5 Ways To Grow Your YouTube in 2018 & Beat The Algorithm!

Hi guys, welcome to another juicy vlog. Now in today's video, since we filmed the Instagram video on how to grow your Instagram organically, since we filmed that video, a question we've been asked, the thing most commonly in our messages about that video is, can you please do the same video but for YouTube? How do I grow my YouTube channel? How do I beat the algorithm? What does YouTube want? What are your tips for growing a channel, starting a channel from scratch? So that's what we're gonna talk about in this video. We are experiencing like a heat wave right now in England. It's so hot. So if you see sweat on us during this video, I can only apologize, enjoy it. There are quite a few, I'm sure if you've like searched for this video, you'll see there's quite a few different videos about how to grow YouTube. But we found a lot of them that we saw are from bigger YouTubers, like we're talking like million plus subscribers. And obviously like they started from somewhere, they know what they're doing in terms of growth, but it's hard like hearing it from someone with that many and you're thinking, oh yeah, all right. It's easy for you to say if you do that, you get more because you're so big anyway. So that's why we kind of wanted to do a video, maybe for like smaller creators to like see how you can grow how you are now. And obviously there's a lot of like competition around. We don't see it as competition. We think there's a bit of YouTube for everyone. We, at the time of filming this video, we're coming up for 6,000 subscribers. So you know, we built a base of subscribers from zero. And you might be watching this in a similar position. You might have 10 subscribers, you might have 2,000, or maybe you have more subscribers than us. Maybe you have 50,000, but you want to get to 100,000. You want to get to 200,000, whatever it is. We think anyone can use these tips. Like it doesn't have to be for smaller creators. It can be for anyone. Before we get into this video, we do want to say there is no formula for success on YouTube. There's no do this, do this in this order. And you are guaranteed to grow there. There are so many variables for how videos get found, for how videos get suggested, for how views work. Ride the wave, right? Ride that algorithm wave. You were like, I'm doing like a backwards worm, you're like doing a front worm, you're like going forward. But we are going to give you some real practical advice that we follow, and to be honest, we've researched ourselves and we- You're too sweaty. Sorry. And that we need to do better ourselves. Oh yes. So we're going to come on this journey with you. We've done the research, we've done the hard work. You can just listen to us give you these tips. If you try them out, send us a message or a DM or comment below on this video, you can see how you got on with them. So tip number one is a fairly, I suppose, simple one for a lot of people, but then some people might find this a bit trickier. It's finding your niche. So finding something that you're enjoying or something you like talking about or like doing and filming that and making that kind of what you're known by on YouTube. When we started YouTube, I suppose, we had quite a few different angles. We do a lot of- Well, we did like daily videos, sit down videos, which is fine, like doing a mixture, but the topics were very random, very- It was more, I suppose, in that time, we wouldn't change that because it's helped us find where we want to be now, but sometimes you've got to get through that for you to realise that's my favourite type of video to film, that's what people like seeing the most and kind of meet in the middle somewhere there. Yeah, and when we started, we weren't particularly trying to grow it. We were just having fun. We were doing like the challenge videos that were popular a couple of years ago, but it's hard when you first start out for people to be interested in just your vlog. You have to give them some kind of value, some kind of information, some kind of entertainment. There has to be something behind the content that appeals to people before you grow, before you get that base, if you're starting from a small following. But if you are just like vlogging your days, if you're like a certain character and people love that, like carry on, you don't have to be like, I want to do a vlog about football. I don't, you don't have to say, I want to do a vlog about makeup tutorials. You can be yourself and do your own thing, but don't like pick a load of random different things to do and talk about, and then everyone goes on channel, and it's like, what? So they've done a video about football, and then they've done a vlog about makeup, then they've done, I don't know. A video about pineapples. Yeah, yeah. It's good for your audience to know what they're signing up for when they come to your channel. So if they scroll through your videos, people like to see a kind of theme, that's why you get travel vloggers, that's why you get beauty people, that's why you get fashion people. People have their niche, their types of videos, and yeah, a lot of different things can happen within the videos, but generally people know what they're signing up for when they come to that channel. So find something that you love, and also, if you wanna grow, something that people are searching for as well. Searchable content is probably the most important thing, and something, to be honest, that we need to get better at as well. If people are actively searching for the type of videos you're making, you are 100 times more likely to show up rather than just, I don't know, a day out to the beach vlog. We made pumpkins at Halloween. No, that would get views, and then people would search how to make a pumpkin at Halloween. Yeah, but call it how to make the best pumpkin at Halloween or five ways to carve a pumpkin. You're gonna get ranked higher in search, you're gonna get suggested more videos. You need to be specific. Oh, my bad. I'm sorry, yeah, that's really hot. I'm so hot. So tip