How to Get Your First 10,000 YouTube Subscribers

One of my students inside of Video Strategy academy recently hit her first 10,000 subscribers on YouTube after deciding to take YouTube seriously. Yeah, she went from about 200 subscribers to 10,000 subscribers and is about to reach 20,000 subscribers, all within a four month time period. What did she do? Well, grab your notebook because I'm going to break down all the things that you need to do if you want to hit 10,000 subscribers on YouTube. But you've got to make sure you stay to the very last step. Step. Because if you miss that step, everything else that I tell you here today isn't going to work. So I'm saving the best for last. One of the first things that you need to do to get to 10,000 subscribers on YouTube is know your niche. Yeah, I know you probably hear this all the time and it probably gets a little boring. In fact, every time I talk about niching here on YouTube, I see my audience retention graph drop. I know it's not the sexy side of YouTube, but in the side of YouTube that will help you grow to 10,000 subscribers because it's critical for the YouTube algorithm. So the YouTube algorithm is trying to figure out who to put your videos in front of, who's going to watch your videos. And if you don't know who's going to watch your videos, how is YouTube going to figure out who to put your videos in front of? Now if YouTube knows who to put your videos in front of, that's going to help you get more subscribers because YouTube is going to continue to do that. This is is very simply why you need to understand who you are speaking to. And you can't just have this broad audience because you're going to confuse YouTube. Right. YouTube may put a video out and 10 people click on it, but then YouTube puts your next video out to those 10 people and one person clicks on it. So then it sends total confusion through the algorithms. So I'm going to use my channel as an example case study and then I'm going to share with you about the student who had 10,000 subscribers and what she did as a case study. Again, all revolving around your niche. And I'm telling you this is critical. So I do a lot of content here on my channel about growing on YouTube. Not only are you my subscribers signed up for that type of content, but YouTube has kind of categorized me as a YouTube education channel. It knows it can put my videos in front of people that are searching for content around growing on YouTube. So if I post a video on Instagram, not only am I Confusing the algorithm because it's putting my videos in front of people that aren't looking for Instagram content, but it's confusing you as the viewer, as, as well. And you're going to be more likely to skip that video, making YouTube think it's not what my viewers want. Therefore, my video performs below average. Example right here. When I publish an Instagram video and my channel is going to continue to perform below average. If I stay on that route, right, If I expand my niche, it gets everything confused because you can see my top videos all revolve around YouTube in some way or form. Now let me show you how Hope use this to grow her channel. But if you want to see how she used keyword research to figure this out, make sure you're subscribed to my channel and turn that bell on because that's what we're going to dive into next week. Keyword research and how to find that out. So what Hope actually did was double down on the niche. Frugality, frugal tips, frugal living. And that's why her top videos right now are so huge and drove so many subscribers so quickly. Because YouTube got the data on who to put these videos in front of and then put it in front of more of those people, quickly growing her channel to 10,000 subscribers. And again, the same thing with Kathryn Manning. She's one of my favorites to watch. And she blew up and kind of really snowballed her growth when she decided to Double down on YouTube monetization. And she will tell you that in that particular video, that's what she did. So these are three specific cases that prove to you that knowing your niche is critical if you want to get to 10,000 subscribers. So your action step here is to look at your top performing videos. Which ones are performing above average? Which ones are getting the most subscribers? Which one's getting the longest audience retention? Find the common theme or the common topics that these videos center around. Double down on those videos. Next thing you need to do is level up. And while this can mean leveling up your equipment, it's not the first thing that you need to do to level up. You need to be leveling up your content. Like I've said the past couple of weeks, looking at your audience retention graphs and finding ways to improve it and get people to watch your videos longer. If you want to hit 10,000 subscribers, you need to get at least a 50% audience retention or more. If you want YouTube to start recommending your videos to more people, YouTube's not going to push content to people that people aren't watching. So again, I've mentioned this earlier, but really study those audience retention graphs. Try different styles of video. For me, I tried a little bit of vlogging and that actually helped my audience retention. Try different camera angles. See if using different camera