Are You Growing a YouTube Channel - or Growing Your Creative Business?
Beth Ann Williams 
You can follow good YouTube advice, get views, gain subscribers and still build a channel that isn't doing the job you need it to do for your biz.
Guest Article written by Beth Ann Williams
I know, because I've done it.
When I started building my own YouTube channel, I had plenty of good advice to follow. Publish consistently. Pay attention to what's working. Create videos people want to watch. Give YouTube enough content to understand your channel and help viewers discover you.
None of that advice was wrong.
But I was so focused on learning how to build a successful YouTube channel that I didn't always stop to ask a different question:
What does success on YouTube need to look like for my particular business?
Watch/Listen to our full Creatives on Camera episode here - or read on.
That's an important distinction - especially if you're a creative teacher or business owner.
Because chances are, YouTube isn't your entire business. And you don't necessarily want it to be.
REGISTER NOW AND START GROWING YOUR BUSINESS!
Live Course, September 15 - October 16, 2026
Real-Time feedback and coaching!
1-year access to replays and course materials.
When a Successful Video Isn't Quite the Success You Expected
Early in my own channel, I created a video about setting up and organizing my quilting studio.
It made perfect sense at the time. I was actually setting up a new studio, my audience was interested in creative spaces, and I had recently made a trip to IKEA. Why wouldn't I turn that experience into a video?
The video did very well.
Great news, right?
Mostly.
The problem was that YouTube began finding more people who were interested in organization - which wasn't what I wanted my channel to be primarily about.
My goal was to build a channel for quilters, with a particular emphasis on helping them make and finish beautiful quilts using practical machine-based techniques.
But its success was teaching me something important: getting more views isn't necessarily the same thing as reaching more of the people I want to serve.
Today, my channel has a much larger library of content, and I have more room to branch into related topics. I even have a playlist devoted to sewing-room setup and organization. But now those videos have a clear home within an established channel. That's very different from trying to establish what your channel is about in the first place.
And it taught me to look at YouTube growth through a different lens.
What Are You Actually Trying to Grow?
There's no shortage of information available about how to grow on YouTube.
You can learn about titles, thumbnails, watch time, retention, click-through rates, subscribers, keywords, Shorts, upload schedules, monetization and, of course, the algorithm.
Those things can matter.
But what if the problem isn't that you're doing YouTube badly?
What if you're simply measuring success against goals that were never yours in the first place?
If you're a creative teacher or business owner, you may want more of the right people to discover your work.
You may want viewers to join your email list, register for a class, buy a pattern or product, hire you to teach, or simply stick around long enough to discover what else you have to offer.
You may also want to build relationships with people who aren't ready to buy anything from you today - and may never buy at all - but who value what you teach and share your work with others.
That requires a slightly different way of thinking about YouTube growth.
Views matter because there are real people behind those numbers.
Subscribers matter because they're telling you they want to see more.
Watch time and retention can help you understand whether people are actually engaging with what you've created.
But none of those numbers exists in isolation.
The more useful question is: What are those numbers telling you about the people you're reaching, the content you're creating, and whether the two are coming together in a way that supports your larger goals?
Good YouTube Advice Still Needs Context
One of the things I've learned - both from building my own channel and from working with other creative teachers and business owners - is that good YouTube advice isn't always good advice for you right now.
A strategy designed for someone whose primary goal is to become a full-time content creator may not make sense for someone using YouTube to support a teaching practice, sell patterns, promote artwork or designs, attract speaking opportunities, or build an email list.
And a publishing schedule that works beautifully for a YouTube-first business may be completely unrealistic when you're also teaching classes, designing new work, filling orders, writing newsletters, serving customers and, occasionally, hoping to have a life outside your business.
That doesn't mean you should ignore YouTube best practices.
It means you need enough understanding to make informed choices about which practices make sense for your audience, your goals, your resources and your business.
That's the part I find most exciting to teach.
I'm not interested in handing you a list of rules and telling you that there's one correct way to build a YouTube channel.
I want you to understand what you're doing well enough to make good decisions when the answer is, inevitably: It depends.
That's Why We Built YouTube for Audience Growth
This fall, I'll be teaching a new session of YouTube for Audience Growth: Connect, Build & Grow through the Academy for Virtual Teaching.
It's a hands-on, implementation-focused course designed specifically for creative teachers and business owners who want to use YouTube intentionally as part of the businesses they're already building.
And this isn't simply a repeat of the first course I taught in the spring.
Teaching that first group gave me the opportunity to see where students made progress, where they needed more support, and what helped them turn information into action.
One of the clearest lessons was that learning something and having enough time and support to apply it are not the same thing.
So we've built that understanding directly into the fall course.
We'll begin with positioning and channel architecture, then move into content strategy and intent mapping. Week 3 is devoted specifically to implementation and application - no new lessons to keep up with. You'll have time to work on your own channel and content direction and bring your questions to our live session.
From there, we'll move into planning and packaging individual videos, understanding what your analytics can tell you, and creating systems that make sense for the time and resources you actually have.
We'll finish with practical printable resources and next steps to help you keep building after the course ends.
You Don't Need More Rules. You Need a Stronger Foundation.
My goal isn't to tell you exactly what every video should be about or hand you a formula you have to follow. It's to help you build the understanding you need to make those decisions for yourself.
By the end of the course, you'll have a stronger foundation for your channel, a clearer direction for your content, and practical resources to help you continue building.
You'll also have a better understanding of how the different pieces of YouTube fit together - and how to evaluate your choices based on the audience and creative business you are trying to build.
Because while growing on YouTube can be exciting; for most of us, growing a YouTube channel was never the whole point.
The point is reaching and serving more of the right people - and building something that supports the creative work and business that brought us to YouTube in the first place.
If that's the kind of YouTube growth you're looking for, I'd love to have you join us this fall for YouTube for Audience Growth: Connect, Build & Grow.
REGISTER NOW AND START GROWING YOUR BUSINESS!
Live Course, September 15 - October 16, 2026
Real-Time feedback and coaching!
1-year access to replays and course materials.
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