As the old adage goes, ‘’Nothing worth having comes easy’’, building your initial fan base, that first 100 or thousand fans, can be infuriating. Making time in your to create fantastic videos only to go months on end with only a handful of views. But stick with it, cause when it finally does rain, it pours.Â
So assuming your content is on point, here are a few other tips to help you make that initial drought as short-lived as possible:
1. Make use of your personal connections
Most of you, especially if you’ve already started your journey as an influencer, have a modest amount of friends/fans on Facebook or the channel(s) of your choice. Ask them, no wait, guilt trip them into subscribing and showing support! Ask your closest ones to watch your video multiple times, and stick through the entire thing. Even if it is just in the background.
2. Utilise the featured videos section
If you’ve just created your first YouTube page, you probably already know the opening seen rate isn’t pretty. As stated, in our fundamentals for YouTube success (here) give off a more professional vibe, by organizing your content, and adding rows of featured videos. Coupled with the perfect branding from cover to profile graphics.
3. Promote & Advertise
Out of the tons of brands/influencers on Facebook, Twitter, etc, only a small percentage actually share original and high-quality videos. Why? Because they’re not easy to do.  So make use of that, and cross-promote the heck out of those videos on all your other channels.
If your reach on Facebook and Twitter aren’t that great, then perhaps you could consider using PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising to amplify it. You could also promote your channel through YouTube itself using AdWords.
4. Seek Collaborations
Collaborations are an amazing way to reach similar audiences and also transfer the credibility of someone a little more popular on YouTube, onto you. Be the one to initiate, present your idea and make their role in the same very clear.Â
5. Close Out Strong – Craft End Cards
YouTube provides the option to create end cards, which can be used in tons of creative ways. Some use it to display their branding and social media handles, others use it to cross promote other videos, encourage subscriptions and even run promotions for your sponsors.
YouTube gives you all the tools you need to put these together. To do so, make your way over to your Videos section, hover over the video you’d like to optimize, open the drop-down next to edit and select ‘End Screen & Annotations’. Once there, you should see multiple options to add elements like, Subscribe, Featured Videos, etc.
6. Interact With Your Audience
Whether you have 100 subs or a 100,000 it’s important to get and keep them involved and invested in your channel. Leading beauty YouTuber in the region, Huda Kattan, is great at this, hosting Q&A’s on her page, and taking requests like providing a tour of her wardrobe for instance.
7. Reward Your Fans
Show your fans some love and build traction at the same time by hosting competitions on your page. You could do comment or like based competition or even subscriptions, based on what your objectives are at the time. Â Bonus Tip: Host competitions using sponsored prizes for a win-win all around.
8. Beef Up Your Metadata – Rank Your YouTube Videos
When it comes to which videos show up on search results, the harsh reality is, it has less do with the quality of content, and more to do with meta data i.e. titles, tags, descriptions, etc, and results. Also, what makes a huge difference is the level of competition for those search terms i.e. how many videos are up there, and how popular they are.Â
This is where you need to do some research. So when coming up with content ideas, find search terms that have videos with a high view count, but low subscribers on the co-responding channels. We want to find topics that have high view counts because of interest, not because of the popularity of the YouTuber (that will come in time).
9. All You Need To Do Is Ask
Only a very small percentage of people actually subscribe after a view, even if they loved your video! Be honest, you’ve done it too.Â
Encourage them to subscribe by teasing great content to come, promotions and giveaways. It can be at the end of the video, or even riddled throughout. Just don’t sound desperate! That can be a turn-off.
Bonus tip: Annotate your videos. Add ‘Subscribe’ buttons to them. Simply go to your video manager, select the video you’d like to edit, and in the top right corner, you should see annotate. There are tons of options in terms of formatting and even adding links.Â