If you’re serious about growing your YouTube channel, there are several significant milestones you should aim to reach. One of the most important is attaining 1000 subscribers, as that’s the magic number that makes you eligible for YouTube’s Partner Program so you can monetize your videos with ads.
(Another important milestone and requirement for the Partner Program is 4000 hours of watch time – but once you have 1000 subscribers, that one becomes quite easy)
Once you’re ready to join the ranks of successful, profitable YouTube creators, here’s a 7-step guide to help you increase your subscriber count quickly:
1. Create Videos that Your Ideal Audience Will Love
The first requirement to grow your YouTube account is to create videos that will entice the audience you want to attract, i.e., the customer avatar of your business. You probably want to spend some time exploring on YouTube to see what kinds of videos are already being watched by your niche (YouTube Search is your best free tool for this).
No matter what your niche is, there are several established video types that are perennially popular that you ought to consider including in your mix. These include:
- Tutorial / How-To videos
- Reaction videos
- Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) videos
- Listicle videos
- Challenge videos
- This vs. That videos
- Challenge videos
2. Post Frequently & Consistently
The more content you post, the more opportunities you have to reach potential new subscribers. However, it’s not just a question of quantity, as the quality of your videos is what will likely make a viewer stay and watch and subscribe (and hopefully even share your video with others).
In order to keep up the momentum of your channel, it can be useful to set a posting schedule. This will also help your growing audience know when to look for more content from you, and want to subscribe so they don’t miss out. While you don’t have to post every day, you do want to post often enough to influence the YouTube algorithm to perform in your favor.
3. Pay Attention to Analytics 
Once you have 30+ videos posted to channel, you can utilize YouTube analytics to track the “subscriber gained” metric and see which of your videos generated the most subscribers.
This information can help you determine what kind of content you should create more often (and perhaps what kind of content isn’t working as well as you had hoped).
4. Define Your SMART Goals
At this point in your content creation journey, you should have enough information on the performance of your videos and your track record of subscriber growth to set out SMART goals for yourself. As a reminder the acronym SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable Relevant, and Time Bound.
Establishing goals can help keep you motivated and consistent so that you don’t give up on producing your videos. While reaching 1000 subscribers is a good goal, it can be helpful to break that significant (and difficult) milestone into smaller SMART chunks, such as creating 12 videos and gaining another 100 subscribers in the next 3 months.
5. Collaborate with Other YouTube Creators
One of the best ways to find subscribers for your YouTube channel is to get your content seen by people who already watch other videos on YouTube. To tap into an existing audiences, consider collaborating with other YouTube creators to cross-promote across your channels.
The best collaborators are those who already reach an overlapping audience. In an ideal situation both you and your collaborator will gain new subscribers from each other’s’ current fans.
4. Promote Your YouTube Channel 
Do the people who already love your work even know you have a YouTube channel? If you have an existing list of fans (or better yet, customers), be sure to promote your YouTube channel content to them.
Even if you’re just starting to grow an audience, it can be helpful to pick 2-3 additional social media sites or promotional avenues to let people know about your videos. For example, you might want to post to Twitter and send out an email notification for every video that’s already generating many likes and views.
You can also promote on YouTube itself, for example by creating a YouTube playlist, adding hashtags to your videos, and posting on YouTube’s Community tab.
5. Ask People to Subscribe
Perhaps, the easiest, most obvious, and most overlooked strategy to increase your subscriber count on YouTube is to simply ask people to subscriber. Many creators fail to explicitly ask, and then wonder why no one hits the subscribe button.
So, as you create your video content, don’t forget to take a few seconds midway through to remind people to subscribe. You can also include a reminder in your video descriptions.
Which of these 7 strategies will you be sure to try? Have you already had success with an additional strategy we should add to our list? Share your story as a YouTube creator with us!
