YouTube Best Practices for Content Creators to Grow a YouTube Channel

‘Is it too late to start my YouTube channel?’ If you have ever asked this question, let us tell you: No!

We agree; there are already too many creators with millions of subscribers on YouTube. But if you are passionate about a niche, have stories to tell, and know how to edit your videos, YouTube can still be the best platform to showcase your talent.

As of April 2024, India alone had 476 million YouTube audiences, followed by 238 million in the US. Active YouTube users spend 48.7 minutes on this platform every day. These numbers establish one thing for a fact: YouTube is a trusted platform for consuming content.

With the right strategy, growing and monetizing your YouTube channel is not impossible.

But which strategies will help you get your first 1000 followers on YouTube?

And how do you scale from there?

We have analyzed the journeys of some of the biggest YouTube influencers and summed up our findings in this article.

How to Create a YouTube Channel?

First, you must create a YouTube channel, and the process is fairly simple. Below are the steps:

Step 1: Log in to YouTube, and you will find the Your Channel option in the left navigation bar. Click on it

Step 2: YouTube automatically fetches the name mentioned in your email ID as your channel name. To change it and add other details, click on Customize channel.

You can now change your channel name, adjust your layout, add your channel’s display picture, and add other branding elements to personalize your appearance.

Step 3: Once the primary set-up is done, you can explore different content types. Click on the video icon labeled Create at the top right corner of your screen. You can select a content option from videos, podcasts, live streams, or playlists from here.

Step 4: To upload your first video, click on Upload videos, select a file from your device, and you’re good to go.

There are additional steps, such as editing your video, adding background music, and adding a thumbnail. We will get to those parts in the next sections of the article.

There is also a dedicated section for analytics where you can measure major YouTube metrics such as views, watchtime, subscribers, etc.

Whether you are a new YouTuber or a seasoned one, if you are measuring only one metric for your YouTube channel, it should be ‘Views’. Why? Let’s find out in the next section.

What are ‘Views’ on YouTube and Why Does It Matter?

‘Views’ on YouTube refer to the total number of times a video has been watched. Every time a user plays your video and watches it until the first 30 seconds, it is counted as a ‘View’. If the same user watches your video twice from the same device or different devices (mobile, laptop, iPad, etc.), YouTube considers each of these views as new views.

Now, to the more important part, why do views matter?

The view is where all the money is. The pay varies based on the type of content you upload.

Videos: YouTube pays an average of $0.01 to $0.03 per view. If your video has 500 views, you can make anywhere between $5 to $15. This is just an estimate. By monetizing your YouTube channel You can make more money from YouTube as your view increases.

Shorts: For YouTube Shorts, you can earn between $0.01 and $0.06 per 1000 views. Naturally, the pay for Shorts is much less than for long-form videos. But getting views on your Shorts is easier than getting views on long-form videos.

Apart from the financial aspects, the YouTube algorithm is also fond of views. YouTube pushes videos with higher views to more users, which means more reach, higher brand presence, and, of course, higher ROI.

How to Get your First 1000 Subscribers on YouTube? – YouTube Best Practices

Getting your first 1000 subscribers is not a big deal if you follow YouTube’s best practices. It is all about setting up your channel from scratch, picking suitable topics to create content on, and trying different content formats to find the right mix.

We at Beatoven.ai grew our YouTube account close to 4K subscribers, and here are our suggestions based on our experiences:

Find a niche that you are passionate and confident about

Finding your niche on YouTube is a consistent process. Even the most popular YouTubers are trying out new niches now and then based on their audiences’ preferences. As a beginner, you should start with a niche you understand and find interesting.

That’s a good starting point. As you start getting views and subscribers, you can always experiment with other horizontal niches.

To start, ask these questions to yourself:

What is it that I enjoy thinking or talking about?

What niche of content is all over my Instagram feed?

What do I search for or learn the most about online in my free time?

Suppose the answers to these questions direct you toward one niche: movies.

You enjoy watching movies and reviewing them, and movie reels are all over your social media feeds.

But does that mean you will start a movie review channel?

It could be, but you have to find a more specific niche. You need to find your sweet spot with hundreds of movie review channels on YouTube. You need to research your audiences to understand what they want to watch.

Some of the easiest ways to do that are:

Go to your favorite movie review channel on YouTube and check the comments of their audiences. Note what they say about the video, their questions and requests for new video ideas. This is a good strategy to identify the gap in the popular creators’ content within the same space to find your AHA moment

For example, Netflix just released the trailer of the show ‘A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder’ and a user left this comment:

A possible content idea – ‘Best books turned into TV shows?”

