How to Double Your YouTube Subscribers (Without Buying Them) (2)
You can even turning some of your blog posts into videos. 59% of executives would rather watch a video that read a chunk of text.
Okay, so that's the basics of creating incredible content. The next point is going to be essential if you want to ensure that your subscriber rates consistently grow.
Post often and consistently This is probably the hardest part of growing a YouTube following — though it can also be one of the most important.
96% of B2B companies plan on using video marketing as a part of their strategy next year. Posting content consistently is a great way for you to compete.
Plus if you're constantly posting new content, then people have a reason to become a subscriber. After all, people are less likely to subscribe if you're not going to post any more content — why should they? If you use the tips mentioned earlier, then coming up with ideas for posting new content doesn't need to be hard. You just need to set a schedule and stick to it.
How often should you post?
If you want to keep things simple, you might want to take a look at what your competition is doing and then one-up them.
Often, however, the best plan is the one that you can stick to.
So, you may just want to create a schedule that you actually can keep up with. Either way, it's important that you do everything in your power to stick to that schedule. Consistency is important as it'll keep existing subscribers coming back for more. This will result in more views for your video and will also improve the engagement that your video receives.
Engagement on a video tends to come in the following forms:
Thumbs up or Thumbs Down Social sharing Subscribing Commenting Favoriting Ideally, you want to improve the levels of engagement in each of these categories.
People like to engage with content on YouTube and did you know that over 100 million people per week take a ‘social action' on YouTube every week? You'll also be surprised to know that 92% of mobile video viewers share content with others. Another mind blowing fact is that 700 videos are shared every minute on Twitter.
Great engagement will help make the video more visible in the YouTube search engine.
As you might have guessed, this will expose your video to more people, who can then become subscribers themselves.
If you want to view some statistics in terms of how your videos are performing then you can use the YouTube analytics dashboard.
You don't have to be at a computer to consistently post content. That's because you can use the scheduling feature provided by YouTube. In order to gain access to this feature, you must first turn on monetization for your videos. This means that you are willing to show ads on your videos.
If you don't want to show ads on your videos, don't worry. You still have control over which videos are monetized and which ones aren't. Let's take a look at how you can get that done. Sign up for a YouTube account and then go to the ‘Creators Studio' section. Then, on the left sidebar, under the ‘Channel' option, select ‘Monetization.' Then choose ‘Enable My Account.' Once you've done that, you'll then be able to access the scheduling features provided by YouTube. You'll also be able to access a lot more in the way of analytics. If you want to schedule a video, click on the ‘Upload' button. Then click on the dropdown menu and select the ‘Scheduled' option. Then drag and drop your video, or click the icon to upload it.
On the next screen, you'll the ability to adjust the scheduling options. All you have to do now is to enter in the date and time when you want the video to go live.
If people are subscribed to your channel, they'll get a message when your video goes live. Additionally, scheduling that date into your social media management platform, if you have one, is also a good idea.
This will ensure that Tweets, Facebook updates and LinkedIn posts are sent out in synchronicity with the video upload.
If you have an email list that is relevant to your video, you might even want to send a message out to those folks, too. After all, messages with video tend to boost open rates by 19%.
You might want to stagger the messages to ensure that you're not bombarding people on multiple platforms all at once. If you're struggling to come up with a lot of content on a daily basis,you might want to split up some of your longer videos into shorter ones. For instance, in each of your long videos you are going to cover various topics.
You could edit out certain topics and then create mini videos, using those topics.
You'll notice that the channel ‘Inside Quest' does this a lot. Here's one of the videos on their channel. Note how it is nearly 49 minutes long.
Even though the average mobile session on YouTube is 40 minutes, for someone who is new to the channel, that video length can be potentially intimidating.
So what you'll also notice a lot on the same channel is that they have broken down the video into some ‘highlight clips,' that cover interesting points and topics. Note how short each of these videos are.
59% of people will watch a video to the end, if it's under a minute long. Short videos can be a great way to introduce people to your channel, by giving them a taste of your content.
78% of people watch videos online every week, so there's a good chance that they'll come back to watch some more of your stuff, if it is good. Make some evergreen videos A great way to consistently generate subscribers is by creating some evergreen videos.
These are essentially videos that will be of relevance whether they are being viewed today or they're being viewed 5 years in the future. This will apply to some niches more than others.
For example, I spoke earlier about the pencil drawing business and that one naturally lends itself to producing a lot of evergreen content.
