To kick off 2019, we've got 10 practical resolutions to help you get more views, more subscribers and ultimately grow your channel.

The YouTube channel banner is essentially an advertising billboard for your channel. Ensure it demonstrates to visitors:

What you do on your channel Why you do it Why you’re the person to do it (authority and passion)

Your YouTube channel banner should be consistent with the branding, colour and design of the video thumbnails. And don’t forget to make sure it’s mobile friendly, so the edges don’t get cut off.

2. Write a compelling channel description

The channel description in the YouTube About section is what visitors will read when they search and find your channel. Think about writing your channel description as if you were writing a tweet of 140 characters — people have very short attention spans, so it should be clear and concise.

Keep in mind, too, that when people first visit your channel, chances are they’re more interested in what’s in it for them. Avoid self-indulgent biographies and instead focus on what your channel can do for your audience. A simple way to check yourself is to search how many times “you” or “your” appears in the channel description. Take a peek at the example below from vidIQ’s About page:

Bonus points for applying the same principles to your video descriptions, too. Your audience can always read the first couple of lines, so make them count.

3. Develop and apply consistent design to everything

A proper style guide will ensure consistency across your entire channel and all the elements within it. Define your fonts, colors, logos and brand images, and keep them all in one place to apply to your channel art, thumbnails, video intros and even the lower thirds, like this one:

4. Make your channel welcoming to visitors

Think of your channel as the front room of your home or your place of business and you as the gracious host.

An effective way to create a welcoming channel to new visitors is to include a dedicated channel trailer or use a high-converting video as your channel trailer, sure to increase your subscriber count.

You should also consider creating a playlist that shows off your best content and use it to introduce your audience to your channel. Putting the most recent uploads playlist near the top will let your visitors know your channel is still active and posting on a consistent basis.

5. Engage your audience as much as possible

One of the mistakes many video creators make is to ask questions at the end of a video. By that time you've lost a significant portion of your audience — just take a look at your audience retention to see for yourself.

Asking your visitors a question at the beginning, the middle and the end of a video — maybe even including a voting poll as well — really will help keep your audience engaged along with the content.

On the bottom right corner of your video is your branding watermark, and it's a call to action for viewers to subscribe to your channel. In order for it to achieve its objective, it should say exactly what it does.

Rather than using your channel logo, instead use something that invites viewers to subscribe to your channel.

In the example above from the vidIQ channel, you’ll see a very simple ‘SUBSCRIBE’ button. Once we switched to this graphic, our click rate on this button increased more than 500% almost instantly, which you can see in the graph below.

, or for more information on how to create your own and set it up on YouTube watch our video,

 How to Add a YouTube Subscribe Button that Gets Results in 2018!

7. Reference your own related YouTube content

Did you notice what we did in that last resolution? We referenced our own related content to encourage the audience to stick around in the vidIQ YouTube universe.

Always plug your own content and directly reference it on screen. And remember, the more stupidly overenthusiastic, the better.

You work is not finished when you press publish. If your audience is taking the time to comment on your videos, respect their time and energy by replying to every single one.

If you get too many comments, block off an hour a day in your calendar for responding. You could even pin the best comments to your videos, or pin your own comments to continue the conversation in the comments section, like we’ve done in the example below.

If replying to every comment feels overwhelming, remind yourself that the comments section is where connections begin, which could evolve into collaborations, brand deals, friendships and more.

The YouTube Community tab is available to all channels with over 1,000 subscribers and can be a huge engagement opportunity if you know how to use it right. In fact, you’ll often find that a well-crafted question or voting poll gets as much engagement, if not more, than your videos.

For more information on how to use it, check out our dedicated video, 

How To Build a YouTube Audience Through The Community Tab!

This last resolution sounds really easy, but believe me, when you're programmed to say canned phrases like “That’s it for this one,” or “Hope you enjoyed the video,” or “Thanks for watching,” at the end of every single video, it can be a hard habit to drop.

As soon as you say things like that, the audience knows that the content has effectively finished and they leave the video in droves. Take a peek at your audience retention — you’ll likely see an immediate drop.

For your next video, I want to challenge you to scrap the canned phrases and instead promote related content or just do a hard finish.

