7 ways to reach first 100 subscribers

1. Start right away

If you don’t have a channel yet, then the first step is to start right away. A lot of people keep waiting for a perfect moment, one more excuse and so on. But, let me tell you… There won’t be any perfect moment. You just have to start at some point. Let it be right now!

You might think, “Oh, I don’t have a good camera…. Oh, I don’t have a good microphone…. etc. etc.”. But it is way better to start off with whatever you have at hand. You won’t have those many subscribers you want to please in the beginning. So, your video/audio quality should not be the priority as long as the content you are delivering is good!

2. Choose your audience

The most crucial step is to choose your audience. You have to decide on what type of content you love making. Then check if people actually resonate with that topic you are trying to create content about. There is no point in creating content that no one is going to watch, right?

3. Don’t start YouTube for money

Usually, many of us see YouTubers making a lot of money and decide to start a YouTube channel ourselves. But, get one thing clear. YouTube does allow making money, but it takes a lot of time even to get the first YouTube salary. You can make money in YouTube, no doubt about that. But if your main goal is just to make money, I’m sorry to say, but your channel might not go far.

YouTube is platform to share educational and entertainment content. If you love creating such content and money is not your main goal, then YouTube is a great platform to start! If you keep making the content you love, eventually you also start getting paid for your efforts. That’s how it works.

4. Be consistent

Once, you have started making videos and your immediate reaction would be keep track of the subscriber count. Getting the initial subscribers is really not that hard. You just share with your family and friends, and you have yourself a bunch of initial subscribers.

But, later as you keep posting, your subscriber count might increase very slowly, or in some cases, not grow at all! This happens to all of us. The decision you make at this point decides your entire YouTube journey! Many lose hope and leave the platform, instead of being consistent at posting what they love.

YouTube’s algorithm is quite interesting. Since, you just started your channel, it takes time for YouTube’s algorithm to figure out when & whom to recommend your channel. I can’t stress on how important being consistent is! The best thing to do is keep posting consistently and eventually, you will definitely see your subscriber count increasing.

5. Create catchy thumbnails

The main differentiator between videos on same topic is the ‘thumbnail’. Think about it. You see multiple videos on YouTube for the same topic, but you mostly end up watching only one video on that topic. How do you usually choose the video? The title even though is important, what actually grabs your attention is the thumbnail!

Any viewer hardly looks at the title of the video. All of you have is like 1 second of their time and how you try to market your video within that 1 second counts as a potential subscriber. Even if your content is amazing, but if people just pass your video just because they didn’t like your thumbnail, how heart-breaking is that! All that effort you put into your video gone waste if no one decides to watch it. Just put at least 1/4th of the time you make the video to make a good thumbnail.

So, just try to make good catchy thumbnails. Don’t make it clickbait one since people usually get irritated and sometimes even unsubscribe if they don’t get what they came for. So, don’t do click baits and just make good eye-catching thumbnails. You can figure out if a thumbnail is good by sharing it with your friends and asking them opinion, or you can just put yourself as a viewer, and honestly judge if YOU yourself would watch that video based on the thumbnail.  

6. Use Call to Action

Call to action is basically encouraging the viewers to subscribe, like or share your videos.

One of the biggest mistakes that a lot of beginners do on YouTube is either not give any call to action at all thinking it makes them look cool by not asking people to subscribe or like, or giving too many call to actions throughout the video.

People usually don’t perform any of these actions unless they are reminded and encouraged to do so. Make sure you do a call out during your video, preferably at the start, middle or end. But make sure you don’t put one call to action at all these 3 places, saying if one is good, then 3 must be better. Remember that people watch your video to have a good time being entertained or to learn something new, and not to watch you constantly telling them to subscribe or like the video.

7. Make use of YouTube analytics

Now that you have started posting consistently on your YouTube channel, its time to check the analytics that tell how your video has performed amongst the audience. You can check this in the ‘Analytics’ section in your YouTube studio.

This is crucial because it may tell you what are the terms that people usually search for and end up watching your video, to fine tune the title of your video to those search terms. Some of the most popular search terms are “How to”, “what is” and so on. Don’t try “my so on so” as you aren’t famous yet and people need not be interested in “your” life yet. So, save the fun titles for future and stick to the general keywords what people search for.

Another good metric to see in the YouTube analytics is “viewer retention” that tells you how long have people watched your video. This helps in understanding what parts of the video do people usually stop watching your video. You can make changes to those parts in the future videos to make your videos more engaging.

These were the 7 steps to get your first 100 subscribers! I hope to see you all YouTube aspirants in the comment section and while you are down there, hit the subscribe button to help out my channel. It really means a lot! Now, that’s a live example for call to action.

Thanks for reading and see you all in the next one! Peace.