- In this video we're gonna guide you
on the journey to 1,000 YouTube subscribers,
but in order to do that I need your help.
So before the end of the intro,
answer this question in the comments below.
Why do you want 1,000 subscribers?
Let's do this. (clap)
- [Man] VidIQ.
- [Woman] VidIQ.
- [Man] VidIQ.com.
(mellow synthesizer music)
- All right, then.
If your answer was something along the lines of
because I wanna monetize my YouTube channel, well,
don't forget, you need 4,000 hours of watch time, as well.
If your answer was because I wanna
monetize my YouTube channel, well,
don't forget that you also need to apply for
the YouTube Partner Program and be accepted
into it so there are no shockers.
YouTube will be checking whether or not you're trying
to buy subscribers or manipulate the metrics.
And if it's because you wanna monetize your YouTube channel,
then you're not thinking about your audience.
Can you see where I'm going with this?
Now, if it's because 1,000 people represents
a huge community that has put their faith and trust
in your content to inspire and educate them,
then you're on the right YouTube path.
We've uploaded over 600 videos on
the vidIQ YouTube channel now,
and we've had over two million comments.
I haven't read every single one of them, I must confess,
but the overriding theme of a lot of these comments is a
lack of understanding a mindset of the YouTube platform.
Most new creators naively, and understandably so,
are thinking more about what they can get from the YouTube
platform rather than what they can give to their audience.
And I've said this already in
videos that we've made in 2020.
Stop thinking about the metrics and how you
gain things from the content that you create,
and think first about what's
valuable to your YouTube audience.
I can almost guarantee that when you shift
mindset from you to your audience,
your channel will grow so much faster
and so much more easily that you'll hit
1,000 subscribers before you even know it.
That's because your content,
your daily interaction with your community,
becomes far more important than any
milestone that you're trying to achieve.
Hello, I'm Rob, and welcome to vidIQ,
the YouTube tool and channel that aims
to educate you on your YouTube journey.
For more YouTube tips, tricks, and advice just like this,
make sure to subscribe to the channel and do this (ding)
so that you're the first to be notified
when we release brand new content.
As always, school is, well, already in session.
Stop asking whether file names matter in SEO.
It never has done and it never will do, it's a myth.
Now, while I did say that milestones
aren't necessarily that important,
especially to your audience at this stage,
they probably still do rattle
around in the back of your head.
So let's touch on this to help with your mental welfare.
Getting to 100 subscribers is one of the
hardest things you will do on the YouTube platform.
We know, we were there to help guide you through it,
and if you weren't there,
then there's a video over here
that you should definitely watch.
Now, let's say theoretically that it took you
three months to get 100 subscribers,
and then, your next target is 1,000 subscribers.
That might be a bit of a stretch, but at the same time,
it's not going to take 30 months
to get to 1,000 subscribers because,
like with any YouTube channel, you will be gaining momentum.
So what you want to try and continue
to have is incremental increases in milestones.
So going from 100 subscribers to maybe 250 subscribers,
then maybe 500 subscribers, 750 subscribers,
all the way up 1,000 subscribers.
As long as you're aware of a reachable goal
somewhere in the distance and you keep track of
your incremental steps towards that milestone,
whether it be two or three subscribers
a day or 10 or 20 subscribers a week,
that will nourish you as you nourish
your audience with value from your content.
Now, if in the background you want to track these
incremental milestones up to 1,000 subscribers,
vidIQ has a free tool for you.
On most YouTube pages you'll see
a cluster of YouTube tools from vidIQ.
Click on the Achievements one and it
will give you all sorts of stats,
but there is specifically one for subscribers,
and when you click on it that generates a certificate,
and you can share that success with your
audience on any of your social media platforms.
If you have over 100 subscribers
and you're working towards 1,000 subscribers,
for the typical channel you've probably done a few dozen
videos and you have some experience and an understanding,
generally, of what your audience likes on your channel.
So it's now time to solidify your value proposition.
What does that mean?
Let me put it very simply.
Describe your channel in five seconds
or less in a catchy, memorable fashion.
For example, our value proposition
could be YouTube growth channel,
but in order to make it catchy and memorable
what do we say our channel is about?
Educating your YouTube journey.
Now, let me give you a couple more made up examples.
Fortnite gaming channel.
There are literally hundreds of thousands
of these on YouTube already,
so how do you describe your channel in a catchy,
memorable way if you're a Fortnite game play channel?
Well, it could be something along the lines of this.
Because head shots are better at 347 frames per second.
That could mean that your channel is all about
how to improve the gameplay performance of
Fortnite or any other first-person shooter game.
