The simple reason we make videos and host them on YouTube is because we want people to see them. Now we don't mean showing off your home videos to complete strangers, but if you're showing someone how to change their oil, why not widen your range to as many as possible?

More viewers leads to more subscribers, more subscribers lead to more consistent viewer numbers, and both are the pathway to monetizing videos and potentially building a community. Even without monetizing your videos, isn't it nice to see that people are watching the videos you put so much work into?

Ultimately it's not hard to just upload a bunch of videos onto a YouTube channel, that's the easy part: you just get the videos, hit upload, and done. It's what you then do with those videos from there that helps your channel grow. How do I organize my videos so my viewers can find what they want, both while scrolling through my list and while searching YouTube? Am I using any feedback my viewers are giving me to make proper adjustments?

It takes a combination of organizing your channel and its content plus making sure you're not only visible to your viewers, but catching their attention to make a channel grow. Anyone can swing a hammer, but not everyone can build a house. 

The top channels on YouTube didn't get to where they are by accident or through some stroke of luck, even if it may seem that way. There's a definite strategy for gaining more viewers and growing your channel, even if some aren't immediately apparent. Hard work isn't always enough, nor is simply paying for sponsored positions like some of the channels of big companies like CNN or the NFL.

In a lot of cases there are some simple things that one can do to make their channel more attractive, such as using good video titles or making sure to establish a unique identity for your channel. There's also more subtle ideas such as what words to use in the video description or which tags to use, all providing significant advantages over those who aren't utilizing these steps.

YouTube Includes plenty of great ways to track not only how many people have viewed your video, but when and from where they watched it. Maybe you're getting a lot of views from the west coast of the US and see an opportunity to focus more on a Californian style of cooking on your food channel. Or say you're getting a lot of views from another country entirely and decide to adjust your video release schedule to take advantage of that and build off of it.

There video analytics look intimidating at first and admittedly are more of an advanced feature, but that's a great step to go from in order to stand out among the crowd. The data is just sitting there, use it!

There's a fine balance between not putting your videos out there enough and being a spammy pest. With the abundant delivery methods available to us today to share links, embed videos, and show people what we've made, it's easy to want to throw everything out there all at once as often as possible. On the flip side you want to make sure you're not afraid to tweet out a link to your latest video or make a Facebook post teasing some upcoming content.

There's lots of data showing how your users are finding content, so make sure to be smart about it and share where you'll have the best impact and do it enough that people see it but don't sick of you.