For me, consistency helped in my early days, and with that level of consistency, I built a collection of around 180 videos. People say to focus on trends and such to "blow up" and while that is a good strategy short term... if the trend goes away, so will your views.
My strategy was more long term. I focused on making evergreen content that was always interesting in some level all throughout the year. People have always wanted to know how to draw dinosaurs... yes, Jurassic World made it more popular, but even when there was a 10 year gap between films, people still enjoyed drawing dinosaurs, so I focused on that.
I was "bad" in that I never focused on tags much, my titles and thumbnails and topics were what got people clicking. I think if my titles and tags were more compelling, I would have got more attention still, but never underestimate the importance of a thumbnail.
If your topic isn't trendy, and rather boring, and your thumbnail looks like it was an afterthought, people will treat your channel like it's a joke to not take seriously. Act professionally, treat your content like it's quality worth watching, and realise there's more to life than views and subs. Focus on delivering value instead of feeding your own ego. The videos I did for myself performed worse than videos people asked for. The differance with me is I know what to expect, and I don't get upset if things don't go my way. I mean yeah, if a video gets much lower views than normal, that's dissapointing, but I treat that as a learning lesson for what not to do next time.
And learn to make good thumbnails.