Why Your Channel Isn’t Growing (Even With Great Content)

You're creating high quality content. Your thumbnails are on point. Your titles are amazing, but your channel is still growing at a snail's pace. Does this sound familiar? Well, what I'm going to do in this video is explain to you why this is happening and what you can do to start changing it. I'm Lauren Bateman, and I help course creators learn how to leverage the power of YouTube to increase their influence and increase. Increase their course sales. Now, if you're someone who's out there that is posting content, but you feel stuck, this video is for you. Now, you might be saying, lauren, I noticed that your YouTube channel only has about 3,500 subscribers. Why should I listen to you? Well, just so you know, I have another YouTube channel where I teach guitar that has over 550,000 subscribers, and I've sold well over $3 million in courses. So I how to grow a popular YouTube channel. I'm going to share some of those tips with you right now. So the first note I have here is the difference between good content versus discoverable content. All right? So you have to get real, okay? This is point number one. Good content is not the same as discoverable content. So what do I mean by that? So you could have the most helpful and knowledgeable video on a certain topic, but if no one is clicking on it and nobody's watching it, it's just going to fall on deaf ears. Now you truly have to ask yourself, are my thumbnails, you know, scroll stopping? Because people are picking thumbnails within a split second. And maybe they are, and maybe your titles are fantastic. But the biggest thing I find when I'm working with my YouTube clients, the biggest thing is they're creating content without thinking about what their audience is searching for. Okay? They'll just create a video. They'll throw it up on YouTube. They're like, I got my content done. I made a cool thumbnail. Great title. But if it's not something people are searching for in YouTube, guess what? It's not going to be discovered. Remember, YouTube is a search engine, okay? And what do people do? They go into YouTube, and in the search bar, they type in a question, okay? They're looking for the answer to something. So for me, on my guitar channel, people might be like, how to tune your guitar, how to play a C chord. What's the best guitar to get started? You know, what's the first song I should learn to play on the guitar? These are all questions that my person is going to be typing in that search bar. So I want to make content that answers those specific questions. All right? So when you're creating content on YouTube, ask yourself, is this something that, that my client, my person would type into search on YouTube, and if it's not, you shouldn't do the video. Now, if you want to learn about YouTube SEO and how that can increase the chances of you ranking a video and becoming more discoverable on YouTube, you can go watch that video over there. I'm not going to get too detailed on SEO in here, but understand that YouTube is a search engine, and understanding how that works is super important. All right? Number two, retention matters, okay? Watch time is the most valuable asset to YouTube. And the reason for that is YouTube wants to sell advertising, right? So they make money off of people staying on their platform and watching more content. So when you release a video, go look at the analytics, okay? Go look at your retention graph. Is there a huge drop in the beginning? You should be aiming for trying to retain, you know, at least 50% of those viewers within the first 30 seconds, because the more people you retain at the beginning of the video, the more people you'll retain at the end of the video. All right? And that is super important because that increases watch time. And when YouTube sees that a video is getting a lot of watch time, guess what it does? It shows that video to more people. Because if it can show it to more people, those people may also watch it for a long time. And guess what? They will make more money because they can now do more advertising on those videos. So YouTube will help you win. Win if you help YouTube win. So my best recommendation is to go back to your last 5, 6, 7, 8 videos and look at that retention graph and ask yourself, is this a good looking retention graph? Okay. Retention graphs in general are going to decline over time and fade. Okay? You can't retain every viewer, but we want to try to stabilize that as much as possible. But the biggest impact can happen within those first 30 seconds. So if you notice within the first 30 seconds that your retention is going from 100% to like 20% or a hundred percent to 30%, you can work on improving that. And the way you can do that is the intro to your video, the hook of your video. Are you engaging with people and getting them interested right off the bat. The other mistake that people make is we have this great thumbnail and title, but the intro of the video doesn't quite line up with what the thumbnail and title are selling. So you want to make sure that, that there's congruency because if YouTube sees a lot of people clicking on a thumbnail and going to watch a video and then clicking away from that video, the algorithm assumes that the video is not good or it's not delivering on the promise that it said it was gonna make. So that's also not a good thing. So the more people we can retain in the beginning of the video, the better for everyone. Number three is a big one. This is something I work on with my YouTube clients. Pretty much everyone needs help with this one thing. And it's probably the most important thing you can do on YouTube, even for me, above watch time. And what is that? It's knowing your person. All right, so a lot of people on YouTube, and I understand if you're just getting started, you might be trying to figure out what you're doing, you might not know what your niche is, but you need to know who you're making the content for. Because different people have different vocabulary, have different needs. Okay? Think in the fitness world, all right? You're a 20 year old versus you're someone in your 60s. This 60 year old is going to have very, very different questions. They're also going to have very, very different problems than the young 20 year old. Right. The 20 year olds usually aren't suffering from knee and back pain. Okay. Or