All right, so if you care about growing your YouTube channel, then hopefully this video will help.
We're gonna be talking about a step-by-step process that you can use to grow your channel from scratch.
And I'm gonna share the principles and the strategies that I would do, and also what I would not do, if I actually cared about growing a YouTube channel.
If you're new here, hello.
My name is Ali and I've been making YouTube videos on this channel since like 2017.
And in that time I've documented my journey from broke medical student to working full-time as a doctor, to then becoming an entrepreneur and then a best-selling author.
And, since 2020, I've also been running an online community called the Part Time YouTuber Academy where, since then, we have helped thousands of students start, grow and monetize their YouTube channels, with some pretty incredible success stories that you might recognize.
So if you would like to check out the Academy and get all the systems and processes that I've used to grow my own YouTube channel and join a thriving community of creators from all around the world and get one on one support and feedback from my team, then there'll be more details in the video description.
Okay, so here's the thing.
Growing a YouTube channel fundamentally comes down to three different things.
We've gotta get them to click, we wanna get them to watch, and we wanna get them to like you.
Them meaning your viewers.
Because your YouTube channel grows.
If you can get people to click, get them to watch and get them to like you, then they are likely to hit subscribe.
Actually growing subscribers, like getting people to hit the subscribe button.
That matters a lot less.
So if people like you, they are more likely to hit the subscribe button.
But, more importantly, they are more likely to become returning viewers who come back to your channel again and again, and they're more likely to then binge some of your content.
And all of that is a good thing that contributes to the growth of your YouTube channel in terms of views, or subscribers, or average view duration or whatever metric you want.
Now, there are two factors that are involved in getting people to click on our stuff.
And you are probably familiar with those.
That is the title of the video and the thumbnail of the video.
Now, this is not to say that in order to grow your YouTube channel, you have to start doing really clickbaity titles and really clickbaity thumbnails.
But it does mean that we have to keep in mind that it's not actually just about the video.
YouTube is not just a video platform, it is a click and watch platform.
You have to be relatively good at crafting titles and crafting thumbnails that are not click baity but that are intriguing enough for people to click.
Now, when it comes to getting them to watch, we need to craft a hook which is the first, like 30 to 60 seconds of the video.
And the video needs to provide a good amount of value.
So the hook, the first 30 seconds they click on the video, they click on a title and thumbnail like how to grow a YouTube channel or something.
And then in the hook, in the first 30 seconds you want to deliver on the expectation that your title and thumbnail has set.
So you might say something like in this video we're going to talk about how to grow a YouTube channel.
For example, right?
Like often, the hook is just repeating the title.
But in your hook you've got to give people a reason to keep on watching.
And for most YouTube channels, you will find in the retention curves that, like 30 to 50 of viewers are dropping off by the 30 second mark.
And if you think about your own viewing habits on YouTube, you probably don't watch all the way through every single video you click on.
You probably click on it.
You might like watch it for a little bit, see if it vibes with you, and if not, you'll click off of it.
You've got like the suggested videos tab on the side that you can constantly like be attracted to more things on, and it's quite rare for you.
I suspect that you actually watch a youtube video all the way through, but you're more likely to watch a video all the way through if you feel like the video is giving you value.
So this could be educational value.
You could be learning something.
It could be entertainment value.
You could be just be entertained.
It could be inspiration value.
You could be feeling inspired but, like either way, this is value that's causing you to invest your time, which is your single most valuable non-renewable resource.
You're investing your time in watching the stuff.
Therefore, when we're thinking about trying to grow our own YouTube channels, we want to be mindful of that.
We are asking our audience to pay.
They are not paying with their money, but they're paying with their time and attention.
And arguably their time and attention is even more valuable than their money.
So we wanna create a video or a series of videos or a content library that gives people a lot of value, so that they keep on watching.
Watch time is measured by something like average view duration, which you can see in like your YouTube analytics.
Clicks is measured by things like impressions and like click through rate percentage, which you can see in your YouTube analytics if you really want to.
And basically, the more average view duration we get for our content, the more YouTube realizes that like oh, this video is keeping people watching.
And this video is keeping people on the platform on YouTube itself.
And this is very good because essentially, the longer people are watching your stuff firstly, the more they are liking you because you're providing them with value, the more they get to know you as a person, which is fantastic for all of the relevant downstream effects of that.
But also the more the algorithm then realizes that oh, this video is keeping people on the platform.