Go to Reddit. There are so many threads and subreddits on every topic, irrespective of your selected niche. Be it movies, music, or books, you will know what your target audiences are discussing, what they want to watch, and, therefore, what your videos could be about

You can also use tools like SparkToro or Google Trends to dive deep into audience research. These tools will help you understand what your audiences are really searching for and keep you away from making videos based on assumptions

Work on your YouTube channel’s art

A new user may come across your video or shorts in their feed, and the next thing they want to do is check out your channel. This is where you make a first impression that is so impactful that the user cannot leave but subscribe to your channel.

Below are the elements of a good channel art:

Pick a name: Your channel name should represent you and your content. For Beatoven.ai, since we already have a brand name, our YouTube channel is named accordingly. Individual YouTubers can play around with their names. The channel name matters because an appropriate channel name instantly gives away your niche and what you discuss on YouTube.

Add display and cover images: Your channel’s display image can be your image or your brand logo. Don’t forget to add a cover image representing your creator’s positioning. Best if you can add a catchy tagline in your cover image. You can use a background remover to make your logo or image stand out even more by eliminating distractions and creating a cleaner, more professional look. Notice how we did it:

Add a description: Your profile description should include a brief ‘About You’ section that discusses your channel, how often you publish videos, and who should watch them. Keep it brief and crisp.

Link all your social profiles: This is your first step at building a community. When new subscribers discover you, consume your content, and subscribe to your channel, your next goal will be to direct them to your other social profiles. That’s exactly why linking all your social profiles in one place matters.

Focus on YouTube SEO to find video topics

Picking up your niche is not enough. You have to identify untapped keywords with high volume and low competition to strengthen your YouTube SEO game.

Here’s how you can do it in three easy steps.

Open the Ahrefs YouTube keyword tool, enter a keyword relevant to your niche, select a location, and click Find Keywords

Note down the relevant keywords and target a keyword with high volume and less keyword difficulty

Alternatively, you can use YouTube to identify your video topics. Type the keyword in the YouTube search bar to find the related queries. You can watch the videos ranking for these queries, analyze what’s lacking in them, and create an informative video that closely discusses your audiences’ questions.

Try different content formats

When starting out, don’t rely on a single content format. It would be like playing against the YouTube algorithm. Explore different formats for a good amount of time to figure out which works best for your channel.

Apart from long form videos, you can also try:

Shorts: The short video culture is here to stay. Be it TikTok, Reels on Instagram, or YouTube Shorts, you must explore this content format. Shorts could be crisp, fun videos with trivia and facts or just a repurposed version of your long video.

For Beatoven.ai’s YouTube channel, we tried out many shorts. Our shorts are mostly related to unknown facts and trivia about music albums and movies. Though our initial shorts didn’t receive many views, we stayed consistent and followed YouTube analytics to replicate the successful content formats.

This approach helped us increase your engagement from shorts. One of our shorts on The Game of Thrones’ music crossed 26K views.

YouTube Live: Another YouTube best practice is to arrange live sessions. These sessions could include collaborating with fellow creators, Q&A chats, gaming, teaching classes, etc. The idea behind YouTube Lives is to interact with your audiences and showcase your honest personality with them by sharing your life’s behind-the-camera glimpses

Community posts: Any user with over 500 subscribers can explore community posts. These are text posts, polls, photos, and other interactive elements. Community posts are perfect for connecting with your subscribers, asking them to ask questions for Q&A videos, getting their opinions on video ideas, and so on.

Notice how popular YouTuber Mostlysane uses community posts to make a special announcement to her subscribers:

Optimize your videos to perfection

Before hitting ‘Publish’ on a video, you must ensure that it is optimized. By YouTube video optimization, we mean the following:

A keyword-optimized title that impactfully communicates the topic of the video

Make your titles clickable. This research about YouTube confirms that higher click-through rates (CTR) provides your video a boost in the recommendation system. But having said that, we don’t encourage clickbait titles. Make your video titles engaging and emotion-driven

Make your video descriptions SEO-friendly. Avoid super-short video descriptions that hardly tell something about the video. Instead, write detailed descriptions, add relevant links mentioned in the video, add social links, and optimize with keywords

Add tags to your videos to help the YouTube algorithm categorize them and recommend them to the right group of audiences

Use royalty-free, relevant background music

Background music can make or break the vibe of your video. Contextual background music adds an additional layer of engagement to your video and elevates storytelling, while boring music makes a video unwatchable.

But there is a major YouTube policy regarding music: you cannot use copyrighted music without the consent of the original musician. This could mean removing the music from your video or the entire video.

