How to Get More YouTube Subscribers in 2024

If you're a YouTube content creator looking to crack the code on how to get more YouTube subscribers, you're in the right place.

In this article, I'll share the top 15 ways that can help you grow your YouTube subscriber base like a pro. So, buckle up, grab your camera, and let's dive into the secrets of YouTube stardom!

How to Get More YouTube Subscribers: 15 Tips

Being in the digital marketing space for over two decades, I've seen what works and what doesn't when it comes to growing your YouTube following.

It's not just about luck, but rather a strategic approach that involves creating compelling content, optimizing for SEO, leveraging collaborations, and more. 

Here are the 15 best ways to get more YouTube subscribers:

1. Create A Unique Value Proposition

With the ever-growth of online content, as well as the variety of formats and platforms available to consume content from, it can be hard to stand out. 

Chances are there is a video for every single niche that has ever existed. That’s why you shouldn’t be solely focused on a niche, but instead your content’s value proposition.

Ask yourself, why should someone click on my video and watch it? If you have no answer, it most likely means a lot of people feel the same.

Assessing your YouTube channel's value proposition is crucial to understand how you differentiate yourself from other channels and what unique value you offer to your target audience.

Here are some steps to help you evaluate and refine your channel's value proposition:

• Identify Your Target Audience: Determine who your content is intended for and narrow down your target audience. Consider the demographics, interests, and preferences of your ideal viewers.
• Define Your Channel's Niche: Identify the specific topic, theme, or niche that your channel focuses on. Evaluate the competition within your chosen niche and assess what sets you apart.
• Analyze Your Content: Review your existing videos and analyze the overall quality, production value, and presentation. Identify the types of content that have performed well in terms of views, engagement, and audience feedback.
• Determine Your Unique Selling Points: Identify the key features or elements that make your channel stand out. Consider your expertise, personality, storytelling style, or format of your videos.
• Evaluate Audience Feedback: Pay attention to comments, likes, dislikes, and shares on your videos. Take note of recurring feedback or comments that highlight what viewers appreciate about your channel.

An excellent example, and one of my favorite YouTube channels is StarTalk.

StarTalk’s description reads “Science meets pop culture on StarTalk.” And what you see is what you get. Neil DeGrasse Tyson and some of the world’s leading experts talk science, pop-culture, the past, and the future.

Its value proposition is simple, but the channel makes the most out of it with interesting concepts and content.

2. Don’t Overlook the Basics

Building your brand on YouTube requires getting the basics right to turn random viewers into loyal subscribers. 

Here are some of the basics you need to focus on:

1. Your “About” Section

Your channel's “About” section is crucial in providing an engaging and compelling description of your channel.

Keep it short and simple, yet catchy, as most viewers don't have the patience to read through lengthy text. Use this space to clearly communicate what your channel is all about and how it can benefit your audience.

2. Your Channel’s Art

Your channel art is one of the first things viewers notice when they land on your YouTube channel. It needs to look professional, attractive, and align with your brand’s personality. Consider changing your channel art periodically to give your channel a fresh look and attract more viewers. 

You can also add a “Subscribe” link in your channel art to make it easy for viewers to subscribe to your channel. This can significantly boost your subscriber count and grow your YouTube community.

Here are a few more great examples from Sephora, Netflix, and Amazon:

3. Your Channel Icon

In addition to your channel art, your channel icon is another important parameter that deserves special attention. 

Don't leave it blank. Consider using your brand logo or a professional photo as your channel icon to enhance brand recognition. If you haven't created your brand's logo yet, tools like Logaster can be helpful in creating professional logo designs within just a few clicks.

Here are some great channel icon examples:

3. Don’t Sleep on Your Channel’s Thumbnails

Creating custom thumbnails is important if you want people to click on your videos. In fact, according to Google, 90% of the best videos have custom thumbnails.