This video is doing really well.
Therefore, we wanna push this video out to similar people who might also enjoy the video.
So we've gotta be pretty reasonable at crafting hooks and this is the hardest part.
We've gotta make sure we are able to provide value.
And then finally, we wanna get people to like us.
Now, the nice thing about this is that when you give value automatically, you're more likely to get people to like you.
So value actually is a thing that lets you double dip in terms of average view duration, and also, people are more likely to like you if you are giving them value.
But that's not the only factor that makes people like you.
Another key factor to, make people like you, is personality and vibes.
Now, obviously this is very subjective.
To be honest, value is also very subjective, but there are certain channels that you watch where you vibe with the personality of the creator who's created the channel.
This is also why faceless channels have a harder time of growing than channels that show their faces or face full channels, because it's very difficult to channel personality and vibes through a faceless channel.
Look at a channel like Kurzgesagt, for example.
They're a faceless channel, but they do a really good job of channeling personality and vibes.
Even though it's a faceless channel.
But they have a freaking enormous team of 50 plus animators working for them full-time to craft these videos.
It's a massive operation and it's really really, really hard to do something like that, especially if you are a solo creator or even if you have a small team.
So this is why in general, I recommend against faceless channels.
I know that people are like, oh my God, I don't want to show my face.
I just want to make money without doing any work and without showing my face.
It's just really, really, really hard to do that.
YouTube is a platform where fundamentally, it's about the connection that your audience has with you, the creator.
And so if you want to grow your channel, it's worth figuring out like What is the kind of personality and vibes that makes you unique, that makes you kind of stand out, that makes you your authentic self?
And then, how can we bring that authentic self into our content so that, you know, not everyone is gonna like us, but so that the people who are most like us and that vibe with our unique personality, are gonna be more likely to like us?
All right.
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So thank you so much ManyChat for sponsoring the video and let's get back to it.
So this is a little bit of a sort of high level overview of what's actually going on and what it takes to grow a YouTube channel.
And if you imagine like this whole thing, if we think of like get them to click, get them to watch, get them to like you, if we imagine all of this like packaged up into like a single package, this is what we would get as a single video and say this is the video that you make.
It's a video that's gotten people to click.
It's a video that's gotten people to watch.
And it's a video that has gotten some percentage of the people that clicked and watched on the video to start liking you as a person.
This is one video.
Unfortunately, if it were just that easy, everyone would be successful on YouTube.
It is not that easy because we need to, We need to make lots and lots and lots of these videos.
So one of the biggest factors that contributes to the growth of a YouTube channel is consistency, but not consistency in the sense that there's any magical like once a week, twice a week, once a month.
There's no like magical level of consistency that causes the algorithm to start promoting your channel.
It's just that the more videos you make, the more likely it is that people are gonna discover your content.
Like let's say there was a channel that only had four videos on it, right?
Because, like you got started, you maybe made a video, you maybe thought about it for six months and then you made a video and then you put it out there and you realized it's hard and then maybe eight months later you decide I'm gonna try YouTube again and you make video number two and then, maybe a year later, you make video number three and then maybe two years later, you make video number four.
It's not that there's anything inherently bad about the fact that you've not been consistent on YouTube, but you only have four videos on your channel.
And each video, we can kind of think of each video as a little bit of a lottery ticket.
That's one analogy that I like to think of, which is that you know, every time we make a video, we are playing the lottery.
We're like stacking the deck in our favor a little bit by doing sensible things, like you know decent title, decent thumbnail, decent hook, decent value, et cetera, et cetera.
But really every video is a lottery ticket and you never know which of the videos is gonna suddenly take off, because this thing around, This thing around in particular value and also personality and vibes, is kind of subjective, right.
Like, I can make a video and I can think I've added a lot of value in that content.
But you know I'm not the judge of that.
The audience is the judge of that.
Similarly, I could make a video where I'm like oh, it's super basic, obvious stuff, that like ah, but maybe something about that video either the way I've delivered it or what I've specifically delivered really resonates with people.
And so that video might just take off.
And this is very difficult to predict.
I know a lot of very big, very famous YouTubers.
I know a lot of their teams and they spend tons and tons of money growing their YouTube channels.
And even then it is still very, very difficult to predict what will do well.
There are certainly things you can do to increase your chances.
For example, if you pick a video concept or a title that has done well on someone else's channel, you can kind of do your own version of that.
