1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours. Why is this important? This is the critical level you need to reach in order to have a chance at monetizing your YouTube channel by putting YouTube ads on your videos.
We started our Tangerine Travels YouTube Channel about three months ago and just reached 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours watched. We've learned a lot over the course of those three months and would have been able to reach that mark faster had we known more about the ins and outs of YouTube.
In this post, we're going to share a few tips and tricks that are going to help you reach 1,000 subscribers fast!
We have two previous posts that will help you grow your channel, so if you didn't see those two posts, you should check those out as well:
Add each video to a playlist and share those playlists
We reached 1,000 subscribers a few days before getting to 4,000 watch hours, so we would have been able to hit the goal a few days sooner had we put a little more focus on getting those hours watched.
If you add each video to a relevant playlist, you can share playlists instead of just sharing videos. This way, people might watch 10 videos of yours instead of just watching one. We now have all of our videos in playlists but we weren't doing this for the longest time.
One of our more-popular playlists is now our Mazatlán, Mexico playlist.
Join niche Facebook groups and share your videos
For us, we're two people from the US who are traveling throughout Mexico. So that means we are in 6-10 Facebook groups that are dedicated to US and Canadian citizens who are traveling throughout or living in Mexico. We write a Steemit post for each YouTube video, then share the Steemit posts in these Facebook groups.
In sharing these Steemit posts, we are able to gain new subscribers, get a lot of watch hours, and send well over 1,000 unique visitors to Steemit every week.
Often times, in addition to sharing the Steemit posts in these Facebook groups, people will have questions about moving to a particular city, say Mazatlán for example. In replying to these people who are asking about a particular city, we send them the link to our playlist for that city (which contains all of the videos that we made in Mazatlán), and that's going to get us a lot more watch hours than just sharing a single video.
Get on Tinder
This might sound like a weird tip to get subscribers, but it worked wonders for us! We created a couple's profile on Tinder "Just looking for friends," put our job as "YouTuber at Tangerine Travels," and watched the subscribers pour in. What can be better than free advertising to tens of thousands of people?
Find popular channels in your niche
Figure out who has the popular channels in your niche and subscribe to their channels. Be sure to click the bell so you're notified the moment they post a new video.
As soon as they post a new video, watch it, and leave a great comment. People will see your comment, click on your channel, and sometimes subscribe.
When commenting, your goal is to get voted to the top of their comment list because the higher you get, the more people who are going to see your comment. This tactic is how we got most of our first 500 subscribers.
I hope you can use these tips to get your channel to 1,000 followers and 4,000 watch hours more quickly. We have more tips that we'll post about at a later time, so be sure to stay tuned for those posts.
