It’s better to be a meaningful specific than a wandering generality.

Sean Cannel, Think Media

In my quest to learn about growing my YouTube channel and building a strong community, I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of the strategies required for garnering YouTube success.

Most successful YouTubers suggest two definitive ways to get started and get some momentum on YouTube, i.e. find a niche and answer specific questions within that niche. I did write about ‘finding a niche’ a couple of weeks ago. It is crucial to find your tribe in order to grow on YouTube. And it is equally important for the tribe to be able to find you.

And the second most effective strategy to succeed on YouTube, as a beginner, is to answer specific questions. So once you know the general direction in which you want to take your channel, it is then important to start by answering specific questions within that general niche.

Don’t answer generic questions, but answer specific questions.

A good example is to think about answering ‘how to’ questions within the niche you’re targeting.

For instance, I try to answer ‘how to’ questions through my YouTube Shorts and some longer videos on my channel. These ‘how to’ questions are within the ‘YouTube tech community’ niche. And these include very basic tech tutorials like, ‘How to download photos and videos from Google Drive into your iPhone’, and ‘How to download WhatsApp on your laptop’, just to name a few. These ’how to’ videos have very high views so far (for a channel with less than 100 subscribers right now). Out of the 7 videos that have over 500 views, 4 of them are ‘how to’ videos.

‘How to’ videos have a higher view count and higher subscriber conversion.

I intend to have a healthy mix of product reviews and ‘how to’ videos in order to help propel the channel to 1000 subscribers this year. It’s an ambitious target, but with the right plan and the right execution, I should be able to achieve this goal for 2022. Fingers crossed 🙂