Ask any YouTuber and they will tell you that generating significant views and subscribers isn't easy. But with the right strategy and tools, any video creator can build an engaged subscriber base when they understand what those subscribers want to watch.

Appealing to an audience to watch content you are passionate about making is just the first step, you need to know how to reach them and get your videos discovered. Our guides to how to guide more views on YouTube will give you the best tips to succeed on the platform.

How To Get More Views on YouTube

Do you want to make money on YouTube? Millions of creators are earning a very good living from the platform by uploading content that drives huge views and engagements. Whether that income is from advertising revenue, merch sales, or brand deals, we keep you updated with best practises and ideas.

How To Make Money on YouTube

Do you know how to do keyword research so you understand what videos people are actually searching for on YouTube? Do you know how to create a custom YouTube thumbnail? Do you know how to create a Playlist on YouTube?

vidIQ has a ton of tips that will help every creator maximise their video content. We publish content every week to keep you up to date with all the best practices.

YouTube Tips & Tricks

If you’ve put off creating your own YouTube channel because you’re overwhelmed with the choices you need to make or are panicking because you feel you lack the right skills to succeed, worry no more and welcome to the only resource you’ll need to fulfill your video creator dreams.

If this is your first time here, we have a 

 that aims to educate you on your YouTube journey. And if it is your plan to grow your channel, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, and click on our notification bell so you don't miss any of our latest tips, tricks, advice, and news.

How to Start Your YouTube Channel: 10 Top Tips

We promised 20 tips to kickstart your YouTube channel, so let's start delivering on that promise with 10 tips in this post and 10 tips in the 

. All the tips are covered in this video too:

So amazingly, there are still some people out there who are thinking of starting a YouTube channel and have been for months, possibly even years. My advice to you is, ready or not, start now. And I'm not telling you this as a New Year's resolution. Every moment you hesitate or procrastinate, there are thousands of video creators starting their YouTube channel today, and gobbling up all your potential audience. You don't want that.

Feel the fear, do it anyway. Start, press record. Record whatever you want today. It doesn't matter if it doesn't end up on YouTube. You need to gain experience in getting in front of the camera, getting behind the camera, using your editing program. You need to start creating content to find out whether or not you enjoy making videos before you know whether or not you enjoy being a YouTuber.

Tip #2 Learn How YouTube Works, No Seriously:

The chances are, that the first video you make is going to absolutely suck. Fantastic, you've made a video. You've made the first step, and in six months’ time, you'll look back at that first video and think yeah, that really was terrible, but you've gotta start the journey somewhere. And with that, you've gotta start your YouTube channel somewhere as well, even if you're not ready. Create a YouTube account, upload a video to YouTube. You don't have to publish it, that's the important thing.

You need to gain experience going through the workflow of uploading videos. The last thing you want is having a brilliant video ready to upload, but you don't know how the YouTube system works. Again, experience is going to trump any advice any of us can give you, so record a video, upload it to YouTube. You don't have to publish it.

Tip #3 Develop a Strategy you Will Actually Follow:

While getting some practical experience behind you is obviously a good thing, you also want some form of strategy. So, answer these questions:

What do you want your channel to achieve on YouTube

, and when you're answering this, try and answer it from a viewer's perspective, not your perspective. So I don't want to hear about hitting 10,000 subscribers, a million views, or whatever. If your viewers know that you're in it for your own self-gain, they will see through it and immediately switch off. Viewers want to know what they can gain from the content, and you want to sell that as much as possible in your videos.

 Again, try and be as specific as possible. What age range? What gender, if you are going to a particular gender? What type of demographic? What are they interested in? You need to know who's going to watch your content.

 There are millions of gaming channels out there, hundreds of thousands of Fortnite channels out there. How are you going to distinguish your content from everybody else who's already on YouTube making content? You need to disrupt the status quo, not join it, because you'll never be seen.

how are you going to deliver this content?

 Is it going to be every day, once a week, at a particular time of the day? Think about when your audience is most likely to watch YouTube, and how much YouTube they can watch per week, and then tailor your content to those watching habits, and think about whether you're going to do video on demand, live streams, what's going to be best for you and your audience?

Tip #4 Find Your Niche and Build the Hell Out of It:

live streams, you'll know this one off by heart. Niche down. Let me give you a quick example. What's your channel about? If you're giving an answer such as, "My channel's about beauty, and it's about travel, "and it's about vlogging," then it's about too many things. 

