Unlike other social media network metrics that can simply be vanity metrics, your YouTube subscription count is the best way for you to optimize and maximize your organic reach. This is made more important by the fact that YouTube is the second-largest website currently operating.
It’s that much more important if your goal is to make a living with your YouTube videos. Achieving subscriber milestones on your channel is a necessity to get to the monetization features available through the website. As an example, to begin earning ad revenue through YouTube you need to have at least 1,000 subscribers and be a YouTube Partner.
Not everyone wants to be a YouTube celebrity, though. Some people just want to support their brand with YouTube as a part of their digital marketing strategy. But subscribers are still important to your success.
If you’re uncertain as to why that is, it’s because approximately 70 percent of the videos on YouTube, totalling over one billion hours, are determined by YouTube’s algorithm. This means that having subscribers that bump up your watch time, engagement, and play counts is imperative to being seen.
You can either buy YouTube subscribers or achieve growth organically. We’re going to touch on both of these possibilities in this article.
Why You Should Avoid Buying YouTube Subscribers
If you create amazing videos, you don’t have to buy subscription bots to be patrons to your channel. You shouldn’t worry about buying subscribers when you, too, could just make impressive, engaging videos!
To understand why you shouldn’t waste your time and money on bought subscribers, you need to understand the two-step process of the free YouTube subscriber services.
First of all, you earn subscribers by liking and subscribing to other relevant YouTube channels. Most of the time, subscribing to 20 channels and liking a set amount of videos will net you, ten subscribers, easily.
But this can very quickly get old very fast, and if you get tired of being a click farm, you may decide to spend ten dollars or more to get fake followers to your channel without the additional hassle. But this isn’t a great solution.
Bot or fake subscribers don’t engage with your channel at all past subscribing. Additionally, any real followers and subscribers that you have will not appreciate the number of fake subscribers present on your channel. It makes you and your brand look inauthentic. Plus, YouTube actually has a policy against false engagement, and buying subscribers could get your name and account banned on the website. Other brands will also be skeptical of partnering with you.
With all of that in mind, we’re going to look at tactics to get genuine, real, free subscribers for your channel.
17 Tips for Getting Free YouTube Subscribers
If you’re just getting your YouTube channel started, there are guides out there for creating and setting up your channel from the beginning. A clean slate may be just what you need, after all. You can also find some useful tips for beginners that might not have used YouTube before.
The following tips for getting free subscribers are ordered from least to most complicated, and are meant to save you time as well as money. Remember not to try using all of these tactics at once – try one a week or one per video and see what works best for your niche.
1. Ask the Viewers That You Have to Subscribe to Your Channel
As we said, we’ll get the easy stuff pointed out first.
Sometimes your followers and audience need to be reminded to subscribe to your channel, particularly if it’s a new channel for an established brand or business or if you’ve switched over from another channel.
Also, there’s now a bell beside the subscriber button on the video page and on your channel. This will turn on notifications about your channel, so when you post updates or new videos, your subscribers will be notified. It’s all incredibly simple.
You may already be doing this though, and if you are, great! Keep in mind that you should periodically demonstrate exactly why your audience should be subscribing to you, that your channel and content are worth it.
Be careful not to oversell this point, as it can easily turn people off from your channel.
2. When You End Your Videos, Mention the Next One You’ll be Working On
If you do your job right and successfully catch the eye of new viewers, they’re going to want to continue seeing the content that you can create. So they’ll subscribe to your channel, hopefully, and watch more of your videos. But they might feel anticipation about what video you’ll do next.
Use this to your advantage and hype up the next video that you plan to do. Make it abundantly clear that the next video you put out shouldn’t be missed, and it will encourage people to stay on top of their notifications and their subscription to you.
This, of course, requires proper planning. You need to know what’s next on your content calendar and also be able to schedule appropriately. But the work is well worth the result.
3. Make Friends and Interact with Your Audience
Customers, consumers, viewers, and followers all want to feel like they’re being given attention when they subscribe to your channel or follow your business. Just like in other fields, people appreciate feeling appreciated.
One of the best ways to give your audience this sense of appreciation is to interact with them. Responding to viewer comments and following back or subscribing to channels are great ways to increase not only your relationship with your viewers, but also is a great way to get new viewers to your channel.
With these tactics, you can form a community. These are your peers, use the platform to promote one another and bring yourself to success at the same time.
Once your audience is engaged, they’ll typically provide you with a ton of content ideas for upcoming videos. This can be particularly helpful if you’re feeling low on content ideas. You don’t have to accept all of these ideas, of course, but they might be useful for brainstorming.
4. Update the Art for Your Channel
Anyone that clicks on your channel is welcomed to it by the banner that you upload. These could be curious viewers just looking for more relevant content, but that could mean that they’re also potential subscribers. Like with most first impressions, you want to be sure that you make a good one, and your banner is a big part of that.
Make sure that your banner is crisp, clean, compelling, and is connected to or embodies your brand. You also need to be certain that it’s properly optimized for easy viewing on all devices, including phones, laptops, tablets, and computers.
You can make your own art for your channel or you can hire a graphic designer or artist to create the banner for you.
5. Brand the Thumbnails of Your Channel
Thumbnails on YouTube are 1280 by 720 pixels and are still images that cover for your video when it isn’t actively playing. They’re the eye-catching aesthetic that convinces people to watch your video, just in case the title isn’t enticing enough.
One thumbnail template does not fit all video types though, and what works for a channel dedicated to letting’s play videos won’t work to a channel that focuses on building hydroponic gardens.
