What is your goal while using a video platform like YouTube?
Is it to solve your audience’s problems?
Is it showing your credibility and expertise in your niche?
Or is it generating money by monetizing the channel via ads?
Well, whatever your goal is, you need YouTube subscribers to achieve them.
Without a YouTube subscriber base filled with an engaging audience, neither you can showcase your knowledge nor you can generate any revenue.
Now, how can you generate a massive amount of YouTube subscribers for your channel?
- Should you buy subscribers?
- Or are there ways to gain free YouTube subscribers in bulk?
Let’s find out.
Why Should You Go for White Hat Ways Instead of Black Hat Ways?
If you are just stepping into the YouTube world, or even if you have a decent subscriber base, you’ll be looking to grow the number of your subscribers. Humans are like that, and there’s nothing wrong with it.
But do you know the secret of how to increase YouTube subscribers free of cost? Outstanding, valuable videos.
You pick out any popular YouTuber from the US or around the globe, and you’ll find that they never focused on buying subscribers. Genuine YouTubers would never rely on other black hat means to grow their subscribers.
What they focus on is being legit, being humble towards their target audience, and being loyal in their hustle of crafting valuable content. On the contrary, you might have heard or seen people buying subscribers, and you might be allured for that instant success.
But, we advise you not to fall into this trap. Want to know why? There are many black hat ways people use, like view hacking, paid subscribers, comments, likes for their channel, and there are websites like Caged and View2 that offer these black hat ways, but you should stay away from them.
First, they’ll take hundreds of dollars to do the desired work for you.
Second, it’s dangerous. If YouTube finds out, YouTube will block your channel forever; all your hard work and money will be drowned, with no chance of ever returning.
Third, if you are putting in all the hard work, if you follow all the white hat tips, you won’t even think about these flashy, risky ways to achieve success if you create meaningful content for your audience. If all the successful YouTubers can achieve their goals on YouTube with no use of the black hats ways, you can too.
If you believe in the real hustle, if you believe in what you create for your audience, if you want to become a result-oriented successful YouTube content creator, we’ll be ready to help you. Here are some time-tested, result-oriented working tips to gain free subscribers on YouTube.
It doesn’t matter if you are a beginner or a professional YouTuber; we got help for both categories.
Working Tips to Get Free YouTube Subscribers
1. Set Your Brands Homepage
Setting up your brand’s YouTube homepage is one of the initial and most essential ways to attract new subscribers. Having a beautiful YouTube channel art will help you inform your new viewers what your channel is all about and what makes it different from others.
Apart from that, here’s what you can do on your channel’s homepage to get free YouTube subscribers:
- Choose vibrant colors
- Choose a unique and catchy channel name
- Fill up your about page with a short and effective description
Check out this catchy YouTube homepage of famous YouTuber, Marques Brownlee.
You can see how vibrant red looks across this channel page. Also, he is focused on making his personal brand, so he chose his name as the channel name. Now, talking about his channel art, MKBHD stands for Marques K Brownlee High Definition, which represents two things: his brand name, and his work.
You can also see a text quoted ‘Quality Tech Videos,’ which also tells the viewers what he talks about in his channel. Hence making an effective YouTube home page can help your viewers to be your future subscribers. Once you are done with your homepage, the next thing you need to focus on is:
2. Being Consistent with your Upload Schedule
Being consistent not only rewards you in the short term, but it has its long-term benefits. Being consistent with your upload schedule has a compounding effect.
For that, you need to create a fantastic content calendar. Once you are consistent, YouTube will notice that and understand that you are serious about content creation.
This will increase your chances of getting help from YouTube, gaining more organic traffic, and growing subscribers. Another prime example of a YouTuber being consistent with content uploads is Gary Vaynerchuk. He uploads a new video every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, without missing out on his schedule, and this thing is clearly mentioned in his YouTube channel art.
He consistently provides his audience new valuable content to consume, and this is one of the prime reasons he has gained a whopping over 3 million subscribers in his YouTube journey.
