How to Build Your Youtube Channel

We were recently approached by Ray Bayne through email who wanted help on how to grow his Youtube channel.

I thought since we are all about making the world a better place through psychology content, why not help others who are trying to do the same by teaching how to do what we do. And the best way to do that?

An article … or content that can reach multiple people at once. Instead of retyping an email to the same request over and over, why not create something you can share once.

Hopefully, you find this article helpful.

Step 1: Start by listing 10 or more channels who are doing what you are doing.

This is similar to market research in a business proposal. You have to know what and who you’re up against. What’s already out there and how you plan to do it as good or better than them. Ideally, you want to be someone who’s already consuming a lot of content out there from people like you, but you see a need or element that’s missing. Theo from Practical psychology talks about how he used to watch one of his favorite channels before he started his own.

By knowing your market and what you’re up against, you can have a realistic picture on how to appeal to your market. Also, it helps you set a bench mark you can go after.

So go ahead. Type all your favorite Youtubers. Subscribe to them. Watch few of their videos. Identify the limitations or missing elements, and start a draft.

Step 2: Consistency

After you know that a market exists for your content (in fact having competitions is great, because you know there’s a market there for it), you need to be consistent with your content. Here you might want to brainstorm a list of ideas related to your niche. In fact, copying all the top performing videos from your competitors, adding your own spin to it, would be the best way to go. Other people done the research, found out what’s popular, now you just have to use that public information to your advantage. It’s not cheating. It’s just how the world works. That’s why companies would pay millions just to acquire data.

Step 3. Quality

Copying is not enough. You need to be original. You can do this by:

Upping the quality of your competitors
Better animation.
Better camera
Better points made
More authentic
More heart
What ever that is, it has to have one thing that’s different or better than your existing competitors.

For us, over at Psych2Go, we were not the first to market. There are companies like Crashcourse who have a whole psychology series and Vsauce.

They are obviously, where they are, because their content quality is so high up there. But what helped psych2go forge a place were the following:

We’re community driven (meaning we give our audience a chance to make videos for us)
We’re animation based (meaning unlike our competitors, we offer a new format; the new format happens to be more pleasing to the eyes and younger folks, and are cute)
We’re psychology focused. (meaning we focused very narrowly on what we love and stand for; we believe psychology is the future)
Our core vision is entirely different. We aren’t doing this just for the money. If it was, we would have expanded into other niches and scale what we do to a larger demographic. But we believe that psychology is something that can truly help people change their lives. The founder himself also studied psychology and many of our current team, so we know the power of psych.

Find your competitive angle and go for it.

Step 4: Collaborate

Nothing sucks more than doing things by yourself. You need a community around what you do. This is essential for support and feedback. Like a chef, you need people to taste your food. So you can keep improving your craft. Without an audience, you can not get better at what you do. So collaborate, invite people to work with you, cross promote channels, and you’re on your way. Our friend over at PsychIrL does a great job collaborating with others to get her channel to where it is.

Step 5: Do not stop

Can’t stress this enough. When psych2go first started, we took 1 year to get traction. During this time, we invited a lot of different people to make videos for us, animation. Despite the lack of traction, it was a time we were experimenting. I believe we were already losing lots of money at this time, but we felt Youtube is a future for us. We wanted to reach more audience. And through Tumblr, we knew that was not enough. So we kept going. But the key is don’t stop.

Step 6: Get help

Again, like collaborations. It’s hard to do anything alone. You need to list out the challenges you have, and if you can afford it, pay people to consult you. For us, we invested a lot. We hired consultants. We partnered with broadbandTv to take advantage of this help. We paid to create videos for other channels. All in all, make sure to do what you can and ask for advice with the people you work with.