A thumbnail is like a first impression for your video. It’s a quick way for a user to gauge what the video is about, and what the tone of the video will be like. This effectively helps them decide whether they want to click on the video or not.

Some things you should consider when creating a YouTube thumbnail for your video are:

• Use a clear, high-quality picture.
• Make use of eye-catching, easy-to-read titles.
• Add some form of branding for users to recognize it as your brand’s video.
• Make use of contrast and colors to catch users’ eyes as they scroll.
• Evaluate and find what works best for your audience.

Good Mythical Morning’s video thumbnails are an excellent example of how eye-catching thumbnails should look like.

4. Focus on Quality Over Quantity

When it comes to getting more YouTube subscribers, it's essential to focus on providing value through your content. While setting up an attractive YouTube channel with all the basics is important, it's the quality of your content that will ultimately determine your success in gaining subscribers.

Invest in creating informative, engaging, and entertaining videos that resonate with your target audience. Consider hiring professionals to create and edit your videos to ensure they have a polished and professional look.

If your videos feature people, ensure that they don't just read off a script but exude passion and excitement while sharing information. Authenticity and enthusiasm can greatly impact viewer engagement and increase your chances of gaining more subscribers.

Keep in mind that the most effective way to attract subscribers is to increase the number of views your videos receive. Your existing subscribers are more likely to watch and re-watch your videos if they find them enjoyable and useful.

A great example of this is the YouTube channel, 5-Minute Crafts, which gains hundreds of thousands of views on its videos due to the informative and fun nature of its content.

5. Leverage Social Media to Build a Sense Community

Influencers have perfected the art of creating a sense of community. With more influencers and content creators than ever before, it has become crucial to create a community around you or your brand.

To do this creators make use of plenty of different platforms and formats. This includes long-form content, short videos and clips, live streaming, paid content on sites such as Patreon, and creating and selling branded merch.

Here are some insightful strategies on how to effectively create a sense of community and get more YouTube subscribers:

• Encourage interaction: Actively engage with your viewers by responding to their comments, messages, and questions. This shows that you value their feedback and opinions, and it encourages them to participate in discussions, increasing their sense of belonging to your community.
• Foster collaboration: Collaborate with other YouTubers or influencers in your niche to tap into their audiences and expand your reach. This cross-promotion not only exposes your content to a wider audience but also helps in building relationships with other content creators and their communities.
• Create exclusive content: Offer exclusive content, such as behind-the-scenes footage, sneak peeks, or exclusive giveaways, to your loyal subscribers. This makes them feel special and incentivizes them to continue supporting your channel, as they feel like they are part of an exclusive community.
• Utilize Live streaming: Host Live streams to interact with your audience in real time. This allows for direct communication, Q&A sessions, and interactive discussions that create a sense of community and help build a personal connection with your subscribers.
• Use polls and surveys: Conduct polls and surveys to gather feedback from your community on their preferences, opinions, and interests. This not only encourages participation but also helps you understand your audience better, enabling you to create more tailored content that resonates with them.
• Use the channel membership option: Create custom content for paid members of your channel, as well as host exclusive Live streams for paid members only. Not only will paid members receive exclusive badges, but these badges will be displayed on Live streams in the chat.

6. Create a Trailer for Your YouTube Channel

When a user visits your channel, you need to introduce them to your business. Of course, they can check out the “About Us” section, but that isn’t always enough.

To create an even more engaging way of greeting new users when they first visit your channel, you can create a channel trailer.

Creating a compelling channel trailer provides your viewers with a sneak peek into the kind of content your channel offers and the value you can provide.

A great YouTube channel trailer should:

• Be anywhere between 30-90 seconds long
• Offer users insight into what your channel is about
• Offer sneak peeks of other videos where possible
• Be engaging, with great visuals

Use the trailer to pique their interest in your content without giving away too much information. Speak to your audience and appeal to their emotions. Talk about the challenges you can help them resolve.

Here’s a great example of a channel trailer from Contiki.

