How to Grow Your YouTube Channel: 5 Tips That Actually Work
The only way to promote your music back in the days was only through big record companies. Now, it is easier because of platforms like YouTube, Spotify, and SoundCloud. YouTube has 122 million active users daily from all around the world. YouTube is a great asset in supporting an artist’s career with a huge user base and easy accessibility. It is an extraordinary platform for musicians to market their potential, keep their audience excited for their next songs, and a way to reach a new fan base. With everything the platform offers, you can grow big as a musician, with more streams and ticket sales.
As experts in the field, we can help you learn more about YouTube! In this DaimoonMedia article, we’re helping you to expand your knowledge on how to properly set your YouTube channel as a musician.
How To Create A Good Channel Description As A Musician?
Your channel description appears in both YouTube’s and Google’s search results, and it’s often your only chance to get the searcher to go through. For starters, it’s your technique of swiftly communicating the topic of your material. Your frequency of publication, video style, main issues you focus on, and even your (or your brand’s) personality may convert a casual visitor into a subscriber in seconds.
To create the best description, you should focus on storytelling. Think of it not as a list of accomplishments but as a story. Describe your career trajectory. Consider writing about what inspired you to create your first album, how many people you played shows for, and similar information that reveals how your career started and where it is going now. It might be your channel’s key selling point, but it can also be anything you choose. You can write a single sentence or an entire paragraph.
Keep it short. genuine and realize that you may modify it whenever you want. Moreover, you can further describe the style of your music and the content that you are going to publish music covers, behind-the-scenes content, or your songs. Along with video kinds, the upload schedule is one of the most effective techniques to keep your target viewers returning to your channel. Next, you should include call-to-action such as subscribing to your channel, buying your merch or purchasing tickets for your concert.
Define Your Target Audience
Without fans, you have no success. Using YouTube to promote yourself requires marketing strategies. The first step in marketing is to define who your audience is and their values and needs. When characterizing your audience, you need to be specific because you can reach many people. However, only people that resonate with the message behind your music will become your fans.
The big mistake most musicians make is that they think only about their fan’s tastes, styles, and habits. However, as a creative individual, you need to think more broadly than just about the music. You must get to know them as human beings. A helpful tool to define in general the characteristics of your audience will be to create a User Persona. Persona is a representation of behavioral, demographic, psychographic data, and goals of a group of users, ,in this case, your fans. By doing so, you can optimize your content to the value they are searching for.
Connect With Your Fans
Building a relationship with your fans is the next important step in building your channel and creating a community. There are a few ways you may engage with your fans, such as liking, responding, and pinning their comments. Those gestures can be seen as tiny but show that you value their opinion and care about your audience.
Upload Good Quality and Versatile Content
Like every other platform, YouTube is highly competitive. Therefore, you need to stand out, and the only way to do so is to ensure that your musical output is up to standard. If you are uploading and singing covers, they need to be on a high level, and you must stay updated with trends, developments, and new songs. If you cover songs, make sure they are still trending. Otherwise, your audience won’t be interested. Furthermore, by collaborating with musicians, you can cross-promote each other on the platform and expand your current fanbase. If you are curious why you should consider doing music collaboration, consider checking out our latest music collaboration article.
As a musician, you may use your YouTube channel only for releasing new music videos. However, there are different other ways to showcase your music. Focus on delivering value to viewers through your content. Another important factor that you should consider is to research what topics are people searching for. Furthermore, you should check if your thumbnails and titles are optimized to get the highest number of clicks. It can be entertaining but also educational.
For example, fans enjoy connecting with the artist itself and learning more about his life in the form of a vlog. To make your audience, even more, intrigued, you can also upload behind-the-scenes of your latest music video. In this way, you can build a real community around your music project. All of this additional content will add to the storytelling, which is crucial to raising music awareness and retaining fans.
Why Working with Tags and Hashtags Is Important?
YouTube is the second largest search engine, and like every other platform, YouTube works with an algorithm. Therefore, to make sure your YouTube video is pushed by the algorithm you must use keyword optimization for your videos. Moreover, that way YouTube can define your content’s topic and category, and link it to similar content which can increase your video’s reach.
So, you may ask yourself….
How can I make the algorithm work in my favor?
Firstly, create as your first tag, your focus keyword, and arrange the rest by significance. Next, use a mix of broad and focused tags that describe your video’s category in a broader aspect. On the other side, placing dozens of tags on your video is a mistake because YouTube will find it hard to understand what your video is about. There are many free tools that you can use for generating tags for your YouTube videos, such as TubeRanker and RapidTags. Remember, the end goal of using tags is to help YouTube’s algorithm to understand what your video is about.
Furthermore, hashtags are an essential component of every social media channel. They improve the searchability of videos and allow viewers to find trending content. YouTube hashtags help you create organic playlists of your content. Optimized hashtags make all related video uploads on social media more visible. Hashtags put terms and relevant topics together to make them easier to search for viewers.
To find relevant hashtags for your video, check competitors or trending videos related to the topics that you cover and then use their hashtags on your videos. You can even use YouTube Suggest, which is very helpful for finding trending themes and hashtags. You just need to insert “#” into the YouTube search, and YouTube shows the currently most popular. However, you should limit the use of hashtags to 3-4 per video. Moreover, you should pay attention and choose only hashtags closely relevant to the content of your video, otherwise, you may violate YouTube’s “misleading metadata” policy.
Verify Your YouTube channel
To have a verified channel means more than just additional attention. There are three benefits from being verified: access to detailed statistics and the opportunity to improve your channel SEO. Additionally, you can promote your product or tour just below the video. You may also use YouTube to increase the visibility of your other platforms! Every video you upload serves as a showcase for your music, and the description allows you to promote your other channels. You may upload teasers and urge users to follow you on Spotify, for example, to find all your tracks as soon as they are available to advertise a forthcoming release or clip.
BONUS TIP: Publishing Schedule
To keep your audience engaged you must create a consistent schedule for your content. That way you keep them curious about the videos that you are going to post at that specific time of the week. Furthermore, before you upload a new video, make sure that your fans know that it will be released soon. You can do that by sharing teasers or dropping hints before the release days. By doing so, you are consistently providing value and your audience will grow, which will also give you more opportunities to monetize your channel.
In short, you might have started reading this blog with a vague idea of how to optimize your YouTube channel and increase exposure. Through our article, we showed you the most important elements and steps to do so. Curious if you can use more help in growing your artist career? Make sure to read our next blog and follow us on our social media channels. Moreover, feel free to ask us questions on our Instagram (@daimoonmedia)!
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