. It should be about one specific topic, when you start your channel, because you need to appeal to a very specific audience.

Once you've grown your channel, and you've got millions of subscribers who fall in love with you, you can take them on a journey wherever you want, but to begin with, the audience is only interested in the content. They have no investment in you. Try and remember that. It's a cruel lesson to understand, but it will help you when you first start out on YouTube.

Once you've thought about and answered all of these questions, I want you to wrap it all up in a nice little present, called your value proposition. This is your elevator pitch. Try and tell your audience who you are, and why they should watch you, in around about six words.

. It tells you the who, YouTubers, video creators, and why they should watch, because they will learn how to grow their channels. But we've managed to do that in four words. Now it's your turn.

Tip #6 Invest in the Right Audio Equipment:

If you've just started out on YouTube, and you're wondering what your first tech upgrade should be, it is 100% audio, and here's why. Bad audio is so much more distracting than bad video, and everybody hates onboard microphones. 

So if you can, get yourself a dedicated microphone for your camera,

 and if you're recording from a computer, you can't go far wrong with a Blue Yeti.

Tip #7 Create a Formula with Template Videos:

Videos need structure, so when you make your next video, try to think of how you will develop a show formula, that you can use as a template for your future videos. Remember at the beginning of this video, I literally gave you a hook. An introduction, a teaser to what's going to be going on for the rest of this video. Then we have the branded intro, followed by an introduction to who we are for new viewers, a call to action to subscribe to our channel, and then we jumped into the meat of the content where we are right now, and at the end of this video, you'll see how we round this all up.

Your show formula will take time to structure, and it will evolve over the course of your YouTube journey. Try and keep an eye out for this when you watch your favorite YouTubers. As rough and as random as they might appear, there is always structure and story behind each video, and that's why you watch them.

Some people love analytics, others hate them, but there are a couple that are crucial to keep an eye on, whether or not you want to look at that analytics. The first is 

This represents how enticing your titles are, and how clickable your thumbnails are. Check the click-through rate for your channel as a whole, and on individual videos as you test. I'm not going to give you all of the same target to reach. Check what your current click-through rate is, and whether it's two, four, six, or eight percent. I want you to try and improve that by two to three percent this year. It will bring in so many more views.

The other metric, as it always has been, is 

. Generally speaking, the more watch time you get, the more YouTube is going to promote your content. But if you make shorter videos, that doesn't necessarily mean you must make longer videos, because your audience might not react very well to those longer videos.

What I will say is maximize the value of your watch time in the videos that you have. That's by looking at relative audience retention. How does your video stack up to similar videos, in terms of whether people are still watching or not, and try and improve the relative audience retention. Having said that, if your average view duration is 60, 70, 80%, you're doing really well, and it gives you a license to try testing longer videos.

Verify your YouTube account. That will give you access to the most important tool on YouTube, which is custom thumbnails. We've got a video here on how to do it.

Tip #10 Create an Engaging, Interesting Channel Banner:

If I see another generic cityscape, or rolling hills in the channel banner when we do channel audits, I'm going to rip out my hair.

10 more tips or creating and growing your YouTube channel

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level and 

 then make sure to download vidIQ. Join over 1 million other users and use vidIQ to help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

Members of the vidIQ family that have upgraded to our Boost and Pro packages get immediate access to the Academy 

 so you can kickstart your YouTube success today! Access to the exclusive vidIQ academy will give you a huge advantage over your competitors from the get-go. 

Kick off your YouTube dreams with the tools you need to launch YOUR channel. We've got the top tips just for you!

How to Start a YouTube Channel: 10 Brilliant Tips

Keyword research. It's one of those things every video creator on YouTube should have in their skill set. While you may know what your content is about, you need to be able to understand how to tell YouTube what your content is about. So in turn, YouTube can share that content with exactly the people who want to watch what your content is all about. We're going to tell you everything you need to know to get proven results, to help grow your channel. In this post you’ll learn:

Keyword Research Basics: Using the YouTube Search Bar

How to Play the YouTube Search Bar Alphabet Game

How to Drill Down on Niche YouTube Keywords

How to Target a Specific Audience with the Right Keywords

How to Determine Keyword Interest Over Time

How to Analyze the Success of Your Keywords

A keyword is a word or concept of great significance. Or to put it into a YouTube context, an informative word used in an information retrieval system to indicate the content of a video. When it comes to keyword, try and imagine it as the first word, or phrase, or conscious thought, that instinctively comes into your head, when you think of that particular topic.

