- I want to share with you today
some of the best strategies
for reaching that first big YouTube milestone,
100 subscribers.
Let's do this.
- [Man's voice] vidIQ
- [Woman's voice] vidIQ
- [Man's Voice] vidIQ dot com.
(upbeat music)
- Hello, I'm Rob, and welcome to vidIQ,
the YouTube tool and channel
that educates you on your YouTube journey.
For more content just like this
make sure to subscribe to the channel,
and do this (bell rings)
so that you're the first to be notified
when here are new videos released.
As always, school is in session.
Settle down back there.
(smooth music)
Just before we jump into these strategies here,
let us know in the comments below
how long you've been on YouTube,
and how many subscribers you have so far.
And when do you think you're going to reach 100 subscribers?
Now a very reasonable question to ask me is,
"Rob, why have you set 100 subscribers
"as the first big YouTube milestone?"
Well, let's be honest,
getting to 10 subscribers is pretty easy,
because you could just ask all of your friends and family
to help you get there.
As for 1,000 subscribers, well,
right now that's probably a little bit too ambitious,
and that's a trap you don't want to fall into.
Throughout your YouTube journey,
which hopefully is going to be
a very long and successful one,
you want to set yourself manageable targets.
The obvious temptation is to target 1,000 subscribers,
along with 4,000 hours of watch time,
because it means you're halfway to monetizing your channel.
The problem is, this is going to hurt
your short-term, day-to-day mindset.
Because you won't feel as if your making enough progress.
For some channels, reaching 1,000 subscribers
can take many months, if not years,
and if you think when you're starting on day one,
and you're into day 17 or day 34,
and you haven't yet reached 100 subscribers,
how is that going to make you feel?
And when you get frustrated,
you might start resorting to
bad habits and tactics early on.
Those include sub-for-sub,
which is against terms of service,
and as we all know, never proves to be successful
in the long term for successful channels.
- Hey YouTuber!
- Hey!
- Fancy being sub-for-sub?
- Absolutely!
- Great!
(sighs deeply)
♪ Hello darkness my old friend ♪
- The next thing you might start to do
is go onto large channels and post comments
such as, "Hey, check out my channel," or sub-for-sub,
or with this weird arrow pointy finger
or the blue thumbs up that says,
"Have you subscribed to my channel?"
I have no idea why anybody ever does that.
All of those dodgy tactics
center around the me, me, me mentality
of a YouTube video creator.
As we will always preach here at vidIQ,
it is a value that you give to your audience
that will get them to trust you
and subscribe to your content.
And if you get completely desperate,
you may resort to buying subscribers,
which is the worst thing you can do on your channel.
First of all, it is against terms of service, once again,
and it may resort in your channel being terminated,
and those subscribers will offer you
absolutely zero value to your YouTube channel
in terms of growing it through views, watch time,
and creating a community.
So I personally believe that your first subscriber milestone
should be 100 subscribers.
When you first start your channel,
you'll be getting a new subscriber every few days.
Then you'll be getting maybe one or two a day,
and then you'll be getting ten or so a week,
and that should help you reach that goal
as quickly, as hopefully, as possible.
(upbeat music)
Let's give you a best-case-scenario.
You launch your channel, the first video goes up,
and to your surprise, lots of people watch it.
And then you've got nothing else to show them.
It's always a good strategy
to give your viewers a collection
of videos to watch on your channel.
So if possible,
don't launch with just one video on your channel,
or at the very beginning, you want to try and pump out
as many videos as possible,
which may be against the schedule that you end up doing.
For example, you might be wanting to post one video a week,
maybe in that first week, you wanna post three videos,
so that people who are finding your content
have something to feed off of very quickly.
It is often the case that viewers won't subscribe
to the first video that they watch on a channel.
It may take two or three videos
to persuade them to push that red button.
And if you have more than one video,
you can start to communicate to your audience
in all of the content that you produce,
that it is on a topic that your audience is interested in.
