knew for the longevity of my business that it would be a really great thing to put time and effort into.

But at the very beginning of my channel, I really didn't know what I was doing.

So I literally just made videos about anything that I wanted to, but I did stick to putting out one video every single week.

So I did make sure to be consistent, but my videos ranged from everything from vlogs in Costa Rica to vlogs of digital marketing conferences to sharing what's on my desk, what I do for productivity, or how I sold certain things.

It was all over the board. There really was no rhyme or reason other than it was for business owners.

And I did make sure to hire an editor from day one.

(So I actually have 16 years of experience as a professional photographer.) I knew the number one thing that was going to take up my time would be the editing.

And even when I had my photo business, I always made sure to outsource my editing.

Also when I first started, I didn't have any SOPs. SOP stands for standard operating procedure.

It's basically a fancy three letters for a checklist.

And I didn't have any of that in place. I didn't have any procedures in place for how I'm going to come up with ideas, how I'm going to record videos, how the editing's going to be, how we're going to create thumbnails.

I didn't have anything like that.

In the very beginning, I mean, it kind of makes sense. I was just really trying a lot of things.

In the very beginning, there were struggles. But I'm here to tell you that there were three main things that I changed that took my subscribers very consistently from 150 a month to over 800 subscribers per month in just one month's difference.

Again, it took me two years to get to 2,000 subscribers and then just two months to get to 3,000 subscribers.

3 Tips for Growing a YouTube Channel in 2023

1. Niching down.

The number one biggest change that I made for my channel was niching down.

I know there are a lot of people out there who just create lifestyle content and vlogs and things like that. And maybe that will work for you.

But for me, niching my channel completely exploded my growth.

So here's what I mean by this. Again, I shared earlier how I was just making content about literally anything they had to do with business.

And I actually set up a call with a mentor and he looked at my channel and he was like, well, what do you talk about in your business and what do you sell?

And at the time, I was just focused on helping people with courses.

But after teaching that and really looking back at my journey, I realized that I started with digital products and then I added on courses to scale my business.

And so I really wanted to go forward with the niche of digital products in general. Then I could help people with things like ebooks and guides, but also courses as well.

And I thought that was a really good idea to go all in on the niche of digital products. I really started to see that explosive growth, when I narrowed down into who I was talking to.

And I know a lot of people talk about this when creating products, but the same thing goes for your YouTube channel.

So before, I was basically just like, “Oh, I'll help anyone create a course.” And I dabbled in all help service providers make a course. But what I realized was that when I started selling digital products, I was a blogger. I was a content creator!

And I was seeing a lot of my students who already had followings, was getting way faster results than the other students.

Now, obviously, other people can come in and buy your products, but you want those people to be as close to your ideal client as possible.

So not only did I niche in from business content to digital product content, but I also niched in from just helping anyone to specifically talk to content creators.

And this played a massive role in the growth of my channel.

2. Package your videos to get clicks.

This is something that I have really learned from just really studying YouTube.

If you scroll back through my channel, you'll see that my older videos, the thumbnails, well, they sucked.

And I didn't really understand CTR, which is for click-through rate. I didn't understand that it was really important, but it makes a ton of sense.

If somebody isn't even clicking on your video, then obviously the chances of them watching your video is zero.

So you really need to take the time to focus on your thumbnails and your titles.

And in the beginning, I was just like, I don't really understand how to create titles for YouTube. I don't really understand how to create good thumbnails.

So here's what I did. I started looking at other similar channels to mine on YouTube and I started paying attention to their view-to-subscriber ratio.

So typically if one of their videos has a lot more views, then they have subscribers. That typically means that the video did really, really well. And odds are in order for that video to do well, they have to have a good click-through rate.

So that would mean that their title and thumbnail did well!

So what I started to do was I made a list of all of these thumbnails and titles from similar channels that did well. And then I started to use them as templates.

Now I didn't copy them exactly word for word or the exact same design. I always tweaked something about it.

And of course, my video would be different. My photo would be different. The colors typically would be different.

And when I started to do that, I really started to notice what elements inside of a thumbnail worked to get a high click-through rate.

Now as far as the titles, modeling other people's titles has worked for me, but I actually recently discovered something that works even better.

Now if you're like me and you have a lot of experience with email marketing, then here's how I like to think of it.

I like to think of creating good YouTube titles like creating good email subject lines. And that for me was a brain explosion moment.

As soon as I started creating just good titles in general, that's my video started taking off.

Because it's no longer about ranking for search, it's all about simply creating videos that people want to click on.

-Create a thumbnail that grabs their attention

-Create a title that makes them want to click and actually watch the video

So how do you write a catchy title?

If you don't have experience with email marketing, just create titles that people want to click on and really try to keep them short and sweet.

Think of why would I want to click on it.

But if you do have experience with email marketing, that could be a total game changer!

The way that you write a title that works for a blog or an email is the same way that you're going to write a title that works for YouTube.

3. Use certain frameworks in your videos.

The third thing I did to really explode the growth of my channel was using a certain framework in my videos.

Now I don't script my YouTube videos word for word, but I do use bullet points. So, here’s what my script looks like:

-Hook (something you say at the beginning of the video to catch people’s attention)
-Intro (about myself, what I do, what my business is all about)

-Storytelling (I go into a story about the thing that I'm teaching)

-Framework (typically a three-point framework)
-Call to Action (to download a freebie or to get further help)
-End screen (recommend to watch the next video)

Final Thoughts

So again, the three-part framework is…

Number one, know your niche and exactly who you're talking to.

Number two, package your video to get clicks, if they don't click on your video, they're not going to watch your video.

And number three, try different framework scripting teaching styles to see which one is easiest for you to deliver and which one resonates best with your YouTube viewers.

All in all, the journey of growing my channel’s subscribers has been a thrilling and insightful experience. While there's no one-size-fits-all formula for success in the world of content creation, a number of crucial tactics have worked well.

And I hope that what I shared today was helpful to you!

Let us know what you think!