angles keeps people watching longer. See if a different style of editing or faster paced editing keeps people watching longer. And I know this isn't a simple search for the best keywords to help you grow to 10,000 subscribers. It takes work. But if you put in the time to do this, you will see a difference. Because if this was easy to grow on YouTube, everybody would be doing it. In fact, understanding your audience retention graphs are so important that we do this with our clients inside of our agency. For example, Virginia is a student of mine and she's an a pretty competitive niche on YouTube around Instagram education. She came to us back in December with about 500 subscribers, and within three months we're able to hit over 3,000 subscribers for her. Her channel's been monetized and each month her subscriber rate continues to grow. So she's gone from getting 400 subscribers a month, 700 subscribers a month, to 900 subscribers a month and a completely competitive Instagram niche. How is she growing this fast? And because we here at the agency are putting in the work. We're reading the analytics, we're studying the audience retention graphs, and we're telling her how to level up her videos, how to level up her content because of the analytics that we are studying here in the agency. But what's even better than more subscribers? She's getting more and more sales every single month to her digital course. And that's what we love. Even more here is seeing our clients actually making more money because of the work we're putting in to help them grow their YouTube channel. So you guessed it. Your action step here is to start study those audience retention graphs, look at the best performing ones and try to replicate that. What do you need to do to your videos to keep people watching longer? Or maybe none of your audience retention graphs are that good. So maybe you need to scrap it and totally try a new style of video. Maybe you try vlogging, maybe you try a different style of editing, but you need to do something to make those audience retention graphs better. And maybe you do need to upgrade your equipment. Now, before you upgrade your camera, I would recommend upgrading to a microphone or a lighting first, because that can make a difference with your quality of your camera. If you want to upgrade your camera for sure, but it's an easier upgrade if you do a mic or lighting first. The third thing you need to do is consistency. Now, a few weeks ago I ran through 20 different initial video ideas for you, so I'll link to that up here. But you've got to be posting at least once a week here on YouTube to see growth. Not only is it helping you get data and analytics by getting videos up, but it's helping you figure out how to make better videos. And every single time it's also building your content library, allowing more chances for people to find your content. And like I said, I'm not talking about doing multiple videos a week. Honestly, quality over quantity will win on YouTube. Case in fact, back in January and February I upped to two videos a week and my YouTube channel didn't grow any faster than in December when I post one video a week. So really focus on finding a way to stay consistent. Your action step here is to figure out a plan. Look at your calendar. Maybe every single Wednesday, record videos and every single Thursday you edit. I personally like to batch multiple videos. So today I'm filming five videos in one day. But I had to back that up and plan to batch my video game plan. So I researched and script these videos first so that today I could just focus on filming. So I know every last Wednesday of the month is my day to film videos. So I have the next month's videos content done. So look at your calendar and start to figure out what routine works for you. Our client Virginia, her routine works best if she knows she films every Tuesday. That's her filming day. She gets us the videos, we edit it and we upload it for that next Wednesday. Find what works for you. The next thing you need to do to hit 10,000 YouTube subscribers is self promote. Now the past couple of weeks I've talked a lot about how we promote our YouTube video, so I would check those videos out after this. But I want to talk about something a little bit different here in Self Promote and I want to talk about public relations pr. So what I mean by PR is finding ways to reach other people's audiences as long as that audience aligns with you. So for example, think about podcasts that you could go on and talk to. Find podcasts that are reaching your target audience. For me, this is like Jessica's Speak to Scale podcast, Amy Porterfield's Marketing Made Easy Podcast Boss Project Strategy Hour podcast. These are the podcasts that I would want to reach out to in Pitch to Speak. Their podcast Then I could get in front of their audience to help me grow my subscribers. Right, because most podcast hosts are going to let you tell their audience how they can find out more about you and you can tell them to go to your YouTube channel, thus helping you grow your channel. Another way to do this is with some partnerships. Maybe there is a brand or another influencer that has the same audience as you that you could do Instagram lives with or Facebook lives with. For example, I partner up with TubeBuddy