Your Best Niche on YouTube: How to Attract An Audience at 0 Followers
How do you grow a YouTube channel & attract your target audience?
If you want to build a large and engaged audience, you need to perfect your YouTube niche. In this article, you will learn how to identify the best niche for YouTube for you, an overall game plan, and tips for starting at zero.
Everyone starts with 0 followers on YouTube. The game of content creation is a long marathon and requires you to be flexible & adaptable. You will constantly need to test new ideas, analyze your data, and pivot as necessary in order to grow a successful YouTube channels.
Alright, let me guide you through how to find the best YouTube niche for you! We’re going to start wide & then refine.
How to find your niche on YouTube?
In the past, the advice that content creators got was “Niche down!”
We were told to pick a particular niche, and then go even deeper by choosing one of the sub-niches of that niche. Creators would research the most profitable YouTube niches or the most popular YouTube niches to try to choose a profitable niche to grow in.
The problem with that approach however was that content creators would eventually experience burnout trying to keep creating content on something that wasn’t a natural interest for them.
Some of the most profitable YouTube niches include making money online, personal finance, digital marketing, and investment strategies. But unless you have an innate love for those kinds of topics, you are better off picking a different niche on YouTube.
Many channels do amazing outside of those traditional most profitable YouTube niches, such as channels on slow living, dog training, and spirituality. Individuals can make channels and niches about almost anything & can find ways to monetize in their unique niches quite lucratively.
You need to find your YouTube niche that allows you to speak with confidence, enthusiasm, & joy.
That’s the kind of energy you need in your videos to attract a great audience for your YouTube channel.
Stop researching the most profitable YouTube niches, because that is a recipe for shortsightedness. Instead, build your YouTube channel on a solid foundation of your natural interests.
Thinking of Becoming a YouTuber…
Alright, I am going to assume that you want to become a YouTuber because you watch hours & hours of YouTube.
You want to become a producer because you’ve been a consumer long enough. You’ve gotten enough value from educational content, relatable videos, & the online YouTube community.
After so many helpful YouTube videos and valuable advice from all the creators, you realize you also want to contribute & join the YouTube community to share your unique insights & personality with the world.
Heck, it would be awesome to get paid by YouTube (Google Adsense) in their Partner Program for creating content you enjoy talking about.
What a dream, and rightfully so. A majority of young people nowadays aspire to become a YouTuber as their career.
Are you someone who actually wants to make that a dream a reality in life?
Well great, that is an inspiring place to start & as you rise to your chosen challenge, it will make you grow as an individual as you learn how to create for your YouTube channel. You are embarking on a journey from a beginner to a full-time YouTuber.
Choosing your niche is the right pre-planning for a successful channel.
There are 5 steps you can do to reach niche clarity.
- Analyze Yourself
- Research Your Role Models’ YouTube Channels
- Plan Your First 10 Videos
- Record + Edit + Share Your Videos
- Explore Your YouTube Analytics (after publishing video content)
For this article, we will start with just Step 1: Analyze Yourself.
How to find the right niche for you on YouTube? (3 Exercises)
Here are 3 exercises to help you understand the easiest way to pick your YouTube niche when first starting out. Get a piece of paper or open up a word document and explore these questions for yourself.
- Analyze the content you like to watch on YouTube.
- How can you categorize the YouTube videos you usually like to watch?
- Are there categories you’ve learned so much on that you feel comfortable teaching others about the same topic?
- What topics of what you like to watch do you notice have surprisingly large online audiences?
- Consider how past you used to watch YouTube.
- Take a little mental trip back to 5 or 10 years ago: what did you used to watch on YouTube then?
- Did you use YouTube videos to help you solve any problems?
- List major problems you experienced in the last 5-10 years + identify which solutions you tried and/or worked best.
- This is the easiest way to create valuable content for your perfect audience: what can you specifically help and confidently guide people through?
- What was a life-changing solution you found online and how do you share that solution with someone who is struggling with the same problem you used to have?
Do these 3 exercises to start generating YouTube video ideas that will help you find your target audience – a loyal following. The best YouTube content is authentic, genuine, and insightful.
In the beginning, you have so much to learn about how to actually create content on YouTube that “picking the perfect niche” is actually the wrong thing to obsess and focus on.
Instead, start with creating educational content that will allow you to practice how to create videos.
You need to practice the process of video creation enough times that you start to feel comfortable with actually making videos. Because you likely have no prior video editing experience, starting with educational videos will be better than entertaining videos.
Educational content is great because YouTube SEO strategies will help to get your initial content discovered.
