Because of the quarantine, even more people have begun to think about how to make money online. One way is to create your own YouTube channel. But the question arises – how to get subscribers to it?
In this article we’ll discuss several ways to attract users to your channel and make them regular viewers.
10 ways to get subscribers to your YouTube channel
The channel should be optimized for the target audience as much as possible. What to pay attention to.
Channel design
The desire to subscribe is influenced not only by the content of the videos, but also by the design. A beautiful, high-quality decorated channel evokes trust and a feeling that the author is serious about the matter. What is included in the design:
Avatar image – here is usually a company logo or personal photo. We recommend picking a recognizable picture without fine details.
Header – this is the first thing people see when they enter the main page of any YouTube channel. That’s also where they can subscribe to you (another way is to click “Subscribe” under the video). The header should answer the viewer’s two main questions: “What this channel is about” and “Why should I subscribe to it?
Tip: Add a call to subscribe in the header. Don’t forget to include links to your social networks and website (if any).
Video covers – people may click on the video without even reading the title if the video has an attractive and informative cover. It should match the theme of the video.
Also you need to create and set up:
- channel trailer;
- channel and video description;
- playlists;
- Recommended videos section;
- end screensavers;
- annotations;
- channel sections.
Read more about all of this in our article: How to Design a YouTube Channel.
Selecting keywords
Keywords influence the promotion of your channel and individual videos in Google search and YouTube itself. You need to learn how to make titles and descriptions properly, select tags and hashtags, and analyze statistics to understand where viewers are coming from and for what queries. If some keywords bring in the most viewers, then you need to use them and shoot more videos on this topic.
2. Run ads
This includes any free and paid advertising methods:
- channel or video advertising within YouTube;
- advertising from bloggers – a mention in their videos or a link to your channel in the “Subscriptions” section;
- video seeding on social networks;
- mutual PR;
- advertising on websites;
- video reposts;
- comprehensive promotion from the agency (you can turn to freelancers).
3. Place the link everywhere (website, social networks, email listings).
If you have resources other than your YouTube channel, you can drive traffic back and forth. Be sure to put the link on your personal website (if you have one), on all of your social networks, emails, or push mailings.
4. Collect with TicToc.
TicToc allows you to get huge traffic in a short period of time, and you can easily direct it to your YouTube channel. To specify a channel in your profile, you need to click “Edit Profile” – “Add YouTube link to profile”. Press it, we are redirected to the Google account, you need to select the one that is linked to the YouTube channel, and then the YouTube button will appear.
There you can also attach an Instagram profile. You can also add a link in your profile description (this option is still available to accounts with more than 10,000 followers).
If you don’t have a TickTock account yet, make sure you get one, switch to a PRO account, and start making videos for it.
5. Use services (only carefully)
If the channel has already gained a certain number of subscribers, it’s better not to take the risk of nakrutki. Try to promote only white methods. But to gain the first 1,000 subscribers, you can use several services.
What you can do: buy views, likes, reposts, comments and subscribers. To avoid being suspected in the gray method of promotion, use the services carefully – all actions should be similar to the actions of an ordinary viewer. Namely, you should keep an interval, not make too many reposts and comments at once, and spread your actions over several videos.
- That’s right: 1,000 views split into 10 videos, all with different numbers of views. There are more views than comments. The whole process of scaling is stretched out over several days.
- Wrong: One video gets 1,000 views in the first 5 minutes, another has 10 views and 500 comments.
6. Streaming
Streaming (live broadcasts) helps to promote yourself in any social network, YouTube is no exception – during the broadcast the viewers are involved in the process, they write comments in the chat and ask questions. You can earn on live broadcasts by collecting donations. At the end of the broadcast there is an opportunity to save the recording on the channel as a normal video.
Advantages of live broadcasts:
- no need to spend time on video editing;
- direct contact with the audience, to increase involvement;
- the opportunity to make money on the airwaves;
- you can broadcast from any device and any location with Internet access.
Read our step-by-step instruction on how to set up and launch a live broadcast on YouTube.
7. Create Your Community
The Community tab allows you to interact even better with your audience – get to know their opinions and attitudes about content. What you can do:
- create polls and votes;
- ask viewers for advice;
- find out your audience’s interests;
- publish additional content (e.g., backstages, gifs, photos);
- post news about the channel or related topics.
The advantage of the community is that news from it is displayed on the YouTube home page and is visible to everyone, not just subscribers to the channel. You can see news from a channel you once visited but didn’t subscribe to. This is called “YouTube News” on the home page. Ten news items from multiple channels go there. This section is personalized, meaning each viewer is shown different news.
Viewers can also subscribe to your community and be notified of new entries.
How to Create a Community – Once you reach 1,000 subscribers, within a week you’ll have a “Community” tab on your channel home page. To post there, you need to click on the camera icon in the upper right corner of the creative studio and select “Create an entry” from the drop-down menu.
You’ll be prompted to choose the type of entry – a message with an image, a gif, a video, or a poll.
8. Set up contests
Contests and givas always attract a lot of subscribers. To really get an increase in audience, set a condition for participation in the contest: be a subscriber of the channel, click on the bell, repost the video to the social network and write a comment under the video.
9. Making videos on hot topics
When you create a channel, you want to shoot only what is interesting for you. This works if you have really unique content, an original form of presentation, and an established audience that constantly follows your posts. But most channels are not very different from each other. Such authors should look for relevant topics and then shoot a video on them.
To do this, you can use Yandex.Wordstat and Google Trends – look at what is most often searched for, for which keywords, and shoot on this topic.
10. Writing comments on other people’s videos
This is a time-consuming way to promote, but it can also help. The essence – find videos of competitors or related topics and write a comment. You can add a call to subscribe in the end.
If the name of the channel fully reflects the subject, you can do without appeals to subscribe, just leave comments, not necessarily long ones.
Important: You don’t have to spam and beg for a subscription like a schoolboy. It should be a meaningful comment or question to the author of the video, so that after reading it, people want to go to your channel and see what it’s about.
Conclusion
When attracting subscribers don’t forget about content – publish new videos regularly, make everything of high quality and encourage viewers to subscribe to your channel and click on the bell so they don’t miss new videos. We also advise you to make as concise and informative videos as possible, with no more than 5-10 minutes duration.