That’s a very simple introduction to keywords, but it obviously gets a lot more complicated. I'm sure you already know, that if you put in a single word into a YouTube search, you're not going to get exactly what you're looking for. Often, when people search on YouTube, or on Google, they're looking for keyword phrases AKA long-tail keywords. And again, you have to have an instinctive mindset.

If I have a flat tire on my car, my instinct is to search for something along the lines of “how to replace a flat tire.” If I have a sudden urge to play the piano, my instincts might be to search for “beginners guide to playing the piano.” If my toilet is blocked, well, you get the picture. And of course, if you want to grow your YouTube channel, your instinct might be to search for “how to get more YouTube views.”

So before we dive into the details, there are three fundamentals of keywords:

A keyword represents the first thing that usually comes into a person's head.

A keyword is often part of a key phrase - a sentence of three or four words.

And most crucially, think like a human, not a robot, when it comes to researching keywords, and then using them in your titles and descriptions.

As a very simple example, let's take the title, “how to get more YouTube views.” It's keyword rich, but does it have enough of a draw to really entice a viewer to click on it? What if we added a year to the title, to give it more currency? And maybe an adjective to give it more umph, such as how to get more YouTube views fast in 2019. Simple changes like this, can have a really powerful impact on the way a title is perceived by a potential viewer.

1. Keyword Research Basics: Using the YouTube Search Bar

All right, let's go on an epic keyword journey using your best friend, the YouTube search bar. Even if you type in a very simple keyword, such as “how to,” almost an auxiliary keyword for many phrases, YouTube will start to make suggestions.

But of course “how to” is a very broad keyword. So how could we narrow this down? Let's add a verb, such as install. Now we are getting into a more technical landscape, which is all to do with construction, or building something. We're very much in the instructional, or tutorial area of YouTube. But of course, your channel and topic of interest, is going to be very specific to one of these keywords. So let's look at how to install Windows 10.

Now we have a pretty good, broad keyword, for computer tutorials. But again, look at how YouTube is encouraging you to dive even deeper into this topic. Remember, these are the topics people are searching for on YouTube, and that's why YouTube is showing them to you. It thinks, you want to know how to install Windows on a new PC, or on SSD, or with a USB.

So to dip your feet into the YouTube keyword bathtub, so to speak, you should always start with the search bar, and see what auto-complete suggestions is pushing your way, for your topic of interest.

2. Play the YouTube Search Bar Alphabet Game

Another thing you can try is the YouTube search keyword alphabet game. Once you have a keyword you're comfortable with, simply add one character to it, and go through the alphabet. So “how to make slime A”, or “how to make slime B.” And you'll get all sorts of interesting suggestions from YouTube, that people are searching for.

It's amazing how many long-tail keywords you can find doing this process, to really help you niche down, and find a very specific topic that you're passionate about.

Now on to my favorite part of any video, and that's introducing you to some vidIQ tools. Remember, if you want to see any of this on your YouTube pages, download the 

. We're going to take a fairly general keyword here, which is “how to make slime.” And once you press enter, and it shows you the YouTube search page, you're going to start to see some of the YouTube tools that we have. The first one we're going to look at is the subscriber count. Something I'm always interested in, is whether a small channel is having an impact on a search term.

At the time of making the above video, we found two channels with less than 10K subscribers who were ranking on the front page of YouTube for “how to make slime.” WProving that small channels can make an impact with very broad, and popular, search terms. If a channel with 1,000 subscribers, is getting a video with 100,000 views, that tells me at some point in the past, this keyword was right for making content about.

Now, interestingly, the title of one video includes the word cheap. So maybe we can include that in our keyword search term - “How to make cheap slime.” Now at this point, we can riff on the keyword a little bit. Instead of searching for “how to make cheap slime”, how about searching for “how to make slime on a budget?” It means the same thing, it's just worded slightly differently.

But who's searching for that search term? At the time of writing, the number one result on YouTube for that keyphrase is a channel with only 1,137 subscribers. Scroll down and there are other small channels appearing on the first page for the term.

So we can confirm that there are relatively small channels making a huge impact in the world of how to make slime. And all I did was focus on a particular niche in the area, which was making slime on the cheap, or on a budget.

Funnily enough, you're not the only one doing keyword research on YouTube. There are thousands of video creators, just like you, trying to find those super-rich keywords to help serve the billions of people who watch YouTube every single month. YouTube's been around for 13 years, so many a keyword, such as “how to unblock a toilet”, “how to replace a spare tire”, and “how to get more YouTube views” have had the life sucked out of them, over that period of time.