We call this viral replication.
You are replicating an existing viral video.
And so you're more likely to win the lottery as it were with that particular lottery ticket.
But the fact remains that if you only have four videos on your channel, you've only played four lottery tickets.
Or another metaphor I like is that you've only planted four seeds.
If however, you have made 400 videos on your YouTube channel over the period of like two or three or four or five years and you just keep on going, Now you have hundreds of seeds that you've planted.
You've got hundreds of lottery tickets that you've played.
And chances are at least one of those is gonna hit.
And what happens when one video starts to sort of get traction, is that more and more people will discover your channel.
And if they like that one video, they are gonna be more likely to be like oh, that's a really cool video.
I've never come across that creator before.
Let me click on their channel and see what else they've got.
And then they'll start seeing maybe you've got all this other content, this other like back catalog of like dozens of videos or hundreds of videos that you've made.
And now your channel becomes a bingeable asset.
A lot of people have binge habits when it comes to YouTube videos.
Like if you see a video and you really vibe with it, you might click the end screen and click on the next one.
You might check out the creator's channel and watch some more.
The fact that YouTube knows that you've now given a particular creator a lot of watch time.
That means YouTube is going to be more likely to suggest that creator's content on your homepage and in your suggested videos.
And so what you get is this sort of virtuous cycle where, if you, as the viewer, watch a lot of a particular creator, you will start to see more of their stuff, because that's how the algorithm works.
And therefore, if you, as the creator, are thinking about how to grow on YouTube, we want to think about how can we create a bingeable content library so that One year from now, two years from now, three years from now, when someone discovers that one video or that one or that one or that one, that person is more likely to then vibe with the rest of our channel and is gonna be more likely to binge our stuff.
And this is how YouTubers with a back catalog can, for example, keep on getting millions of views for years after the video has been published.
Because they've got this long tail of views that people are discovering the channel subscribing, watching stuff and you get this virtuous loop.
So that is why quantity matters on YouTube.
It's less about a magical level of consistency.
It's more about the fact that firstly, being consistent helps you build the habits and build the systems for creating more videos.
Secondly, being consistent and making lots of videos helps you actually get better at the craft of making videos.
So you get better at getting people to click.
You get better at getting them to watch.
You get better at like allowing your authentic personality to shine through because, chances are, if it's your first time and you've only made a few videos, you're probably not very good on camera.
But once you've made hundreds of videos, you become better on camera.
You become better at channeling your personality.
You get better at getting people to like you.
And so all of these things happen as a result of just making a lot of content, which is why I make the point that like yes, it's about getting them to click watch and getting them to like you.
But it is also about doing this lots and lots and lots of time.
Oh, by the way, if you're watching this before Black Friday 2025, we have a special mega discount available on the YouTuber Academy.
So there'll be a link in the video description if you wanna check it out.
But now we come to the thorniest part of the video, which is We've got.
We understand that, like these are the factors that make for a good video.
These are the factors that lead people to check out our channel.
You wanna make lots of these videos, but there is also a science and an art to choosing the right videos to make.
Now, if you imagine a YouTube channel where the first video is a video about cooking and the next video is a video about knitting, and the third video is a video about like a mechanical keyboard and the fourth video is a video about like the importance of hydration,
And the fifth video is a video about like what they learned growing a YouTube channel.
And the sixth video is a review of Ali Abdaal's New York Times bestseller, Feel Good Productivity.
Like that is a channel that's trying to do a lot of stuff, right?
There's a lot of things going on on this channel.
Now, the way the algorithm works is that it shows you a video to a few people and it sees how is that video performing with the small amount of people that it shows it to?
It's looking at click-through rate.
It's looking at like how many people click on it.
It's looking at average view duration, how many people are watching.
They now have these like little surveys that you might've seen, where it asks you how satisfied were you with the video.
So they're sort of measuring viewer satisfaction.
And I attended a talk by YouTube themselves where the guy who runs the YouTube algorithm was talking about this.
And there are somewhere between 50 and 100 different factors that the YouTube algorithm is looking at to basically get a sense of like who is vibing with this video and what is good content for that particular person.
So what happens is, let's say, a particular person, let's say this is person, A person A really vibes with your video about cooking.
What the algorithm is then gonna do is gonna be like okay, you know, person A is really vibing with this video about cooking.
Let's find other people that are similar to person A and let's promote this video about cooking to those other people.
