So you are dreaming to be the next BIG NAME on YouTube or aiming to make some bucks out of it, WHATEVER the case is if that is what you are dreaming of, you’re not alone in the race!
Within this article, we are going to throw off some light over the thoughts of the newbie or to-be Youtubers regarding how they find it a hard nut to crack.
Additionally, we will be closing it up with 22 steps you need to take in order become a successful YouTuber in 2020.
Plus we will cover these hot topics:
- How to Become a YouTuber Star
- What Do You Need to Become a YouTuber
Give it a read and wake up one morning being the most prominent YouTube sensation.
Here you go!
YouTube
YouTube is still the one that is the most informative and the most entertaining but facing the fact; it is now more to be known as an earning platform instead of other reasons.
With plenty much popularity under the red play icon, the platform has been recently tagged with a consensus that “YouTube channels do not worth anymore.”
Digging into the sources as the reason behind such a statement, it was found that the concept has somehow grown in many around us and the only reason is that, now content marketers have even better opportunities to take the world by storm.
However, treating the statement as “JUST A STATEMENT” because YouTube is still the first one to pop-up in our minds as a productive source irrespective of the topic.
Talking about YouTube sensations and influencers, the list can walk down to infinity. Some people slept and just woke up being a YouTube sensation with millions of dollars in the bank account.
Curious about what they even did? Well, who won’t be?
The record of thousands of successful names has driven many of us to take an interest in “how they became famous out of just a single YouTube channel,” and here is the answer.
22 Steps You Need to Take for YouTube Success
1. Analyze What Success Means to You
The very first thing associated with every person bearing a dream to become a successful YouTuber is SUCCESS. You, as a newbie or the one to-be-the-newbie, first need to understand what success is!
This takes into considering your thoughts about it: what is it? How do you evaluate it? And what is its purpose? And how successful do you want yourself to be?
Talking about the majority, people evaluate success on a monetary basis. However, apart from financial evaluation, it is something beyond dollars. We are all born and brought up with different mindsets, and hence, every single of us can think of one thing in a million ways.
EVALUATE YOUR CONCEPT ABOUT SUCCESS.
Is it just money, or fan following, audience engagement, etc. whatever it is, Figuring out your answer; you will lie somewhere between the following three spots:
However, once you are clear about your meaning of being famous and successful, you will lead the way ahead with a clear understanding of your objective.
2. Figure Out Your Channel Goals & Content
Hands-down over the second tip, after understanding your definition of success, you need to figure out your channel’s content and its goals that is the first block of the building.
For instance, YouTube is a video platform where the variety is beyond one’s imagination. You have a ton of niches to choose from and hundreds of video types ranging from how-to videos to entertaining and academic lessons.
However, the choice is merely yours! But, even though the choice is yours, you need to understand and decide what you are going to do to roll-on with a flow.
YouTube is more like an ocean where you are riding a boat that calls for constant paddling to reach up to the shore. Hence, you have to do something extra to stand out of the box!
In other words, a plan is a need for success! There must be a well-defined plan of what you are going to do in your channel.
Select the niche and video type. Even if you are going to be a chit-chat sensation with your camera in front, you should have a clear interpretation of how you are going to postulate your channel/brand personality with only you in front of the lens.
After doing your content job, you have to look for ways to be unique in the crowd. Alternatively, you have to go some extra miles to stand out of the box and be one of those admired sensations.
Moreover, the last room spares for walking with the trend. You, as a struggler to be a famous YouTuber, have to decide whether you are going to march on with the crowd following the trend or not.
However, the question here arises:
How can one be unique and walk with the with masses for the sake of trend at the same time? Well, the real challenge is to follow the trend while being unique.
It’s totally up to you whether you go with it or not, but generally, it is beneficial to stay up-to-date and ride with the wave as it gives you an extra room to come up with something more interesting to drive traffic towards your channel.
3. Map the Journey
Map it out! So What If it’s just a YouTube channel?