You Need to Put in the Reps for Video Content
The truth is that in the beginning, you need to do the process of video creation as many times as possible to get better at creating engaging content.
You don’t need high-quality camera equipment, the most profitable YouTube niche, or even the most visually appealing content in the beginning to start an eventually successful YouTube channel.
Instead, you need patience and discipline to learn how to create videos that your target audience will actually like watching.
Learn Video Editing + PRACTICE Over & Over!
For video editing software, I recommend the free software CapCut, that is available for desktop & mobile. I’ve tried the more complicated ones like Adobe Premiere Pro + iMovie, but CapCut is way more simple & free. It’s great, use it for your beginning journey with video editing!
At the start, you might be slow & one video might take you a few hours to edit.
However, please remember that you will get so much faster at video editing by doing it more & more.
Simple videos can eventually take you less than an hour to edit if you just keep practicing & doing the process.
Use Your Data to Discover Your Perfect YouTube Niche
The other reason you need to just keep repeating the process in the beginning is because YOU NEED DATA.
By publishing your videos on YouTube and allowing the algorithm to try to find your target audience, you will have your YouTube Analytics available to understand how the video performed in terms of viewer response, audience demographics, and best-performing content.
Your channel analytics will help you to refine your YouTube niche.
Start wide, then use your data to refine & to pivot.
That is how you appropriately & effectively “niche down” specifically for you as an individual.
Another thing is that you might learn that what you thought you wanted to create videos on is actually not that fun to do. You will thank yourself for figuring that out sooner rather than later.
Learn by doing. Build the experience through analyzing yourself, researching role models, planning your own videos, recording, editing, publishing, and finally analyzing again.
But the second time analysis is FEEDBACK from your growing audience.
Use the feedback to make good decisions on what is actually worth your time in doing more of.
Take everything as a learning lesson.
Start small, keep creating. Try, test, & take action.
Summary of Steps to Find Your Best Niche on YouTube
- Do the 3 Exercises (above) to Analyze Yourself as a YouTube Viewer
- Study Successful YouTubers You Like (try to emulate their unique strategies)
- Generate Video Ideas (for your first batch of videos to create content)
- Create Your First 10 Videos (optimize the titles for YouTube SEO discoverability)
- Analyze your YouTube analytics (find what’s working best & create more of that)
This is not.a quick and easy process, but I promise it is how you actually discover what is YOUR best niche on YouTube.
You will skyrocket your YouTube channel by focusing on your own unique strengths & personality.
If you have the wisdom to understand that YouTube is a long game, your success is inevitable.
Your results will compound over time as you continue in the marathon to growing a successful YouTube channel.
Your first 100 subscribers might be the slowest ramp-up, but after your growth can become easily exponential once you start doubling down on what’s working best.
Quick Tips for Starting at Zero
- Make videos on how to solve a specific problem
- Use YouTube keywords to try to rank in the search (best method for when just starting)
- Find examples of successful YouTube channels you can see what’s currently working
- Create videos that are of the highest quality you can currently produce
- Engage with your audience by replying to all comments
- Aim for consistency – most people start with 1 video per week (however, feel free to make more/as many as you can to learn more & get better faster)
- Experiment with various formats + content types to find which style you find easiest & most fun to create
- Get familiar with your YouTube Analytics to see audience interests & adjust your content strategy accordingly
0 comments, 0 views, 0 engagement is totally normal at the beginning. That’s how everyone starts!
Use the time to feel comfortable publishing publicly & get better at the entire process sooner before your audience really takes off.
Overall, remember this: Everything you do is a test…
Never stop testing your ideas & try to detach your emotions from the feedback you get.
Use feedback to pivot appropriately. Do more of what’s working & less of what doesn’t.
Conclusion
Finding the perfect niche comes down to figuring out what are the best topics that YOU can easily talk about, help people on, and deliver immense value with.
Since you likely have never created video content before, you should just try out anything & everything that you feel inspired to create about.
Educational videos (such as how-to tutorials) are the easiest to plan out with a clear value proposition for your audience. You can later venture out from educational video content once you get more comfortable with video content creation.
Focus on creating high-quality content (the best that you currently can) packed with valuable advice.
It’s okay to experiment in many different niches when just starting. This will help you to learn about what topics you like talking about and what type of content you enjoy creating.
Because you need to keep creating for long enough so that your success in growing a YouTube channel is inevitable. Just start small & watch how big it can get.
Every content creator that you’ve ever watched started exactly at 0 followers. If they can grow a YouTube channel, so can you.
