“YouTube requires that you have at least 1000 subscribers as well as at least 4000 hours of watch time in the last year, to be monetized.”-Nelson Jr
In this article, I will tell you exactly how you can gain subscribers organically to reach that 1000 subscriber mark and tell you tips on converting your viewers into subscribers and a bunch of other tips and tricks. You can buy those subscribers, but that’s going to be useless cause none of them will watch your videos because they sell you ghost accounts, which won’t even comment, meaning it won’t help you with the YouTube algorithm.
YouTube requires that you have at least 1000 subscribers and at least 4000 hours of watch time in the last year. This means that if you add up all the collected time that people have spent watching your videos in the last year, it has to come up to at least 4000 hours, that’s 240 000 minutes. So, once you hit these numbers, you can create an AdSense account and link it to your YouTube channel. This allows you to put ads in your videos, which is the most direct way of making money from YouTube.
Okay, so now that we’ve gotten all that stuff out of the way, let’s jump into the steps that you need to take to build your first 1000 subscribers organically.
1. Have a good production quality, and also content quality
I want to get to this stuff first because literally none of the other steps matter; if you make bad content, your content must be good. After all, the content is king, and to be honest, you could skip out on the next eight tips and still build a successful YouTube channel. Now, what do I mean by quality content? Well, there’s a production quality, and there’s also content quality; the production quality is like all the stuff that makes your video look good, try to have good lighting, try to have good sound, and also try to put in a lot of text, screenshots and other supporting media like animations, that makes the video a bit more interesting to watch, get a freelancer to do that for you, professionally.
Let’s focus on the sound a bit because I think this is something that many people miss out on. Buying a good quality shotgun mic or lavalier microphone is definitely a good investment for any YouTuber, especially where you make many videos that are just talking; obviously, it’s going to be quite important for the sound quality to be good.
Now the next huge part is your content quality, you can have the best cameras and best video production quality, but if the content sucks, the video will suck. When developing a subscriber base, you need to have quality content; you need to provide value because if you don’t, then nobody’s going to subscribe; you need to find a way to deliver value, and that means creating content that people learn from, relate to, or just entertained by it depending on what types of videos you want to make and what type of YouTube channel you want to have.
2. Have a call-to-action animation displayed on the screen
The second and crucial thing is having a C-T-A, a call to action. What I mean by this is somewhere in the middle of your video, and at least at the very end of your video, make sure to tell your audience to like and subscribe, and you want to give them a reason actually to subscribe. You can say something like; I put a lot of time and effort into my videos, So if you want to support me, give this video a like, or you can say something like, subscribe for more videos just like this and then tell them what type of videos you make and how they will benefit from it. Most people watching your content won’t even think to do those things. It just doesn’t cross their mind, and even if they really liked the video, a lot will just not like the video and not subscribe.
Please don’t be pushy, but give them a gentle reminder. I know that when my favourite YouTubers asked me to like or subscribe, I think to myself, “Oh wait, I really like this video, I should like it or whoa, I’m not subscribed to this person, I should really click that subscribe button”, and it’s also very beneficial for the YouTube algorithm. If your call to action increases the likelihood of someone liking or subscribing by 5%, then that 5% will compound every day, and your channel will grow a lot faster. This is crucial, and just don’t be scared to ask them to subscribe.
3. Make searchable content
Number three is to start by making searchable content at first. When you’re just starting, I’d actually avoid making videos about your personal life or vlogging because people aren’t actively searching for these things. For example, when starting my channel, it wouldn’t have made any sense for me to vlog or do anything related to my personal life because people weren’t searching that stuff; no one knew me, so why would they be interested in my life? Right? I mean, it really depends on what type of content you’re making, but I think for any niche, you can kind of skew in a way so that it’s searchable.
For a channel making a lot of content about personal finance and entrepreneurship, I found the best thing to do was to make many searchable contents like top five credit cards for beginners or top seven savings accounts. Many people don’t realize that YouTube is one of the biggest search engines globally; we want to use that fact to make searchable things so that people are actually looking up. That way, you will get many new people to discover your channel; also, find people specifically looking for content that you’re making. Like videos about credit cards, People who would find those videos are specifically interested in finance and entrepreneurship. That’s why I said,
“When developing a subscriber base, you need to have quality content, you need to provide value because if you don’t, then nobody’s going to subscribe, you need to find a way to deliver value, and that means creating content that people learn from relate to or just entertained by it depends on what types of videos you want to make and what type of YouTube channel you want to have., so they’re much more likely to be interested in your other content within the niche, and therefore subscribe” -Nelson Jr
It also improves your watch time because YouTube really considers that when deciding which videos it wants to push out onto the homepage.
4. Make videos about trending topics within your niche
The next big tip I have for you guys is to make videos about trending topics. From late March to April, I made a lot of videos about the stimulus plan and stocks; these are two huge trending topics that I knew a lot of people would be searching for. So, what I did was I made catchy videos about stimulus plan stuff about stocks, and that attracted a lot of new viewers; it was really perfect because this is all stuff that I’m really interested in. So, making videos about it felt quite natural for me; one thing you can do is go to Google Trends and look at their recently trending section. You can also read the news, stay up to date with current events, and be in the know; it really helps a lot. I guarantee you that making videos about these trending topics will get you more views and more subscribers than making videos about things that not many people are searching for. Right now, it’s all about relevancy, and if you can find a way to actually deliver content promptly on things that people are searching for, this can give your channel the huge boost that it needs.
5. Engage with your people in your comments
You want to comment back to people, it shows you actually read what your viewers have to say, and this interaction will also show your viewers and subscribers that you care about them. If you have under 1000 subscribers, you should comment on almost every single comment on your videos; once you have a bigger audience and you start to get hundreds of comments per video, it might be sort of hard to respond to each comment. Still, it definitely takes like an hour per day to personally respond to people. It’s the best way to turn these subscribers into loyal subscribers. On YouTube, we’re in this whole game of providing value to people; so if you show that you can care about people, they are much more likely to care about you.
6. Make videos consistently
You want to make videos consistently; the more videos you make, the more likely it that people are going to see your videos, the more likes and views you’ll get on your videos, and the more conversion from viewers to subscribers will get like I said before, people are more likely to subscribe if you put out regular content and not just the video every once in a while. I know making videos takes a lot of time, and many of us don’t have the time and flexibility to make one video per day; get a freelancer to help you out. I just took it to the extreme, you absolutely do not have to make one video per day, even two to three videos per week is enough for sustained growth, and if you keep up to three videos per week for a year, the chances are that your channel will grow substantially. Please be consistent and don’t get discouraged if your videos don’t have too many views or one day, you’re just not feeling like making a video when you should keep doing it, and success will come at some point.
Don’t forget. You need 1000 subscribers plus 4000 hours of watch time to get monetized, so follow these steps and make sure you get to that 100 000 subscribers milestone to get the YouTube Red diamond creator award.
I genuinely believe that anyone who puts in the time, effort, and consistency into their YouTube channel can grow beyond their wildest dreams.