It too calls for proper scheduling and mapping before getting hands over it if you genuinely want to drive popularity and success out of it.
Here, you have to decide on your channel needs: equipment, people involvement, etc. For instance, the vlogging camera you are going to have for flawless high quality videos, the people you are going to have, the script of what you are going to say or talk about, and posting, scheduling, etc.
ALL of these aspects must be mapped out in advance to get the work done in synchronization with the checklist.
In other words, you should think of your YouTube channel like a business.
4. Keyword Research
Hands-over the next yet the most crucial tip to grow on YouTube: KEYWORD SEARCH!
Similar to how we use a keyword search for websites and blogs to let them rank higher on Google, YouTube keyword search holds the same importance and value. For this, use YouTube’s keyword search tools and use words that hold the most value to attract the target audience in your zone.
Additionally, Google includes YouTube videos in its search results, so it is beneficial to combinate both Google and YouTube keywords for a productive outcome.
You can also use tools for YouTube trends. There are more tools like ubersuggest and many others.
However, apart from using tools to find out keywords, you should first start with yourself. Think like a layman for the type of content you are going to produce and figure out the keywords you will be most likely to search that with.
Doing so, you will find out some of the most common words that will pop up in the majority’s mind that is productive to a great extent.
Often vloggers are skeptical about investing time in keyword research. However, in reality, they are wrong at the moment. Youtube is one of those platforms where you can be discovered easily only if you decide to choose the appropriate keywords for the purpose.
If you want to learn more about Video Keyword Research then you should check out guide by Backlinko.
4.1 How to Efficiently Find YouTube trends?
There are many resources to get the latest, real-time data on YouTube trends. Here are some recommended options:
4.2 How to Easily Find Keywords for YouTube Videos?
YouTube Autocomplete
Whenever you type anything on YouTube search it automatically suggests some of most related topics around that particlur keyword:
The above feature is called Autocomplete.
You can also use tools like KeywordTool.io to get hundreds of autocomplete suggestions.
5. Dig into Your Competition
Take this one as an essence to the cake because it will boost up your keyword game!
While figuring out keywords for your YouTube videos, try to analyze your competition. This implies looking for your big competitors and figures out what sort of keywords are they using. Doing so will help you have a broader knowledge and idea for using the most appropriate keywords to reach out to the majority.
Additionally, it will also help you to steal your competitors audience attention. Moreover, by doing so, you will also come to know what your competitors are talking about these days so that you can also make your part in it.
After all, being successful is all about being on top of the big crowd of competitors. However, it is not so easy to reach that point. Hence, you must know what to do first to find it and secondly, to deal with it.
5.1 Competitor Most Popular Videos
To find the list of keywords which are doing great for your competitor just open his channel and check the most popular videos in his channel. This will surely help you to get tons of ideas for your next videos as well.
Steps to get the Most Popular videos of any channel:
- Open any YouTube channel
- Head over to the Videos section
- Sort by Most popular
6. Necessary Video Detailing & Lengthening
Always fill in the required detail in your description box of the video so that the viewer can have the maximum information. Though for this, you must keep the SEO criteria in mind and fill in the details with productive keywords that are relevant to both, Google Keywords and YouTube keywords
For this, search for some of the mainstream YouTubers and get an idea from their videos that how they give details below it. Generally, you must write the following things in the description box:
- Link to the social media platform
- Concise & Compelling video description
- Humble message for viewers with a catchy phrase or channel slogan
- Tags
- A thank you note for viewers
Concerning the length of the videos, so ideally your one video should be around 8 to 13 minutes.
According to the largest YouTube ranking factors study ever, Longer videos rank better in YouTube’s search results.
YouTube has publicly confirmed that a video’s total watch time is a key ranking signal.
Additionally, the platform reward vloggers for the time a viewer watches the video. So, alongside to lengthening the footage, also try to make it engaging throughout the time so that the viewer watches from start to end and not leave in the middle.
