You’ve spent a lot of time creating and editing the video you want to upload on YouTube. Only to upload and watch your video remain at 0 views for almost a month.

It can be frustrating, to say the least, and some might get discouraged and be tempted to quit YouTube.

The dream of every YouTuber is to get that first 1000 subscribers. Starting, it would seem almost impossible to attain such a goal.

Truth is, it doesn’t matter how good your video is or whether or not you hire a professional to edit your videos, as long as you don’t do some basic optimization on your video, the chances of getting noticed are relatively slim.

YouTube has a cool algorithm that favors new channels, by recommending their videos to others. But if your video is not optimized properly, no one would want to click on your video.

In this post, I’ll share with you guys how I grew my YouTube channel from almost zero subscribers to over 1000 subscribers in one month.

How to Grow a Youtube Channel in 2021

Before we start, I have to point out that you have to be patient to achieve anything in this world. Those who put in the work will most definitely see the results. With that in mind, I’ll share my tips for growing your YouTube channel.

Make Your Channel Professional

By professional, I mean doing the needful such as having a channel Logo, Channel art, and an about section.

Most people that visit your page for the first time, observe your logo, banner and go through your about section to know what your channel is about and how often you post. If they don’t find anything there, I bet you, they’ll never check back.

Edit your channel about section with important details about your channel and let your potential subscribers know what to expect from subscribing to your channel.

Make use of Custom Thumbnails

YouTube allows the use of Custom images as the thumbnail of your videos. For those who do not know, Thumbnails are the featured images in a YouTube video.

Many people make the mistake of using the thumbnail auto-generated by YouTube. That’s bad practice, you want to design a custom thumbnail for your videos.

Thankfully, there are several apps to help you quickly design a thumbnail for your videos.

Also, adding texts of about 20 – 30 characters with the title of your video into your Thumbnails has been proven to work.

Perform Keyword Research

Keywords are the terms people enter when they search for a video on YouTube. Those who appear on the YouTube search page have optimized their videos properly.

One way of promoting your channel is by uploading content that people would want to watch, and also what people are searching for on the platform.

For instance, you can search for ‘makeup tutorial’ and YouTube will suggest other phrases people use in their searches. These are the keywords, and you can use them as a guide to direct you on your next video.

You can use tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Tube Buddy, Keyword everywhere, or aHrefs to do proper research.

In targeting a specific keyword, you need to focus on the ones with moderate search volume per month.

This is because it is easier to rank for less competitive keywords.

Optimize your Videos for YouTube Search

This aspect is mainly a build-up on using custom thumbnails and doing a little bit of keyword research. After getting a keyword you want to use for your video, you should make sure you mention it at least twice when recording your video,

In addition, you should also add them to the title of the video, write a little description section about the topic, and include the keyword as well.

Lastly, YouTube lets you add tags, so make sure the keyword is the first tag in the tags section, then you can add related keywords as well.

Doing all these will help YouTube search engine to easily detect your content and recommend it when someone searches for the Keyword on YouTube.

Get Relevant Backlinks

Backlinks are simply the number of times your YouTube link is seen on the internet outside the walls of YouTube. One way to get free backlinks is through social media such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

In addition, you can utilize community forums such as Quora, Reddit, Nairaland, etc. These platforms are already popular which means when you share your links there, it will count as a relevant backlink.

If you have a website or a blog as well, you can link to your YouTube videos on your website. Here, we use our blog to promote our videos which is getting us additional views.

Do you need a website or blog? Follow this link to learn more.

Another means of getting quality backlinks is by paying for them using a service such as SEOeStore.

For instance, you can order quality backlinks for as low as $1 on SEOeStore. We used them to get backlinks and it helped us rank for certain keywords on YouTube.

Encourage Viewers to Subscribe

This is quite easy and straightforward, tell them to subscribe to your Channel. Either vocally or add a cool subscribe animation into your video. It works a lot trust me. People will consciously or unconsciously subscribe to you without even knowing. The human mind is quite tricky.

However, you have to be careful not to mention or tell people to subscribe at every minute in your video, that’s spamming and people do not like that.

From my experience, the best approach is to mention it at the beginning of the video, middle of the video, and towards the end of the video.

Promote Other Related Videos Through End Screen and Cards feature

The goal of YouTube is to keep people on their platform for as long as possible, and if your video is helping them achieve that, they’ll recommend your videos to others.

YouTube lets you add an end screen linking to another video from your channel or a playlist. I studied my analytics and discovered a significant rise in views, subscribers, and engagement as soon as I started using the end screen feature on all my Videos.

Consistency and Commitment

All the tips mentioned above depend on this one single tip. You have to be consistent in what you are doing. Note that we are not saying you should post daily. That doesn’t guarantee your growth.

What we mean is that you should have a posting timetable and ensure you stick to it. For example, you can choose to upload one video weekly, two weekly, or even upload daily, it all depends on you.

The most important thing is to stick to your timetable. This will help you build a strong fan base on YouTube who will likely check back your channel in anticipation of new videos.

Conclusion

In this guide, I have shared my tips on how to grow your YouTube channel in 2022. I don’t guarantee you will see the same results as I did, but if you put it in the work, you will surely see changes in your videos.

Are there any tips you think I didn’t cover? Let me know in the comment section below. If you’d like a follow-up on this post, also specify in the comment section.