The best way to grow your youtube channel? well, it depends on what you want to accomplish. I am writing this strictly from the perspective of a business, and not an individual creator. There will be a different article for creators, so stay tuned.

Define Clear Goals

This is the a basic starting point, have clear goals. Goal needs to be specific, and you should have a short term goal and a long term goal. Short term goal is achievable, has maximum deliverables in your control. Your long term goal is ambitious.

Some examples of short term goals

- 1000 views per week on videos

- 20 leads from videos

- 1000 subscribers in 3 months

- 100 live stream viewers

- 100 comments per month

Some examples for long term goals 3-5 year goals

- 100,000 subscribers

- 1000 leads per week from videos

- Revenue of $100K from youtube and youtube related leads

Defining a clear goal can align all activities to manage your youtube channel.

Have clarity on your target audience

You need to know, really well who you're making videos for. Youtube has not only started tracking how long someone watches one of your videos, they're tracking average session time your channel is able to generate - the only way you do this is when you are not just making 1 video for a specific target audience, but a number of them.

This is great news if you're in a specific niche - it's easier to figure out the kind of content your niche audience is interested in, and this is why you need clarity on your target audience.

Understand demographic data, psychographic data, daily habits, channels they watch now, topics they may observe etc. When you can clearly describe all these factors, you know who you're making content for.

Choose winner topics, titles and thumbnails

Before you decide to start working on a video, before you start working on editing, and production, you need a WINNER topic. It would help if you spent time determining how many of your target audience will be interested in clicking on the video and want to watch it. Whether they'll actually be interested in it, will they be interested enough to click away from a thumbnail of a beautiful celebrity dancing in a song or click on your video? Your topic from day 1 has to be a winner topic.

How do you know if a topic is a winner topic, well, when you start - you won't. What you need to do is set a time - maybe 1 hour, and brainstorm as much as possible for all the best topics you can come up with. Finalise the best one you can come up with, and repeat the process. Over time, you'll start picking winner topics on your own!

I would even suggest finalise on the idea for the thumbnail even before you've

Setup a content and release schedule

Knowing when you're planning to release videos with a strict deadline can ensure that you maintain a release pattern, but more importantly when you have a fixed schedule. You start outputting content, you're gaining data and insights. You'll begin to understand which videos do well, and which don't and how you can improve your videos.

The reason I ask you to maintain a release schedule is until you start putting videos out, you DON'T know what will work. The only way to find out what works is to fix a release schedule and commit to it.

Figure out your production, and editing workflow

After freezing your content format, figure out how you'll shave time off your video production, and video editing. It can be as simple as setting up keyboard shortcuts in your editing software or freezing on colour schemes, and font schemes for elements in your video. Creating repeatable assets in your video editing workflow will reduce friction in producing content, and you'll end up producing more output.

Don't look at views, see if your video is shown to the right target audience

How do you even determine his? well, look for audience retention and at what rate people are subscribing to you. High audience retention and a high view-to-subscription ratio is the metric which will tell you if your videos are shown to the right target audience.

If you're a business, your views don't really matter, what matters is if your videos are seen by the right target audience. That is what will impact your bottom line.

Tweak, Refine, and Improve

Get comfortable with youtube analytics, impressions, CTR, audience retention, reach.

Look at demographics, advanced analytics, average views per session etc.

This is where you'll figure out how to improve and incorporate into your youtube channel management workflow.