It gives your channel more focus,
your audience knows exactly what your channel is about,
and it's memorable.
What about this one?
European travel vlog.
Naw, it's too generic, we've heard it all before.
Let's try this.
Euro-penniless traveling nomad.
All right, it's not my best effort,
but I came up with it in five seconds.
That defines your channel as content all about
an individual going around countries of Europe,
most likely on an extreme budget.
And what type of content is that going to
appeal to in terms of a target audience?
Young students.
So you've sold your channel to your audience,
not explicitly and functionally,
but through a catchy, memorable value proposition.
Now, this can change over time.
There is nothing wrong with that,
but if your channel has a core theme,
you always know the value that you're
trying to deliver to your audience,
and your audience,
whether they be new visitors or regular subscribers,
will always know what to expect from your content.
So yeah, in short, I wanna see some of your
channel value propositions in the comments below.
When it comes to starting and building a YouTube channel
I always say that nothing beats experience.
Hopefully, by now you should have some videos out on the
platform and you've got some views and some subscribers.
So what you've gained from that is social proof.
You will have certain videos that
have performed better than others.
You'll have videos that have some engagement
and some feedback asking you to make
followup videos or asking you general questions,
which you could potentially answer with future content.
So my advice to you now would be
to start researching your channel,
even if it is the simplest trick in the book,
which is to go to your video tab on your channel page
and sort by the most popular videos.
If there are any patterns in the top five or 10 videos
that are telling you a certain type of content works,
then make more of that content,
whether it's about a particular topic or a video style.
It may be that you've already chosen your video topic niche,
whether it be sports, gaming, politics,
wrestling, beauty, but from the content that you have
you should by now be able to find
a subniche in that particular topic.
Now, it might be predictions or tutorials or reaction videos
or when you're in front of camera
and you're giving your personal stories.
When you start your YouTube channel,
there is nothing wrong with experimenting 80% of the time,
but as your channel grows,
you'll get to a stage where you are serving your audience
the content they want to see 80% of the time
while you can experiment with the other 20% of content.
Know more about your own channel
and discover what works for your audience,
and it's pretty simple, do more of it.
If you drill down into that concept a little further,
if you want more subscribers,
then look at the videos on your channel
that bring in the most subscribers
and make more content based on those videos.
You can use the vidIQ channel audit tool to do this,
as we have a column which shows you which videos
on your channel bring in the most subscribers.
Funnily enough, it's our video tutorials that are
all about how to get more subscribers,
hence, why we're doing this followup video
on how to 1,000 subscribers in 2020.
You know what we're also likely to do in the future?
Based on the data we're getting from our channel audit tool,
which is also telling us that we're
making successful gaming content,
we're gonna make a video on how to
get 1,000 subscribers as a gaming channel.
It just makes sense.
Now, this next thing may be way down your priority list
as you build out your YouTube channel,
but maybe you wanna start thinking
about creating a channel trailer.
We've already talked about your value proposition.
A channel trailer should essentially encapsulate that value
proposition in a video of no more than 30 to 45 seconds.
By all means, look at how successful creators
have already used channel trailers
to introduce themselves to an audience.
What you're generally going to discover with channel
trailers is that you have 1,000 fantastic ideas,
but you only need to put one of them
in that video or else it's too long.
With all that being said,
there is an alternative to a dedicated channel trailer,
and that is to use the video that converts most subscribers
on your channel and use that as your channel trailer
as it's already proven to work with your audience.
Next up, it's time to start taking
search engine optimization, or SEO,
seriously on the YouTube platform.
After all,
it is the second largest search engine in the world.
The most creators get their start on YouTube by
having discoverable content through search.
This means extensive keyword research into your topic
to find out what people are searching for,
including those keywords in the titles,
but also, making those titles intriguing to click on.
This also includes expanding your keywords out to
your video descriptions and video tags, if you want to.
And they're trying to include keywords in the vocabulary
of your video content because YouTube is watching
and listening to everything you put out on the platform.
Now, some of these things, admittedly,
are marginal gains, but remember this.
If you're a channel with 100 subscribers
versus another channel with 100 subscribers,
would you rather be the video content creator that is giving
YouTube as much information about their video as possible,
or the one who's just throwing stuff onto YouTube
and expecting it to be discovered?
As you might expect,
keyword research is a huge learning topic in itself,
so we've done a big video over here on YouTube,
but we've also done a massive course in the vidIQ Academy.
VidIQ Academy allows you to go into
microscopic detail on YouTube topics,
including thumbnails, keyword research,
finding your niche, starting a YouTube channel,
and monetizing your content.