And so like if someone's vibing with your stuff, then the algorithm's job, what it's trying to do, is match other people who have similar viewing habits to that person to also, you know, promote that video.
But now imagine that your next video is about knitting.
It is unlikely that the person who vibed with your video about cooking also vibes with your video about knitting, unless they just really fricking love your personality, which is just kind of unlikely.
It's quite hard to have such a winning personality that people will just watch anything you put out.
You generally have to be pretty lucky or pretty charismatic.
And even then like, unless you're like a really really really famous celebrity, it's just really really really hard to just get people to watch literally whatever you put out.
Vanishingly unlikely.
So if that second video that you do is about knitting, Okay, a bit of reorganization.
So yeah, person A watches your video about cooking and then the next video you make is about knitting.
It is unlikely that person A is also gonna watch your video about knitting.
So then that confuses the algorithm, because it's like okay well, we showed this video to this person, but he didn't really vibe with it.
He didn't click on it, didn't watch it, didn't like, oh, okay, cool.
So now it's sort of like okay well, do we find other people who enjoy knitting?
Let's say, this is person B who enjoys knitting.
And we're like all right, let's show the video to person number B and person B vibes with your video about knitting.
So it shows it to a couple more people who are interested in knitting.
But the problem we have is that when you do some content about cooking, some content about knitting, some content about books, some content about tech, some content about like I don't know your dog.
It's very, very difficult for your channel, as a asset, to become bingeable and to become like a thing that grows.
Yes, you might get individual views on your cooking video or on your knitting video, but you won't really be growing your channel because the audiences are quite different.
And this is where the idea of, And my hot take is gonna be.
It's not that much of a hot take, but it's like if you want to grow your YouTube channel, you need to find a niche.
Now a niche I define as a target and a value.
A target audience and a value proposition.
So, for example, with my channel back in 2017, my original niche was I help medical applicants in the UK get into medical school in the UK.
And in particular, it wasn't even that.
It was like I help medical applicants in the UK get into Oxford Cambridge, Imperial or UCL medical schools.
There's like four of them.
It's like so specific and so niche, but I was providing a lot of value to a very specific target audience.
And therefore the YouTube algorithm did a good job of surfacing my videos to other people who were in that target market.
There were only a few tens of thousands of people in that target market, but I would venture that, like back in the day, almost all of them would have seen my YouTube videos because they were so targeted and they were so valuable to just a specific set of audience.
I'm never going to get famous doing that, but it's a very good place to start.
Sort of like Amazon.
Amazon started out selling books.
Now, two decades later, Amazon is the everything store and they sell absolutely everything.
But it's very difficult to get started out in any kind of business or with any kind of YouTube channel by trying to do everything.
I know you have interest in everything.
You're interested in productivity.
You're interested in personal development.
You're interested in finance.
Maybe you want to start a business.
You've got some skills in your career.
You've got a few hobbies.
Maybe you play some music.
Maybe you have kids.
Of course you want to be able to talk about all of those things and showcase your personality and like, bring it all into your content because you want to talk about the stuff that you are interested in.
Unfortunately, when we are trying to serve our own interests rather than what other people want, it's very difficult to grow.
Some people do it, but it's just unlikely.
Similarly, if you're trying to start a business based on what you want to do rather than what the market wants or what your customers want, it's very difficult to grow a business that way.
And so this is where we kind of get into a bit of a crossroads, where a video like this it's sort of like do you want to do YouTube as a hobby or do you want to do YouTube as a business?
And you're not allowed to say both, right?
Because these are like, it's kind of like a spectrum from hobby to business.
And it's sort of like a seesaw that, like you know, hobbies are things that you do for yourself, right.
They're things that you do because you wanna have fun.
Whereas a business is a thing that adds value to other people.
And ideally you make money and you get growth.
Now we have a problem if, for example, your current approach to YouTube is treating it like a hobby.
Ie
I'm just gonna make videos about whatever I want, whenever I want, about stuff that interests me.
That's totally fine.
But if you then have an expectation of growth, your goal is like a business goal, ie growth and maybe money and maybe financial freedom and maybe all that kind of stuff.
But your approach is a hobbyist approach.
And this where we have a gap between the goal and the path and the plan that we're following.
This gap is where misery is contained, because now, like you want something and you are not working towards the thing that you want, right.
Now, if you're doing it as a hobby and your metric for your hobby is having fun.
Now this is amazing because hobby and fun is aligned.
