I Tried TubeBuddy to Grow my YouTube Channel

There are lots of services out there that will help you grow on social media. Some services are much better than others in terms of how they work, how they promote your accounts and how much they cost. Some of these services use bots and fake accounts, always read reviews and try to source where views come from before signing up to any of these services. For example, always be mindful of sites that will allow you to buy subscribers and views.

TubeBuddy is slightly different in how it works, it is more of an aid to help the SEO of your videos. TubeBuddy is an extension that allows you to see what the top raking keywords are for your videos based on similar videos. It also gives you suggested tags, tells you the best time to publish and it has other services like a thumbnail generator, channelytics and channel health report, to name but a few.

There are currently three price levels. I chose the cheapest package, which currently costs me $7.20 per month if you pay for the year (you can get offers and discounts). I ended up paying approximately £50 (you pay in $) for a one-year subscription. The basic package gives you access to SEO tools; which includes help with your keywords and shows keyword statistics etc. It also enables you to bulk process things like cards and end screens as well as creating custom thumbnails.

After about two months of using TubeBuddy, I there was no growth on my channel that was out of the ordinary, I was still receiving the odd subscriber a week and the same amount of views. I was posting at least one video per week, usually on the same day of the week for consistency. The only feature of TubeBuddy that I found useful was the keyword generator. I did not really use many of the other services that I was paying for as they did no have much benefit for me as a small creator.

One downside of Tubebuddy is that, if there are not many videos similar to yours then there is no data to compare your content to. My channel is a history channel and so I was trying to find places that had not been already covered on YouTube, or that were not oversaturated with videos. Indeed, this means that my videos were unique in their content. However, there was no data for TubeBuddy to compare my videos with. If your content is related to popular video topics. For instance, ‘how to grow your YouTube channel’ then the SEO tools will be very helpful. My videos are more obscure so there is nothing to compare them to.

From my initial experience on YouTube. I would say that if you are familiar with keywording from other social media or stock photography sites, you will already know the basics of how keywording works. Also, growing your channel will come naturally if you put in the work, upload regularly and post content that people want to watch.

From doing a little more research into how the algorithms of YouTube work. It would appear that YouTube does not favour videos that are loaded with keywords and elaborate descriptions. Instead, YouTube wants to see content that is created for your audience. To get recognised, your content needs to keep your viewers watching and engaged for as long as possible.

Now I have tried TubeBuddy, I can honestly say that I have not found it overly useful in terms of growing my channel. However, I do find the channelytics a useful tool. The channelytics allow you to see your views and compare your stats with other channels.

Overall, I think that building an audience through great and consistent content is the best way to grow your channel. Also, interact with your viewers and build up your following on other social media sites, such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. I found that creating a Facebook page significantly increased my views and subscribers. There are so many people on YouTube trying to do similar things so be unique.