number two is consistency. Now, in order to be consistent, you actually have to start. If you've started, great. If you're uploading already, amazing. If you haven't started yet, we uploaded this vlog. Sorry, Lucy, can you just? We uploaded this vlog. In that video, we spoke about starting, just getting going. So many people plan, so many people wanna start something, but they never actually do. We gave some of our kind of tips and advice on just getting going in that video. So after this, if you're interested, go ahead and watch that one, and that'll give you loads and loads of advice on how to just start, how to just not be afraid and just take the leap into doing something that you wanna do. So once you have started, consistency is so important on YouTube. People say, from our own research, people say once a week is the minimum you should be uploading on YouTube. That's only 52 videos a year. And we look at uploads as chances to grow our channel, chances for more people to come to us, chances for us to be able to provide more value, entertainment, whatever it is, to more people. So if you've got 52 chances in a year, find more people, that's 52 chances. Well, if you did two videos a week, that's only 104 chances. You've doubled your- It's only when you surprise people. Yeah, it's pretty. I was struggling. I was thinking ahead. I was like, can I actually do 52 times? The point is, the more you upload, the more chances you're gonna have to actually... The point is, the more chances you... The point is, I can't do this. The more you upload, the more chances you have to get in front of people and share. And get found, and get suggested. If you do one video a week, and then for six months, say, and then you don't upload for three months, and then you do daily for a week, that doesn't work either, because people have forgotten about you. You need to kind of always be there in the back of their mind and say, go on to YouTube, oh, they uploaded again. That's nice. People will look forward to your videos if they know when they're coming. And sometimes having a schedule works as well. So it's like, say, for example, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or something like that. But that said, there's no magic formula. Again, there's no magic number on how many times you should upload to be successful, to grow. We just think. And like, times as well. Yeah. Like, again, I feel like we've tried a few different upload times. We now stick to six o'clock mainly when we upload, because I feel like that's quite a good time, and people can watch it into their evening. Part of me thinks we should upload later, because then people would have got home. Not at the moment, with Love Island on. Oh, God, yeah. Eight o'clock would be good. Comment below what time you normally watch our videos. If you're like a regular viewer, there's lots of comments going on. I hope I see lots of comments in a second. Comment below what time you generally will go onto YouTube and watch a video, or like, spend some time on YouTube in an evening, because I'd be interested to know. And different types of content will mean different upload schedules, and different upload frequencies. So, if you're making like, high quality cinematic visual videos, they're gonna take longer to edit, so you might only be able to do two or three of those a week. The more you can upload, the more chances you're gonna have to grow. Tip number three. What does the algorithm want? What does it want? If you don't know what an algorithm is, it's basically the coding, whatever, behind YouTube, behind social platforms, behind websites, behind everything, that is in charge of what you get shown. So on Instagram, the algorithm, if you consume a certain type of account on Instagram, on your Explore page, it's gonna show you more of that, because it knows you like that. If it shows you what it likes, you're gonna spend more time on the platform, which ultimately is what these platforms want. YouTube is no different. If you watch a load of prank channels, you're gonna be suggested prank videos constantly on the homepage, and on suggested videos after the videos that you're watching. YouTube wants people to watch anything on their platform for as long as possible, and keep people's eyes on the platform. Yes. So if you can create a video, say it's like a 20-minute video, and the first 10 minutes, even though you called it something about football, I don't know why football's in my head, it's because it's coming home, but if, say, for example, you said, this vlog is about football, I don't suggest that you title the vlog that, but if it was primarily a football video, and then in the first 10 minutes, you haven't spoken about football yet, the majority of people that have clicked on that are gonna have already switched off, unless you're doing something ridiculous and amazing that people would watch anyway. So then you're gone, you're lost. And then that means that YouTube wouldn't therefore push your video as much, as if someone is watching the whole 20 minutes of a video. Exactly. And we're not saying 20 minutes is the best video. There's a lot of things around 10 minutes for a video, but then there's proof that shorter videos have done well as well. But our kind of videos are kind of between 10 and 15 minutes. And Lucy's totally right. YouTube, because it's a money-making machine, it's an advertising platform, they want the most people on the platform for as long as possible. So as creators, we have to make videos that are gonna keep people watching. So if we can be as interesting as possible and provide enough value, provide enough information, whatever your type of videos are, whatever they're providing for your audience, you can do that for as long as possible without getting boring. And if you look at your analytics and people are watching for a long time, then YouTube is gonna think, great, people are spending a lot of time on this channel. Let's push that a little bit more. Let's put out some suggested videos. I've just had a genius idea. Go on. Or like thought. You have about