I’ve been on YouTube for over a decade. My first channel was a music channel I started in high school and ran as a hobby. Since starting Lavendaire in April 2014, I’ve created over 470 videos, amassing over 1.3M subscribers and 90M views. 
To be clear, I was definitely not an overnight success. It was a lot of trial and error for many years as I slowly built my following. But I believe in growing at a balanced pace and doing it right.
Don’t rush, but allow your small, consistent actions to compound over time to yield major results in the long run.
If you’re interested in growing your platform, I’m sharing my content strategy that helped me cross over the 1M subscriber mark on YouTube. 

1. Be Stubbornly Consistent

The #1 most important thing to know about growing on social media is to be stubbornly consistent. Pick a publishing schedule and stick to it!
One thing I learned from my failed music channel was that my lack of consistency made it hard to grow and scale. People won’t remember to come back if you haven’t posted for a couple of months.
When I started Lavendaire, I promised myself to post every Wednesday for an entire year, even if no one else was watching. I continued this schedule for the next three years before ramping up to 2 videos a week in 2017, which contributed to even more growth.
A tip for posting consistently: Kill the perfectionist in you.
I love the saying, "Done is better than perfect". Don’t overthink your content. Just create something and put it out there, so you can start getting feedback and use that to make an even better piece of content next.
As Elizabeth Gilbert wrote in Big Magic, “You must learn how to become a deeply disciplined half-ass.”

2. Serve Your Audience. It’s Not About You, It’s About Your Audience

Create your content with the intention of creating value for your audience, meaning your piece of content has to be helpful, useful, entertaining, or inspiring.
The most common mistake creators make is centering their content to be all about them. When you’re just starting out, people don’t care about you. They care about what they can gain by watching your video.
Give them value upfront. Once they become more loyal, then you can share more about yourself without your viewer clicking away. 
The key to growing your channel is to be constantly dialed into your audience and what they want to see. Spend time reading comments, asking questions, getting to know the lifestyle of your viewer and what she’s drawn to—research what other content they are watching on other channels.
Know your viewer deeply so you know exactly how you can serve her, giving her what she needs, when she needs it. This is exactly the process I used to expand my brand into creating sustainable notebooks and agendas. 
My people kept asking for a product like the Artist of Life Workbook, so I created it for them. 

3. Keep Testing & Learning

Every creator and brand are different, so there’s no cookie-cutter method that everyone should use to grow. Instead, you have to adopt a growth mindset and set out to test and learn.
With each piece of content you put out, you are testing for what works and what doesn’t. It’s trial and error. I like to call it “continuous learning.” 
Analyze why certain pieces of content do better than others. Once you create something that works, repeat that format, or consider turning it into a series. Cut out what doesn’t work. 
In the beginning, everything is a test, so create whatever inspires you and put it all out there. Then you will start learning.
By now, I know the formats that perform well for my channel (ex: lists, routines, self-care vlogs) so I will balance posting those tried & true formats with newer, experimental formats. Usually, those tests don’t do as well, but something will pop off once in a while, which gives me a new series that I can riff on.

4. Stay True to Your Brand

Growth is awesome. But please do not get caught up in the “grow at all costs” mentality. 
If you’re trying to create a brand that lasts, you must know who you are and who you want to be and stay true to that. 
You have to make sure that you’re growing in the right direction versus following the trends for faster growth. It’s good to hop on trends if they align with your brand. The danger of following trends is that you can start to grow in the wrong direction.
Back in 2016, minimalism was becoming a huge trend. I had read Marie Kondo’s book, started decluttering my life, and made some videos documenting my journey, which happened to do really well. People started to find me through those videos, and more and more people kept requesting more minimalism videos from me.
At a certain point, I had to be intentional about NOT making more minimalism videos because I wasn’t trying to be a channel about minimalism. My vision for Lavendaire was a channel about personal growth and lifestyle design, that empowers people to create their dream life. That can include minimalism if you want, but it doesn’t have to. I knew that my topic was less popular than other topics I could talk about (ex: minimalism or beauty hacks), but I stuck to my vision and chose to grow slower.

5. Refine Your Format to Optimize Engagement

This is where it gets nitty-gritty. If you really want to be an A+ content creator, you have to refine your format to optimize for audience engagement. Engagement means how captivated someone is while watching your video. It’s increasingly difficult in today’s era, where literally everyone is vying for your attention.
An example of something you would refine is: editing an amazing first 5 seconds of your video that hooks the viewer. For shorter form of content, you have 2 seconds or less to engage someone before they scroll away. 
I have an entire checklist that I refer to when planning a video that includes questions like: 
● Who is the audience for this video?
● What value does this video serve? What’s the main message?
● Is there an enticing intro? 
● How do I encourage the viewer to keep watching? 
● How do I encourage people to comment?
● How does this content make people watch more videos? 
● Would I honestly share this? 
Not every video is going to hit all the marks, but it’s good to have guidelines so you can do your best. 

6. Be Authentic & Vulnerable!

My final tip is to be authentic and vulnerable—give your viewers the truest you that you can, because not only is that how you create a genuine human connection, but people resonate with the real you so much more than the fabricated, filtered you.
My best videos and feedback have come from times where I shared parts of myself that I had been too afraid to share with anyone in my life. Parts of myself that I had been ashamed or embarrassed about, or simply too uncomfortable to share. These are the videos where I’ve had to edit out parts of me crying on camera or even leave those clips in.
The connection people feel when they see the real you, the true you—that is a feeling that will last so much longer than any pretty scene or polished production. People will always remember how you made them feel. 

WRITTEN BY

Aileen Xu