How to Double Your YouTube Subscribers (Without Buying Them) (1)
Every minute, over 300 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.
With that much competition, you might have already counted yourself out and accepted the viewpoint that becoming popular on the platform is hard.
But what if you're making a mistake? What if you could break through the noise and become a popular on YouTube?
One of the best ways of measuring popularity on YouTube is by looking at the number of subscribers you have.
The more subscribers you have, the more you can consistently achieve high view counts on your videos.
Not everyone who is uploading a video to YouTube has laid out a strategy that will allow for them to increase subscriber numbers.
And so, this is where the opportunity lies.
If you can come up with a strategy to boost subscriber numbers, you too, will be able to join the companies that are experiencing success with YouTube.
In this post, we're going to take a look at how you can grow your YouTube subscriber count. We'll analyze a variety of strategies and focus on how you can implement them. By the end you should have a good sense of how to create a strategy that will allow for you to use YouTube as a means to grow your business.
Do you create videos often? Learn how to double your YouTube subscribers from this cheat sheet.
Let's begin! Give your channel a theme Before you do anything, you need to give your channel a theme.
If you take a look at a lot of the top YouTube channels, you'll notice that many of them stick to a theme. Take a look at the Derek Halpern channel for example.
Notice how a lot of the videos he creates stick to certain topics related to business and success.
Having a theme will help direct all of your later efforts when it comes to creating content.
On top of that, if you give your channel a theme, you can make it the ‘go to' place for certain types of content. If your channel caters to a specific niche, then people who care deeply about that niche won't mind becoming a subscriber. In doing so, they'll learn something new about their topic of interest whenever you post a video — therefore furthering their ability to learn more about a topic they're passionate about. For example, imagine that your videos are all about Facebook marketing and you aim to help business owners.
If a business owner who wants to learn more about Facebook marketing subscribes to your channel, they'll get an update any time you post some content on Facebook marketing. This provides them with a way to stay ahead of the curve without having to do a lot of work.
This is incredibly valuable when you consider that 50% of small business owners don't have enough time to get everything done in the first place. If you're struggling to come up with a theme for your channel, just think about the problems that your business solves and who it solves those problems for. Then, produce some videos based on the topics that you know best will help the kind of people that your business serves.
Post incredible content 70% of marketers report that video converts better than other forms of media
If you want to experience results like this, you need to learn how to create incredible content.
Plus, if you can create incredible content, then a lot of the work related to growing your subscriber count is done for you already.
When people subscribe to your channel, they're essentially signing up to get updates whenever a new piece of content is posted. If your content is great, people won't mind hearing from you again, because their initial interaction with you and your content was so positive. Subscribing is worth it, because every time they click through to your video, they get something that is of value to them.
Whether that's a learning experience, an entertainment experience or both — it's worth watching your videos. And, remember that people make the time to watch great content. 75%of business executives watch work-related videos every week.
If you're content is really good, then you'll benefit from the fact that 54%of senior executives share content. But, even if your videos are good, you still might need to remind them to subscribe — but it won't be an uphill battle. So how do you produce incredible content?
If you want to create incredible content, it's worth focusing on producing content that is relevant for your target market/audience. Provided that you're sticking to a theme as mentioned before, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with a way to produce valuable content. Let's say that you want to create a channel that covers the topic of ‘pencil drawing.' One way we could come up with ideas is by simply entering the broad keyword of ‘pencil drawing' into the YouTube search engine. Over 3 billion searches are conducted on YouTube per month. So we know there's going to be some relevant data here. When we type in the keyword, we see the suggestions above.
Now, those topics might seem a little broad, so you may want to pick one of those keywords, and go through the same process again so that you can generate something more concise.
Let's add the word ‘tutorial,' for instance. By adding the word tutorial, we are now provided with some more concise keywords.
The fact that these keywords appear in the suggestions lets us know that people are searching for these types of videos.
You might argue that there is a lot of competition for such keywords.
And while that may be true, later on in the post we'll figure out how we can get people to view our videos, even when there is a lot of competition — so don't let it be a concern for now. The great thing about the approach above is that it gives us a place to start from.
If we want to produce content for a certain niche, this technique lets us know what kinds of content people will already have an interest in viewing.