So what becomes super important, especially for smaller channels, are trending keywords. For example, Fortnite is one of the most popular video games on the planet right now, and is heavily searched for. So how might a video gamer refine the search? Maybe if they looked at how to improve gaming performance on Fortnite in season six and beyond? Essentially raising their phrase per second, or FPS boost.

So now we have a very popular keyword, combined with a trending topic, combined with a sub-genre of the core keyword. Instead of finding just channels of eight-million subscribers, we're finding channels of all shapes and sizes competing for this very specific trending keyword.

A telltale sign of a juicy keyword is when small channels are wrangling for this keyword, and they have far more views than subscribers, on their channel. That means the video's been shared out to a much wider audience.

5. Target a Specific Audience with the Right Keywords

Now for something that is super important to remember. Most of us probably aren't interested in Fortnite, don't have a clue what season six means, and definitely don't understand the concept of frames-per-second boost. But you have to remember that you're not trying to appeal to the entirety of YouTube. You're looking to target a very specific audience, wanting very specific answers, to very specific things. And this is where keyword research is so important.

When you are passionate about a topic you build-up an intimate relationship, knowledge, and interest in the topic. Just like your potential audience. And that's who you want to appeal to. Whether it's for educational purposes, to tell a story, or to draw an emotional response from your audience, that innate passion you have for the topic, will be seen in your videos. And you just need to transfer that into your knowledge of the keywords that surround that content, in your tags, titles, and descriptions.

Because, what you're trying to find here are keywords of opportunity. Those are keywords, or key phrases, with the most search volume as possible, versus keywords with as little video competition as possible, on YouTube.

You can do this with the vidIQ keyword score tool. It tries to simplify this task, as much as possible - the higher the score, the juicier the keyword. But as you might expect, these things do not grow on trees. Which is why it's so important to spend some time doing some keyword research. Anytime you see a number next to a video tag on YouTube (once you have vidIQ installed) that's your keyword score. As you might expect, the potential of keywords can change very rapidly. But as a general rule of thumb, you want to be looking at keywords of a score of 50, or above. For a lot more detail to look into our keyword score, check out this video:

Now let's return to this keyword ‘ “fortnite season 6 fps boost”. At first the keyword score shows that there is still relatively low search volume, but very low competition. So it was a very juicy keyword. We looked again at the keyword two or three weeks later. Search volume increased significantly, while the competition score has remained relatively flat. And this is quite a rare occurrence in YouTube.

Now the landscape of the search results has changed as well. We've got a much larger channel now, dominating the top of the search terms, but look at our second channel. This one has managed to maintain its presence in the search terms , and the view count has more than doubled, and subscriber count has increased significantly. So this channel has really benefited from this keyword. As for the other channel that appears in these search rankings here, we'll come back to him later.

What else can vidIQ tell you? Well, if you enable inline keywords, you can see all of the keyword phrases they're using in their video tags. If we click on one of these tags, it launches the vidIQ keyword inspector. This will give you a mountain of information about the keyword selected, including the keyword score, and interest over time.

All right, one more super powerful vidIQ tool to tell you about. And a lot of people miss this one, because it's found in the vidIQ Chrome extension button. So click on there. You'll see a range of options, and you want to select SEO tags. This brings you into the vidIQ web app, and you will need keyword research tab. Now when you do a keyword search here, not only does it bring up all of the information that we saw on the YouTube search page, such as the search score, competition score, overall keyword score, but all of the related keywords, as well. So, for a combination of all our tools, you can not only find single keyword phrases, all that are significant, but a whole bundle.

The idea with keyword research, is not to spend five minutes finding that golden keyword that you can create maybe one or two videos from. It's to spend a considerable amount of time getting a collection of keywords, that all work together for a video series. That's why we recommend maybe spending a morning, or an afternoon, using the vidIQ tools that we've shown you, to get maybe 10, 15, 20 keywords, that you can create 20, 50, maybe 100 videos from.

When you have a focus, a particular niche, that's where you can hammer the YouTube algorithm, time and time again, with content that YouTube will start to see you as an authority, in. And that's when you can start to climb up the search rankings. Especially for search intent. Because when you find your niche, spectacular things can start to happen.