they haven't had a surgery yet. Okay. That, that maybe needs some modifications in their fitness. Okay? So those are, you know, two different people. Okay? Now maybe you're going to talk about a woman in her 40s who's going through perimenopause. She has problems and issues than a man in their 40s. All right? Different person, different problems. You can't talk to both of these people in the same video. You can't. All right? I know some people are like, oh, no, I want to help everyone. If you help everyone, you help no one. It is marketing 101. It's the biggest mistake you can make in marketing is to try and help everyone. Okay? That's why I'm not here helping YouTubers who want to do, you know, video game channels or entertainment channels or blogs. Now I'm helping people who have courses that want to leverage YouTube. You want to know this person so well that when they watch your content, they're going, oh, my God, this person gets me. They understand me. Oh my God, they know. They must be in my head. They know exactly what I'm feeling. All right? That's how well you want to know this person. You should create a story for them. A great thing to do is to go over to ChatGPT, write out who you think your person is, and prompt chat GPT. Say, chatgpt, write me a 500 word journal entry of the worst day in my person's life. Then I want you to Write me a 500 word journal essay of the best day in their life. I did this after doing my guitar teaching. I focus on older adults and I have been teaching them for almost a decade. And I did this with ChatGPT. And when I read the worst day, I realized I was missing a big thing. And the worst day, it said for them to just be able to get out of bed and feel good was a win. And I was like, oh my God. Because, I mean, I'm 42, so I'm still young. I feel the back pain in the morning. But you know, for me, getting out of bed isn't a challenge. But for some of my students who are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, if they have arthritis and joint pain, just getting out of bed is a win. Never mind trying to sit down and practice the guitar. So that really changed and flipped my perspective. Not that everyone in their 60s and 70s is an invalid, but the fact that I missed out on an important pain point, which is as you get older, the things that you used to be able to do that came to you so naturally and so easily get more and more difficult. And that is super frustrating. So when I make my content, I sometimes have to tell people, you know, hey, you know what, if today's a bad day, your arthritis is flaring up, you know, that's okay, you know, put the guitar down. There's always tomorrow. Take your good days when you have them. All right? But that was something that was huge for me in terms of pain points and understanding where my person was coming from. Because if I talk about those things in my content, the person watching on the other side of this camera is going to go, Lauren gets it. Wow. She knows. She must know me. She must be like, in the room with me. People tell me that all the time. Like, I feel like you're talking to me. I feel like you are in the room with me. And that's what your clients should feel when they're watching your YouTube videos. Now, the truth that hurts is that even with consistency, we hear about consistency all the time. Post. Very consistency. Now, for me, posting consistently is like doing one long form video a week. That's, for me, is being consistent on YouTube. But people are like, I'm being consistent. And you have to remember YouTube is compounding okay? It's not linear. Like, I put a video out, I put another video out, I put another video out. It's not a line that is linear. It's compounding. And the thing with compounding is it takes time. Are you ever see those retirement graphs where they talk about, like, compounding interest and, like, the first, like, 20 years of savings, nothing happens. And then in the last 10 years, all of a sudden, it's like expensive exponential growth. YouTube is like that. All right? I had a video that I released that sat for about two and a half years, Two and a half years, doing not a lot. Okay? It was very, very flatline. And then two and a half years, all of a sudden, it shot up. It went from getting about, like, 10 to 20 views a day to getting 4,000 views a day in a matter of weeks, like, out of nowhere. And this has happened to clients of mine as well. I died another client, his video sat for 830 days at doing kind of the same thing, just petering along. 10 views a day, 20 views a day. And then all of a sudden exploded out of nowhere. And we don't know when that's going to happen. And that's why you have to be consistent. Because what happens is, you know, you could do your first 10, 20, 30 videos, and not a lot is happening. Okay? Not a lot is happening. But then you do videos 32 to 40, and all of a sudden you see this boost and you're like, oh, my God, what happened? Like, what's going on? Why all of a sudden am I getting all these views on my videos? It's because you now have a back catalog. You have a back catalog of content that is now compounding. People are watching that. It's then suggesting other content of yours that people might want to watch. This whole thing grows together year after year after year. So that's why consistency is important. But it's not instantaneous. And remember, with every single upload that you do, every video, it trains the algorithm what your channel's about, who your person is, what people even like to watch your content. Okay? The algorithm is still figuring out who you are, what your channel's about, and who is the right person to serve that content to. Okay, YouTube's going to do the work for you. It's just going to take some time for it to figure out how to do that. Now, if you need help dialing in your content and figuring out who your person is or who your niche is, then I highly recommend you, you go to the link in the description below you check out my free YouTube crash course, where I'm going to help you with dialing in some of these things. Cause like I said, it is the most important thing for you to understand as a YouTube creator. So if you're looking for a little bit more direction, a little bit more Strategy behind your YouTube channel, go to the link in description below, go check out that free crash course, and I'll see you in another lesson real soon.