If you can get your audience
to enjoy your first piece of content,
fall in love with your second piece of content,
and then subscribe as a result
of the third piece of your content,
then you potentially have a viewer there
for months, years, a lifetime possibly.
Now, I wouldn't recommend necessarily launching
three or four videos at exactly the same time
when you start your channel.
You want to give each video
a moment to breathe on the platform.
If you have a batch of videos
you want to upload to YouTube all at once,
that is absolutely fine,
just make sure that they remain elicit, or private,
until you're ready to publish them,
and then when you do publish them,
stagger them by at least one day,
and then if you don't intend to post
on a daily basis on YouTube,
probably give each video at least 48 hours.
Now as I say, three in the first week is probably perfect.
You'll quickly learn that when your videos get released,
you get lots of bonuses from YouTube,
and you find that you have rapid view velocity
in the first 24 hours.
But if you launch them all at the same time,
it's not giving YouTube a chance to distribute that content
to the potential audience it's looking for.
As I say, it might not be possible
to sustain the volume of content you push out
in the first week or month of your YouTube channel.
But give your viewers
as much as you are able to provide them
when you first launch your channel.
The first subscribers to your channel,
who you don't know in real life, are wondrous things.
Just consider what's happening here for a second.
Somebody somewhere in the world
has found your content valuable enough
that they want to be notified again
when you release more content.
(sighs) Really gets you right there.
If you were able to put that person in front of you,
that would be a cool conversation.
And then it gets to ten subscribers,
and that's a line of people waiting for a bus.
And they've got to say something to them.
Then you get up to 25 subscribers,
that is a room full of people,
and then you start to get towards 100 subscribers,
that is a hall full of people.
Can you imagine standing onstage,
and speaking to those people directly in real life?
It's a terrifying prospect,
but every single one of you
is doing that every single day
as you try to reach this first big milestone.
Now these real-life people are very precious to you,
and you want to treat them with that respect.
When you have such small sample sizes,
if people are subscribing to
particular videos on your channel,
you want to make more of that content.
Yes, we are drifting down the common topic of niching down,
one of YouTube's most important strategies.
But I'm going to try and keep it
fairly light for this video.
Let's say you're watching television,
and you come across a new sitcom,
and you enjoy the first episode that you watch.
You enjoy the characters, the comedy is on point
with your type of humor,
and you like the way the story is going.
What happens if next week,
you tune in and they remove half of the characters,
there are new comedy scriptwriters
writing all of the material,
and the story has suddenly jumped the shark in some way?
You're probably gonna be turned off from that content.
Now that is a bit of an extreme case of course,
in television series,
but on YouTube channels,
this happens pretty much with all channels.
To begin with, and I don't understand this,
many creators are a little self-indulgent,
because they want to create
what they're going to enjoy making,
and not realizing there's an audience out there
who's already watched some of your previous content,
enjoyed it, subscribed to it,
and want to see more or less the same thing.
If you continue to deliver content
that your subscribers have subscribed for,
you will start to build momentum,
I guarantee it.
And remember, I've already said
that the first video a viewer watches on your channel
may not convince them to subscribe.
However, due to the way YouTube's recommendations work,
even if a viewer doesn't subscribe to your channel,
they may see more of your content appear
in their browse feeds or suggested videos.
And if they watch a second video from you
which is similar to the first,
and they enjoy it more,
then that will convince them to subscribe.
But it has to stay on topic
for the audience's watching habits.
(upbeat music)
All right then.
There's something I want to get you
into the mindset of as early as possible
in your YouTube journey.
It's okay to ask people to subscribe to your channel.
Some people have a real mental block about this.
Maybe it's because they find it too embarrassing,
or because they feel as if
they're begging too much to their audience.
This is not the same as sub-for-sub.
Remember, the viewer is already in your video,
and you are providing value to them.
There's nothing wrong with reminding the audience,
"Hey, if you want to see more of this content,
"then it might be a good idea
"to subscribe to the channel."
there are many ways to ask people politely
to subscribe to your channel.
