Ironically, given the tremendous reach that the YouTube platform has, perhaps one of the greatest challenges you face as a YouTube content creator is growing your audience.

Put simply, no matter what kind of content you might happen to make on YouTube, you’re going to be faced with heavy competition. There are millions of creators on YouTube, with more joining every day. Whatever the nature of your content may be, a good portion of these fellow creators will also be covering it…and at least some of them are going to have a fair amount more followers.

As a result, when it comes to YouTube, one of the best ways to secure long-term success is to invest considerable time and effort in growing your audience. After all, a successful career online requires a following; and on YouTube, a large audience translates to high numbers of views, which, in turn, translates to success on the algorithm.

So in order to help you get moving on the path to YouTube stardom, we’ve gathered below some of the best online resources designed to help you grow your audience, your views, and thus, your stardom.

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is an ideal means of ensuring that you effectively leverage platforms beyond YouTube itself to grow your YouTube fame. After all, the internet offers a great many social media platforms on which to broadcast yourself and your work; and failing to take proper advantage of them will inevitably result in you falling behind the many YouTube stars who do make use of them.

Slick and easy to use, Hootsuite allows you to schedule social media posts at specific times and across multiple platforms, thus ensuring that all your social media feeds are kept constantly updated even when you are busy. This will help ensure that your followers are not only kept consistently updated about new video uploads, but also have you feature consistently on their feed, thus increasing your presence in their minds – as well as the possibility that they’ll share you and grow your following.

2. TubeToPod

For those YouTubers whose videos rely more on audio than visuals for conveying information, TubeToPod is a fantastic way of spreading their reach in a slick, quick, convenient manner. This tool, as one of the many audio-creation features offered by Soundwise, quickly converts your video into an audio podcast – that is, a series of audio files that listeners can subscribe to through a RSS feed– and distribute it to iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Not only will this greatly increase the reach of your work, as it is now spread over a number of platforms, but the podcast format will also grow your audience tremendously.

Due to the hectic nature of modern life, many individuals prefer to consume online media whilst driving, working, or otherwise preoccupied – and, naturally, an audio file that can be downloaded and listened to offline is far easier to consume at such times. This has led to tremendous growth in the popularity of podcasts in recent years. There’re now more podcasts listeners than Twitter users in the US, with around 50% of homes in the US having at least one podcast fan.

In other words, putting your work out there in the podcast form will make it far more accessible to more individuals, as well as greatly increase the frequency at which your current followers consume your content.

3. TubeBuddy

  

This handy tool installs as a simple browser extension that greatly simplifies the various aspects of YouTube video management into a single, simple interface. In addition to reducing the amount of time that one spends on video management, TubeBuddy also offers a great many means of enhancing your audience growth. Features include sharing your videos across various social media platforms with just a few clicks (thus spreading their reach) and the addition of professionally transcribed captions to your videos, which is demonstrated to greatly enhance clicks.

TubeBuddy also simplifies the process of search engine optimisation for your videos, from finding the top-ranked keywords, to suggesting effective tags, to helping you identify the ranking of your videos in YouTube search results. And if you’re familiar with the concept of search engine optimisation, you’ll likely know how tremendously effective all of this can be in finding you new viewers – after all, like almost everything on the internet, the majority of your viewers are going to find your videos through search engines.

4. Google Trends

Naturally, one of the best ways to grow your YouTube audience is to ensure that your videos cover relevant, popular topics that are currently of prominent interest among potential viewers.

And one of the best ways to ensure that you’re doing this is Google Trends. Freely accessible to anyone, Google Trends offers a quick, easily accessible way of tracking the latest trends in local and international search results. And given the ubiquity of Google across the globe, this, in brief, makes for a great way of tracking topics of interest in any community around the world.

And by keeping wise to these trends, you, as a YouTube creator, can make an effort to ensure that your videos are attuned to them, and that you are creating content that taps into these popular interests. In this way, you will greatly increase not just the enjoyment of your current followers, but also greatly enhance the possibility that fresh viewers, interested in the current trends, will run searches that will lead them to your videos. Even if your videos are specialised and focus on very particular topics or interests, Google Trends offers the latest statistics on trends within a broad variety of categories and topics.

5. SocialBlade

When it comes to getting ahead in the game – especially a game as competitive as YouTube – you do well to keep an eye on just how fast both you and your competitors are growing.

And SocialBlade is tremendously helpful for this. Simply by entering your YouTube username into SocialBlade’s search bar, you can see all of your YouTube stats over the course of the last few months – new subscribers, view counts, earnings, growth rates, and so forth. And once you’ve identified your major competitors in the YouTubing scene, you can also directly compare your numbers with theirs. In this way, you can ensure that you always have your finger on the pulse of the latest numbers – that you always know where you rank, and where your competitors rank. In this way, you can ensure you know who in your particular video-making field is doing well, and which of your competitors you might draw inspiration from to grow your views and viewers.