How to Gain Youtube Subscribers - Introduction to vlogging for influencers

Becoming an influencer usually requires you to start a vlogging channel on Youtube that displays your personality and the content you want to offer to an audience. Here are some tips on how to begin vlogging and structuring your videos to gain subscribers.

Creating Content

To gain an audience, you need to ensure that you’re creating valuable content that either helps solves people’s problems or is entertaining, either way you want to make people feel like they aren’t wasting their time when they watch you. Make sure that before you even start making and uploading content that you understand who you want to make videos for and how you want your audience to feel; entertained, connected or informed. You need to see what utility people want from your content not just what you think they want - but this can be worked on overtime as you grow an audience.

Create your own persona, someone you would want to go and have coffee with, someone that would make you comfortable to be yourself and stick to that persona until you notice you’re receiving a certain demographic in your analytics. This is the best way to strive for a person to audience connection, you need to be human and authentic to gain viewer’s loyalty to keep them coming back.

When speaking to the camera you need to extrude passion in what you’re talking about, make sure that you are enjoying what you are creating so that you don’t fake the person you are. Think about how you would talk to the person in front of you, that’s the personality you need when vlogging.

Setting up to record

When initially starting a channel, you might not want to fork out a tonne of money for a camera, microphone and lights and that is totally fine! Everyone’s smart phone camera is usually high quality for Youtube videos, many vloggers started on their phones before they even used cameras. You also would have enough lighting with windows, just aim to film at the right time and you should be set. The main thing that you will need to have is a high-quality microphone, people won’t want to watch a whole video if they can barely hear you so just ensure that you test that before you continue recording.

How to structure your videos

Ensure that you are consistent with uploading to improve your connection with subscribers as that increases reliability and loyalty – you wouldn’t stand up your friend for a coffee date so treat it the same for your subscribers, and if you were going to cancel or be late, let them know in advance.

When starting your video, state the title of the video so that the audience isn’t being misled or click-baited and keep your introduction short. Introductions can help your branding, so people know what kind of content you make but keep this introduction to a sentence. Having a visual on the lower third of your video during the introduction can decrease the amount you say and to not waste time.

Include a call to action right before you get into the bulk of your information, tell them to subscribe, like and comment an answer to a question you ask (this can be fused well with your introduction sentence, so it shouldn’t take too long.)

Once you’ve gained over 1000 subscribers, you can use cards in the top corner of your video, this can include playlists, videos, channels, donations, links and polls to engage your audience while watching the video. If you’re still under 1000 followers, use links in your description to link people to what you’re talking about in the video to keep them engaged in case they want a referral to something you said.

Finish your video with an end screen. End cards can have a subscribe button and some more of your videos for people to continue watching your content. You can continue talking as the end screens come on so that people don’t feel that you have nothing important left to say. You can also quickly call to action to like your video and ask them to comment. This will increase your engagement to increase you search-ability and views.

How to get more views

It is hard to grab views when you’ve just started your channel so it is important to share to the people you already know such as your personal Facebook and Instagram. If you already have a following on there too, it would be a great push to get views. Those people will then share it to others and so on so ensure the content your creating is worth a share. Another way to share your video is embedding them everywhere, people tend to watch videos from an embed more than the actual Youtube site.

Create playlists! Playlists increase your chances of seeing videos in recommendations too. Organise videos on topic and theme so your subscribers can discover your videos easier. Adding descriptions to playlists also help search result optimisation.

Longer videos can also get more views, as long as you fill in the time with important content, don’t drag it on, keep the users attention. Having a full of content 5 minute video that keeps audience on your toes is going to get you more views than a dragged out 20 minutes. For example, David Dobrik is known to make 4 minute 20 second videos that is just action packed and he gets millions of views on each video but if you were a beauty vlogger talking about your favourite products, it would be difficult to keep it under 5 minutes, so know the content you want to make.

Lastly, tease a clip of your video when sharing it to other platforms and provide a link that take you to the full video. It will make people want to see what happens next and click the link to see the whole video.

It's always important to get as many views as possible to help your brand but you must always ensure that you're happy with your content and that you're producing quality content before worrying about the numbers.

Talk soon,

Demi