Have a YouTube channel for almost 4 years now. Thought of using it to earn some small income since I'm now retiring. Was hoping to see some natural growth in number of subscribers but it is pretty dismal and disheartening. Thought of giving up a few times already. Just started using TubeBuddy and trying to implement some of its recommendations for my older videos. If there is any experts who can see any shortcomings in my humble noob channel (foodtravelsg8), I highly appreciate it if you can share it with me and I will make changes to them. Thank-you very much in advance and have a nice day
OK, so I'll give you my thoughts on your questions but bare in mind, this is only my opinion. You're welcome to listen to it and accept some of the suggestions I might make but by no means take what I say as a professional statement. I can only advise based on my experience and the years I've been part of the TubeBuddy team and what I've learned from all the awesome YouTube pros I've watched. With that said:
Let me start by pointing to the first thing every content creator should do when starting a channel. You need to know who your
Ideal Audience is. An
Ideal Audience are the viewers you are making specific content for. In your case, as a food channel, you need to take into account what kind of food you're making (Asia cuisine, seafood specifically, vegan, etc), if you're making how to videos, reviewing restaurants you're eating in or even food challenges, what country you're audience is likely from ( The US, China, Australia, etc) and even if you're putting yourself in the videos, only your voice or just the video of the food with music in the background. All this will create a very specific audience that you can teach the YouTube algorithm target with your content. Once you figure out who your
Ideal Audience is you go to the next step.
Focus on making content. Forget subs, forget views. Right now, you're channel may be 4 years old, but I looked at your content and what I saw was 124 videos in 4 years with huge gaps between video dates. The YouTube algorithm, and viewers, likes consistency, like a TV show. If they don't get their weekly fix of their favorite TV show they notice. The same happens on YouTube. I'm not saying you have to be perfect and never miss a video but when they expect a video the same day or days every week viewers will notice. I recommend creating a schedule and sticking to it as best as you can. 1 video a week, every 2 weeks or even once a month. Just be consistent. But you'll also want to take into account that you'll want to, at least in the early stages of growth, to make as much content as you can. Most YouTube pros will suggest either 30 videos in 3 months (about 2 a week) or 100 videos in a year. The idea here is to let the YouTube algorithm get to know your content so it can analyze it and find the right audience for your content. The more content you make the more data for the algorithm to find the audience you're looking for. This is also the best time to work on your content. To improve your editing, the audio, your style and what ideas and angles work best for your videos. You can learn to read your analytics tab in your YouTube Studios so you can see what engages your audience more and change what doesn't.
It's understandable to consider giving up. Being a content creator can be frustrating. But this is the reality. Most new YouTubers give up quick because they expect instant results not realizing that being a content creator is not as easy as just recording some video, editing it, uploading and bam, you get views. The best advice someone once said was
"YouTube is a marathon, not a sprint". In essence, to succeed on YouTube you have to have a lot of patience, time, faith in yourself and the will to keep going no matter how bad it seems. If you can handle this and make good content, your channel should eventually grow.
I hope this helps.
