New to YouTube or want to expand your existing audience on YouTube? You’re in the right place. YouTube has been around for a while, creating a dedicated user and creator base. However, with the addition of YouTube Shorts, creators, and brands are joining YouTube in hopes of increasing their reach and growing their audience on a new channel.

Follow along for insight into YouTube subscribers and our favorite tips for growing your subscriber list!  

Followers Vs. Subscribers

For most, followers is the universal term on social media used to describe a creator or brand’s dedicated audience. Followers mean a group of users who follow your account. This term describes audiences on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok.

Subscriber is a term used on YouTube and other streaming platforms like Twitch. Since YouTube refers to profiles as channels, users can subscribe to channels to see newly uploaded content.

We will refer to “followers” as subscribers for the rest of the blog.

8 Ways to Build Your Subscriber List on YouTube

In this guide, we are providing tips and best practices to grow your subscriber list on YouTube. We are not distinguishing between YouTube Shorts and regular YouTube.

#1 Add Your YouTube Channel to Your Link in Bio

If you don’t already have a link-building tool for your different platforms, here’s your chance to look into it. Since many creators and brands are on multiple platforms, using a link-building tool to direct followers to your other platforms is excellent. For example, if you’re well established on TikTok and want to grow your YouTube presence, add your channel URL to your link in your bio, create a TikTok video or any social media post, and promote your YouTube channel. You can cross-promote to all your channels.

#2 Practice Community Engagement and Comment Management

Engaging with your audience is a general best practice for every platform. Start replying to every comment on a longer form YouTube video or YouTube Shorts content. Remember, the YouTube algorithm ranks content based on relevance, quality, engagement, user search, and watch history. Engagement refers to watch time, watch percentage, likes, comments, and shares.

#3 Optimize Your YouTube Video Content

YouTube works a lot like a traditional search engine, and since users search for content, you want to use keyword research to ensure your content ranks against other relevant videos. You can use YouTube SEO and optimization for the video title, description, and video tags.

#4 Promote Your Channel Through YouTube Shorts

Many popular creators share promo content on YouTube Shorts. Many content that promotes their channels are snippets of a full-length vlog or podcast. For example, popular TikTok Creator Bri LaPaglia, better known as Brianna Chickenfry, hosts a popular podcast called BFFs. She teased an episode of her podcast on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram by only including a snippet of the podcast discussion.

#5 Create High-Quality Video Content

Unlike TikTok and Reel content, YouTube is more refined in terms of video quality. Since many creators use YouTube for longer-form content, the video quality standard is set higher. YouTube content doesn’t consist of lo-fi, scrappy content but video content shot on SLR-style cameras that you edit later to make an entertaining Day in the Life Vlog, Life Updates, makeup tutorials, etc.

#6 Post Consistently

Just like your other channels, you need to post consistently on YouTube. Start by posting on the same day once a week. This teaches potential subscribers when to expect future content and how often. You can ramp up the number of posts from there once you establish a posting cadence for your YouTube channel.  

#7 Turn Your Videos Into a Playlist

Once you’ve created enough YouTube content, you can create playlists for subscribers to watch when they head to your channel. For example, suppose you have a group of educational videos that share a common theme or a series of videos that are broken up into parts. In that case, you can put them all into a playlist together so subscribers don’t have to leave your channel or manually type in keywords into search. This exposes them to more content and helps organize your channel’s content so it’s easy to navigate.

#8 Use Chat GPT for YouTube Content Inspiration

Writing video scripts can be challenging, especially when maintaining your YouTube posting cadence. Use ChatGPT or other AI text generators to help you develop video content ideas along with the outline, partial or complete script that you can use when it’s time to film your content.