Aim for consistent, sleek, enticing thumbnails. Commit to quality overall. Use the same fonts, color palettes, and frame composition where possible.
6. If You Have a Blog or Website, Embed Your Videos on it
This is a great method to gain viewers and subscribers for your channel as well as for getting traffic on your website, so it’s a winning situation all around. It will help boost your search ranking on Google with its algorithm.
7. YouTube has Clickable Tools – Use Them
YouTube got rid of annotations ages ago, thankfully, but they do have some other useful, less irritating tools that you can use for your channel.
First is the end screen, which is a still-image that exists at the end of your video. It can be used to remind people to subscribe as well as perform other calls to action, such as visiting your website or blog.
You can also use branding watermarks, which are additional subscription buttons. They hover around in-sight over your video even while it’s being viewed in full-screen mode.
8. Create and Utilize Playlists
Playlists are fantastic for increasing your YouTube channel’s overall watch time. People will also be motivated to click subscribe if your videos and content are lined up in one place. Additionally, you can make multiple playlists for content that fits in different relatable brackets.
9. Develop and Run Contests
Contests are a great way to get a short-term engagement boost. You’ll have to select a prize that’s relevant to and matters to your viewers and ask them to subscribe to your channel and to notifications in order to participate. You can also include other stipulations to further increase your engagement ratings.
10. Pay Attention to Your Follower and Subscriber Milestones and Celebrate Them
Round numbers are some of the most celebrated and anticipated things for all kinds of people, not just those of us that run YouTube channels. As a result, when you hit one, you should celebrate it with the people that made it happen.
You can do milestone achievement videos and celebrations as often as you like or as seems reasonable – 50, 100, 500, 1000, and more are all fantastic places to celebrate.
11. Schedule Your Videos and Release Them on a Consistent Schedule
When your goal for your channel is to turn viewers into subscribers, you need to focus on the quality more than the quantity of videos you produce. With quality, you need to also be consistent from one video to the next. When you have consistency and quality, then you can concern yourself with the quantity of videos on your channel.
People will be more likely to subscribe to your channel if they know that you consistently produce quality, engaging content.
12. Coax Your Audience to YouTube From Other Networks
This tip will require you to do a bit of cross-platform promoting on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest, or wherever else you might have a following already established.
This can be as simple or as complex a step as you want to make it. It can be as easy as including your channel link in your bio on social media profiles. Or, you could cross-post your uploaded video content to other platforms.
You can also post short snippets of the video on other social media networks. Make sure that you link your YouTube channel and the video itself to encourage traffic.
13. Do Keyword Research and Use Keywords in Your Video Titles
Potential viewers and subscribers are already looking for specific things with keywords on YouTube, so you can use that to your advantage to gain views.
Use SEO tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner to help you identify all of the keywords that are relevant to your niche or industry. People are already using these terms to search for topics, information, and suggestions, so you’ll pop up when they conduct their search.
Your goal with this tactic is to find topics with low competition but high overall search volume. Doing this will help you avoid creating videos and other content that no one is actually looking for information on. It’ll also help prevent you from creating content on an overly-saturated or highly competitive topic.
14. People Don’t Always Know What They Want – Give it to Them Without Being Asked
With the last tip, you learned a little about how to use keywords to your advantage. About 80 per cent of your videos and content overall should be SEO-focused. This will bring in new viewers, subscribers, and users to your site. But what about the other 20 per cent?
That remainder should be video content that nobody else has thought to make yet, or that they can’t make in the specific way that you can. This is called value-added content.
Value-added content is a great way to get people to subscribe. It allows you to reach beyond simple functionality and lets you provide genuine value unrestricted by keywords and search patterns. You can be as creative as you want with these videos, so do something unseen and original.
15. Create “Evergreen” Videos Primarily and Topical Ones Where Necessary
Another 80/20 breakdown is this: 80 per cent of your videos should be considered “evergreen” while 20 per cent should be topical. What does this mean?
Content and videos that are evergreen are great for boosting your channel’s overall watch time and are more likely to be viewed at any time of year for any reason. Like evergreen trees, they don’t really lose their appeal.
Topical content, by contrast, is fantastic for short-term bumps in your viewership. It needs to be viewed right away, and therefore needs to be on-point to convince people to subscribe to you. Topical videos and content include takes on current political events, the latest sports scores, or celebrity events and sightings.
16. Don’t Be Afraid of Collaboration with Other Channels
This circles back to tip three, where you make friends with your community. You should use the connections that you’ve built with other members of your niche to collaborate with other parties, YouTube creators specifically, and combine each other’s followers. Just how your viewers trust you for content, their viewers trust theirs – take advantage of this opportunity to work together and make something truly fantastic for both audiences.
17. You Can Partner with Celebrities, Too
As we said in the beginning, we’d go easiest to most difficult, and this is definitely one of the most difficult things you can do. But, it will definitely increase your viewership and get you subscribers that might have otherwise overlooked your channel before.
Getting celebrities on your channel can be a hassle. From finding ways to contact them to garnering enough interest with them to make an appearance on your show, this might be a tip that’s best saved for when you have a substantial amount of subscribers. We’re talking at least a couple million.
But, if you can pull it off, you’ll garner views from the celebrity’s fanbase, your fanbase, and curious other potential viewers who just want to find out how and why a celebrity is making an appearance in a YouTube video that isn’t promoting some kind of movie, album, or show.