For the views by the viewers who leave the video before ending does not benefit the creator as much as a fully watched video does. Hence, it is best to avoid dumping information. You should give it pinch after pinch throughout the video but make sure while doing so; you must not stuff it with fillers. People who stuff their vlogs with excess fillers makes the boring. As a result, the viewer doesn’t leave the video halfway, but your channel also looe audience in the long term.
7. Interact with High-Value Users
To be successful on YouTube, you need to raise your followers and views.
For his, you can try to interact with high-value users whose presence may unintentionally benefit your vlog. For instance, try to make your video appear in front of them so that they may like or promote it if they want it.
Secondly, you can also leave a comment on their video with a link to your page so that their followers may drop some attention to your content as well. Moreover, you should always interact with all types of users positively. Since, you expect people to be positive and appreciative towards you, implement the same thing for yourself.
You can also use your community section to post about the upcoming updates or videos.
Never humiliate or degrade others’ content. Even if you don’t like it and wish better for them, point out their lackings in a humble way. This will strengthen your relationship with others in the surrounding, and as a result, they will also tend to react to your content positively.
Youtube is a platform where one cant have victory without being smart. Hence, no matter whether you are a beginner, an intermediate, or a pro, you must take wiser steps that are more likely to benefit your public relation in a positive way.
8. Social Media Support
Facing the fact that social media is one of the biggest developing platforms of the time, it can be a great source of one’s success. Promote your YouTube videos on other social media platforms on your accounts or make official pages for the purpose.
Generally, Twitter, Facebook, and Stumble Upon are productive platforms where one can post videos and bring traffic to YouTube.
By bringing your content to social media platforms, you can do multiple things at the same time. You can make official pages on these platform with the same name you are running your channel and ping people by yourself to gain attention. Similarly, you can suggest your page to as many as you want to bring awareness towards it.
You can upload promotional vlogs as well as compelling posts that are more likely to bring some attention. All of us have heard tremendous success stories pertaining specifically to social media, so why don’t we, ourselves take a step towards it.
After all, its where you can connect across seven rivers.
9. Spread the Content via a Website
We have already talked about promoting your video on social media to reach out to more audience, but there is something more worthy: HAVE YOUR WEBSITE!
Jump off the primary mainstream trend of haunting over Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and have your website where you can synchronize your YouTube videos and have a platform under your ownership. This will make you appear to be a successful name for the viewers, and they will unintentionally start valuing your channel.
Additionally, with your videos uploaded on your website, you may use them for rent and monthly subscriptions as well.
10. Be Consistent
Consistency is the ultimate key to any success.
May it be to become a big name in the vlog industry or passing the exam with distinction, consistency is what can help you travel from floor to high in the sky!
Concerning to YouTube success, you must be consistent with your timing and content. This implies for two things:
- Having a pre-set schedule to upload content on the YouTube channel so that your viewers may expect you to come up with new stuff at the right time. This will evoke curiosity in them and add value to your channel. In short, they will wait for your new content to be uploaded.
- Upload and create content within the same niche. For instance, if you are running a cooking channel in which you share tutorials with different recipes, uploading a review about the latest game in the market will not bake the cake. It will only disappoint your followers and de-value your channel.
David has complied a beautiful Summary on How to be consistent on YouTube:
Be consistent with your tone as well as viewers are used to it. Going further, background matters as well: stay consistent with the background as well.
For example, either make an indoor video or an outdoor one. Frequently, switching between the two will only affect the flow of your videos adversely. However, you may try something new once in a blue moon.
Want more? Check out this cool video by Sean on How to Be Consistent on YouTube:
11. Stay Updated Within the Niche/Topic
Always stay updated with whatever is happening within your focused industry. For this, search over the internet for the latest drama happening or the most relevant trend so that you can talk over as soon as you turn on the flash.
For this, you may also have a wander walk to your competitor’s channel to have an idea of what they are working on so that you may gain some information and give your viewpoints to the viewers. Showing off your viewers that you are updated with the latest in the industry helps them to prioritize you anyway.