You know, I play the guitar as a hobby.
I'm not particularly good at the guitar.
I'm slowly improving my skills over time.
I don't practice very consistently.
I don't have a teacher.
I've taken a couple of online courses, whatevs.
I'm not trying to make money from the guitar.
If I started a YouTube channel and I did try it back in the day, starting a music YouTube channel and I suck at music and I have the goal of growth it's just it's, you know, it's not going to work.
Whereas if it's a hobby and I have the goal of fun, then yeah, things are going to work.
You know, this is fine.
We are in alignment.
I'm all about being in alignment.
So if you care about treating YouTube like a business, then I think you have to have a niche.
You have to have a particular target and a particular value proposition, because this is where, this is where the laws of supply and demand come in.
Okay, so imagine a world where there is only one YouTuber that talks about how to lose weight.
There are a billion people in the world that want to lose weight, but there's only one person talking about it.
If that person made a video titled how to lose weight, loads of people would click on it.
If that person was providing value on how to lose weight, loads of people would watch it.
And if that person was providing value, a good chunk of them would start liking the person because like, this is literally the only person in the world who's giving them really good advice on how to lose weight.
How many youtubers are there do you think that give advice on how to lose weight, or in fitness or in health or that kind of stuff?
There's way more than one.
There is a massive number of YouTubers that are doing fitness or health related stuff.
Therefore, we get into this thing of supply and demand.
There is a lot of supply of fitness related content.
There is still a lot of demand for it, but there's a ton of supply.
And so if you're a beginner and you're trying to make generic fitness videos about how to lose weight or about how to get abs or something, it will be harder for you to stand out.
You'll have to work harder to get them to click.
You will have to work harder to get them to watch and you'll have to be particularly authentic or personality-wise, unique or whatever to get them to like you.
I'm sure you can get people to like you.
That's not really the hard, hard part.
The hard part in a very saturated niche is getting them to click and getting them to watch.
And so in that context, we'd wanna be even more niche.
We don't just wanna be a generic lose weight channel, but let's say you're a channel that helps entrepreneurs get more fit, that your target value is entrepreneurs.
Your value proposition is fitness.
That is someone like my friend, Dan Goh.
Dan and I connected over Twitter because he does sort of fitness tips for entrepreneurs, and then he was my coach for a while and then I helped him out with some YouTube stuff.
And his channel is blowing up because he knows that he is targeting entrepreneurs who want fitness.
He's not trying to target everyone who wants fitness because that's really hard to compete in.
And he's not trying to help entrepreneurs with anything at all, right?
His target audience is defined, ie specifically entrepreneurs and executives, and like rich people and his value proposition and broadly he goes after men rather than women and his value proposition is I help you get more fit.
And so that's his initial in into the market.
And then over time he starts to expand out with like life advice videos and like hey, I'm in my 40s.
You should do this if you're in your 20s or your 30s.
A lot of it is fitness advice.
He's jacked.
He's got a family.
He's a good looking dude.
Like he's got a bunch of different unfair advantages he's tacked up.
But fundamentally, he is niched down rather than general fitness.
He's niched down into fitness for entrepreneurial men.
And that is a very good thing.
If you are trying to now get started with fitness for entrepreneurial men, I would say that even that is now still too broad.
Very hard to succeed in that market because now a lot of people are doing it.
And so you have to work harder to stand out, to get them to click, get them to watch and get them to like you.
And this is where the laws of supply and demand come in.
And this is the crucial thing you have to understand if you want to grow a YouTube channel that you are at the mercy of the laws of supply and demand, depending on what your niche is.
If your niche is I help anyone with anything and you're just trying to go broad, your YouTube channel will basically never grow.
There is a sad story that I saw the other day.
It was actually one of our students in our part-time YouTuber academy.
I'm not gonna name names, but she came to one of our events and she asked me a question at the end, because I do talk and then I do like a QA.
And she asked if I had any tips for growing her YouTube channel.
And I looked at her channel and I was like, okay, what's your channel about?
And she was like, oh, you know, I make lifestyle content.
It was like vlogs about her life.
She lives in London, so it was like literally vlogs about her life in London, like lifestyle content.
I was like, okay, who's your target audience?
And she was like, oh, you know, it's kind of just anyone, you know.
I was like, okay.
And what value do you think your channel adds to people?
And she was like, well, you know, it's lifestyle.
So, you know, I show you what living in London is like.
