- Smash that button.
Give me more subscribers.
VidIQ. - VidIQ.
- [Announcer] VidIQ.com.
- If you learn one thing from this video,
make sure it's this.
When you start a YouTube channel, you are entitled
to absolutely nothing, including these bad boys.
You're gonna have to hustle night and day.
Work your socks off, burn the midnight oil,
all of those classic cliches to scramble
for every single view and subscriber.
Unless, of course, you're Jack Black.
Burn.
Hello, my name is Rob, welcome to VidIQ,
and welcome back to our continuing series,
charting your YouTube success in 2019.
Throughout this series, we're gonna be helping you get
more views, more subscribers, especially in this video,
and growing your channel throughout the year.
For the full playlist, click over here,
and if you want to stay up to date with this series
when we release new videos, along with all
of the awesome other VidIQ content we have,
make sure to subscribe and-- (bell dings)
The notification bell. (bell dings)
I've got a question I wanna ask you at this point
to try and help us all get into this psyche
of the typical YouTube viewer.
Why do you subscribe to channels?
Let us know in the comments below,
and that will help all of us understand
what is the defining moment when a viewer suddenly decides,
"Yep, I love that content, and I want to see more of it."
Let's get on with the tips. (upbeat music)
I think subscribers are earned by building up
a relationship with your audience,
and that can be done in many different ways.
The most obvious one would appear to be
on a personal level.
You're standing in front of a camera.
The audience can connect with you directly,
and vloggers certainly will build up subscribers
as they tell more of their story.
But it can be on an education level.
I know of many videos where I've watched something,
and I've had that light bulb moment in the video.
And that makes me click subscribe immediately.
That sort of subscription happens a lot with educational
and How To channels.
The problem with that is is the user usually just wants
a specific answer to a specific question that you gave them,
and then, they're not interested in anymore of your content.
But that's the nature of YouTube,
so subscribers can have different values
to different people.
I think ultimately, if you can establish a relationship
with your audience and build up a certain level of trust,
those are going to be your most valuable subscribers
who will invest not only in the video
that they have just watched, but in future content
on your channel.
I think all of the tips that you're gonna see
in this video relate back to this one.
Now, there is one tried and tested,
guaranteed to work shortcut to getting more subscribers,
and that's sub for sub. (dramatic music)
I am kidding, of course, but there is a hack
to getting more subscribers faster,
and that's to analyze the data on your own channel
to see what videos convert videos into subscribers.
This can be done through one of the VidIQ tools.
It's called the Channel Audit,
and when you open it up, there is a section dedicated
to videos getting the most subscribers for your channel.
It stands to reason if those videos are turning viewers
into subscribers, you should do more similar content
on those themes, I always find it rather convenient
yet a little humorous that our best performing video
for converting subscribers is a video
on how to increase subscribers by 500 percent.
We'll get onto that tip a little later.
The Channel Audit, by the way, is part
of our huge VidIQ arsenal
that will help you research YouTube, analyze videos,
audit your channel as you've just seen,
and take optimal steps to help grow your channel.
It is free to download.
There is a link in the video description.
I promise you, that's the one sells pitch for VidIQ
in this video, next up is being consistent,
and that concept can come
in many different shapes and sizes,
but the most important ones are consistency of schedule.
Make sure you keep posting so people come back
to your content, but most importantly,
consistency of topic.
Let's say it takes three videos to convert a viewer
into a subscriber.
The first video creates awareness of who you are
and what potentially you do on YouTube.
The second video creates that consistency.
Now, they know what you do and that they like the content.
And the third video, build more momentum
of what we talked about in tip one, trust,
and that's where the subscription may come.
If you're jumping from topic to topic to topic,
you may never get past the awareness stage of your content.
I know this may sound counter productive at this point,
and we'll probably talk more about it in videos
about how to get more views.
But you really need to focus down on one specific topic.
The thing that you're most passionate about
and that you can tell the best stories about.
Consider viewers as your guests,
and welcome them warmly into your home.
Give them a guided tour so they know where everything is,
and those guests will soon become friends.
What do I mean by that metaphor?
Sort out your channel page.
This will include a channel banner
that visually tells your audience what you do
in five seconds, a channel trailer video
that best represents the kind of content that you do.
