Hey team,

Blowing up on YouTube may not be as hard as it sounds…

We’re about to crack 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, whilst also having grown many other channels from scratch into the tens of thousands of subscribers

I can boil it all down to a few key things we’ve focused on to get those results, if I were starting again in 2026 here’s what I’d be doing…

1. Find video ideas people actually want to watch.

Too many people guess what content they think will do well, and I hate to break it to you, but if you’re just getting started on this your judgement likely isn’t amazing just yet

Instead, you want to find proven winning ideas in two key areas:

You can already see what topics are trending, and by creating a video based around one of these topics you instantly skyrocket your chances of success

We’ve had a channel averaging 100-200 views per video, find the right topic and get 10k in 48 hours and that one video became the catalyst for growing their channel consistently from that point forward

Now they consistently get thousands of views per video and often into the tens of thousands

The right video ideas matter more than almost anything on YouTube

2. Have an engaging hook & value inside.

Once you have a strong idea, the next piece is to make sure you start the video with a bang and deliver genuine value inside

When I’ve worked with people with a background in television, they always love to start a video slowly, bring in some branding and take 10-15 seconds to actually start the video

I can’t think of anything worse you could do in terms of performance than that…

Start it fast, cover what the video is about in the first 5 seconds

Then, deliver genuine insights

If you’re giving people tips around investing, instead of regurgitating what you’ve found on Claude, go into your own expertise, your own experiences, clients you’ve worked with and deliver something genuinely valuable

Look at every video with the lens of if this is the first time someone is seeing you, are you going to make an enough of an impression for them to stick around?

Surface level content doesn’t do this

3. Package it with a strong title & thumbnail.

Finally, nail the title & thumbnail to make people actually click on the video

The core difference between YouTube and other social media platforms, is on other platforms people are scrolling through an endless feed of content which autoplays

On YouTube, people see your title & thumbnail show up and they decide whether or not they click on it

So if you can’t get people to click on it, it doesn’t matter how good the video is people won’t get to see it

Now the idea does a lot of heavy lifting, but making sure you properly title & thumbnail the video

Bonus tip: Keep split testing, YouTube allows you to split test three titles or thumbnails on each video and shows which performs the best

This allows you to quickly figure out whats working and whats not and speeds up your learning curve

I wrote a full article going in depth on how to grow a YouTube channel in 2026, you can read it here: https://cleverpreneur.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-growing-on-youtube-in-new-zealand/

Hope this helps,
Josh

P.S - If you want to work with us one on one to grow your channel, book a call with me at https://cleverpreneur.com and we’ll see if we can help