four of these a day. Is this gonna be good? No, it's really good. If you've watched like 10 seconds ago, my face lit up. So you know when like a video is finished and then you've got like suggested and like it's like normally a playlist will roll onto what comes next and start a random video about something else. The reason you want consistency throughout your videos in terms of content and having a niche is because then it's more likely that another one of your videos will be played than someone else's. How good is that? Absolutely right. Well done. Don't pretend you knew that. You'd already thought that. The algorithm also wants engagement. So if you can get your viewers to like your videos, comment and stuff, all that stuff tells YouTube that people are enjoying your content, they're spending time on your videos and therefore spending time on the platform and they will help you out that way. Number four is probably the easiest for you to influence and do. It's very simple and you have to have some thought process behind this anywhere when uploading a video. Thumbnails and titles, they are really important. If you search something and like one of the thumbnails sticks out more than the others, you'll generally see that it's got the most views and it may not even be from someone with loads of subscribers. But if their thumbnail is sticking out, if it's like exciting, it draws you in, it might have some text on it, like not too much text, like that's big as well. You don't want to be like trying to read it in that little box on your phone. If it's like a nice ratio of text to photo, if there's something exciting happening in the photo and then your title is something that stands out amongst the others, again, something giving advice, entertainment, providing some value to the audience, then you're much more likely to get a click. Before anyone even knows what your channel is or what your video's about, all they see is the thumbnail and title. They have to judge whether they want to click on that. Just by that. You judge it by whether? A hundred percent, sorry. That is all they've got to go on. So if your title's like misleading or not straight to the point and your thumbnail is unrelated to the video, then you're not going to get clicks. And generally, if you can get a nice piece of the thumbnail, then it helps. Well, that's a whole other story. That comes into click bait. I think click bait's becoming less effective, but it still works a little bit. Go watch our most viewed video. The next one, we're just going to do using our hands. See if you can guess what this is. I thought it was coming to you. Oh, bless you, sorry. No, we can do it together. The fifth and final tip is cross-promotion. Now, what we mean by this is actually two things. It doesn't mean angry promotions. Sorry, I need to stop. That's awful, man. What are you doing? Firstly, we mean push your videos on your other social platforms. It's not enough now just to upload on YouTube. You need a presence on Instagram, you need Twitter, you need Snapchat. You need to be- Let's say Snapchat now. Well, controversial. You think it's dead. Snapchat's dead until it isn't. I just want to quote that. Snapchat is dead until it isn't. It's true. If they come out with a killer feature tomorrow and everyone hops back on, you'll wish you were there with your video link. If you have friends and family on Facebook, you know, if you've got followers on Twitter, you need to be posting your videos on these platforms. It may annoy the people that don't like watching your videos that you were friends with before. They can unfriend you if they don't like it. You know what I mean? If they don't appreciate what you're putting out there, spit them off. You guys, you'll be left with people who do want to watch your content. Choose your circle and all that. And the second part of cross-promotion is collaborations. Like, when we started YouTube, we quite quickly found other people with similar follower levels than us that you kind of, they start commenting on your videos, you comment on theirs. It's quite nice, isn't it? It's like a little community. Yeah, you start chatting in DMs and stuff. And these people, you can quite quickly and quite easily set up collaborations if they're interested. So that's where you might go and feature on their channel and they'll feature on your channel in a video. And then the viewers of their video might like you. Some of them might come across to your channel and subscribe and watch your videos. And the other way around as well. So you're both providing value for each other and you're both growing together. If you don't live near the person, like with Cam and Kelsey again, if you don't live near them, what we found with their collaboration we did is that we filmed our own videos, but the same thing, like we did a yoga challenge. Go watch it here. No, no, in front of your face. Oh, thanks. Here. And you can see what we got to. But it was like, the idea was we both filmed the same video but we pushed each other's channels in both videos across and also put a little clip in of each other's. And that's quite a nice easy way to do it because it's still just basically you filming a video but then adding a clip in and a couple of sentences about the other person. And that's sometimes easier than actually meeting other people if they live like they do. They were living in Australia at the time. Not exactly easy to meet up. Nothing else, I think it's pretty cool that you can do that, like people all around the world. Yeah, it's amazing. Like the opportunities are endless. Be as creative as you want with it. So we hope those tips helped you. We need to like open some windows and go outside because it's absolutely boiling. Let us know if you use any of these, if you've got any of your own to add to it. So thanks so much for watching. Please subscribe if you enjoyed this video. Check out some of our other videos. We do vlogs, we do travel stuff. Thanks again for watching. Big thumbs up if you enjoyed it. Don't forget to do the thing and we'll see you next time. Bye.