For instance, if you are running a social chit chat vlog in which you talk about the latest happenings, you must make sure that you follow every news. Either specify your focus to only a few areas like sports and politics or else you are committed to taking over every single matter because your audience must be expecting from you.
Once you gain an audience’s confidence by being updated with the most recent news, they will unintentionally walk to your platform whenever anything new happens. Moreover, some people like a pinch of drama in everything, so besides bringing the factual information, try to make your content enjoyable by adding spice to it.
Last but not least, it is another fare tip to give a glimpse of your every next video before head to bring some curiosity within the viewers. This will unintentionally raise your content’s value within their eyes, and that’s something a YouTuber desperately needs to be a success of the field.
12. Study YouTube Analytics
YouTube allows you to see the analytics of your channel. This can tell you:
- How your channel is performing?
- What sort of audience is pinging in?
- Which video is performing better, and so on
Try getting into your analytics as much as possible to get a broader perspective of what you should do to get more success into your way.
Analytics even tell you why a specific content on your channel is performing better than others, so that you may work on something similar for better performance. Analytics gives real insight into your channel progress. They tell you everything like:
- How many people reached your video?
- How many liked it?
- How many watched the complete video?
- How many left the video in the middle?
- The geographical location of the audience?
- Age group of the viewers?
Analytics even helps you to compare the progress of your posts. You can easily find out which video is progressing and which is not.
To Get more insights with YouTube Analytics check out YCA.
13. Know Your Audience
Going further, it is essential to analyze your audience before head if you genuinely desire to gain success within the world of YouTube. Since the platform is all about gaining viewers attention and fulfilling their need of time, it is highly essential first to analyze the people who you are targeting for a better grip.
Knowing your audience means focusing on their level that may be a beginner to intermediate or even an expert.
Moreover, apart from finding out the class of the audience pertaining to their skill level, also figure out other aspects like age group, geographical location, area of interest, etc.
For example, if you are making vlogs targeting teenagers but in real, you prime audience belongs to the age of early 20s, after a while, you will fail to fulfill their expectations, and that will bring downtime to your youtube success. Hence, it is vital to understand your audience first.
For instance, if you are creating kids-oriented content, it is essential to make it attractive and visually appealing by using vibrant colors and pouring some creativity in it. Additionally, you must also make use of easy vocabulary to be understandable by the targeted audience.
Secondly, one must also focus on the frequently asked questions within the target audience regarding the topic to sound the most relevant to them via your content. You can easily find out these questions on google. Else, you can also take help from competitors by going through their content and the points they are covering.
14. Quality
Quality is NECESSARY.
Though YouTube, being the most extensive video platform, lies far away from a saturated state, It still demands top-notch quality.
By quality, I mean how the video looks to the viewer at first sight. One must invest efforts and time in videos to make them appear visually appealing.
For this, you must first have:
- A good vlogging camera with sufficient megapixels.
- You should have a good location.
- Alongside having a good location, you must make sure that if you are making a video right in front of a wall, it must be painted in white to bring the most attention to you only.
15. Attractive & Catchy Name
Having your own YouTube channel is more like having your TV channel with which you can reach millions of people out there. However, reaching a wider audience is not the only thing. What comes next is staying within their mind after the video ends. For this, you must start with an attractive name that sounds relevant to your niche and video content.
Youtubers are often skeptical about choosing the right name and why shouldn’t they be. After all, the name is what will remain in the mind of the viewer!
There are specific tips and techniques to come up with a brainstorming name.
First of all, you need to know that your channel’s name should be easy to pronounce and for that, you need to be clever and unique with your thoughts.
If you are out of ideas then you can use a username generator tool like BNG for the purpose, but trust me, its not the best option.
Hence, you must make your mind work to bring something incredibly exceptional on the plate. Moreover, You, As a YouTuber, must know that name should be a maximum of three words and a minimum of a single word.
People often stuff words, and that is the most foolish thing.
- Since your YouTube channel name is associated with the marketing of your content, you must make breakthrough their words that best describe your channel and find appealing synonyms of them.
