Creating a YouTube channel is a matter of just a few minutes, but managing it isn’t! This precisely is the reason why there are tens and thousands of YouTube channels but not many who have a large subscriber base or make money through their channel. Here’s unlocking the secrets on how to grow your YouTube channel subscribers.
7 Smart ways to grow your YouTube subscriber base
- Do it consistently
When it comes to building your YouTube channel, consistency is the key. Even if you were to religiously observe all the other tips stated below, your channel wouldn’t see success unless for this one cardinal rule. While there may not be a suits-all practice, it is advisable to post at least once in a week for higher views and traffic.
- Keep your schedule
To narrow it down further, being consistent also means sticking to a recurring schedule. Posting video sometime during a week or once in a month could be termed as consistent, but isn’t just enough. Regularly posting content at a particular time of a day or on a particular day of every week helps to generate interest in your subscribers and make them wait for something.
- Customise channel art
Channel art is the background design at the top of your channel that runs behind your profile picture. It is important to get your channel design right as this is where you can make the first impression on your visitors. Consider your YouTube channel as your brand and get a channel art design that’s in line with your genre, content and audience. Apart from creating an impressive background design, make sure that you update the YouTube channel bio including the About tab with channel description, website link and other details. If you can create and add a channel trailer video that summarises your organisation’s mission or channel purpose, then you sure have a head start.
- Name should say it all
Take time to give the most appropriate and appealing names to your YouTube videos. Remember, all you’ve got is just a few seconds of attention and if your video title and thumbnail fails to generate interest, the viewer would move to other video links without any second thoughts. The worst- in most cases, once a visitor is lost, it’s impossible to get him back to view your content.
- Personalise video thumbnails
That brings us to the next point of using custom thumbnails for your YouTube videos along with a meaningful title. It is true that the randomly generated thumbnail images provides great convenience, especially if you frequently upload videos on your channel, but using relevant custom thumbnail images will lead to higher videos click-through rate. YouTube offers auto generated thumbnails from three intervals- at the 1/4th, 1/2 and 3/4th mark. If any of these thumbnails perfectly illustrate your video, you can directly use these thumbnails without further customising it.
- Ask for subscribers
You need not shy away from asking those who watch your video content to subscribe to your YouTube channel. At the end of every video make sure to include an annotation or a Subscribe Now button, prompting the viewers to subscribe to your channel. However, make sure that you tone it right so that it wouldn’t sound too salesy or desperate. The right thing to do is to consider it as a call-to-action section and tell your viewers why they should subscribe and what they’ll get. Apart from this, make it a point to link your official webpage and blog URL to your YouTube channel. In the same manner, add the ‘Subscribe’ button to your website and blog page to goad website visitors to your YouTube channel.
- Don’t ignore SEO
If sequenced according to importance, this definitely shouldn’t be the last point. Search Engine Optimisation efforts are critical in order to drive traffic to your channel and to build a large subscriber base. As the first step, think of all possible keywords that are relevant to your video which people would use in online searches. You can use Google Trends and other Google keywords tools to identify the most searched for keywords relevant to your content. Once finalised, add these keywords in your video content and create a keyword rich in-depth video description to boost the chances of making your videos findable in online searches. Remember, low video view count does not necessarily indicate poor content; it could also be a case of poor discoverable nature of your videos.