I was like, okay, fair enough.
And then I brought up her channel and she had like 300 videos that she'd made over two years or three years, something like that.
And she had 700 subscribers and the videos were getting like a hundred views each.
Now in that context, what I said to her, I was like, look, I asked her, what's your goal?
I was hoping she'd say, I'm doing it for fun.
And I was like, okay, please, please, please say that you're doing it for fun.
But what she said was, I really want to make a million dollars from YouTube.
And I was like, ah, okay.
So you've made 300 videos.
You've got 700 subscribers.
You're not even monetized yet because you haven't got the appropriate watch hours.
And you've been doing it for three years and your content is lifestyle generic vlogs for people who care about life in London.
Oh, and your goal is to become a millionaire.
Oh my God.
And so I was thinking, do I tell her?
Do I tell her that this is just not working?
Or do I try and be like, yeah, just stay consistent.
You got this girl, like fucking go for it.
You never know one of these.
Maybe your 400th video might take off and suddenly you'll become a millionaire.
Like, and I was like, hey, you know, these people buy my stuff.
They come to my events to get like the raw unfiltered advice.
And, you know, it is colored by my own experience.
So like, it's not gospel truth.
But as someone who has seen lots and lots of successful YouTubers and lots of unsuccessful YouTubers, this girl falls into the category of.
This is just not working.
Like when you've made 300 videos and you only have 700 subscribers.
That is a sign that the market is telling you that they do not want what you are offering.
And I think the reason for that was she did not have a niche or actually, no, she did.
The niche was like lifestyle girl content, living in London but it's so saturated and it's so hard to stand out in that space.
So, so, so hard because the laws of supply and demand are not in your favor.
Everyone who's like a young girl living in London dreams about becoming an influencer where she does lifestyle content.
About living in London.
It's like, there's so many of them.
And relative to the demand for that content, there's not that much demand for that content anymore.
Maybe back in the day when like, no one knew what living in London was like, or like it was novel to be living in I don't know, like a particular city.
And people are like, oh my God, I really wonder what living in London is like.
Then maybe the laws of supply and demand are in favor of the creator.
But like, it's just not anymore.
And so this was kind of heartbreaking to me.
Because I was like, oh, she's put all this work into doing YouTube and she's been so consistent.
She's just gone after the wrong niche.
She doesn't realize that...
People don't give a shit about her.
They care about the value they get from the channel.
And if your channel is not adding value to people, it's gonna be so, so, so hard to stand up.
So this is why if you wanna grow a YouTube channel, you gotta find a particular niche.
Now we have a bunch of students in our YouTuber Academy that have been successful.
And basically all of them have found a niche and they have stuck to it for a long enough time to get growth within a specific niche.
And then over time, maybe they expand.
For example, one of our success stories is a guy called Azul, Azul Wells.
He's like an older dude.
He does like financial planning advice for like old people.
And if you look at Azul's channel, Azul's channel is very basic.
He doesn't put that much effort into his titles and thumbnails.
They're like super basic.
He just sort of screenshots from the video and all that kind of stuff.
He doesn't really put much effort into his hook because he just starts talking.
He's got pretty reasonable personality and vibes.
Like a lot of people like vibe with his personality.
It's quite like outgoing and he's a very nice guy, but his videos provide a lot of value.
And specifically they provide a lot of value to his specific niche, which is like old people.
And the value is I help you retire early.
So in that niche of like helping old people retire early, There's actually not that much supply of content on YouTube.
The 19 year old bros who are trying to make money on the internet.
They're not targeting 55 year olds and teaching them how to retire slightly earlier.
But Azul is targeting 55 year olds and teaching them how to retire slightly earlier.
Therefore, Azul has found a niche where his expertise and his value resonates, with a particular target market where there's not that much competition.
And that is crucial, because the fact that there's not that much competition means you don't have to think too hard about your title.
You don't have to worry about making all these like fancy thumbnails.
You don't have to script your hooks word for word.
You don't have to think about retention editing.
You don't have to think about how you can stack so much value.
And as long as your personality is reasonable, you don't have to start doing insane things to get attention.
Like, I don't know, Logan Paul or Mr. Beast or whatever.
Like you can just straight up say helpful things, provide value, film the videos on your phone, not do any editing, and it still works.
And he's got hundreds of thousands of subscribers and making tons of money from it, because he's providing a very specific value to a very specific person.