- You can also go with your nickname.
- Additionally, consider the traits your channel will be following to add a pinch of it within the name. For example, if you are going to run a cooking channel, your channel will only be showcasing recipes. So, use a word relevant to it, like Food formula and much alike.
- Now try amalgamating the figured words and come one with a name restricted to three words only. Make sure that it is easy yo pronounce and remember.
- Don’t use vulgar words
- Don’t use common phrases: the name must grab some attention
- Don’t use symbols
16. Guest Appearance/Guest Posting
You may have heard about guest posting to drive traffic to your blogs, right?
Have you ever heard of doing the same for your vlogs?
Well, a guest appearance is one of the rising trends to drive traffic towards your channel. For this, pitch to some of the most prominent names within the niche and request them to allow you to have a guest appearance in some of their videos so that you may have an advantage of gaining attention from their viewers. This may unintentionally have progressed in your channel by increasing the followers.
You also make a guest appearance by running ads on YouTube before the video begins in which you can tell people what your channel is all about and how it can entertain them.
Moreover, apart from your guest appearance, you can also request some famous names to have it in your video. For example, you can ask a media face to have a guest appearance in your video so that people will consider your channel to be worthy. Additionally, it will benefit you by driving their fans to your platform.
However, it may cost you high, but that can be the most productive step towards success.
17. Blog Support
Moreover, one can also support his YouTube videos with a blog along with the video itself to gain benefits from both platforms. For this, you can run a blogging website simultaneously with your vlogs and write about your vlogs on that website. This will help you to reach out to people who are more into reading and less into watching videos.
Plus, it will give you the advantage to evoke interest into the ones who are reading your content. You can drop a link to your youtube video within the content so that people may reach to it with only one click.
Running both blogging and vlogging platform at the same time may be a big hassle, but it will make your content and you to appear as a professional in front of your audience.
However, you can even upload your vlogs on your blogging website alongside the blogs.
As you can see Neil Patel’s blog where he embeds his YouTube videos in his blog. This helps his videos to get more views through his blog which will obviously help him to rank better.
18. Advertisement
The advertisement also gives vloggers a cutting edge advantage to drive traffic.
For instance, the platform allows channels to post ads for publicity. The process costs $50 at a maximum per thousand views and tends to be a productive approach.
However, apart from YouTube, you can also advertise your YouTube videos on other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. all you have to do is to be creative and smart at the same time to be in the limelight. For this, try to be creative with your ads.
Try making promotional tutorials. Moreover, one can also go with blogging as well for the purpose. When we consider advertisement, there are several ways to do it, including guest posting. With the help of guest posting, you can drop your channel’s link in various articles. This will drive traffic for sure.
Additionally, one can post ads on reputable websites aswell. However, it is most trendy to most ads on youtube itself. They appear on the top right and gains the most attention.
Last but not least, you can also spam on famous YouTuber’s comment section by dropping your link in it. Almost half of the audience will open it within curiosity, and what if few of them like your content? You will gain audience right away!
Check out how you can advertise on YouTube.
19. Be Open
Since YouTube is all about gaining more and more subscribers, be open to asking your viewers to subscribe to your channel while watching even the first video on it.
Sometimes, they may forget due to some reasons, however, to avoid such an unfortunate, be specific in asking them to do so. Sometimes, people feel shy to ask others for a favor. However, in reality, there is nothing to feel shy about it. Success is not a piece of cake that you can have without any hassle.
The word success is a milestone covered with bare feet specifically YouTube success, it does not come easily. You have to do a lot of struggles to gain a fan following and for that you first need to lower down your ego and be open to asking people to lend you a hand by simply subscribing.
Youtube is all about people subscribing your channel and liking your content. The more subscribers you have, the more famous you will be. Additionally, the visibility of your videos is enhanced when you have more followers, and as a result, your channel comes in the notice of the majority.
