How I grew my YouTube channel from barely getting any views to 1.1K subscribers
💡 Initial idea for a youtube channel
When I started out I knew I wanted to make screencasts but I wasn't sure what would be the topic. I've decided to make my channel about AWS for developers who are more frontend oriented.
My idea was that because AWS might appear more complex and the docs are not very friendly, many developers choose to go to other platforms, which are easier to use but are more expensive, and these platforms are built on top of AWS anyway. I wanted to show that AWS could be easier than it looks.
🤦♂️ Fail: no views, no subscribers
After making a bunch of videos based on my channel idea, I was getting barely any views and subscribers. At first I thought maybe because it's a new channel and it will take time, but I started to realize that maybe I'm not presenting the videos in the right way.
🤔 How can I adjust?
I knew that if I want to get views, I need to appear in search results of queries that users are already looking for on google/youtube. I've decided on a new plan: try to find the intersection between what people are searching for and the topics that I'm interested making videos on, instead of trying to maintain a certain "channel topic".
So I went to stackoverflow and google, and started looking at the most popular questions about the technologies I was interested in: nodejs, typescript, lambda, react, etc
I've discovered that I could keep a lot of the video ideas I had, but present them as answers to commonly searched questions. Then, I would answer these questions in my own way and add extra value in the video about related points which I think are valuable, about the same topic.
For example:
- a video about lambda functions turned into "How to install npm modules on AWS lambda". For some reason, a lot of people ask about it. While I answered the question in the video, I also went into a lot of other details about lambda. It ended up being my most popular video, currently with 12k views.
- a video about a react animation library turned into "How to animate mount and unmount of a react component". Another highly popular question that I wouldn't have predicted. While I showed how to use the library for this specific use case, I also went into other details about it. It ended up being my second most popular video, currently with 8.6k views.
I've also mixed in some other topics which I personally was interested in and I've noticed that other people ask about, like lambda layers or deploying lambda functions using github actions.
📈 Growth
This method of targeting popular search queries for the video topics worked well. The number of views and subscribers started growing all of a sudden, and the rate increases with each released video.
With the growing number of viewers I can expand the topics more and more into other related topics which I think could be interesting. I've decided to abandon my initial idea for the channel, be more flexible with the topics, and instead see what works and then double down.
My mistake initially was that I spent too much time thinking about which topic my channel should be about, because it's just guess work. Instead, I should have first checked what are the popular questions people ask online and which questions I'm interested in answering in my videos.
🔮 Future plans
I plan to keep making videos and grow the channel further and then start making free tools for developers. It will create content for more videos and If any of these tools will get traction, I'll try to expand with paid features.
