How To Be A Successful YouTuber

Over the last few years, YouTube has gone from being a small video website containing funny videos, to the world's second-largest search engine. YouTube currently boasts more than 2 billion video views per week. It can also provide a low-cost to no-cost solution to making a social marketing channel for your hobby or business. Most of the time, success is not achieved overnight.

Creating a YouTube channel that will be successful takes a lot of time, effort, planning, and work to kickstart it from zero. In this article, we will be covering the most important topics you have to remember when becoming a successful YouTube star.

With that said, let's get into it!

1. Understand 'Success' Means

YouTube's success is based on the premise that all visitors need the same thing. Search, find, and leave as fast as possible. Kind of like a store. But YouTube visitors have much more diverse needs than you might think. Some come to watch short clips of cats doing silly things, others to view TV shows or how to learn an instrument, cooking, maintain a car, and so much more.

The way your success is measured is by the number of viewers you get onto your channel. No matter what kind of content you upload, whether it's about music, education, when you turn viewers into subscribers, dedicated fans, and supporters, that is how you can measure your success and how you can get as many new people through the door and make them stick around because they love what you do and what value you are to them. We are going more in-depth in the other stages of this article about analytics and measurements.

2. Create Your Plan

When it comes to building a successful YouTube channel, consistency is super important. You are more likely to gain success if you have a well-thought-out plan and a strategy for uploading content. Instead of uploading once per month, try once per week if your time schedule allows it so your new viewers know when to expect a new video. Planning is super important because it will allow you to stick to a schedule. If you have a lot of time to create videos, people tend to get used to that schedule. Once you're planning becomes less structured because of lack of time, it can confuse viewers as consistency is important. People do not like change, or it will take time for them to get used to a new schedule, especially if it changes often.

3. Make Your YouTube Videos

After you created your plan, your strategy, and all the preparation, it is time to start filming! We highly recommend working with an upload schedule, so you know which videos to create and when they have to be finished. Try to have a good overall layout and theme for your videos from the start so people know who you are and what you do. Once you started filming you can continue the process and keep producing.

Note: If you have less time, you can create more videos in one filming session so you have a bulk library you can release over the period when you don't have time for creating content.

It's highly recommended to write down a list of topics for videos so you can have your same recording set ready to go for whenever you start shooting. If you are able to keep a dedicated space to keep your set, that's a huge plus instead of having to tear everything down and setting up again each time you film and it gives your viewers a consistent idea of what they can expect any time new video releases onto your YouTube channel.

4. Use Analytics to Improve

Some marketers could have an unhealthy relationship with analytics. They track too many of the numbers. Maybe we think we can prove any marketing campaign is producing results if there's an eye-catching percentage. But we all know that some metrics are a lot more revealing than other types of statistics.

We have listed 3 important types of metrics you have to study to truly understand your audience.

❶ Watch Time

The Watch Time is the total amount of minutes viewers have spent watching your content. It's a key metric because YouTube pushes videos and channels with higher Watch Times in their search results and recommendations section. YouTube does this because the more Watch Time a video has, the more engaging their algorithm knows it is and YouTube like to recommend videos that keep viewers as long as possible on the platform.

In the Watch Time section, you can see the amount of Watch Time your videos have generated. You can also rank each of your videos by Watch Time and group your videos by styles, lengths and themes to determine your most engaging videos.

❷ Average view duration

Your Average view duration is the total Watch Time of your video divided by the total number of video playbacks, also including replays. This metric measures your video's ability to engage people. If your video can't engage new visitors, they'll jump off from your video quite fast, leaving you with an unimpressive average view duration. If you create a high-performing video, your Average view duration and total Watch Time will increase over time and boost your search and recommendations rankings by a lot.

❸ Audience Retention

Let's talk about Audience Retention. If your video is longer than five minutes, and Audience Retention is more than 50%, you are going in the right direction. A hook is something that grabs a viewer's attention and will result in them staying longer on your video or browsing your other content. We recommend regularly reviewing your videos to ensure you aren't attracting visitors to outdated content. Older videos can turn them away and they may view your YouTube channel as less trustworthy or valuable as a source for the information that they are looking for. Updated videos are high-quality videos.

5. Promotion and Marketing

Now it is time to let all your hard work pay off! There is one last thing to focus on so your videos will generate your desired results. Promoting your video is important when it comes to letting it find the target audience. We have listed a few options for promoting and marketing your content.

❶ YouTube's Community Tab

To create a YouTube Community post on your computer or smartphone, go navigate to your YouTube channel, and look for the tab called "Community." Now you can make a post and add either an image or a video to it to promote it! You can also tag other content creators by writing an @ symbol in front of the channel's name.

❷ Social Media Advertisements