The best news is when you sign up for either
vidIQ Pro or Boost you get the Academy included.
There is a link in the video description.
This next point is true for every single video creator
no matter where they are in their YouTube journey,
and that is that they have pain points
that are preventing their progress.
Now, that could be thumbnails that just aren't clickable,
or keyword research that doesn't match up
to what people are searching for,
or you're just absolutely terrible in front of camera,
which means that you have to
retake every single shot 10 times.
Now is a good time in the early stage of
your YouTube journey to start identifying
these pain points and facing them head-on.
The longer you ignore that pain point,
the more brittle that foundation on your YouTube channel
will be to a point where it is just crippling,
handicapping your channel completely.
Now, I don't suggest trying to tackle
all of your pain points all at once.
Identify which you personally feel is a thing
that's holding your channel back the most.
Usually at this point in a
creator's journey it's thumbnails.
Now, if it is thumbnails, again,
we've got a really big playlist over here
on YouTube on how to create better thumbnails
and an Academy course down here.
Whatever it is, spend an extra half an hour
or hour per video trying to
improve on that pain point by 1%.
If you start to improve on something today,
in two or three months you'll look back at where
those videos were and you'll think, yeah,
that was horrible, those thumbnails were terrible,
but I'm so glad they look like this today because
I'm getting a higher click-through rate and more views,
or presenting in front of camera,
or your video editing, or your B roll,
whatever it is, start tackling it today.
A lot of what I'm telling you in this video about how to
get 1,000 subscribers is foundational strategies
that are going to put your channel in good stead
as you move forward as a video creator.
Hopefully, you're taking a lot of this onboard
along with all of the other tips, tricks, and advice
you're getting from other YouTube educators,
but what I would also encourage is to stay weird.
Do things that you wouldn't expect to normally do.
80% of the time you are wanting to deliver content to
your audience and create thumbnails that are consistent,
but there's nothing wrong with experimentation
because if you don't test new things,
you'll never know if you discover a brand new niche
or a certain thumbnail that defies all logic,
but really appeals to a certain demographic
who want to click on it because
it's different to anything else on YouTube.
I'm gonna put it like this.
A lot of vidIQ regulars may be annoyed with this.
However, PewDiePie versus T-Series.
That was me experimenting with
different content on the channel,
and it turned out to be highly successful.
What a lot of regular viewers didn't realize
is that it didn't impede on our regular vidIQ content.
I was still pumping out hundreds
of educational pieces of video content,
and the PewDiePie versus T-Series content
took up about 10 to 15% of what we did in 2019,
but at the same time,
those videos brought in millions of views
and tens of thousands of subscribers,
many who have stuck around to now watch
this type of content to grow their channels.
Had I stayed strictly within the educational content
that we provide here at vidIQ we may not
have reached 450,000 subscribers
and 30 million views in the last year.
Now that the PewDiePie versus
T-Series story has come to an end,
what have we come back to?
Our core value proposition.
Educating you on your YouTube journey.
It's just that 20% of the time I like to
entertain you on your YouTube journey.
Now, because of something called audience retention,
not everybody who started this
video is still watching right now,
but for those of you who are 15 minutes into this content,
thank you very much for watching.
I value your time,
and because you're watching the entire video,
I hope you're getting the whole value from
this content that you're going to use on your channel
to help you get to 1,000 subscribers.
You are the core members of this community,
the brothers and sisters of the vidIQ family,
and you will have those same people who
are not just subscribers, but super-fans.
Those who already care deeply, not only about your content,
but about you as a video creator,
and they want to see you succeed,
which is why you should engage with your community
as much as you can in your videos.
That's why at the beginning of this video
I wanted to engage you all by asking a question,
which you have answered.
And for the first couple of hours of this video's life we
will be responding to as many of those comments as we can.
It's why I put a voting poll in a recent video
asking you whether or not I should keep this beard,
and the results have been a resounding yes,
so that's exactly what I'm gonna do
'cause I care about how you feel,
and it's why for the rest of this video
I'm going to shout out all of these people who
just commented on the vidIQ channel.
We always appreciate the engagement,
and that's what you should do with your community.
Grazik, TazMusically, VoltageAce,
ChangingStranger, WestOfGaming, 007theMaskedGamer,
GamingWithMorris, ByTatters, TheDreamcast,
ZuZuCom, NLaminD, KianTV, TutorialLiveStudio,
KenjingTV, TheHandsomeLife, PowerOfSun.
Thank you, and thank all of you for watching.
Enjoy the rest of your video-making day.