Keyword Research: The Positive Impact on a YouTube Channel

 we briefly saw in the Fortnite search rankings before. In the summer of 2018 this channel didn't have any focus. They were doing random videos on pranks and whatnot. But then, they had one breakthrough video, on the topic of boosting frames-per-second, on Fortnite, on season five. And this is what the channel did next.

They threw all of their content into that one keyword phrase, boosting frames-per-second on Fortnite, whatever season it was. And these went from a few hundred a video, to thousands, if not tens of thousands, of views per video. In just a few short months, this channel has become one of the authorities on the subject, so that now, whenever they post a video on Fortnite, and boosting frames-per-second, they rank at the top of the search terms, instantly. If you want to know more about this particular keyword research story, then check out this video:

I know we've used Fortnite for many examples, and it's because we have a lot of data on the subject. But believe me this strategy can be applied to any video topic. I did exactly the same thing a couple of years ago. It was all on a topic of how to record your iPhone screen, or your iPad screen, or iOS screen. And I was able to successfully leverage YouTube into sharing these videos with hundreds of thousands of people. And it grew my channel from tens of thousands of subscribers to over a 100,000 subscribers.

Use Keywords to Show YouTube What Your Content is About

All you've got to do is take these tips, tricks, and strategies, and apply it to your video topic, by doing the keyword research. But don't leave those keywords in your notebook or in your computer, because those are going to form the basics of your metadata to help your content be more discoverable on YouTube.

The more keyword research work you do for your titles and descriptions, the increased likelihood of YouTube surfacing those videos in search results. To put it simply, front-load your video titles with keywords, include those same keywords in the first two lines of your description, and include them in your video tags and playlist, as well. Give YouTube every opportunity to understand specifically, what your content is about. And stick to it over a series of videos.

Another important reason for having keywords at the very beginning of your video descriptions, is because people can read this when they search for content. So try to think of the beginning of your description, as if it were a classic tweet of 140 characters. Reinforce your keywords, while still making it a readable sentence. Give an enticing reason for the viewer to click on your video, and don't waste space with links and calls-to-actions, that will take the viewer away from your video.

Just before we analyze the success of your keywords in your YouTube videos, I want to step outside of YouTube for a second, and go into Google search, to look at something called LSI keywords. What on earth are they? It stands for latent semantic indexing. And if you still don't understand what that means, it's a system search engines use to analyze other words people use surrounding a given topic. If you don't know what that means, don't worry, I'll show you in Google.

When you do a search on Google, if you scroll to the very bottom of the first search page, you'll see lots of related keywords to what you were searching for. And these are your LSI keywords. So this is another golden opportunity to beef up your keyword collection.

If you scroll to the top of the Google search page, you'll find something else of interest, as well. If you produce good quality content, and have a strong keyword metadata in your YouTube videos, they'll start to be suggested in Google search. Imagine all of that extra free external traffic, being driven to not only your videos, but to YouTube, as well!

Now let's look at how you can analyze the success of your keywords. We're back into some vidIQ tools here, so once you have the Chrome extension installed, you can take a look at our SEO scorecard. This can be found either on the video upload/editor page, or on video watch pages.

You want to pay close attention to the actionable aspects of this SEO scorecard. When you use strong keywords in your tags, titles, and descriptions, and reinforce them throughout your metadata, your score will continue to increase. And you want to try and get to as close as 50 as possible. This gives your videos the best possible chance of fruition on YouTube, and that's reflected by the performance score.

If you want to learn more specifically, about the vidIQ SEO score, we've got the 

When your keywords in your video tags, start to rank highly and consistently, you will definitely see the rewards in your video views.

And for all vidIQ Boost users, don't forget to scroll to the bottom of the video editor page, and take advantage of our recommended tags tour. As you input keywords into your tags, titles, and descriptions, we will advise on further tags you might want to use. But be selective. Choose the ones that really define your video content.

How else can you analyze the success of your keywords? One of our most powerful tools is the Channel Audit button, found on the left-hand side navigation bar once you've installed the vidIQ Chrome extension. It will give you a full report card on your channel, 24/7. What we want to do here, is scroll down to this section that says ‘Top Search Terms’. This will show you all the traffic that's coming to your channel, from keyword search terms on YouTube. And you can click on the view more buttons to see all of the traffic coming from keyword search terms, including views and watch time.

Common sense will compel you to create more content on the keywords that are performing well for your channel. It's what we like to call the double-down strategy.

Everyone knows that keyword research is hard work - but it's a skill that every video creator should have in their toolbox. Here are 7 ways to rank on YouTube using the best keyword research hacks.