Moreover, having more subscribers on YouTube is also a crucial thing if you are planning to earn bucks via this platform. Youtube has a specific criterion of paying a sufficient sum of money to the owner of the channel once he/she has gained a standard number of subscribers. Hence, you should never feel shy to ask people for it.
Ask them straight in your videos. Moreover, you can also share its link on other social media platforms and ask people for the same thing.
20. Ignore the Trolls
YouTube videos get a lot of comments, and all of them are not to be taken seriously.
Many trolls are only to provoke you to respond with unreasonable behavior to lower your image. Hence, one must avoid responding to trolls by simply ignoring them.
Here, we’re not talking about negative comments that are pointing out your lackings or telling their problem regarding your content that it failed to solve it. Else, here we are talking about the trolls who are just to spread bad words about you to lower down your success and demotivate you.
Trolls are everywhere! They are to pull you down as soon as you accelerate one step higher. Talking about Youtube, the platform is pretty saturated and full of competition. In such a case, one had to face a lot of difficulties to steal the limelight and be successful.
Youtube is basically where you can find stuff on every single thing, from smallest to the gigantic. Hence, no matter which topic you choose to talk on, you will find competition to fight. Additionally, the game always comes with haters trolling to demotivate you. Hence, before getting your hands over it, you should first be prepared to ignore such types of situations because pondering over them will do nothing except for demotivating you and pulling you down on the success stair.
21. Judge the Comments
Moreover, not all comments are from haters.
So, try to be open to your commenters and invest time reading their reviews and complains. This will give you a room for improvement by knowing how your audience feels about your content and is it fulfilling the requirements or not.
Naturally, we as human beings, are humble towards the ones that appreciate us and tries our level best to ignore the rest passing negative comments about us: this is where we fail because of our nature and lack success.
It is a rule of thumb always to stay patient while listening to people’s reviews regarding yourself now, whether the comments belong to yourself as a person or the work you do! This is because these comments are highly useful to you to progress further focusing your growth.
Keeping the positive reviews on the side as they always cheer and appreciate you, if you begin to respond to the negative reviews in the similar negative way, you will lose your chance to win the game by yourself.
This can be explained as, “YOU SHOULD ALWAYS FIND SOMETHING POSITIVE EVEN IN NEGATIVE FOR YOUR BENEFITS.”
To be a successful YouTuber, you should first stay calm and positive to everything happening in the surrounding. Your only focus should be to find the best in the worst because as a beginner, you only need to improve and improve!
22. Ask Viewers to Drop Reviews
Similar to asking your viewers to subscribe to your channel, you should also ask them to drop down their fare reviews regarding their experience with your video. This will appreciate them to be honest about the content that will somehow help you improve a lot.
This will tell you what viewers feel about your content. What are their inner feelings and other related stuff? You will be able to know whether your content is fulfilling your viewer’s expectations or not that will give you a big room for improvement, and you will end up with multiple benefits.
Additionally, asking your viewer’s review will also expose you to the audience, and you can quickly figure out what type of people are more into your content. For instance, you can find out the age group, the geographical location, and the class of the audience that will intentionally or unintentionally give you a big chance to improve and make your content more audience-specific.
It is often observed that YouTubers are offensive about people dropping negative reviews regarding their videos. However, it is not a sensible action to turn out aggressive whenever you find a viewer disliking your content — this one of the most significant advantages of working on your lackings.
Improving the areas where you lack will not only convert the negative reviews into positive, but it will also give your audience an idea that you care about their likes and dislikes. By the end of the day, you will end up in their GOOD BOOK.
Conclusion
Seemingly, YouTube is the biggest platform for content marketers that are doing wonders to our lives by being a rich source for both knowledge and earning. Almost the world use it.
The article gives one sufficient information to gain success with YouTube videos. However, this is not the end of the story. The topic has a lot to be revealed within a single post. This post holds the cream of what you one need to know for ultimate success.
Nice article. 🙂
Hi Tahir,
Great article on achieving success on YouTube, you really went into good detail.
P.s. I appreciate the mention. ????
Best regards,
David