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There is an awful lot of advice out there for running a YouTube channel. Especially
in regards to how to get your channel to grow quickly. How to get more subscribers, more
views, how to entice people into your videos. A lot of this is very good advice, and some
of the things that people say you should do I do. And then there's an awful lot that I don't
Let's just have a quick run through them.
Don't split your audience.
If you've been on my channel for any length of time you will know there are several very
different kinds of videos that I make. I make videos about having no sense of smell. I make
video reviewing games that I enjoy playing to relax. I make videos about being a PhD
student and that process and how it's stress. [Laugh] And I also make videos that touch
on things like mental health, I do occasional videos art kind of stuff. Though I haven't
done many of those and I really need to do more. But I have an awful lot of different
genres of videos on my channel. And that splits my audience. Now you'd think that maybe that's
a good thing. That you get lots of different kinds of people in. You've got more people
if you're spreading your net wider you're gonna get more people in. But the way YouTube
works is that if you're subscribed to a channel, and a video comes up in your subscription
feed and you don't click on it because it's not part of the reason why you subscribed
to that channel. If that happens a few times in a row, YouTube thinks 'Oh, you're no longer
interested in this channel' and it stops promoting the videos to you and other people. If too
many people do this it goes 'eh, obviously this channel's not doing so great, we're not
gonna bother pushing it to people because it's not keeping people engaged. So, if you
want it to grow, don't do that. However I like having a range of different things. I
don't wanna have, like, five channels. 'Cos that's how many I'd need to separate all my
content out. And I just, er, then you'd have the problem of not uploading to them frequently,
which leads us to.
Having an upload schedule.
Regular uploads equals more promotion. It's very simple. If you're uploading on the same
day of the week, twice a week. That seems to be, from people testing it out, the time
when it kind of kicks in and is, more than that doesn't do much. Your videos get promoted
to more people. You know, they get showing up in the recommended videos at the side of
other videos and on the home page on recommended videos there. So, frequently uploading shows
your channel is very active and YouTube's mysterious algorithm seems to like that. I've
tried an upload schedule. I have. But my problem is I don't have enough ideas to do
two videos a week. And I don't have enough time to do two videos a week. Sometimes I'll
keep up a video a week quite frequently. I did a pretty good run recently, I've only
just broken it. But you know, life is busy. This isn't my full time job, I've got other
stuff to do. And honestly it stresses me out. If I have to upload every week and it's like,
this never ending thing that I'm gonna keep doing this for years. It suddenly becomes
really intimidating and I don't want to make videos. So, that doesn't work for me. At least,
not right now.
Jumping on trends and using clickbait.
These are kind of different things but they're on the same vein. It's making your content
and your titles and your thumbnail reflect something that is gonna get them clicked.
Whether that's because fidget spinners are currently a thing and everyone's searching
for fidget spinners so if you include the word fidget spinner in your title, you're
gonna probably show up in more lists when people search. And if you make it a clickbait-y
title about fidget spinners, oh, you're gonna get some views. People always go on about
how much they hate clickbait but clickbait gets you views. It works. Like, I see an article
that's along the lines of 'you wont believe number seven on this list of things'. And
I know that it's probably really benign and I'm not interested. But there's a part of
your brain that's just like 'ooh! I won't believe how amazing this is? I'd better click
it!' It's just something I don't wanna do. Clickbait irritates me, though I do love a
good clickbait and switch. It's fairly rare, but when you get a good one. Oh. For example,
about a month or so ago, Louise Pentland, Sprinkleofglitter, did a video 'My new baby'
and I knew she had a book coming out and she'd referred to it as her book baby quite a few
times so I was just like, well clearly this is just gonna be about her book. Any yeah,
she starts off and goes 'it's my book, my baby' and talks about it for a minute and
then she just goes 'and there's my actual baby' and brings out an ultrasound picture.
It's like, beautiful. Beautiful clickbait and switch.
And now my last point.
A simple username.
When you're starting up your YouTube channel, YouTube tries to give you some help, you know,
some advice. And the recommendation is to choose a channel name that is related to your
channel, that is simple to remember and is easy to know how to spell it if somebody says
it to you. Any my channel name doesn't do that at all. [Laughs] I could change it, but
I like joolzzenda. It's the name I've been using on the internet since I was like thirteen.
It's, I've been using it half my life. Like, it feels kind of like my name. But no, when
I tell people at like, VidCon or Summer in the City, that's the only time I've really
had to say my channel name out loud to people and get them to know what it is. But [laughs]
when I've been at those things, like the first time I went to Summer in the City. Yeah, I
had to write down for people and spell it because it's like, yeah there's two z's in
the middle. Don't get cause out by that. And it's, er, it's not a word. But I've got around
that because now I have business cards. I made these over a year ago for Summer in the
City and they've been to an Summer in the City, VidCon Europe and they'll be going to
this years Summer in the City with me and I still haven't got rid of them all. Because
you can't buy business cards in like a pack of 20. So, I'd actually be really interested
if you do YouTube as well, what advice do you completely disregard? 'Cos, this could
be interesting.
Well thank you so much for watching. Still don't have an actual end screen sorted out
so; video, video, subscribe.
Click something. 'Cos, this is getting awkward.