And there are lots of those people on YouTube who are underserved.
That is an example of a very, very good niche.
Or, for example, we have Kepi and Ben, who have a channel called How to Write Songs that currently has 170000 subscribers.
They're also students of our YouTuber Academy and they have targeted the niche of helping people who wanna write songs get better at writing songs.
Again, in that niche, there's not a huge, huge, huge amount of competition.
There's still a little bit.
There's more competition than Azul has, for example.
And so if you look at their channel, for example, their titles are pretty good.
The thumbnails are pretty good.
The production value on the videos is very good.
They're providing a lot of value.
They've got hooks.
They've got personality and vibes in spades.
But it's not like they're trying to do generic fitness content.
They're not even trying to do generic music content because that would be too broad.
They're not trying to do productivity.
They're not trying to do personal development.
All of their videos are basically focused on helping aspiring songwriters and existing songwriters write better songs.
That is a very good niche to be in.
They're also able to sell a course off the back of it and make a bunch of money and all that kind of stuff.
Because that's the other thing.
When you have a specific educational niche where you're helping a specific target audience ideally, who has some amount of money with some kind of value proposition that they care about, you can probably sell them some kind of product further down the line, whether it's a course or a coaching program or a book or whatever the thing might be.
Whereas it's very difficult for people without a niche or people with a very broad niche.
It's very difficult for those people to make money because it's very hard for them to actually sell a sensible product to their audience.
The way they tend to make money is monetizing through brand deals and influencer partnerships and stuff.
Which I mean I know a lot of people in that space and mostly they're having a less good time of it because they're constantly chasing views.
They're on the views hamster wheel.
They're having to constantly sell stuff to their audience that they don't really care about.
And the only thing they can really sell of their own is like merch, that kind of thing.
And unless you're expecting to be like you know celebrity levels like Logan Paul and KSI and have your own like drink or something like that, it's just vanishingly unlikely that you watching this will get successful or get to the financial freedom that you want through a YouTube channel without having a sensible niche.
And I've seen some people on YouTube saying that like, oh, you don't need a niche.
You are the niche because like people are there for you.
And like yes, eventually they will be there for you and they will start to like you and they will start to then be more likely to watch your stuff.
But fundamentally people are selfish and only really care about themselves.
They actually do not care about you.
This is the thing we need to get into our minds.
And I've noticed this like firsthand.
For example, you know, I have a very big channel.
I've been providing useful videos on the internet for the last like eight years.
And every now and then we'll release a vlog on my YouTube channel And that vlog will get basically no views in comparison to educational videos.
Because people fundamentally don't really care about me.
Maybe there's like I don't know 20000, 50000 people in the audience, out of like 8 million total followers, who actually would watch one of my vlogs.
But for the most part, they don't really care.
They care about what they're gonna get from it.
What value can I provide?
And so the videos that do the best are the ones where we are providing lots and lots of tangible value to a specific target audience.
So, when it comes to thinking about how to grow your YouTube channel, If you care about growth, you don't have to care about growth.
You can totally care about fun.
But if you do care about growth, I would really recommend you really sit down and figure out who is your niche.
Who is the target audience?
What is the value proposition?
Why should people actually care to watch your videos?
And the difficult thing about this advice is that if you haven't yet gotten started with your YouTube channel, you will listen to that and you'll think, and you'll continue overthinking.
You'll continue not taking action.
And so with all this niche stuff, There's so much nuance to it.
There's so many factors that go into choosing a niche, as to whether it's likely to be successful or not.
There are loads of different exercises that you can do to figure out your target audience, figure out your value proposition.
And when you're picking your niche, just have a better chance of succeeding in that particular niche.
If you're interested, this is a lot of the stuff that we cover in the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, which is my flagship course that I've been running for the last like five years now.
We've had thousands and thousands of students go through it, including a bunch of successful case studies and stories of YouTubers that you will probably recognize.
That took our course and it taught them very sensible things.
And they have now grown their YouTube channels to hundreds of thousands, if not sometimes millions, of subscribers.
A lot of them are making really good money.
There's links down below in the video description if you want to check it out.
And if you've gotten to the end of this video and you're still worrying about your niche and you haven't yet gotten started with YouTube, then my advice would be slightly different, because you don't want to be overthinking your niche.
And actually you can check that video over here, which is advice specifically for beginners to YouTube.
So thank you so much for watching and I will see you there.
Bye-bye.