and every time I go live on TubeBuddy, I see an increase in subscribers on my channel. So you really want to start thinking about outside the box as well. Not only promoting your content, but promoting yourself as well with pr. One last way to get some PR as well is online summits, or what used to be in person conferences. I have actually found that online summits are great for growing my YouTube channel. I think since this online summit way of doing things helped me grow my channel quicker because people are online watching the training and they can easily go to a new tab and subscribe to my channel when I talk about it. Whereas conferences are great because you're reaching a lot of people. But we're usually buzzing around back when we could go to conferences and we tend to just forget to look that person up. So think about ways that you could start maybe speaking at conferences to also build your publicity so that leads into the action step. Right? Think about a PR plan that you could have for your YouTube channel. Could you speak on podcasts? Could you speak at an online summit? Could you maybe guest star in somebody's live series or maybe do an Instagram story takeover with somebody with the same. Same audience as you? The next thing is to think about playlists and series again. I went into a deep dive on this with my YouTube strategy video. I will link that up here. But you want to find ways you can get people to binge watch your content. How can you get people to watch multiple videos of yours back to back to back and series is a great way to do that. That's exactly what we're doing here on my channel. This entire month we've been talking about strategies and tactics to help you level up your YouTube strategy. This has hopefully been getting you excited to back every single Wednesday to watch this video. And I'm hoping long term it gets people to one of these videos and then the end screen or the additional videos I'm talking about gets people to watch video after video after video. Because let's say I get somebody to watch this particular video and then they watch four more videos of mine. YouTube's actually going to push this video in the algorithm more because they know people are going to click on it and watch four more videos. That's what they've seen, right? If you can get people to binge watch. And for me, I've just found it easier to think about playlists as a video series. And we're already planning what our series is going to be next month as well. So your action step here is to think about how can you create a three, four or five part series that you could then turn into a playlist or a compilation video to get people to binge watch your content. That's the key here to growing to 10,000 subscribers. Now this last one, like I said, is the most important of all of these. All of these will help, but not if you're focusing on this one. And it's the YouTube Triton trifecta. I've talked about this before on my channel, but the YouTube trifecta are the three major metrics that matter in growing your YouTube channel, and that is your click through rates, your audience retention, and your end screen clicks. Everything that I talked about earlier is what's going to help you focus on these YouTube trifecta pieces. With the click through rate, you need to be making sure your thumbnail and your title are getting people to click. You need to make sure every single video that you put out, you're getting a better click through rate and a better click through rate. Compete with yourself. Or you can shoot for a 5 click through rate and go up from there. Because it doesn't matter how great your content is, if people aren't clicking on it, they're never going to see your content. That second piece, audience retention, we've talked about it a lot the past couple of weeks. You need to focus on getting people to watch to the end so that they can get to that third piece, your end screen click through rate, which I just talked about in the previous step. Right? Your binge ability, your binge worthy channel. If you can get people to the last 20 seconds and you can add an end screen and tell people to watch that video next, you're going to see a snowball of growth. I've seen channels that I've worked with have a 10 or more percent end screen click through rate that skyrocketed their channel growth. In fact, one of the videos that a client has a 10% end screen click through rate has over a million views on it because that video hit the YouTube trifecta so that video got pushed to even more people. The algorithm knew if that video was shown to somebody, they were going to click on it, they were going to watch the end, and they were going to watch another video. That's why this YouTube trifecta is critical to hitting 10,000 subscribers on YouTube. Now, I dug deep into the YouTube trifecta, but there are a lot of other analytics that you need to be looking at, depending on your goals. So I did an entire 20 minute video walking you through YouTube analytics and how to find that on this video on your screen right now, if you're not sure where to find these analytics or what analytics to be looking at, watch this video next, because it's going to tell you exactly, exactly how to do that. So if you want to hit those 10,000 subscribers on your channel, watch that video now.