Increase YouTube Subscribers-2015

How to Increase YouTube Subscribers-2015

Hey. What’s up everybody? It’s Brian Dean, from Quick Sprout. In this video, I’m going to show you how you can get more subscribers to your YouTube channel. Subscribers are really important for YouTube marketing, because even though there’s 30 million visitors a month on YouTube, most of them, obviously, aren’t going to see your videos. If you want people to see your videos, you want them to subscribe, because then your feed will be front-and-center when they head to YouTube. They’ll also get email updates about channels they subscribe to when they upload new content. It’s just a great way to get more views for your video.
Your first step is to create videos consistently that are really great. What does that mean in practical terms? What you want to do is we’re basically reverse-engineer what’s already out there in your industry. Let’s say that you’re in the social media marketing niche. You head over to YouTube and put in a keyword like ‘social media’, ‘Twitter’, ‘Facebook’, whatever you’re specializing in, or whatever video topic you want to cover, and then click Search. Then you basically want to see what videos have a lot of views. This one by Common Craft, ‘Social Media in Plain English’, has almost 100,000 views. ‘Social Media Revolution’, whatever that is, has over 1 million views. What you want to do is actually click and watch the video. Just see what it is. This looks like one of those animated videos, storyboard explainer videos, which tend to really perform on sales pages, but I haven’t really seen them so much on YouTube. This could be a great way to stand out from the competition, and you have some competitive intelligence that tells you that it works based on the number of likes and the number of dislikes is very low for the amount of views that this video has. This might be something that you might want to incorporate.
The next thing you want to do is take a look at your analytics and see how people are interacting with the videos that you already have. To do that, click on this little arrow up here and click on Analytics. This will show you statistics for all the videos that you’ve uploaded to your YouTube channel. What you want to do is click here, where it says This Month, and choose Last 365 days, This Quarter, Last Quarter, or a long time period so you can get the most data. What you really want to pay attention to is engagement. For this channel right here, I actually have no videos uploaded. It’s more of a test channel, so there’s not much to see here. If you upload a lot of videos or if this is your official YouTube channel, you should see some engagement metrics like likes, dislikes, comments, shares, and things like that. If you notice that you’re getting a high proportion of dislikes to likes, or not getting many comments or shares, that might be a sign that you should approach the video content a bit differently.
Another great way to see how people are engaging with your YouTube videos is to go to the sidebar and click on Audience Retention. This page will show you how long people tend to watch your videos for. At the top-left corner, it shows your average view duration; you want this to be preferably above 50%. Above 65%-70% is really, really good. You also want to pay attention to individual videos, because as you see here, one video has an average percentage view of 75% and this one’s about 30%, so less than half. What we want to do is take a look at this particular video and say, ‘What’s going on with this video? Why aren’t people watching the video all the way through? Why are they only watching 1/3 of the video?’ Then maybe replace that video with another one or look at where you can improve your video content. That’s really important to do this first before you do any of the other steps in the video, because if you don’t have great videos that encourage people to like and comment, and also encourage them to watch the entire video, it’s going to be very, very difficult to get any new subscribers.
Once you have videos that people are interested in and are watching a lot of, your next step is to add annotations to those videos that encourage them to subscribe. Annotations are just little messages that appear on the video that can either give them a call-to-action or actually have a link back to your YouTube channel. To add one to an existing video, head up to Upload, click on the little arrow button, and click on Video Manager. Then click on this arrow button and choose Annotations, and that’ll take you to the Annotations Page for that video. What you want to do is click on Add Annotation and choose the annotation that you want to add to your video. In my experience, speech bubbles and notes work best because they’re not too in-your-face and they do grab attention. What you want to do is add some text here, something like, ‘Subscribe to my channel’. Then you can customize the font, the color, however you want it, either to blend in or to stand out. Then you can choose when you want it to start and end. If you want the annotation just to appear at the end of a video, you can make it start later on in the video. If you want it to end at a certain point, you can do that. If you want it to link, which you probably do, to your YouTube channel, you can do that.
What we want to do is choose Channel from the dropdown menu, and then put in your channel name. Then when people click on it, it’ll link to your channel, and obviously, it’ll encourage them to subscribe when they get there, or you can link to another video. Considering we’re focusing on getting subscribers, you want your annotations to actually link to your channel so people can subscribe.
Once you have that setup, your next step is to add a YouTube widget to your blog. You can easily do that in WordPress. Just head over to your WordPress dashboard, then hover over Appearance and click on Widgets. Then you want to grab a piece of code that you can add to your sidebar, which will act as your YouTube subscription button. To do that, just Google ‘YouTube subscribe button’, and click on the first result. Here you’ll find a code that comes straight from Google that you can use in WordPress or whatever site that … CMS that you happen to use. What you want to do is scroll down to Configure a Button and then put in your channel name. Then you can choose the layout, whether you want it small or whatever, and dark. Then you want to grab the code, head over to the widgets areas, and then as a text widget, copy-and-paste the code. That’s it. You want it to look something like this. When you press Save, this’ll be added to your sidebar, so that people can subscribe to your YouTube channel directly from your blog without actually having to visit your channel. It’s one-click subscribing.
That’s all there is to getting more YouTube subscribers. As you see, the most important thing is to have videos that people really love and to encourage them to subscribe. Then you want some calls to action through annotations and also, possibly, as a widget on your blog. Thanks for watching this video. I’ll see you in the next one.