What’s your number one YouTube resolution for 2019? Let us know on 

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level then make sure to download vidIQ. It will help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

YouTube video thumbnails and titles focused on increasing views and channel growth tips.

Whether you’re a fan of New Year’s resolutions or not, there’s always room for improvement when it comes to growing your YouTube channel.

How to Get More Views and Subscribers FAST on YouTube

We asked many amazing creators what it takes to get more views and subscribers in 2019 and this is what they had to say:

Andrew LakeMaker: Spend a good 3-4 hours per thumbnail, they are that important.

Evan Carmichael: Better understand your data to come up with new video series.

Spankie Valentine: Focus on the artistic and creative process.

Derral Eves: Data does not lie. use data to drive decissions.

Sean Cannel: Master your craft by keeping to the basics, leveling up and learning as much as you can.

Ernest: Strive for higher audience retention and sharing.

Brian G. Johnson: Keep on striving for perfection even though that's not possible.

YouTube creators discussing platform trends and tips for success in 2019 with vidIQ logo.

Want to know how to crush your YouTube channel? Hear from many of the best.

How to Get More YouTube Views & Subscribers

Need ideas on making your next video, here are 30:

Start talking to camera and see what happens

Try to add a cliff hanger at the end or beginning

Double your video length and see what happens

Or shorten your video and see if that changes the pace and tone of the video

Man pointing at glowing light bulb next to YouTube icon and text "Video Ideas"

Struggling to come up with content? Here are 30 YouTube ideas for ANY channel!

Want More YouTube Views? 30 YouTube Video Ideas To Kickstart ANY Channel

How do you get your first 100 subscribers? We've got more than 10 tips and suggestions to help you get there. Getting started on YouTube and grinding up to 100 subscribers can feel like the hardest hurdle to overcome. Where do you start with so much to think about? We've come up with some awesome suggestions to help kick-start your channel and think more like a YouTuber and less like someone chucking videos randomly onto the internet!

Man pointing at YouTube subscribe button with 100 subscribers and vidIQ logo background

Getting started on YouTube and grinding up to 100 subscribers can feel like the hardest hurdle to overcome.

How to Get 100 YouTube Subscribers FAST: Creator Tips for Success

Can you guess what question we get asked the most? It’s pretty obvious: How do I get more views on YouTube?

The answer, however, is far from obvious; unless you break it down into a hundred jigsaw pieces. And what jigsaw pieces do you look for first? The corners of course.

So let’s look at four crucial pieces of the YouTube puzzle What Do YOU Love to Talk About? YouTube knows what its audience wants, so you need to think like YouTube. Let’s say your passion is videogames. Be specific. If you love Fortnite or Call of Duty or Fifa 18, make sure to focus on that topic.

The more passionate you are about something, the more you know about it and the more confident you will be creating and sharing content about it.

Passion is an invisible vibe, energy and presence that your audience can always see.

Who Should Be Watching and Why? Don’t stop at just your favourite game, film, beauty product or superhero either. Dive deeper. Popular topics attract thousands of video creators, so you need to provide the audience with something they can’t get anywhere else.

Ask yourself this question: who should be watching and why? If you can’t answer that question then your audience won’t understand or (worst still) won’t care about your content. If someone else can answer those two questions better that’s where the audience will go.

This is your target audience and your value proposition and you should be able to sum it up in a sentence. For example: Helping Video Creators Get More Views In Less Time.

A ‘niche’ is an interest that appeals to a small, specialized section of the audience. Let’s say you buy the latest iPhone and you want to do a general video review on it. OK great, but the chances are there is a tech channel with millions of subscribers that has more resources to produce something in a shorter time frame to a wider audience.

But is that massive tech channel interested in EVERY aspect of the iPhone? Probably not, they will have another big phone release to worry about. But you? You could have a special interest in how the camera works or the best apps for productivity or how to record the screen. The chances are, if you are interested in something, there will be an audience out there who is also interested in the same thing.

This is your niche. While there may be millions of people interested in an iPhone, there may only be a few thousand interested in recording the iPhone screen, yet still passionate enough about it to create guides and tutorials that spread a message of value better than anyone else.

