The Secret to Sustainable YouTube Growth You've Been Missing!

If you're a YouTuber and you're feeling demoralized, this post (or the video above) is for you.

You might be doing a lot of different activities; you might even be having success. But because you haven't gotten YouTube monetization, or perhaps you haven't hit some particular milestone, you feel demoralized. You feel like you're treading water, you're not moving forward, and you're not making the progress that you think you need to be making.

I want to take a moment and suggest a few ideas.

Defining Success in a Sustainable Way

The first thing I want you to think about is, have you defined success? And if you have defined success, have you defined it in a sustainable way? 

If you think about YouTube as a habit that you're developing, it's something that you're doing regularly, and over time, that has a compound effect. It has compound interest that continues to provide a return over time, but you have to continually invest time after time after time to get to that end goal.

A  sustainable way to set a definition of success is not the outcome that you get—the outcome that you may not be able to control—but rather the activities you do that can generate that type of outcome. This is something that I do in my freelancing work.

I wrote a book called Path of the Freelancer about my freelancing journey. One of the ideas explored is that instead of focusing on how much money I want to earn, although that is an important factor, the idea is what must I do every day, maybe several times a week, to move toward that goal?

I'll use my book as another example. I wrote for one hour a day, and then after 18 months, I had a published book. I could control writing every day, so I spent an hour a day on my book. I couldn't necessarily control what type of response people would have to the book, or what type of success it would have, but I could control what I did to create and publish that book.

The same is true for YouTube.

Think about what success is for you. It's publishing another great video. You've planned it, you've recorded it, you've edited it, and you've published it. And then, as part of that publishing, you've packaged it and put it out there. So, you've done all of those things. That's success.

A sustainable definition of success is built around actions, and that's how I've been successful across my life: focusing on those actions that I can control.

Now, you might say, "Well, some actions don't lead to the outcome that you want." And that's true. So, you may have to adjust your actions. But if you build the habit, if you set the definition of success as those actions, and then you have a mentality and a process to continually update your actions, you'll eventually get where you're going.

Sometimes it might take longer than you expected or hoped, but it will eventually compound into the effect you're seeking.

Comparing The Right Way

The second thing I want to talk about is comparison.

It's easy on YouTube for us to compare ourselves to somebody else: somebody that has 1,000 subscribers, 10,000 subscribers, 100,000, a million, 10 million, 100 million. You could easily compare yourself to Mr. Beast, and if you're comparing your videos to each of Mr. Beast's videos, that may be a recipe for disaster and destroying any morale or motivation that you have.

What you need to do, and what I do, is compare yourself to "past you". What have you done before? What's worked? And what are you doing now, and how does it compare to that? Are you making progress? Are you moving forward? Are you stuck? Are you staying still? How is one video doing compared to the last video? And I think even more helpful is how this video I'm doing now compares to one I did six months ago or a year ago?

The more time that you have to look at it, sometimes it gives you more perspective to see what's going on, what's working, and how far you may have come along without even realizing it.

Steadily Improving

We learn and grow. Learning to do better YouTube titles, better thumbnails, how much you're doing better video recordings, and better editing... All of these things have an effect. And sometimes we might do that thing over and over, and we get a little bit better, and we don't necessarily see the result we're looking for just yet. But eventually, sometimes, if we persist, if we keep doing that thing, the success will come. And sometimes it comes in fits and bursts. Sometimes it's slower and methodical and iterative, a little bit at a time.

Financial Sustainability

Let's explore financial sustainability. If you need YouTube to be successful, if you need the money, it's going to be hard to make it work. If you're young, that could be an option. But for me, I'm 40, and I have a family. I have five kids and a wife, and a house, so I have responsibilities. I freelance, and I make good money, earning six figures a year as a freelancer.

I want you to think about, as you go down this YouTube journey, how to make it more financially sustainable. You might need to have a job.

When I first moved to Atlanta, one of my earlier clients was a comedian, and she had a corporate job. That paid her bills and that allowed her to save money, invest in retirement, because if you've ever been a comedian or you know someone, it's a brutal life of travel with little money in return. You don't have a good chance to make it, and if you survive the crucible, you might succeed. She gave herself more time by having a corporate job. She didn't have to worry about money, and she could focus on the comedic work and write her jokes, and do her shows. And we did a lot of stuff on social media marketing (twenty years ago!). MySpace was a thing back then, and we were doing stuff on social media, posting to Craigslist, just to try and get her name out there. She could pay me because she had a corporate job!

You might need to make money another way to do the thing you love and want to do, to give it a chance to be successful. I make good money freelancing part-time. And I use the rest of my hours to work on YouTube, blogging, podcasting, writing my books, and doing other content creation. If I had to rely on income from content creation, I'd be homeless. But freelancing is a lifeline and lets me do these other things.

Think about what you're doing and how to do it in a sustainable way to buy you time, to allow you to move things forward, and not be trapped by the financial context that you're facing as a YouTuber. How can you give yourself more time, even if it means going slower? And that's a trade-off that I had to make: I have to go slower because I do have to spend part of my day doing freelancing work.

Where Does Your Identity Reside?

Let's talk about identity.

If your identity is wrapped up in your YouTube channel or the success or failure of any one video, you are going to be an emotional wreck. When your videos do well, you will feel like you are on top of the world. When they do poorly, you will feel horrible and like a worthless human being.

So, you need to have an identity that's grounded and beyond your YouTube channel and any particular video: that you are successful, that you are a valuable person, even if you fail, and you fail big, and you fail repeatedly.

That's the type of identity that I have, where I could completely flop as a YouTuber in every possible way, and it's not going to change who I am. It's not going to change why I'm a valuable person and why I'm still content in spite of that failure.

If that's something you struggle with, think about and explore the idea of self-authoring. Define what success is for you, define your values, and move towards what you care about. Set a vision and move towards it. You'll then be successful in what matters most.

With those foundations in place, you can try new things and swing big.

I'm doing all kinds of things on my YouTube channel. Some people say I should do this, some people say I should do that, and I'm just pushing the edges. It's a testing environment. We'll see what works, what doesn't, and maybe I have to pull in and narrow in on certain things as time goes on, or maybe I'll want to do that organically. But right now, it's a playground. I get to do whatever I want. No one can tell me what to create.

You have that opportunity to do that as well. And sometimes that means exploring ideas that may not work, but if they did work, they could be huge. So, you might as well give it a swing. What do you have to lose?

Practical Tips: Trends & Fusion

A couple of other practical ideas for you are: think about what trends you can tap. 

People talk about finding videos either in your niche or in other niches, but find successful videos and do your version of that. Ultimately, it's figuring out what's working out there and just replicating it in your way. Sometimes, it's about the demand, what people want. If you create an amazing video for one person and you're trying to get a hundred views, you know that's going to be a tough dynamic to reconcile. But if your vision, like I mentioned earlier, is to impact someone who's having that one problem, and it's just that one person who watches, and you've made that impact with that one person, that's a success.

That's how I've thought about my books: if it helps one person, or if it helps just a few people, whether it's a blog post, a book, or a podcast episode, I've made an impact, and that impact makes a difference. It matters.

Don't get too caught up in the numbers, because sometimes the people behind the numbers, maybe you've made a difference, maybe you've shared something that helps them. And if you did that, then that was a win. That was a success.

There are also ways to ride the trends to get more traffic, to get more exposure. There's also the idea to fuse content: take two things that don't seem like they go together and share—put them together and share a story, share a message, share an idea.

Wrapping Up

I hope this message is encouraging to you as you go on your YouTube journey.

I'm Jason Scott Montoya. Stop waiting and start living that adventure today!