- As a small YouTube channel,
one of your big goals is to get 1,000 subscribers,
and that's hard to do.
But you are probably making this task even harder
by ignoring one of the most important subscribe buttons
on YouTube.
Spoiler alert, it ain't this one.
How many subscribers have you got right now?
Let us know in the comments below,
or the comments over here, or over here,
or wherever YouTube decides to put them.
Now, I'm asking because I know for a lot of you,
subscribers are really important.
Custom URLs, Community Tab, monetization.
All of these are unlocked through subscribe accounts.
So let's help you get more subscribers
by getting more people to click this button on this page.
Yes, that's right, folks.
It's your often neglected,
sometimes totally forgotten channel page.
I'll be honest, it's probably been six months
since I've updated this page myself.
But this week, I discovered something pretty astonishing
in the analytics that I can't ignore.
This single subscribe button the vidIQ channel page
is responsible for almost 300,000 subscribers,
nearly 25% of a channel's total.
It's brought in more subscribers
than our top 10 videos combined.
There's also another slightly unusual,
definitely overlooked subscribers
that a lot more creators could be taken advantage of,
but stick around to the end of a video
to find out what that one is.
Unlike your videos that come and go
and have a certain lifecycle to them,
your channel page is permanent.
It is the page users visit most often.
That's all about you.
In fact, I would love to know how many people
have visited our channel page
given the number of subscribers we've gained from it.
It must be in the millions, possibly tens of millions.
YouTube, can you do that for us? Thanks.
The improvements you need to make to your channel page
will likely take a lot less time
than it does to make the average video,
so it's worth doing, right?
The most obvious place to start
to make your channel page more welcoming
is your channel banner.
It really serves one purpose:
to let a visitor know as quickly as possible,
whether or not they're in the right place.
Or to put it another way, is this channel made for me?
Well, given that we have
a YouTube Certified logo on the banner,
the words YouTube Education,
and some ugly bloke holding a gold play button,
I think it's pretty clear pretty quickly
what vidIQ is all about, right?
Very much like a thumbnail,
keep it simple, make it clear, be concise.
If it's vague, if it's complicated,
you confuse and then you lose.
Let me give you a couple of quick examples.
Every Tuesday, we do channel audits on the vidIQ channel,
and this is a good example of a simple channel banner
that communicates instantly what the channel is about,
as opposed to this channel
that's far more interested in personal goals.
All well and good for the channel,
but what about me, the viewer?
I've learned nothing.
I don't know if I'm in the right place or not.
The next thing you wanna look at
is the About section of your channel page,
and it's all to do with this.
Currently, on the desktop YouTube experience,
the About section is quite buried.
But on mobile, it's a different story.
When you visit a channel on the YouTube mobile app,
the first 100 or so characters
from the About section are visible,
so use them to clearly explain
who should be watching your videos and why.
If you treat your YouTube channel like a business,
as you should,
this will be your value proposition.
And the first line of your About section
is the perfect place to put it.
But we're not finished there because just underneath that
is your channel trailer,
the first thumbnail and video new visitors
are going to encounter on your channel.
Advice differs on channel trailers, but here's what I think.
Do not use a dedicated channel trailer video
unless you really good at them.
Instead, pick a video from your channel
that you already know is really effective
at converting viewers into subscribers
and you get bonus points of the thumbnail,
and the start of a video
really reinforce the mission of your channel.
Getting your first subscriber on YouTube
is one of the easiest things you can do.
But it's also one of the hardest to get right.
Whether you're on a desktop or a mobile app,
all of a channel page stuff we've just talked about
is a above the fold.
You don't need to scroll or swipe down to see it.
But if you do wanna build out your channel page
a little bit more,
the next two things you should include is a playlist
that best represents your channel
and recent uploads to make sure that people know
that you're publishing on a regular basis.
And if, after all of that,
a visitor can't work out what the channel's about,
the channel's probably not for them, and that's fine.
You, as a creator, only want to grab the attention
of your target audience.
Now, then, about that secret source of subscribers.
Yep. We're talking about the Community Tab again.
Over The last 28 days,
vidIQ has gained over 1,000 subscribers from Community posts
because each one includes a subscriber.
That's a pretty big opportunity, isn't it,
for about five minutes work?
And in a recent update to this data,
you can now click through to see which community posts
specifically gain the most subscribers.
Rather hilariously,
when we basically ask people to subscribe, they did,
in their hundreds.
Now, I can't promise you a ton of new subscribers overnight
just because you make these changes to your YouTube channel.
But over the coming weeks, months, years,
your YouTube channel page
will likely be the biggest single source of subscribers
to your channel,
so leverage it to its full potential.
And the rumor is, YouTube might be looking
to make some pretty big upgrades to that page,
especially on desktop.
Hmm, what's all this, then?
The first few words of the About section,
Shorts separated into their own tab, finally,
and a rotating carousel of channel banners
and a non-red subscribe button?
All fun and games to look forward to in the future.
But if you wanna apply today's strategies,
then you'll need to know how to customize your channel.
And you can find the complete guide
to doing it for beginners over here.