7 Ways to Rank #1 on YouTube with Keyword Research

When you are logged into YouTube, you should see your channel logo in the top right-hand corner of most YouTube screens. If you click on that, you have the option to go to YouTube Studio. This is currently in beta, but will become a standard as 2019 progresses. This is your new dashboard or analytics homepage, and from here you want to click on the Settings section down the left-hand side.

On this screen click on Channel, and finally you want Branding. This is where you can set a video branding watermark, and what this does is add an image of your choice to the bottom right-hand corner of videos, which viewers can mouse over and use to subscribe to a channel. This branding watermark also appears on the mobile YouTube app, but you cannot use it here to subscribe to a channel. The ideal image should be square, 150 pixels by 150 pixels, and no more than one megabyte.

How to Add a Branding Watermark to Your YouTube Channel

To add a branding watermark, simply click Choose Image, and select one from your computer. You can select when the branding watermark appears on your videos, but we highly recommend choosing the entire video, so that the viewers have the opportunity to subscribe whenever they want. This branding watermark affects all videos on your channel, and don't forget to save before leaving this screen.

This is an absolute no-brainer, it's guaranteed to work, it's a free way to get more subscribers, and it's a YouTube tool. Now you could of course use your own channel logo, and many do, but my question is this. This is a branding watermark, and the call to action is to subscribe to your channel. So it might as well say exactly what it does on the tin. As you can see, when we changed our branding watermark to this current Subscribe button, and set it for the entire length of the video, our subscriber count from that source increased by over 500%, and because we're such lovely people, we want you to enjoy the same success.

This is the ‘Subscribe’ button mentioned in the video

 - just click on that link, download it, and apply it to your channel.

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level then make sure to download vidIQ. It will help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

YouTube has a little feature that’s guaranteed to get you more subscribers. We show you how to turn it on, and what impact it will have on your channel.

How to Get More YouTube Subscribers In ONE MINUTE!

If you’re new to YouTube but want to monetize your content you’ll need to generate 

, and you’ll also need 1,000 subscribers to qualify. Here are 10 tips to help you attract those first 1000 subscribers to your YouTube channel

#1 Apply Directly to Your Audience to Subscribe

There is a school of thought that suggests asking for subscribers, may sound a little desperate, even cheesy, but it's simply a part of the YouTube fabric. People ask you to smash that like button to improve the YouTube algorithm and engagement rates. I've never had a single comment on one of my videos complaining about asking for subscribers and if you never ask, you may never get.

#2 Use Resources to Encourage Subscriber Sign Ups

A way you could encourage your viewers and subscribe is to use animations on your videos to make the subscribe button pop. You can get all sorts of resources from all over the internet. Simply try what fits for you and you may see an upsurge in your subscribers.

#3 Take Advantage of Your Watermark Branding

Our next step is to take advantage of our watermark branding. When viewers click on this icon, it takes them to your channel where they could subscribe after watching more of your content. It's edited and created via the branding page on the Creator Studio. Make sure the word ‘Subscribe’ is included in your icon, and don’t introduce it right at the beginning or at the very end of your video. You want it to act as a visual distraction, maybe 30 to 45 seconds into the video.

#4 Add a Call to Subscribe on Your Endscreen

While you can’t add subscription links in YouTube Cards during your video, you can add a subscribe button to your Endscreen. Have a play around with graphics and animations for a really strong call to action (CTA).

Next up is a neat little trick. Whenever you share your YouTube channel add a command to the end of your link, like this: 

. When users click on it they are prompted to automatically subscribed to your channel before actually visiting your YouTube channel page.

#6 Use a Pinned Comment to Ask for Subscribers

Another way to directly appeal to your audience for a subscription is to write a comment and then pin it to your videos. When you do this, that pinned comment appears at the top of the comments list. Now again, I feel as if honesty is the best policy. Be open and transparent. Tell your audience why you're pinning these comments, why you're asking for subscriptions. Maybe it's because you want to invest the money you earn back into the channel with new equipment or products.

#7 Add a Subscribe CTA to Your Video Description

You could also add a similar message to the video description of all of your videos.

#8 Be an Active Part of the YouTube Community

Another thing you can do is reach out to an entirely new audience by adding value to other channels. That might be watching their content and posting awesome comments that either get pinned or liked by the channel creator and create a conversation. When people get involved in those conversations, they might think, "this video creator perhaps has value on their own channel." So, try and attract a new audience who may really enjoy your content and subscribe.

