📝 7 Things Bloggers Can Do to Get Their First 1,000 YouTube Subscribers
YouTube as a secondary content marketing strategy
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YouTube is a platform synonymous with vlogging, so why should bloggers consider adding it to their content marketing strategies? Well, bloggers stand to gain a lot of benefits by starting a YouTube channel.
After all, video is the most engaging content on the web. Over one billion people visit YouTube each month racking up billions of hours of views. What’s more, people remember only 30% of what they see (reading your blog posts) but retain 70% of what they see and hear (watching a video), so pairing video content with your blog posts carries many potential positives for your business.
While your main goal should be putting out quality content, getting to your first 1,000 YouTube subscribers is also important. There is a reason why there are so many articles and videos around on the topic of getting to the first 1,000 YouTube subscribers.
To begin with, it can be rather challenging to reach that milestone. Secondly, having 1,000 subscribers makes you eligible for monetization on YouTube (in addition to having 4,000 watch hours, of course). Getting to 1,000 subs also helps to boost your reputation, not just on YouTube, but also in your field of specialization. So, what are some of the things bloggers can do to achieve their first 1,000 subscribers?
1. Have a main theme
There are millions of channels on YouTube, how will you set yourself apart from them all? For starters, you need to have niched down your blog content to reflect what market segment you are appealing to. With that in mind, your videos need to be consistent in delivering content that people will be looking forward to from you and not someone else. A consistent, main theme in all your videos helps to establish what you want to become known for on YouTube. Once people know what you are about and realize they can count on your channel to consistently deliver quality content on a particular topic, they will be more willing to subscribe.
2. Create videos on popular topics in your field
Having launched a YouTube channel, you may be tempted to create and upload videos on varying topics. This is not advisable. Gaining traction on YouTube with your videos requires a well thought out strategy. Comb through your blog’s analytics to find out which ones are getting the most attention from readers. Posts that rank highly in terms of views, feedback, time on page, and engagement on social media could be good candidates for video ideas. Note that you don’t necessarily have to use your popular articles for video content, you can use them as inspiration to create related topics that viewers might be interested in. For example, if you blog about electronics and one of your popular posts is about taking pictures with the latest iPhone, you could create a video reviewing the smartphone’s camera quality. On the other hand, some types of blog posts such as listicles could easily be converted to videos for your YouTube channel.
3. Link corresponding blog posts in your videos
One of the reasons you may want to start a YouTube channel as a blogger is to generate more traffic for your blog. If that’s the case for you, placing blog post links in the descriptions of videos they are related to can help. In the example above, it would be a good move to plug the link of your article about taking pictures with the iPhone in the description of the corresponding video. It is also a good idea to insert your social media links in your video descriptions as well.
4. Post videos on a consistent basis
Consistency is the name of the game on YouTube when it comes to posting videos. If your content is any good, viewers will start looking forward to your next upload. Consistent uploads means more view time, which is beneficial to the YouTube platform, by the way. In addition, you should have a posting schedule that you follow. It does not matter whether you post every day, every weekend, or once every other Wednesday. You just have to ensure you are keeping up with the schedule you set. This builds trust with your audience who can rely on you to deliver videos they want to watch at the time you promised. Eventually, this trust can lead to some of them hitting the subscribe button.
5. Upload at the right time
The YouTube Creator Studio provides creators with a number of tools that can tell you plenty about your viewers. One of the things you can find out in this area is when most of your viewers tuned in to watch your video. By looking at this data, you can determine when most of your fans are likely to be online and willing to watch your video. If your YouTube channel is new, you may not have enough data as yet to determine the best time to upload. However, there are a few different times that people generally tend to be on YouTube. These are 1 pm EST, 5 pm EST, and 10 am EST. Once you have uploaded a few videos and gotten some views, you can always go back and check the data to see if there is a more optimal time.
6. Create eye-catching thumbnails
When a user signs into YouTube, they often see a sea of videos on the home page. Unless you are looking for a specific video, the ones that will jump out at you will tend to be those that have a striking thumbnail image. Likewise, you should seek to design thumbnail images that are captivating and unique. Thumbnails are the display graphics that represent your video. They help to tell the story of what your video is about while enticing people to click. They can be created in Canva, Photoshop, or other graphic design tools of your choice, but your main goal is to make them stand out. If you don’t feel confident making them yourself, you can have them created at a low cost by hiring a freelancer on UpWork, Fiverr, etc.
7. Engage with viewers
If someone leaves a comment under one of your videos, be sure to reply promptly. Responsiveness will help people feel comfortable about engaging with your content and want to become subscribers. In addition to replying to comments, people will also be willing to subscribe to your channel if you simply ask them to. You can say “please subscribe to my channel…” at the beginning, end or middle of each video. You can even place a thumbnail at the end of your video asking for them to hit the subscribe button. Whichever way you do it, asking people to become subs will lead some of them to do just that.
Conclusion
As you probably know, growing your presence on YouTube is proportional to the number of subscribers you have. Hopefully, by following these tips you can develop a booming YouTube channel that will help reinforce or grow your blog.
Until next time!