It’s a good idea to check out the kind of trailers your competitors are using and tailor yours accordingly. Feel free to change this up once in a while if you feel that you’re not getting too many new YouTube subscribers.

7. Optimize Your YouTube Video Descriptions Correctly

Many YouTubers who are just starting out neglect how important video descriptions are. Within YouTube’s creator tips, there’s a whole section dedicated to video descriptions.

YouTube uses its own search engine, and it does in fact look at video descriptions to optimize its recommendations. That means your video descriptions need to be search engine optimized.

The three most important things to consider when creating a YouTube video description are:

• Each video should have a unique description.
• Identify 1-2 keywords that describe your video and use them in your title and description.
• Keep it neat and divide different parts such as descriptions, links, and collaborations into sections separated by line breaks.

You can also optimize your video titles and descriptions with long-tail keywords that have high search volumes and low competition. Also, try to use actionable words in your video titles that give your audience a reason to watch your videos.

Here’s a great example from UNILAD.

8. Post Consistently and Frequently

To grow your YouTube subscriber base, you need to provide them with interesting content on a consistent basis. That’s a crucial step you shouldn’t overlook.

Many bloggers start uploading videos with a lot of enthusiasm. However, they are unable to follow through with videos on a weekly or monthly basis. Inconsistency can make your YouTube subscribers uninterested. It may even push some of them to unsubscribe due to inactivity. And you don’t want that.

Make sure to create a content calendar for your YouTube videos and stick to it. It’s necessary to post content on a regular basis so that viewers realize that your channel is an active one. This can provide them with greater encouragement to subscribe to your YouTube channel.

A great example is Good Mythical Morning. Their channel has been running for over a decade now, and they still stick to the same schedule. Their videos are uploaded Monday to Friday, approximately 6 AM Eastern Time.

This means their followers know, that every day they’ll be getting their bit of entertainment at the exact same time.

9. Use Compelling Calls-to-Action (CTAs)

Make sure to include calls-to-action in your videos asking people to subscribe to your YouTube channel. You should use both annotations as well as verbal calls to action in your videos to do this.

Combine these with features like YouTube Cards to send viewers to your other videos or End Screens. In End Screens, you can encourage viewers to watch some of your other videos by clicking on “Watch Next.”

10. Repurpose Livestreams for YouTube Shorts

Livestreams aren’t just a great way to keep the community engaged, but it’s also a great way to create a large amount of content. It doesn’t matter if you’re streaming on Twitch, YouTube, or any other platforms, you should be repurposing this content.

One of the most effective ways to do this is by creating YouTube Shorts. Plenty of content creators have started using YouTube Shorts and for good reason. 

A lot of users, especially those coming from TikTok, might prefer the same short format on YouTube over the usual longer content, which opens up a whole new audience for your channel. It will also most likely expose your content to a younger demographic, as just in the US, 3.5 billion YouTube Shorts are watched every day.

LovelyLo is a relatively new YouTube channel that started early in 2023. Within 4 months she already had over 600K subscribers on her main channel. A lot of her subscriber growth came from YouTube shorts, which she created using livestream footage from her daily Twitch streams.

You can clearly see the huge advantage channels that utilize YouTube Shorts. Her channel’s video uploads receive between 80K-150K views. Even though she has over 600K subscribers.

Now take a look at the YouTube Shorts. Those videos range between 200K – 2M views. A major increase in viewership and proves why you should start repurposing your livestreams into shorts.

11. Use YouTube Cards

YouTube rewards those channels where people spend more time. This means you have a better chance of improving your visibility if you can increase the average watch time on your channel. One of the best ways to do this is to use YouTube Cards.

YouTube cards are interactive elements you can add to your videos, webinars, or channel. YouTube allows you to use five types of Cards. Here is how you can use them:

• Video – To promote video content
• Link – To insert a link to another site
• Poll – To encourage your viewers to participate in a poll
• Donation – To encourage your viewers to donate to a cause
• Channel – To promote another YouTube channel

In one video, YouTube allows you to add a maximum of five cards. The best part is YouTube Cards are visible on mobile devices as well.