As an example, we get all sorts of awesome comments from you on our videos. I'm sure many other video creators are reading those comments, agreeing or disagreeing, generating a conversation, perhaps visiting your channels and subscribing. In a recent example, we had a video creator who got an audit on one of our live streams, and that drew in a significant number of new subscribers to his channel. He increased his subscriber base by 5% just by contributing to our 

#9 Post Content on a Regular and Consistent Basis

Our next tip may sound obvious, but it does need reinforcing. Post new content on a regular basis. For some viewers, it may only take one video to convince them to subscribe to your channel. But for others, they may watch a video, enjoy it, but they don't subscribe. Then in their YouTube homepage, they see a never new video from you, they watch it, enjoy it and say, "Yep, I've seen a couple of videos from this person now. I enjoy their content. I'm going to subscribe."

#10 Make Your YouTube Channel Homepage Welcoming

Following on the theme of encouraging viewers to become subscribers, make sure that your channel homepage is very welcoming. Use a channel trailer, give a good description about what your channel does including a good channel banner, and of course, plenty of playlists that tell the viewer exactly what your channel's about. In fact, when you're sharing videos, share the playlist video link. That means that when a viewer is watching your video, they're within your playlist environment. There may see it more videos that they like from your channel and eventually subscribe.

Want to monetize your YouTube content? We show you how to get your first 1000 subscribers so you can hit that goal.

Top 10 Tips to Get Your First 1000 YouTube Subscribers NOW

 and now you think that feature should apply to every single video you publish. You don't have to convince us, but you do have to convince YouTube.

The next time you upload a video you may find yourself encountering a new screen as part of the upload workflow. This new step gives you the chance to “self-certify” your content before it goes live. If you are part of the YouTube Partner program step two will always ask you whether or not you want to monetize the video. If you say yes and save, a new third step will appear labeled ‘Ad Suitability’.

On this screen, you will be quizzed about whether or not the video contains certain content that might make the video not suitable for all advertisers. You can click on each box and answer the questions contained within. And as you do so the revenue potential box to the right will show you how this might affect the revenue on the video. In some cases, you will get the all-clear, indicated by a green dollar icon.

While in other cases your video may only be eligible for limited ads as indicated by a yellow dollar icon. Just to be clear, this doesn't mean that your content is inappropriate for YouTube and that you will get community guideline strikes. But it may be inappropriate for certain advertisers who want to target particular audiences.

There are 8 categories to work through including adult content, violence, drug-related content, sensitive issues and more. If you are 100% confident your content doesn't come close to any of these issues, you can simply check the none of the above box at the bottom of the screen, and move on.

YouTube: Self-Certifying Your Content for Monetization

Why is YouTube now giving creators the ability to self-certify their content? The answer is because YouTube wants to place the burden of responsibility on you, rather than itself, for the content on the platform.

Now this has both its positives and negatives. So let's take a look at both.

It is well known that YouTube uses lots of machine learning and artificial intelligence to automatically review content, but that isn’t always foolproof. So it stands to reason that if you are truthful with your self-certification - and this is confirmed through an automated review - YouTube will start to trust you more. That means it's less likely that your future content will be hit by inappropriate misleading ad warnings when you don't deserve them.

This may also mean that if you have been on YouTube for years, without any issues, you may not see this screen very often, or even have to go through this process.

On the flip side if you're brand new to the YouTube partner program you may have to confirm this screen with every single video you upload. We'll have to see what happens over the next couple of months. Ultimately for all those creators who are doing the right things, this should add an extra layer of comfort.

YouTube Partner Program: Don’t Upload Inappropriate Content!

Now if YouTube decides that your content is doing something wrong, then they're washing their hands of it and saying, "we asked you to fill out this form, you didn't fill it out properly, it's your own fault".

YouTube also says that if you continually misrepresent your content they will review your participation in the YouTube partner program.

In a sense, YouTube is gathering evidence. Like they do with the ‘Made for kids’ question - you have to answer regarding 

So with all of this in mind, here are a couple of tips to follow:

First, and obviously, be honest. If you try and cheat the system, or dodge the questions now, it's going to come back to bite you later.

Secondly, if you're not sure if your video falls into any of these categories, you can play it safe. Set one of the categories, unlist the video and then request a manual review so that human reviewers can check on the video.

Over the past year, YouTube has been experimenting with running adverts against edgier content. That's because in part if YouTube knows the nature of the content, advertisers can target those particular videos with the right target audience.

