How to Get 1000 Subscribers on YouTube: Proven Strategies for Rapid Growth

(00:00) – I dunno about you, but getting my first 1000 subscribers on YouTube felt like an endless uphill battle. I’m not alone, though. To this day, it remains one of the biggest milestones and most frustrating ones to achieve. But today I am hoping to make it a little bit easier for you. Imagine a world where your channel picks up some steam and then gathers maybe a few subscribers every day, and then before you know it, you’re at a hundred, and then you’re on your way to a thousand, and then hopefully 10,000 and beyond, right?

(00:24) It may sound like a dream, but this channel, this one and this one hit 1000 subscribers in under a month. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out the breakout strategies that channels like these used to gain such traction so quickly. Today, let me share what I’ve learned about channels like this.

(00:39) I’m gonna boil it down to just four strategies, and some of these feel pretty simple, but they’re really easy to overlook. As we go through these, I’m not gonna stop at what they did to grow, but I’m also going to explain why what they’re doing is working. Hear me out, though. The usual advice here is about following a specific passion, but more importantly also being strategic.

(00:55) Many people will tell you that, yeah, you should pick a popular niche that you’re passionate about and maybe it has like a high search volume, so you know a lot of people are looking for it. But if you’re trying to get to 1000 YouTube subscribers in today’s day and age with so much competition, you should maybe try something a little more high stakes.

(01:10) So a high stakes niche, what do I mean by that? Well, you basically wanna look at topics that are way more important to people’s day-to-day lives, such as health, personal finance, or education. And these aren’t just casual browsing topics, right? These things affect people’s day-to-day lives.

(01:24) And if none of those specific examples are things you would like to be covering, don’t worry. we’ll get to that. But when it comes to health, people inherently care about it and their families’ wellbeing. When it comes to the soaring costs of living, then people are saving a lot more money or they’re trying to invest.

(01:38) And all of those things are a lot more important than just looking for a quick bit of entertainment. The people looking for these types of videos are seeking solutions, advice, information, anything that can have a real impact on their actual lives. If you’re doing something a bit more risky for yourself, like comedy for example, people are a lot more likely to click off if a joke doesn’t land, but they’re probably gonna stick around if you have a bunch of promises that you’re trying to deliver on

(02:00) within this educational piece of content, right? I did start with the highest stakes content in those examples, but let’s just say you are a gaming channel. Now you could just play the game and that would be interesting, but it’s a little more high stakes to try and give people actionable tips and advice for completing that game.

(02:15) Someone just paid $60 or $70 for this and they wanna sit down and get through a certain part, and your video could offer solutions to areas of the game that they’re maybe stuck in. If they can’t complete the game, they waste $70 bucks. So the stakes are a little bit higher for that kind of content.

(02:27) If you’re a gardening or a homesteading channel, something like that, it’s cool to show people around your property. But what about a video that actually shows people how to build something that you use every single day and maybe even take for granted? Learning how to build raised bed vegetable gardens means people can grow different produce in their own backyards potentially, and that means they’re able to feed their families a little bit without going to the store.

(02:47) And again, that’s pretty high stakes. Entertainment based content is fun, but it typically doesn’t demand the same level of urgency or necessity. And that means viewers quickly hop from one video to the next to the next, and they’re not really thinking about it too much. They’re getting a little bit out of each one, and it’s no big deal.

(03:02) Meanwhile, the retention on each one of those videos they’re skipping is going down and down and down. And this is why retention is so important when you are in the entertainment space. I’m not saying you can’t succeed in niches like entertainment, for example, and countless creators have built massive audiences through their brilliant entertainment skills that they’ve built over time, right? But generally speaking, if you make a high stakes niche kind of video for your target audience, you can capture a lot more of their loyalty from the start

(03:27) as you practice and grow as a creator. And then maybe you can do some of those more entertainment driven pieces of content as well. The possibilities are honestly endless once you kind of figure out the core value proposition of your channel. What separates it from all the channels like it on YouTube? But finding the right niche is just one piece of the puzzle.

(03:43) You’re not gonna go anywhere if you don’t nail the second principle. This one is gonna help you increase your growth exponentially, even in the most saturated of niches. The channel I wanna point to as an example embodies this perfectly, and they go by Ms. Rachel. It’s not news that kid-focused channels dominate YouTube’s top rankings, but Ms.

(03:59) Rachel realized something early on about her audience. She understood that while kids are the viewers, they’re not the ones controlling what they actually watch, when they watch it or where they watch it. This meant that the parents, not the kids, were the true audience from a decision making standpoint. So instead of just mindlessly creating videos to entertain children, she made parents the heroes, by focusing on educational and developmental value, creating a safe viewing space, and prioritizing ethical messaging.

