How To ACTUALLY Get Views As A New Channel

You just started your new YouTube channel and you’ve got your eye on a Silver Play Button

That’s great but there’s only one small catch…

How the hell do you start getting views on your newly created channel?

I mean, you don’t have an audience yet so who is going to watch?

It’s this common beginner mystery that results in my inbox receiving tens of DMs per day asking:

“How do I promote my new channel?”

One common approach I see a lot of new creators take is trying to direct external attention to their videos

They post their videos on Facebook, Reddit or run Google ads against their videos

While this can provide some traffic to your videos, it’s not the recommended path to channel growth

Why? There are 5 reasons you want to avoid promoting your content externally:

1. View Quality

When you post your videos to non-YouTube platforms, who do you think is watching?

Do you think it’s someone with a keen interest in the topic of your video or someone who is flipping through pages on Reddit trying to kill time before having to report back to work?

Chances are it’s the latter and this is not good news for your video (and channel).

When you place your video in a situation where you are hoping to garner external views

You are essentially promoting your video to a cold audience and often this leads to extremely low average view percentages and watch time on the video

In short, you’re harming the videos performance in exchange for slightly more traffic

2. Impression Quality

Meet Paul. Paul is a massive soccer fan and always has a match playing on the TV in his bedroom.

Paul’s Mom is concerned that Paul’s not reading as much as he should and presents him with two books.

The first is the biography of Lionel Messi. The latter is an Oprah Winfrey cookbook.

Which do you think Paul will choose to read?

Duh…the Messi biography. He has zero interest in cooking!

This is how external promotion of your videos work.

You are promoting your videos to people who really don’t have an interest in them.

When they see the video and an impression is garnered, without a click, your clickthrough rate drops, harming the performance of the video.

3. Audience Quality

Keeping with the soccer example, let’s say you wanted to build a team.

To build the team you have two choices.

The first is to find 10 people off the street and build your team around them.

The second is to go to the best soccer clubs around the city and hand pick each of your 10 players.

Which approach do you think would allow you to build the best team?

The latter of course!

Picking up random people obviously won’t lead to the best team and nor will it lead to the best channel if you promote externally.

All you are doing is running up a subcriber count but the chances those who do subscribe turn into fans is low.

Damn, I am really on a nice roll with these soccer analogies :)

4. YouTube Data

Now that you have your soccer team together you need to get them to train

You have two choices: run practices yourself or hire a trainer while you sit on the sidelines

Both can work but only one provides you with the tools to learn for yourself what works and what doesn’t (i.e. running practices yourself)

On YouTube, external views provide the platform with little knowledge of who your audience truly is

For all YouTube knows it’s just random people you’ve targeted through a Google Ad campaign or the 439 followers you have on your personal IG page

Surfacing your videos in this way gives YouTube little information to work with and even for YouTube the saying, “knowledge is power” rings true

5. Cost

Running ad campaigns can be expensive - like signing an all-start player to join your team

For example, you may pay $100 in ads just to generate 10,000 views on a video

Sure, 10,000 views are a lot but as we’ve discussed above, the quality of those views and followers wil be poor at best

Plus, espcially in the beginning, you want to run your channel as a lean operation

One of the biggest hurdles I see new creators face is spending too much money off the bat, getting nervous that they won’t recoup their investment and shutting the channel down to stop the bleeding…

Well, here’s the good news!

External promotion is absolutely not required to grow and monetize your channel

In fact, whether you’re a new or existing channel, YouTube will do all the promotion you’ll ever need for you!

All you have to do is create content and YouTube will start serving the video impressions

Impressions give YouTube an idea of what type of audiences are interested in your content

Once YouTube has tagged an audience with the type of content you’re producing

Your job then becomes creating valuable content for that audience so that your existing audience returns

All the while creating content that can expand your reach over time.

TL;DR - Post quality content and YouTube will promote your channel for you

Until next week,

Adam

 When you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. If you want to learn how to grow and monetize your own faceless YouTube channel, check out Tube Automate and Tube Freedom

2. If you want a personalized review of your YouTube channel, sign up for a YouTube Channel Review

3. If you want to work with me one-on-one to build a faceless channel, check out Tube Launch