YouTube has a dedicated support page on advertiser-friendly guidelines that does include broad examples, so that's definitely worth checking out. 

If you would like to learn more about monetizing your YouTube channel then make sure to check out this 

And if you’re really serious about growing your YouTube views and subscribers, sign up for exclusive access to the 

 and learn how to launch a successful YouTube Channel in just 30 days.

YouTube wants you to earn revenue from your videos so it has introduced a new step to confirm your uploads are ad-friendly. Read more about this new feature for creators in the YouTube Partner Program.

How to Monetize Your YouTube Videos (and Keep Them Monetized!)

 here at vidIQ, as we’re always getting asked how to create a one, or how to grow one. We also get asked the following question a LOT - is it too late to start my own gaming channel when the competition is so fierce out in YouTube world.

And the answer is, if you hit the right strategy then no, it’s not too late. Particularly if you’re prepared to put in the work and the wait time. No-one is going to become as famous and successful as 

 overnight (not even Pewds himself), but if gaming is your passion and you feel you have something of value to offer your target audience, then go for it. Today.

To show you it’s entirely possible, let’s shine a light on one particular creator who only started their channel in March 2020, and now (at time of writing) has over 8K subscribers.

100 Percent Zelda: A Gaming Channel Case Study

 is a channel focused on the action-adventure game Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and it came to vidIQ’s attention during one of our live-streamed channel audits that take place on 

The creator then shared a post on Twitter about how the channel was suddenly gaining some traction

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I made it in right under 3 months! =) This last 2 weeks were crazy!! Quality over quantity for me. Do it for your audience, not yourself, and the rest will come. Thank you to all my wonderful subscribers =)<a href="https://twitter.com/vidIQ?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@vidIQ</a> <a href="https://t.co/2RC8p8rS90">pic.twitter.com/2RC8p8rS90</a></p>&mdash; 100 Percent Zelda (@100percentzelda) <a href="https://twitter.com/100percentzelda/status/1276368834144976896?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 26, 2020</a></blockquote>

To understand exactly what this creator thinks happened to get their channel to take off, we reached out to them and asked if they would share just a little bit of insight. What we learned from 100 Percent Zelda is, obviously, they're a fan of Zelda, but not only that, they're a fan of watching creators on YouTube who also play Zelda. Take a look at

How a YouTube Gaming Channel Got 1000 Subscribers in Three Months

The creator of 100 Percent Zelda decided they wanted to start a channel, so they started taking note of things they liked and things they didn't necessarily like about other creators and the way they were covering the game on YouTube.

In addition to doing some serious competitor research, they also joined Zelda communities across the Internet and paid really close attention to the types of questions people were asking in those communities.

Perhaps the most crucial step this channel took though was keeping their audience in mind when they decided to launch. They determined that if someone was going to subscribe for 100 Percent Zelda, they had better get 100% Zelda. But the creator went a step further and not only niched down on gaming and ‘Zelda,’ but went one step further to focus right in on ‘Zelda: Breath of the Wild.’

That’s proved to be a winning strategy, with videos like this one generating amazing views for a relatively small and new channel:

So, we already know that they've seen explosive growth covering ‘Breath of the Wild’, but the long-term plan for this channel is to eventually explore other Zelda games. As we know, there are plenty of Zelda games to choose from with more on the way in the future.

What’s really helping this channel with its success is the type of Zelda content they're creating. They're not just playing Zelda, they're answering those questions that they learned about from the community like ‘

Key to YouTube Success: Know Your Audience

The methods that 100 Percent Zelda used here to grow their own channel are totally repeatable. As with any big game franchise, when the game features a lot of depth like ‘Breath of the Wild’, a lot of questions come up as players try to find out how to do something in the game. That’s a lot of video content to be made just answering those questions.

100 Percent Zelda started their YouTube journey by making content specifically for their audience. As they continue to grow and people connect with them on a more personal level, that will be time to branch out into different Zelda games, or different games altogether.

Of course, if you want to play multiple games across multiple genres, then you'll probably start generating some subscribers, but any time you switch a game or switch a genre, you need to be prepared for some of those subscribers to never come back.

One size doesn't fit all on YouTube, but with a little research and some hard work, you can make high value, dependable content that people subscribe to and continue coming back for.

Want to Make it as a Gaming Creator on YouTube?

Yes, it's an insanely competitive space, but you can still find success with a brand new gaming channel on YouTube. Take this Zelda enthusiast for instance!

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