YouTube Cards are helpful in driving engagement and redirecting your YouTube subscribers to related content. If your aim is to grow your YouTube subscriber base, it is recommended that you use YouTube Analytics before placing YouTube Cards.

First, find videos that have a high audience retention rate. Then make Cards to send people to these videos.

The best time to use Cards is when the audience tends to stop viewing your video. Look for valleys in the graph of your audience retention score. Add a YouTube Card at the same point to give your YouTube subscribers an option to view more of your videos.

That means greater engagement which can help your videos show up more prominently in search results, and help you get more YouTube subscribers.

12. Cross-Promote Across Your Channels

One of the easiest ways to attract YouTube subscribers is to showcase your YouTube channel on multiple platforms.

Leverage your website traffic and social media following to grow your YouTube subscriber base. Add a YouTube widget on your website as well as social media channels. Alternatively, you can also display a variety of videos on your site.

You can also display a YouTube video in a pop-up box. When someone visits your website, the video can be automatically displayed at the side of the screen.

Popular websites like Forbes and TechCrunch use such pop-ups to display videos and ads. You can use Video LightBox to create pop-ups for your site.

If you have more than 10 videos and are planning to create more videos, you should add video categories to your site. You can redirect your website visitors to your YouTube channel.

In addition to this, link your YouTube channel to your Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. You can also use social aggregation tools like Tintup and Enplug to showcase videos and aggregate hashtags for you.

13. Collaborate with Other Channels

Look for other YouTube channels that cater to the same target audience as yours. The main advantage of such a collaboration is that you can tap into their YouTube subscriber base.

You can collaborate with them to create co-branded content that is relevant for both brands. Or, you could promote each other’s videos or channels.

Just make sure that the channel you pick to collaborate with is in some way related to your niche. If you have a fitness brand, you could collaborate with sports influencers or even brands that focus on healthy food.

Having related niches will help you to create content that can seamlessly integrate both brands.

14. Create Themed Playlists

Themed playlists have become a common occurrence on YouTube, as it's a great way to get users binge-watching.

This is especially true if you want some of your older content to be rewatched, or repurposed within the context of a playlist. Playlists help users find some of their favorite types of videos that you create, and watch them in succession.

Playlist themes will obviously depend on the sort of content you create. Here’s an example of a way tech review YouTube channel, GSMArena does it:

Reviews are split between different devices, as well as a dedicated playlist for buyer guides and the most viewed videos. This makes it easy for anyone looking for a specific subset of videos to find what they are looking for.

15. Do Your Keyword Research

I brought up keywords within the optimization of the descriptions section, but it really deserves a section of the article to itself. As much as SEO is important for websites, it’s just as important for social media, including YouTube.

These social sharing platforms all have some sort of algorithm and search engine to decide which content to offer in people’s feeds, as well as what content should be shown first when a term is searched.

Thus, getting your keywords and optimization right is just as important as it is for any website.

There are a few things you can do to up your keyword research game for YouTube. Here are just a few:

• Brainstorm relevant topics related to your niche.
• Use YouTube’s autocomplete feature to reveal which search queries are used the most.
• Learn from and compare search results to see what videos are ranking on page 1 of search results for a certain topic or search term. 
• Use keyword research tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner.
• Consider search volume and keyword difficulty when choosing keywords to focus on.

Final Thoughts

I've seen it all when it comes to YouTube subscriber growth strategies.

From crafting captivating content to engaging with your audience, optimizing your videos for SEO, and collaborating with other creators, these 15 proven techniques are the secret sauce to skyrocketing your channel's following.

So, go ahead and implement these strategies, and watch your YouTube subscriber count soar to new heights. Remember, with the right tactics and a sprinkle of wit, you'll be on your way to YouTube stardom in no time!

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