There is nothing more satisfying than touching a neat milestone videos uploaded on YouTube after a lot of work, patience and more patience.  One important one is your first 100, 500 and 1,000 subscribers.

YouTube offers the feature of live streaming when you reach the 100 subscribers milestone (it was 1000 subscribers and now brought down to 100) and your account has a good rating. One of the difficult task is getting more subscribers, but I’ll share below 10 killer tips on getting your first 1000 YouTube subscribers in 168 hours.

1. Post Useful and Engaging Content Regularly

One of the most painstaking things to do as a Content Creator or Producer is creating and posting engaging content consistently. If you take a look around YouTube for a while you might think that every video capturing a sunset has been created and that is most likely true, but you can put your own spin of tweaks on a popular or trending topic.

Leading with a simple example, there are many “unboxing” gadget videos…what if you created a “re-boxing” and elaborate on the various components of technology while you put it back in the box?  The main key to content creation here is immense creativity and that will certainly boost your subscriptions or sky-rocket it to an unbelievable number.

There are so many YouTube channels that I have seen online growing their number like wild-fire because of their type of content uploaded consistently.

2. Strategy backed Video Titling or Naming

Another difficult thing after creating your video, is “Naming the Video on YouTube”. You have the name in your head, but it may be something too complex or too long so how are you going to come up with a catchy name ?

I follow a pretty decent strategy of keeping the name basic. Using YouTube’s auto-complete for naming is not the best to use every time. Keep in mind that you have to be creative and at the same time relevant.

3. Channel Design Matters

Always remember that the first impressions is the last one. If you do not implement creative and eye catchy design on your channel, you are just loosing out on loyalty for your brand or product. Create a engaging header to simply show off your brand.  On my channel, I am intentional about the design making it fit into my overall branding and marketing strategy. The perfect target is to design with a purpose having a CTA (Optional).

4. Show Your Lighter Side of Life

Lighten up for your subscribers and laugh at yourself, sometimes.  Bloopers are a good way to break the professionalism to a corporate channel or even a singing, ice-skating video. It’s a great way to connect with your YouTube community and make it feel more lively.

5. Shuffle Shooting Locations

Generating interest in your content is very important and one of the key factor is having the locations of shooting or vlogging changed every now and then. I completely understand that it may not be possible or you may have a set ready, but try to change a main background or even use a green screen that you can work with to change the tone of location.

6. Custom Thumbnail Creation and External Links

On my other Android Channel “AndroGuru”, I have seen subscriptions and views increase by adding this tricky step which has recently kicked in as a trend since June 2017 on YouTube.  I recommend the “Impact” font to grab attention of viewers.

I also recommend to title the photo thumbnail differently than the video name because when people are browsing through other videos, they can easily understand what they video will be about and take action.

Add your social media and website links (up to 5) in the About section to get more social media following and website hits. You might feel that it’s not super effective but why leave it out ?

It’s free to enter the links as well as plays a strong part on your brand and SEO which you will see paying off along time and effectively showing up better on Google.

7. Use of Neat Annotations

In case you are not aware about this feature, annotations are those irritating things that pop up during or at the end of videos, but they can be a content creator’s dream to get more out of the video.  I recommend adding clean annotations to every video and make it easy by creating a link for new visitors to subscribe.

This is extra work for sure, but once you see your subscription rate increase you will make more time to continue to add them to every video on your channel. Every new visitor is like a coin and it’s all about how you can get the coin !

8. Ask For Subscribers

This is very basic and easy to execute. At the end of every video, ask existing subscribers and new viewers to “like” and subscribe to your channel.  Make sure you explain to them in short as to “why they should subscribe”. For example, if you are a DIY Office Improvement channel I would say, “subscribe for my DIY corporate projects, tricks and insider hacks delivered to you every week.”

Remember, ask carefully, because you might get it……

9. Be Yourself, Be Unique

Every one is different, you know that right ?

Well, you are the best you—you can be, always. Being on camera was difficult for me at first because I was shy, but then I realized, “I just have to be me.”   Let your personality flow in all your videos and I guarantee someone will connect with you and your story.

10. Invest in Creating an Engaging Channel Trailer

With the new channel design, YouTube gives all content creators a sweet opportunity to create an awesome trailer to share what your content is about. Just so that you resonate, have you ever attended a movie without viewing a trailer?

I have not, because I definitely want to see what it is about.  Make sure you keep your trailer below 85 seconds and show scenes from your other videos for better understanding and provide an effective call to action of why a viewer should turn into a subscriber. There needs to be a specific Unique Selling Point for every channel.

The trick is to simply keep people coming back by putting some effort into content creation. Did you notice I didn’t mention any technical details such as lighting, audio, camera  and composition?  This is because I will explain this in another blog post.  Be camera ready always and remember to be comfortable as that’s the key to more subscribers.

What are the other methods apart from the above 10 you use to get more subscribers on YouTube? Leave them in the comments below.