You can also use the Google Keyword tool to come up with some content ideas. That's because there will be some coherence between Google search results and YouTube search results. Youtube also happens to be one of the biggest search engines in the world — after all, if people want to find a video they have to search for it right?
Let's stick with the topic of ‘pencil drawing.' In the ‘Your product or service' box, enter a keyword based on your business. If I was running a business that taught people how to do pencil drawing, I'd enter ‘how to do pencil drawing.' You want to keep the keyword broad at this stage, because it'll allow for the keyword tool to come up with a wide range of ideas for you. Once you've entered the keyword, you'll then see this page. It shows several ‘Ad groups' of keywords. Each group of keywords centers around a certain topic.
As you can see, I've arranged the groups in terms of ‘Average monthly searches' and descending order. This gives us a sense of where there might be a lot of competition
Let's click on the mid-range group called ‘Drawing Techniques.' I've highlighted a few keywords that might represent good YouTube content opportunities. I chose these keywords because it's clear to see how you could create a focused, high value video that could be centered around these keywords. You might think that these keywords don't have that many searches, and, therefore, aren't worthy in terms of effort required. However, it's important to remember that we're not just going to post a handful of videos and then be done with it. Cultivating a YouTube channel so that it eventually has a lot of subscribers often requires for you to post a lot of content.
The biggest YouTube channel has over 2,466 videos in existence.
If you want to do that, while still keeping the content relevant, you need to be able to niche down your content as much as possible, so that each of your videos provides something new for a viewer to learn.
And, if you niche down, it's only natural that the level of searches per month is going to go down. Plus, even if you focus on low volume keywords, they'll all come together to help you build momentum and establish yourself in aYouTube niche. Also, you'll notice that with a lot of the smaller keywords, many people haven't created fully optimized videos for them. Only 9% of small U.S businesses use YouTube, so if you're looking to produce business content, this represents a great opportunity. Look at what happens, for instance, when I type in the ‘Simple drawing techniques' keyword. There's a playlist there, but other than that, there aren't any fully optimized titles, or even videos, based solely around the topic of ‘simple drawing techniques.' The next thing that can improve the quality of your videos is production quality. In a certain sense, however, this is not really a priority quite yet.
As long as your videos are rich in value and provide the viewer with the information they need, you're doing a good job. When the videos start to bring you a return, you can focus more on production quality.
Bu,t there are some caveats here.
You need to ensure that what you're saying can be easily heard. It's important that you speak clearly and enthusiastically. You've got to project your voice. Otherwise, people might not be able to understand what you're saying. They might even get bored.
You don't need to act like an extrovert, just try and prevent your voice from becoming monotonous. If you're recording your content using a phone or a laptop, the microphone might not be enough. So, you may want to invest in a quality external microphone.
However, test it to see how things actually sound before you make this investment.
You also need to ensure that whatever you're recording is easy to watch. You don't want to make it hard work for your viewers to see what is going on. This means you need to always ensure that the lighting is adequate.
If you're recording a talking head style video, where you're talking to the camera, ensure that your face can be clearly seen. If someone is recording you, then ensure that the camera isn't shaking. If you're recording your laptop screen, ensure that your actions can be clearly seen and that anything that you're typing can be read. When it comes to video editing, you have a couple of solutions.When speaking about video editing, what we're referring to is improving the style of your videos and not so much about removing minor mistakes. More often than not, you're going to make some minor mistakes when recording your video. You don't need to put tons of focus into removing these bits, as they don't harm your video all that much. In fact, they might even help your video as they let other people know that they're dealing with a real person. Where editing can come in handy, though, is when you need to create cuts in your video or add a title screen.
If you're not an accomplished video editor, you could seek out someone from Upwork or perhaps even Fiverr. Alternatively, you could purchase a video editing suite and learn to do everything yourself.
That method might save you a bit more money, though you might end up spending a lot more time learning how to edit videos on your own.
That might not be the best trade off, depending on your circumstances.
As mentioned, you don't want to over-edit your videos, though you do want to give them a sense of style that separates you from the crowd. Often, the easiest way to do this is by having some custom intro music and a custom title screen.
Another way that you can post incredible content, is by creating some videos based on your product being used.
Demonstration videos can go a long way in showcasing your product as something worth buying.
In fact, it might be worth considering the creation of some demonstration videos, when you realize that 78% of internet users conduct product research online.