3. Creating Irresistible Thumbnails
A thumbnail is to videos what a headline is to blogs. Most of the beginner Youtubers don’t understand it and end up empty-handed.
You need to put in as much effort while creating your thumbnail as compared to your content creation because your alluring thumbnail can make people click on your video and start consuming your content. If they like your content, they’ll ultimately subscribe to your channel.
So learn the art of creating engaging thumbnail images that users can’t ignore. That’s the answer to how to get free subscribers on YouTube. Here’s an example of a YouTuber using attractive thumbnails.
You can clearly see how images and a bit of title text are used in every thumbnail to make it look attractive. You need to sprinkle some of your creativity and design some fantastic thumbnails like these in the image. Viewers get an obvious idea of what the video is all about just by seeing the thumbnail, and they will click on the video to know more about that topic.
Once they consume the content, chances are they’ll become your subscribers. Do you know what the next thing that people will focus on after clicking your thumbnail is? Your intro, so:
2. Hook your Audience from the Start
You don’t want your videos to be boring, as it will make people walk away, and you’ll never gain free subscribers. So hook them from the start, create an enticing intro for your videos, make them ride the slippery slide to the end of the video.
End your videos on a high note with a cool outro and make them perform any specific action towards the end of the video. Infuse some creativity with the knowledge you are about to give to them.
Be unique and make people fall in love with your videos. This will help you gain a massive free audience without having to pay a penny for it. Here’s a creative video by Casey Neistat:
He has used a creative way to introduce his video. This helps hook the viewer from the start, and they become eager to know what’s more inside the video. And then, with an amazing outro (just like you saw in the video), you can ask your viewer to subscribe to your channel as a CTA. For creative intro and outro, it’s time to brush up on your video editing skills.
5. Level Up your Editing Skills
With so many exciting content uploads happening every minute on YouTube, you need to brush up on your video editing skills. You don’t want to enter a video platform not knowing how to edit a video.
First, learn and then use your creative mind to stand apart from the rest of the crowd.
You can find many free video editing tools to start out with; once you feel you need to go premium, of course, you can.
One of the amazing tools you can start with is VideoPad; it’s simple and easy to use. Then, you can watch some tutorials to set up your base for video editing.
Reminder: Don’t waste your valuable money on buying expensive video editing software without knowing how to use them.
Apart from all this, don’t forget about SEO.
Interesting read: The Complete Social Media Video Sizes Cheat Sheet
6. SEO is Important
Know that SEO is the answer when you ask how to increase YouTube subscribers free of any extra cost. Performing proper keyword research, optimizing the headline and video description content, or even in your thumbnail, will help the YouTube algorithm to take notice of your video.
Google can rank even your keywords in Google, and more traffic can be diverted towards your video. You never know what will work for you if you are doing your work professionally and consistently.
Talking about professionals:
7. Learn from the Top YouTube Channels of your Niche
Learning means growing. You won’t be a hit on YouTube in just 1 or 10 video uploads; it will take time. Look up to the leading YouTubers in your niche and ask yourself:
How long did it take them to reach the spot they are in? What content structure do they follow? Which video is the best, and which is the worst? What are their subscribers talking about in the comments section?
Make notes and answer questions like these. This will help you get an obvious idea about how things are working on YouTube in your niche. Once you get the ideas, start working upon those ideas and make achieving growth a reality.
For example, if we need to start with our YouTube campaign, being in the social media marketing industry, we would research some of the top YouTubers in our industry like Kevin David, Garyvee, or Neil Patel.
We’ll answer all the questions that are listed above so that we can create our own effective YouTube campaign strategy to gain more subscribers.
For Intermediate And Advanced YouTubers
1. Translate your Subtitles into Multilingual Languages
Translating your content into multiple languages can help move past language barriers and help you cater to more people around the globe. You don’t need to be overenthusiastic and translate your subtitles into every other language.
Be wise in your moves, go to YouTube Channel Analytics, study your audience analytics, and look for their demographics.
For example, if people are watching your videos in Germany, translate your subtitles into German. Here’s how many translation Pew Die Pie has done:
You can see the versatility in his subtitles; it will help more people understand his content and consume it. Thus increasing his subscriber base.