(04:25) And she landed herself over 9 million subscribers in record time. That’s the second principle, truly understanding your audience. Yes, you make kids’ content, but what does that really mean when it comes to the kids who are watching the content? To hyper target your audience, you wanna focus on specific things like their perspective, their fears, their desires, their motivations, rather than just making bold assumptions.

(04:46) And to learn these things, you should go beyond the superficial demographic data that YouTube gives you. And you should really try to understand and empathize with the people who actually watch your content. Go to different online communities where maybe they hang out and try and learn things like their problems, their obstacles, things they’re struggling to overcome that your content can help with.

(05:03) What types of strong interests, hobbies, or passions do your viewers typically have? What are the knowledge gaps they’re hoping to fill? What entertainment desires and emotional cravings are they looking to satisfy? Behind every click, every view, every subscription you get on your channel is a human making a decision, and they have their own aspirations and motivations.

(05:23) So as I said, I want you to dive deep into your audience’s world. Use the comment sections and the community tab, use live streams, any type of interaction that you can have on your channel is a great place to start. But I also mentioned Reddit’s Discord servers. Every single niche on the internet has a different home somewhere where people are typically hanging out and talking.

(05:40) Now let’s talk about the third principle, which is something a lot of newer channels kind of miss out on, and it’s the big reason why their videos aren’t getting picked up by the algorithm in the first place. To paint the picture, I’m gonna use an example from Dylan Jardon that caught my eye.

(05:52) He compared how “South Park” produces entire episodes in six days, while “Family Guy” and “The Simpsons” and “Rick and Morty” all need like eight months or more. How does “South Park” get so much done in so little time? Well, they simplify the process. Major sections of the production process are kind of eliminated sometimes, right? Sometimes they’re not using storyboards, they’ll simplify character animation, they’ll reuse backgrounds.

(06:15) To this day, “South Park” is one of the scrappier shows, and yet they still haven’t lost any audience along the way. So how do they manage that? That’s the third principle. They’ve found a way to remove the unneeded fluff in the process and just go straight to delivering value. Value in this context means understanding and delivering the things that your audience need the most out of your content.

(06:33) Just like the creators of “South Park,” you as a YouTube creator don’t need to aim for top tier Hollywood level production in every single video. That 1% improvement we talk about sometimes doesn’t have to come in the form of some other spectacular new editing technique you learned. The topic and the information is oftentimes a lot more valuable to your audience than the way you present it.

(06:53) If your viewers are coming to you for quick, actionable advice, they might prefer you to make shorter videos and make them more frequently so that you are producing things quickly and not taking a month to make something that’s really highly edited. This is why so many wildly popular YouTubers, from gamers to vloggers to reviewers, use simple production methods.

(07:11) The real value resides in their personalities, their insights, the substance, rather than the extensive, overly complicated setup. So the key here is optimizing your unique value delivery system first. This brings us to the last challenge we need to overcome, and this might sound a bit like a pep talk, but I am coming from a place of strategy here.

(07:28) Basically, never stop uploading new videos. Of course, uploading a lot of videos means you probably need a lot of video ideas, and that’s why we have this daily ideas tool I wanna show you real quick. I mean, right now it is connected to our channel, but this is gonna give us a lot of jumping off points for different videos we could be making.

(07:44) And if these don’t work, you can also customize it. Right now I’m trying Minecraft gameplay videos and it’s giving us a whole bunch of ideas for those as well. I probably wouldn’t take these as titles, but what I would do is maybe bring them to tools like our Generate tool or something like that, and I would use them to kind of build out some videos.

(08:01) So this could be a really good tool for you to use if coming up with ideas is one of the reasons you’re not uploading a lot of videos. The first thing you need to understand is that your next video could be the one that skyrockets you to a thousand subscribers and beyond. But also, the thing I love about YouTube compared to so many other social media platforms is that your old videos do not just fade into obscurity.

(08:18) There could be a point where the algorithm finds the audience for that video a month later, months later. We’ve seen it happen countless times with videos on this channel, where older videos months later are getting a hundred plus views an hour. Not only that, though, having a massive library of videos gives potential new subscribers plenty to binge watch.

(08:36) So if they watch one new thing from you, they’re likely to go back and see what else you’re all about. Just remember that every new video you post is potentially a new entry point. Someone can find that video and then get into your orbit, your channel’s ecosystem, and before you know it, they’re watching multiple videos that you’ve made.

(08:51) And people are way more likely to subscribe to you if they’ve watched two or three videos as opposed to just one. So now that we’ve covered the basics on that must-have first major milestone on YouTube, you’re probably wondering how it worked for other channels. Well, we’ve done some in-depth case studies in the past on channels that blew up in no time.