You know that the most essential thing in achieving success is not to start but to continue your activity despite the ups and downs. It is also important to remain enthusiastic and positive no matter what happens. For example, promotion on social digital platforms was always tricky – to gain popularity, you have to correctly guess the topic of your content, build a proper image for your personality, choose an effective marketing strategy (and be able to adapt it to get better results than before), master video editing tools, buy professional equipment, and so on.

At the same time, if we talk about specific goals, the biggest challenge in this promotion is to attract the first thousand fans – they will become your most loyal audience and demonstrate to new people that your content has already turned out to be valuable for someone. Below we will explain how to get this coveted 1000 YouTube subscribers with the minimum effort.

Try Out Different Types of Content

Having only several dozen followers indicates your target audience has yet to be formed. It is why you can afford to change the format of your content depending on whether most of your viewers approve of it.

You are at the best stage to experiment so that you can create educational videos, life hacks, tops, etc. Just let go of worrying about: “What will my viewers think of me?” soon, you will see that one of the formats you choose will increase YouTube subscribers.

Publish New Videos Regularly

At first, you may be inspired by your new activity (we mean adding to your channel new content), but over time, you may lose your enthusiasm. And this is likely to be your fatal mistake.

Just understand: creators usually become stars only after months or even years of hard work, including creating and promoting high-quality content. Therefore, you will have to set yourself up not for a sprint but for a marathon and publish new videos at least once a week (or even more often).

Encourage Viewers to Subscribe to Your Channel at Every Opportunity

You may not even realize how effective a blogger’s request to “subscribe and like” can be when getting free YouTube subscribers. The main thing is not to part with it every minute. Note that this applies to both your videos and the videos of your colleagues who participate with you in the same partnership program – they may recommend following you from their channels if you directly or indirectly made some effort to help them with content creation.

You should include an appropriate link in your video description and add a ‘Subscribe’ button (i.e., a watermark) to your specific video. To do this, you must log into your YouTube Studio, where creator tools are located, click on the menu item "Customization" on the left menu, and click "Branding." After that, you will have to select the time when your watermark will be displayed, click "Edit" to integrate it into the video, and click on "Done" and “Publish.”

Use YouTube Live Streaming

A few years ago, YouTube expanded its capabilities with a new feature – live broadcasts. This type of content appeals to the vast majority of the audience, as in addition to pre-edited videos, they will most likely want to get to know you in a more informal environment. It will also allow them to communicate “here and now” with you. Therefore, just do not neglect this feature, and the number of your subscribers on YouTube will gradually grow. You can learn more about how streams (including continuous ones) can affect the popularity of your channel.

Add YouTube Shorts to Your Content Strategy

YouTube Shorts is another relatively new feature of this platform. It lies in short videos up to two minutes long. The algorithms for promoting such videos differ from those inherent in the bulk of YouTube content, which means that if your promotion strategy turns out to be ineffective with your regular videos, it can bring you hundreds of new fans, in the case of Shorts. You can learn about the YouTube Shorts monetization here.

Optimize Your Videos for Search

To get 1000 subscribers on YouTube, you must also master the basics of SEO, that is, strategies for optimizing your content in search engines. Specialized SEO tools will help you with this. Basic SEO practices refer to the text content on your channel, especially the titles and descriptions of the videos and the channel itself.

As for the specific recommendations, you must identify the keywords that describe the main topic of your channel or specific video, include them in the description, and add relevant tags. More information about YouTube tags is available here.

Use YouTube Analytics to See What Works

Lastly, remember to check your YouTube Analytics dashboard metrics regularly. This way, you will understand which videos have attracted the most new viewers and which have been less attractive to your audience.

Analytics will also help you plan the script for your following videos, as it will help you determine which specific moments are the most engaging for your viewers. It is an excellent tool for building and optimizing your channel promotion strategy.

Conclusion

Following the above recommendations will increase your chance of success and help you gain subscriber retention. And most importantly – be patient because nothing more than diligence and constant work on mistakes will bring you closer to your 1K subscribers goal.