A YouTube channel is an excellent place for companies to get more visibility and build an audience that may be interested in their services or products. But getting started with a YouTube channel from scratch may not be easy.
To give you a head start, we listed 15 tips that will help you get more YouTube subscribers. We covered how to deal with YouTube SEO, what parameters you should pay attention to, and what types of marketing tools can help you.
1. Tidy Up Your YouTube Channel
If you’re thinking of starting fresh with an old YouTube channel, you’ll have to do some housekeeping first. Go through your content and critically evaluate every video. Everything that’s poor quality, irrelevant, or not popular will have to go. If you’re considering keeping YouTube videos that are dear to you, think about your audience and whether they’ll find your content valuable.
All the videos that don’t bring value to your channel will have to be deleted. Only then we can start talking about growing your YouTube subscribers.
2. Focus on Video and Audio Quality
To get more YouTube subscribers, first and foremost, your videos must be easy to watch. And we’re not talking about the content inside your videos. Good sound and video quality are very important. If your camera is undeliberately shaky and the video sounds like you recorded underwater, even the best content won’t bring you more YouTube subscribers.
You may have to invest in a proper camera, a stabilizer if you're filming with your phone, and a microphone to ensure good quality. All in all, whatever tools you choose, make sure your video and audio are high quality.
3. Do Your Homework
While some wanna-be YouTubers think that they’ll land thousands of subscribers simply by speaking out their thoughts to the camera, this is rarely the case.
Creating quality content requires preparation. You may need to do some research online or speak to experts and collect shots that will keep your audience glued to the screens even if you’re just speaking into the camera. Writing scripts is another important step that will not only make your final video look more professional but also save you time when filming.
The same applies to companies that want to get more YouTube subscribers. Find ways to position your products in an engaging way, plan ahead and make sure you only post videos that bring value to your audience.
You should also pay attention to content around your videos, such as video descriptions and video thumbnails because they’re also part of your YouTube channel and your brand image on the platform.
4. Create Engaging YouTube Channel Trailers
YouTube gives you a great opportunity to catch the viewers’ attention with short channel trailers. They automatically play once a visitor arrives at your YouTube channel page.
Channel trailers need to be short, compelling and make the users want to stay on your channel. You have about 30 to 60 seconds to catch the viewer’s attention and get them interested in your content. So keep it short, simple, and engaging.
You may also want to add a call to action to your YouTube channel trailers because they have a good track of improving visitor engagement.
5. Pay Attention to the Video Length
Slightly longer YouTube videos tend to rank better. If you have enough content, try to make your YouTube videos around 10 minutes long.
Of course, if your goal is to publish a short 2-min video, you don’t need to bend backwards trying to extend it to 10 minutes. However, if you’re planning to upload an unedited two-hour long monologue on product marketing, consider cutting it to a 10-minute concise video where you highlight the main points.
Whatever length your YouTube videos are, it’s important to catch the viewer’s attention within the first 20 or so seconds. If they don’t find your YoutTube videos engaging during that time, they’re likely to switch to another video.
6. Create Playlists with Video Sets
Playlists are a helpful feature that allows you to create sets of YouTube videos. It keeps your channel well-organized and helps your audience find more relevant content.
You can create playlists with videos that cover similar topics or target the same audience segment. You can group playlists in different categories, and this way, make it easy for your YouTube subscribers to find what they're looking for.
7. Add Strong Calls to Action
Call to Actions (CTAs) are an easy way to let your audience know what action you’d like them to take. Whether it’s a call to like your video, become a subscriber or share, you should always add them to your content.
If integrating a CTA to your video content is complicated, YouTube gives you an option to add it as an end card. It will appear as a button at the end of your video. Make sure your CTAs are clear, actionable, and engaging. Simple “subscribe now” may be overused and not bring you more YouTube subscribers, but if you find a way to say it in an engaging way, the effect may surprise you in a good way.
8. Optimize Your Video Titles
Video titles are a lot like book titles. While many people won’t admit to judging a book by its cover, it’s the first thing they notice. The same applies to your video titles. They may define whether people will watch your YouTube videos or scroll past it.
Some good YouTube SEO practices suggest incorporating a target keyword into your video title. It may help people find your video if they search for a specific phrase. It’s also a good idea to make the title descriptive and engaging while keeping it relatively short (around 60 characters).
