How I Restarted My YouTube Channel's Growth
How an experimental mindset let me understand my audience.
🤩 Hey! I’m Alberto. With my newsletter I want to help you reach your full potential and live your ideal life with a content-based business. I’ve been doing this since 2010.
I talk about productivity, automation, strategy and mindset.
I launched my second YouTube channel in early 2019, and since then, I’ve consistently published at least one video every week—without ever taking a break.
By now, you’d think I’d have earned the 100,000-subscriber plaque, right? I certainly thought so.
But it never happened. I have just a tenth of that.
Mistakes were made, for sure.
However, I recently discovered the right strategy to breathe new life into my channel. I was almost resigned to a slow, inevitable decline. But now, everything is growing again: views, YouTube subscribers, email subscribers. Even clients!
Let me explain the mistakes I’ve made, the current strategy, and, most of all, the thought process behind it. This will help you analyze your content and come up with a winning strategy tailored to your needs.
The viral video delusion
As any savvy Youtuber, when I started, I turned to keyword research. SEO gives a powerful push to new channels that can’t count on an existing audience.
Unfortunately, search volumes in our niche are a fraction of what you see in the English language. The largest keyword is, unsurprisingly, “come guadagnare online” (”how to make money online”). It gets a whopping 8200 searches per month.
This keyword felt too generic and scammy, but I had to cover it. There are just a handful of other viable keywords with a similar volume.
We already snatched the first position on Google with a blog post on that topic. So I turned the article into two videos. The very first started getting lots of views, proportionally to the size of the channel.
Time to uncork the champagne! No: those views were useless.
People looking for “how to make money online” weren't our intended audience. We were looking for business builders, aspiring entrepreneurs, and ambitious freelancers. We got unskilled, lazy daydreamers.
Worse, that single top performer hid the failure of dozen other videos. I published tutorials about email marketing, content marketing, productivity, self-development for entrepreneurs, and more. 99% of them didn't even reach 1000 views, while the two videos about making money online were raking up more than 60000 views.
When they lost their ranking in the search results, our total views plummeted.
Too sophisticated
Generic, high-volume keywords didn't work. So, sometime in 2020, we flipped our approach and niched down.
Content creators and course creators were making fortunes in the English-speaking market. We had been creating content and courses for years, we had the expertise. We also saw many sites attracting more motivated subscribers by publishing more advanced content.
So I started publishing video tutorials only for people (professionals and employees) who wanted to scale their business through courses. We expected low views but higher earnings.
For the first part, we were right—most videos got less than 500 views over their entire lifetime. We exchanged calls and emails with potential clients who liked the topics and loved my relaxed style, distant from the alpha males overcrowding the business niche.
But we were utterly wrong about the second part: it wasn’t a high-spending audience. Even the business owners that contacted us wanted quick results, with almost no work and on a shoestring budgets.
Another failure. But it fortunately brought us to a better strategy.
Reading the signs
Luckily, YouTube analytics are a goldmine. By the end of 2022, we had about 330000 views. A depressing amount after almost four years, but enough to see patterns and trends.
Our most viewed videos of all time were all about useless keywords such as “making money online” and their variants. But I intentionally kept experimenting with topics and formats.
We had several dozens of videos with total views in the low thousands. They were all tutorials about software tools used by entrepreneurs and freelancers. Notion attracted the most interest. Enough to invest more into it.
The new strategy
So, I bit the bullet. Course creation wouldn’t make us wealthy. Ordinary software tutorials were more appreciated than tutorials on business skills and practices.
Also, other Italian Youtubers in our niche grew faster than us, thanks to exactly those kinds of tutorials. One of them is also a friend, so he gave me an insider's view of why and how this strategy works.
Finally, pivoting to this new topic shouldn't alienate our existing audience. They already showed they liked software tutorials. And the numbers on the other videos were so low I would be missing almost nothing.
So, I designed a simple content calendar to test the new topic:
one video per week,
one tutorial about Notion every two weeks,
on the other weeks, a tutorial on another tool.
I also committed to talking to a very beginner audience. My experience and the other creators showed me that our market is unsophisticated. I just sprinkled some advanced stuff here and there to let people know that there’s more if they need it.
It went well, better than any other experiment.
The results
We weren’t wrong about Notion. It immediately lifted the channel performance up.
The other tools didn’t disappoint as well, though not all of them. Riding the AI wave helped, too.
I published the first Notion tutorial after the pivot on December 15, 2022, then stayed faithful to my content strategy. Look at the monthly views:
I didn’t get viral, the niche is still small. But the monthly views doubled. Every other metric improved: watch time, comments, likes, and so on.
We also got far more email subscribers, offering them free Notion templates as lead magnets. And people started reaching out to ask for consultations about Notion.
The greatest news? This growth isn’t caused by a single jackpot video. It’s more like a rising tide. I also posted almost only evergreen tutorials. They will keep fueling the channel over time.
How does this help you?
Start publishing software tutorials on your channel, immediately!
Just joking.
The underlying universal lesson is:
keep publishing, despite the setbacks,
publish at least once per week, if it’s long-form content, more frequenly if it’s short (to maximize data collection),
experiment with different formats and topics, staying in your niche but exploring the boundaries,
look for the content with the highest views and engagement, email subscriptions conversion rate and possibly sales conversion rate,
post more of it for a while to see if it the important metrics keep growing.
How do you analyze your analytics? It’s part science, part art. To avoid the obviou mistakes:
consider a long time interval, at least 6 months,
know your averages,
consider aggregated data (for example, based on topic, format, or other features of your videos),
avoid putting together apples and oranges,
rule out the influence of external events or seasonality,
look for outliers, single videos with exceptional stats,
look for patterns, topics, and formats that repeatedly outperformed.
Read this article for a more in-depth system to gather data from your content and improve your strategy:
Let Your Content Tell You How To Grow Your Audience
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Great read, Alberto. I'm looking at potentially using some of my articles as scripts for YouTube (with some deeper insights). Advice like this is invaluable.
Thanks for sharing your experience and process, solid stuff.
I liked this: “staying in your niche but exploring the boundaries”