Dominate Your Niche and Become the Authority With passion, a target audience, a value proposition and a niche you know better than anyone else, you will start to build an audience.

Usually, there comes a point where one video outperforms everything else you’ve published before: 2x, 5x, 10x, it becomes your viral moment.

When this happens, go all in on follow up content. YouTube is telling you: you have something of value and we want to share it with more people. Your stock rising, your authority is gaining momentum, we ALL want to see more from you about something you are passionate about and can trust you with.

Try this: search for ‘Record iPhone Screen’ and you may see a very familiar vidIQ face appearing over and over again. Who knew such a niche could bring in so many views?

Channel success stories usually start with a niche that builds trust between the YouTuber and their audience. They then take that audience on a journey through more topics that stretch that authority into new, larger audiences.

Try this: do a YouTube search for ‘How Big Is’. This search term is dominated by a YouTuber called ColdFusion. The channel was already successful with tech videos that got 10,000s views. The ‘How Big Is’ video brought in millions of views and now ColdFusion is the authority on the phrase.

Person holding a sparkling red heart decoration against a red door background

Youtube Always Starts With Something You Love and Ends with Something Your Audience Trusts You With.

How to Get More YouTube Views? Passion and Authority

Here are 10 ways to reach the largest audience with the most impact:

Promote in the first 24 hours to get velocity or what we like to call View Per Hour

Share a playlist link, not a video link so that people can watch more of your videos

Share on other social media platforms like Linkedin and Facebook groups

Upload videos to Facebook directly using our vidIQ tool

Use your email list to push your YouTube channel

Use Incase you missed it posts on social platforms to remind people to watch

Man with social media icons for YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and email on blue background

You've made a great YouTube video, now you need to share it.

10 Awesome Ways to Promote Your YouTube Videos for FREE

So you can monetize your content. That's a question being asked by many video creators. So here's 10 practical tips you can start using today to help grow your channel!

Be visual and exciting when asking people to subscribe

Use the branding watermark using a red subscribe button

Put the subscribe button in the endscreen

When sharing your channel use the auto subscribe URL

Pin a subscribe link to the top of your comments

Add vaule to other channels to increase your audience

Make sure your channel page is optimized with a great banner, trailer and sections

Man thinking with hand on chin, YouTube subscribe button, and vidIQ logo in corner

How to get 1000 Subscribers on YouTube so you can monetize your content: that's a question being asked by many video creators. So here are 10 practical tips you can start using today to help grow your channel!

How to Get 1000 Subscribers on YouTube: Creator Tips

This video breaks down how to get 4000 hours of watch time on YouTube:

Breakdown this into 20,000 minutes a month

Accpet that it takes a long time to grow on YouTube

Use the vidIQ real time stats bar to see how your doing

Man pointing at clock showing 4000 hours for YouTube monetization with dollar sign icon

You now need 4,000 hours of Watch Time and 1,000 subscribers to qualify for monetization on YouTube. Keep reading for tips to achieve those feats.

How to Get 4000 Hours Watch Time on YouTube So You Can Monetize Your Videos

Here's 10 tips on how to use playlists to get more views on YouTube!

Use keywords and phrases like you would with a title

Use exact phrase keywords on your playlist

Always share a playlist URL not a video URL

You can add videos from other channels in your playlist

Man in vidIQ shirt points to "PLAYLISTS" text with YouTube and growth arrow icons.

YouTube Playlists: you probably use them but do you know just how powerful they are?

Get More Views With 10 Playlists Tips

Build a better community, save time responding to comments and use YouTube's secret comment weapon! All of which is part of growing your channel to gain my subscribers and better serve your audience with the message you want to spread.

Here are 10 YouTube Tips to improve engagement:

React to comments by giving a thumbnails up and heart button

Use the pin comment for content you want people to see

Go through the spam tab to make sure real comments were not put in there

Man whispering tips with text comment tips, YouTube, like, and heart icons on blue background

Here are 10 YouTube Tips to improve engagement, build a better community, save time responding to comments and use YouTube's secret comment weapon! All of which is part of growing your channel to gain more subscribers and better serve your audience with the message you want to spread.

How To Get More Views on YouTube