It’s simple if more people can understand your content, it will increase the chances of people ending up subscribing to your channel.
2. Make use of Giveaways
Having giveaways on your channel for something to offer can make your audience do that task for you.
For example, you can ask them to tag a few friends in your video comments and give away something in return. This will trigger engagement on that video and hence your channel. It also helps in word-of-mouth marketing, as people will tell about the free giveaway to their friends and family and also ask them to take a chance to win the freebie.
Eventually, this will help to increase your subscriber base as well.
Like in the example above, the creator is having a drone giveaway contest; all the people interested will inform their close acquaintances regarding this contest and perform any genuine task assigned to them. All this will increase the engagement rate on his videos and thus resulting in an increased subscriber base.
Interesting Read: 15 Must Try Social Media Promotion Ideas
3. Create a Channel Trailer for New Visitors
The Channel trailer is the hidden gem that’s YouTuber’s miss out on. You can create a channel trailer for your new visitors, and it will be on auto-play (YouTube has this feature). Catch audience attention, welcome them to your channel, introduce your channel and keep a CTA at the end.
It will help you convert a lot of potential visitors into your subscribers. You can check out the sample on Noah Kagan’s YouTube channel.
It clearly welcomes the new audience to his channel, which starts the start of a healthy relationship. He tells a concise description of what people can expect from his channel to arouse interest in the viewer and finally asks them to subscribe to his channel.
The interested ones will directly subscribe. We hope you got an idea regarding channel trailers for your YouTube channel.
4. Collaborate with other YouTubers
Collaborating with fellow established YouTuber’s in your niche will help you gain new subscribers interested in the work you do. You just need to get in touch with other famous YouTubers to collaborate with.
Here’s an example of how h3h3Productions collaborated with famous Youtuber PewDiePie:
This collaboration helped both the creators to exchange their audiences with each other. People who were a part of PewDiePie’s subscriber base but are not aware of h3h3Productions will surely watch this video and might end up subscribing to the channel and vice versa.
How will they know about this video update by h3h3Production? Once they both share information regarding this collaboration with their respective audience through various social media channels, people will watch it.
It is a highly popular way YouTuber’s help each other increase their subscriber count; you can effectively use this practice.
5. Create Playlists that help New Users
Creating a playlist for your specific videos can be fruitful for your subscriber count. It can make your first-time viewers into your lifelong loyal subscribers.
For example, here’s a video playlist on soccer training videos.
YouTuber Jared Montz created a playlist regarding different things to do while playing soccer. So suppose you are visiting the channel for the first time through any video on this playlist; you will be interested in knowing what’s in those other videos as well.
Thus overall, increasing your watch time, and if you like the content, you’ll end up subscribing. That’s the power of video playlists.
6. Make use of YouTube Annotations Effectively
What are annotations? Well, these are elements popping up on the video while the video is playing.
It is one of the most powerful elements to convert viewers into subscribers. You can add a subscribe button in your annotation and ask your users to subscribe to your video at the end or anywhere in the middle. It will surely increase your subscribers.
7. Optimize your Video Descriptions
Video descriptions are very effective and play a crucial role in your overall SEO strategy. They make the search engines aware of your videos and make viewers aware of what’s inside the video.
But don’t make a mess of it; Don’t stuff keywords resulting in overdoing things. It should look authentic and natural.
8. Make the Optimum use of Meta Tags
If you want your videos to be displayed in the YouTube search results, metadata plays a vital role. If you want to understand what meta tags you should use, go to some of the popular YouTubers’ videos and see what they have done with their meta tags. Don’t just copy, be creative.
This wraps up our tips for gaining free YouTube subscribers and choosing a white hat above the black hat.
What Next?
Now that you are clear about gaining free subscribers through various techniques on your YouTube channel, follow these 15 Actionable tips and thank SocialPilot later. If you are a newbie, follow the beginner tips. If you have gained 1k subscribers (which is essential for monetizing your channel), you can follow the advanced tips.
Decide what you want to do with your YouTube channel and its future growth.