Playlist that help inform the visitor
on the topics that you cover and show recent uploads
so people know you are still producing content.
It would help to write out a good description
for your channel too, and we have more tips
on how to do all of this in the video you can see
on screen now, tap in the top right-hand corner
of your screen to jump to that.
Alright, then, we are halfway through the tips,
and if you are finding this video useful, interesting,
or just downright entertaining, then make sure
to subscribe to our channel and yes, I agree,
in this particular video, we are doing somewhat
of a hard sell on getting you to subscribe.
Sometimes, you've just got to tell those viewers
what to do because they won't do it themselves.
There's nothing wrong with occasionally asking
for a little bit of help from your audience,
and if you do it too much, your audience
will let you know.
Today, I've not had a single person ever complain
about too many subscribe call to actions on a VidIQ video.
Although, I know somebody is gonna do it on this video
just to irritate me.
If you've never tried it before, definitely give it a go,
and try and make it something fun.
Just hurry up and subscribe!
Generally speaking, when you ask your audience
to do something, it's what's known as a call to action,
and we've been fairly direct with ours so far in this video.
But you can be more subtle.
You could have graphics appear on screen
that you don't even reference.
For example, we used to use this.
Simply search for subscribe animation green screen,
and you'll find plenty of free options
on the internet, but now, we have this thing down here,
which we made ourselves simply by recording a screen
and doing a little bit of tweaks in a video editor.
Now, remember earlier when we talked about something
that could increase subscriber growth by 500 percent.
Well, it's this thing down here.
This is called your branding watermark,
and a lot of video creators simply use their channel logo.
But we recommend using a subscribe button like this
because when you mouse over this button on a desktop,
you can subscribe to the channel.
So it does exactly what it says on the ten.
When we switched to this subscriber button,
our subscribe rates from that source increased
by over 500 percent.
We're talking a small numbers on the grand scheme
of your whole channel, but every subscriber counts, right?
It's free subscribes, essentially,
and as a free gift to you, we'll leave this image
in the video description as a download.
For more information about how to implement this
on your channel, check out the video on screen now.
This next tip is gonna have two parts of weirdness to it.
We know that not every video creator
can produce videos every single day,
but you should still produce content every single day.
Sounds weird, right?
What on earth do I mean?
If you have more than 1,000 subscribers,
you can post status updates, ask questions,
post voting polls, and promote videos
through the YouTube Community tab.
So even if you only have time to post one video a week,
you always have five minutes to post an update
on your Community tab.
The same goes for YouTube stories if you have access to it.
Short vertical form video clips
that you can quickly record to keep your audience
up to date with what you're up to.
You can even do video responses to questions
through this feature, which is pretty awesome
for building relationships and establishing trust
with your audience.
Now, I know what you're thinking at this point.
The Community tab and YouTube stories is all very well
and good for my subscribers, but what difference
does that make to non-subscribers?
Well, here's the weird thing.
Those community posts and YouTube stories
can hit people who have not subscribed to your content
but have watched your content or it's related content
to what that viewer is interested in.
I know that sounds absolutely bonkers, but it's true.
We post regularly in our Community tab,
and we often get comments from users like this
who aren't subscribed to our channel.
There's nothing we can do about it,
but we do appreciate YouTube reaching out
to a new audience on our behalf,
even if, in this case, it wasn't welcomed.
But what if this is all a redundant point?
You don't have access to the Community tab.
You don't have access to YouTube stories.
Fair enough, but everybody has access to YouTube comments.
You should be responding
to every single comment humanly possible,
and this all links back to tip number one,
building relationships and building trust
with your audience.
It's always a great feeling for the commenter to know
that the video creator is paying attention
to what they say and responding to their comments.
And we try and do that on VidIQ with every single video
that we do, I'm sure if you post in the first 24 hours
of this video, you will get a response from yours truly.
And there's other ways
to acknowledge your community, as well,
such as referencing them directly in videos.
How awesome is it for these video creators
to see their names in this video.
If you can make your audience feel special,
there's a much higher chance of them investing in you.
I got a good news story to finish this one off.
Throughout this video, I have been attending
subscriber pillow anger management issue meetings,
and I think it's fair to say I've fully recovered.
Although, this is pretty creepy.
Thank you very much for watching.
Enjoy the rest of your video making day,
and remember-- (bell dings)