To avoid all these hassles, YouTubers need to use royalty-free music. Music with a perpetual license confirms that the creator can play the music over the internet as often as they want without getting any copyright strikes from the original musician.

A great source of royalty-free music is YouTube Stock Library. You will get royalty-free music for free. But the challenge here is repetitive nature of the tracks. Since all YouTubers use stock library music, the videos lack uniqueness despite promising content.

This is when you need to start using AI music generators like Beatoven.ai, which allows you to create original, royalty-free music according to your needs. Simply provide a prompt and watch Beatoven.ai’s Text-to-Music feature do the trick.

To fill the gaps between your creative vision and Beatoven.ai’s output, customize the music based on your emotion, genre, and instrument-specific preferences.

Beatoven.ai’s perpetual, royalty-free license lets you monetize your music without compromising its uniqueness. The best part is that Beatoven.ai is one of the ethically trained AI music generators (certified by FairlyTrained) that trains AI models with music generated by human musicians and pays them for their contributions.

Start using for free

Promote your YouTube videos on other platforms

Don’t just stick to YouTube to get engagement. You need to promote your YouTube videos in other platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook to engage your audiences. These posts will build their interests and invite them to go to YouTube to watch your videos. Those who like your videos will subscribe to your channel and as they view your videos, your overall views will shoot up.

How to Grow your YouTube Channel from 1000 Subscribers to Over 20K Subscribers?

You already have 1K followers, and your 0 to 1 journey is complete. What’s next?

Now your question is, “How to grow on YouTube”!

To grow beyond 1K followers, you must consistently practice the above strategies. Additionally, you must be more careful about video quality, promote your videos, and build an easy content production system.

Here are our tips to hit the 20K subscriber milestone and grow from there:

Improve your video editing skills and thumbnails

At this stage of your YouTube journey, what matters most is gaining the attention of your potential subscribers and getting them to subscribe to you.

The two ways to do that are:

Create your video quality with mindful editing

Designing compelling thumbnails

Editing and storytelling tips for your videos:

If you are a beginner at video editing, pick a tool that is easy to navigate. While advanced editors provide exceptional results, getting the hang of their features can take months. Initially, focus on keeping only relevant footage, remove unnecessary ones, and stick to basics

Invest in video editing tutorials to learn the simple yet effective ways to elevate your videos. If editing is too tricky for you, consider hiring a freelance video editor so you can focus on other aspects like shooting and promoting your videos

Alternatively, you could hire a full-time video editor. However, it’s important to note that hiring an employee involves legal and financial responsibilities, including registering them with the government, learning how to make a pay stub, paying taxes, and providing benefits.

Time stamps will be added to your videos so audiences can decide and watch only relevant parts of your videos. They can skip intros, ads, affiliate announcements, etc. Don’t force the subscribers to watch your entire video, as it could distract them, and they might leave your video midway

Store your video footage and updated video files in an external storage. That way you can quickly recover them in unpredictable situations

Use AI music generators to create authentic music for your videos and use music in the right way to improve the storytelling of your videos

Thumbnail designing tips:

Your video title, video content and thumbnail should all be in the same line. Notice the above thumbnails of Vox. They are minimalist yet explain the context of the video and stay true to the title

Leverage the power of emotion. If you are an independent YouTuber, we recommend going for this approach (only if you are comfortable). Cecilia Blomdahl’s videos are about her life in Svalbard, one of the northernmost towns in the world. You can tell what to expect from her channel with a glance at her thumbnails. Apart from annotations and high-quality images, she also plays on emotions

Use fonts, colors, and annotations as tools. Refer to the above thumbnails from both Vox and Cecilia Blomdahl and how text, colors, and annotations are a critical part of these thumbnails

💡More Tips

Here are a few more YouTube best practices to grow your channel:

Find multiple ways to promote your videos on different channels. Use carousels, bite-sized videos, clips, text posts, polls, and other formats to increase visibility

Develop a contingency plan to produce videos. Build a workflow to find ideas in your preferred niche consistently, have a shooting and editing plan to upload videos in your pre-defined publishing frequency constantly

Engage with your community, arrange giveaways and meet-ups, reply to the comments in your videos, and collaborate with fellow creators to grow sustainably

Closely monitor your YouTube analytics. Track views, watch time, time of publishing, and location of subscribers, read their comments to understand what they are seeking, and plan your video schedule accordingly

Conclusion

Growing on YouTube is not easy. It may take months to reach your desired subscriber base. Stay calm, follow these YouTube best practices, and experiment.

Try different content formats, stay consistent, and we promise you will get there!