Evergreen content is generally based on topics that are aimed at beginners.
A lot of ‘how to' content tends to be evergreen. And so, when you look at things through this lens, it becomes easier to understand how to create content that is going to be evergreen.
As a result, take a look at your niche and see if you can create some ‘how-to' videos that will stand the test of time. Even if you're not looking to create evergreen content, it's worth creating some ‘how to' videos, because they are being watched 70%more year on year. Just in the first four months of 2015, 100 million hours of ‘how-to' content has been viewed — there's a lot of demand for this kind of content. Get people to actually click on your videos Even though 80% more senior executives watch online video than they did a year ago, you still need to get them to watch your video in the first place.
Because before anyone can become a subscriber to your channel, they need to first click on your videos.
No matter how good your video is, once it is seen in the YouTube search engine or sidebar, it is going to have some competition in the form of other videos.
So how do you get people to pay attention to and click on your video?
There are three things that you need to focus on — the image, the headline and the description.
These three elements will have the biggest impact when it comes to influencing YouTube users to click on your videos.
This is because they'll help your rankings in the YouTube search engine. They'll also improve your videos' ability to entice users to click on them. Just as you should spend a lot of time focusing on the titles of a blog post, you should also spend a lot of time focusing on the headline of a video.
So, how are you going to create a good headline for your video? If your video is based on a certain keyword, then it is essential that the title of the video reflects this keyword.
When you do this, you increase the chances of someone clicking on your video.
If the title of the video matches what they were searching for, they'll assume that the video covers everything that they need to know in relation to that topic. Of course, that doesn't mean that you should be ridiculous in how you're creating your titles. ‘Keyword Stuffing' can hurt you much more than it can help you. One way you can get around this problem, is by using a colon.
For instance, earlier we identified the keyword — ‘simple drawing techniques.' If we had a video on that topic, we could write the headline like this — ‘Simple drawing techniques: 5 tips that will make drawing easier.' Side note: An interesting experiment might be to split the ‘simple drawing techniques' title into separate niches. For example, ‘simple drawing techniques for cars' or ‘simple drawing techniques for eyes.' This is a great example of how you can take a big niche or keyword that is receiving a lot of traffic and identify opportunities within that niche.
As I mentioned, youll have to experiment a little when you do things this way. But, there's no telling what kind of opportunities you might uncover. As you can see in the example above, the title of the video makes use of a colon in order to separate out the text.
You'll also notice that there are videos where the ‘|' symbol is being used. You'll have to test which one works better, though it could just be that this symbol serves a similar purpose to what the colon would have done. When it comes to creating YouTube headlines, you'll want to follow the rules that already exist for blog posts. You need to have a mix of something that people are searching for, but also something that grabs their attention.
You can do that by using the keyword your video is targeting in the headline and then including some power words in the gaps.
As we've discussed, the style of your videos is going to influence the headline. If you have a ‘how to' video, then you'll need to account for that in your headline. Similar to blog posts, numbers also tend to work well in YouTube headlines.
When it comes to the image/thumbnail, there are a couple of approaches that you could take.
The first is to show a clear image of whatever the video is going to be about. So for instance, if you were talking about laptops, you'd show a clear picture of a laptop. Like this –
Alternatively, you could just show a picture of a person interacting with whatever the video is about.
Like this example —
However, one of the increasingly powerful ways of creating video thumbnails is by editing them so that they have some text.
Here's one example of what that looks like. You don't have to only add some text. You can heavily edit the thumbnail image so that it clearly stands out.
Here's another one. If you want to create thumbnails like this, you need to follow these rules.
You can create a thumbnail using the Canva platform.
First, go to the site, and become a member.
Upon becoming a member, you'll be presented with a variety of options that will help you to create an image. If you want to learn more about how you can use Canva, then going through their initial setup process might be helpful.
However, adjusting dimensions from this stage can be a little tricky.
And so, you might just want to go to the Canva homepage, after becoming a member so that you can see the screen below.
There you'll be able to select the ‘Use custom dimensions' option. Canva doesn't have a preset option for YouTube thumbnails, so you'll want to use the resolution guidelines provided earlier. That means images must be 1280×720.
Enter in the dimensions mentioned and then click on the ‘Design!' button.
You then have the option of creating your thumbnail image.
There's a lot to experiment with here and you'll need to test out a few of the options to get a sense of how things work. If you have some images of your own, you can upload them into Canva and then overlay some text onto them.