9. Create Custom Thumbnails
Thumbnails are video covers that appear on YouTube searches. Just like video titles, covers may also play an important role in your content popularity.
You can choose a custom video thumbnail or let YouTube pick a still shot from your video. And it may not be an attractive shot, so always make sure to customize your thumbnails. Try to make them as engaging and interesting as possible. A good practice is to include a picture of a face or an image of a person in your video thumbnails because it draws people’s attention. However, if your YouTube videos are animated, don’t just upload images of random people as thumbnails. Covers should reflect the content inside your videos.
10. Publish Content Consistently
Keep your YouTube subscribers engaged by posting videos often and consistently. You may post one video a week or every fortnight, but you may lose subscribers if you don't post anything for a month or longer.
Planning ahead can help you post consistently. If you have a video marketing team or are a part of it, dedicate time to plan your video content for the following weeks or a month. This way, you’ll have a clear plan for posting videos, and everyone in the team will have enough time to plan their tasks and prepare. You may even post videos at the same time every week and build a habit for your subscribers to come back to your YouTube channel for new content.
11. Engage with Your Audience
Many brands ignore YouTube comments under their videos. In some cases, they don’t have the resources to respond to every comment, or this simply isn’t a part of their strategy. However, engaging with subscribers may help you get more of them.
Even online, people appreciate being acknowledged. If you get a question under your video and ignore it, you may even lose a potential client. So make sure to reply to comments either in your videos or in the comment section.
12. Invest in Advertising
Even the best content can get overlooked for a number of reasons. The best way to make sure your videos get noticed is by promoting them with paid advertising. Choose a video that you think may get the most attention and run paid advertisements for it.
YouTube supports a few different ad formats, such as display ads, overlay ads, bumper ads, skippable or non-skippable video ads, and sponsored cards. To ensure the best targeting, you can choose to show ads to users based on their interests, location, demographics, etc.
13. Promote Your Channel
A cheaper way to promote your YouTube channel than buying advertisements is by telling people about it in different groups or forums. If you know that your target audience is active in a certain forum or has developed an online community, promote your channel there.
Make sure your promotion is relevant and not annoying. Otherwise, you may start losing subscribers. Also, find out if your chosen forum allows promoting YouTube channels because you may get banned.
14. Optimize Your Channel for Search Engines
The best way to attract organic traffic to your channel is optimizing it for search engines. YouTube SEO slightly differs from other types of SEO. These are some basic rules to follow:
- Optimize your channel description. Make sure it includes your target keywords and makes it easy for interested people to find it via search.
- Optimize video descriptions. Similarly to the channel description, they should include the main keywords.
- Use keywords relevant to your video content. If you optimize your descriptions for a certain keyword, your video should focus on the topic you mention.
- Use meta tags. Create a keyword planner and optimize your metadata for your target keywords. You can check the meta tags of the best performing YouTube videos and make your tags similar, don’t just blindly copy them.
15. Use YouTube Marketing Tools
You can find loads of YouTube video marketing tools out there. They can help you grow organic traffic to your videos, take care of your YouTube SEO, and simply keep track of your channel performance.
Some marketing tools can automate your processes by filling out the meta tags, generating descriptions and suggesting video titles. Other tools can offer you to buy YouTube subscribers.
Depending on your needs, you can even find automation tools that help you grow your YouTube subscribers by automatically writing comments and subscribing to relevant accounts to get more visibility for your channel. YouTube bots can help you quickly boost your channel and get more engagement from other users.
If you decide to use a bot, make sure to choose reliable YouTube proxies because otherwise, you can get your account suspended.
Conclusion
Whether you have an old YouTube channel with few subscribers or want to start a new one, our tips can help you get more traffic.
First of all, you should make sure your channel is clean, and your new subscribers won’t find your old irrelevant videos lying around. Once that’s sorted, you should ensure your YouTube videos are good quality, both technically and content-wise.
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Optimizing your YouTube channel for search engines can help your potential subscribers find your content easily. You should optimize your video descriptions, customize thumbnails, and add actionable CTAs. Your meta tags and channel description should include your target keywords and reflect what content your YouTube subscribers should expect from your videos.
Finally, you can always turn to marketing tools to help you optimize your channel and videos. These tools will make your YouTube channel more visible and easier to discover. This way, you’ll get more subscribers and more views on your videos.