For example, in this video, at the very beginning,
what did we do?
Hello, I'm Rob, and welcome to vidIQ,
the YouTube tool and channel
that educates you on your YouTube journey.
For more content just like this,
make sure to subscribe to the channel,
and do this (bell rings)
so that you're the first to be notified
when there are new videos released.
As always, school is in session.
Settle down back there!
In 18 seconds, I told new viewers of vidIQ
who we are, our value proposition,
and why you should subscribe to your channel
in a slightly inventive way.
I'm thinking of actually doing that,
pointing to people in the classroom and telling them off,
for all future videos, so stick around for that.
As you continue on through a video,
if you get to a point
where you deliver something of real value,
or a spectacular moment in a video,
and that is your payoff to a certain extent,
don't be afraid to put in a call to action there as well.
And what I mean by call to action
is asking the viewer to subscribe,
or something onscreen that you don't even address,
it's just there, it just reminds the viewer,
"Hey, if you you're liking this,
"remember to press that red button."
You can also add a subscribe watermark to your videos,
it looks like this down in the bottom left hand corner,
or is it right hand corner?
I can never remember.
People can subscribe to your channel
through the desktop version of the video,
it will appear on mobile devices,
but they can't subscribe to it from there.
This can be really effective
for bringing in a few extra subscribers
to every single video.
We've got a dedicated video on this over here.
And, don't be afraid to put a subscribe link
in your channel description, in the end screens,
and maybe in a pinned comment.
Give your viewers as many opportunities as possible
to remind them that it's free to subscribe,
and they'll get value from it,
because you're going to give your audience
exactly what they're asking for.
Something that's going to be really important
throughout your YouTube journey is perspective.
You may not like what I'm about to tell you,
but it is the truth.
When you start your YouTube channel,
you have no authority, you have no influence,
you have no social proof.
From the audience perspective, they are asking the question,
"Why should I subscribe to you?"
"What makes you different as a video creator?"
From YouTube's perspective,
the platform wants more data from your content.
It wants to know which audience is watching your content,
and for how long, and how successful it is,
and whether or not to push that content to more people
after they've watched it and indeed subscribed.
I am not going to lie to you,
the first few weeks and months on YouTube
can be a real uphill struggle.
For many creators, hitting that first hundred subscribers
was the most challenging thing they did on their channel.
But then, hitting the next hundred subscribers
wasn't so hard, and then the next hundred,
and before you know it, you're up to five hundred,
and then your coming into the thousand subscriber mark.
What needs to happen is a connection
between the viewer and the content creator.
When you build trust, you build a relationship,
and you get onto a personal level,
you somehow impact that viewer in an emotional way,
that creates a bond
where the subscription hopefully will happen,
and then who knows what beyond that.
Now what I hope I've done throughout this video
is establish some of those bonds so you can subscribe.
You see what I did there?
As this portion of the video suggests,
accept and embrace the challenge.
Think of it in a completely different mindset.
Enjoy the journey.
You need to determine
whether or not you enjoy making videos,
that's what you're going to be doing
the majority of the time.
And it could take you 50 videos, 100 videos,
six months, to understand whether you like that process.
And if you're concentrating more
on how you're gonna deliver the content to your audience,
and observing their feedback,
rather than looking at that single metric of subscribers,
or that single metric of views and watch time,
I guarantee you,
as I guaranteed to you already in this video,
that you will enjoy the process so much more.
And before you know it, you may not even realize it,
you'll surpass 100 subscribers.
You may have noticed that this video
has been geared more towards the mindset of a video creator.
The journey you are starting out on
is a challenging one.
But if you have the right mental attitude,
you can overcome any obstacle in your path,
including that first milestone of 100 subscribers.
We want you to achieve this,
and these videos will help you do that.
Your subscribers, as few as they may be right now
want you to achieve this,
they just don't know it yet.
Enjoy the rest of your video making day.