The Strategy To 100k YouTube Subscribers

The Vision That Fuels Me

Before I share some strategies for YouTube growth, I want to share the vision that the Lord gave me. At the age of 16, I wanted to quit the youth ministry. During that time God showed me a vision of a very large warehouse. I saw people would go in emptyhanded and come out with full carts of food. It was open 24/7. I remember God told me that if I didn’t quit, people would receive and be fed from me 24/7. Although I didn’t understand at the time what that would look like practically, I trusted God. Years later, I am now seeing the fruit of that vision through YouTube. People are being changed, fed, and delivered through this means 24/7.

The Purpose Of Growth

YouTube growth was never the reason why I started my channel. It was never about fame, about increasing numerically, or for my name to be known. This has always been about serving people. It’s about feeding God’s people as the Word says. That’s been my heart since the beginning.

How My Youtube Began

In 2011, I started my YouTube channel. At that time I did not give it the proper attention in order to cause it to grow; I concentrated mostly on our HungryGen platform. It wasn’t until last year, 2020, during the pandemic, that I began uploading short clips from sermons to my channel. Quickly, what began as 2,600 subscribers at the beginning of 2020, ended with 35,900 subscribers without much effort at all. It was huge growth, but it was nothing compared to the growth that has happened in these last few months. In these last 6 months, the channel has grown from 39,000 subscribers to 100,000. The channel has also reached a total of 4 million views; all of it has been a result of implementing the key strategies I am going to share below.

A Special Thanks

I’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone who subscribed, who shares, receives, and has helped make this happen!

Also, I want to give credit to my friends, Isaiah Saldivar, and David Diga Hernandez, for being guidance and key inspirations in many areas of my ministry.

Lastly, thank you to Everett Roeth, my staff member, for making a lot of this possible, and for helping free up my time to focus on other areas of the ministry.

Let’s get right into it.

10 Practical Tips For Growing Your Youtube

The goal of YouTube growth lies in optimizing all of your content and videos so YouTube views your channel as a “high value” channel. This happens when you correctly apply all the practices YouTube wants you to apply to each and every video you upload. Once you do this, YouTube will begin promoting your videos more often to people’s homepages and you will reach a larger audience. Here are these optimization tips and other ways you can grow your channel.

1. Make YouTube Originals

Create content that is specific for YouTube, while also re-using old content when necessary. Content created specifically for YouTube performs much better. Sometimes, if you have old messages recorded, you can simply re-make the video in a better format and upload that instead of the old version. I have done this a number of times and have always seen it out-perform the original old version.

2. Make Trailers

The end goal is YouTube, but using Instagram, Tik-Tok, and Facebook to feed people and promote your YouTube channel can be very effective and beneficial to your audience.

3. Select Good Titles

TubeBuddy is a Google Chrome Extension application that you can download and use to help optimize all of your YouTube videos and channel. TubeBuddy shows you what each title is scoring on the YouTube search algorithm so you can select the best possible title that will reach the most amount of people. 

4. Thumbnails

Choosing a good thumbnail is essential in creating videos that people will click and watch. When someone sees your video on their homepage or recommended page and they click it, that contributes to your Click Through Rating (CTR). A high CTR is extremely important for your videos to reach more people. Also, the majority of YouTube users are viewing videos on mobile devices, so having thumbnails that have very attention-grabbing large font allow people to see your video more easily and end up click on it.

5. Adding Tags

Adding tags to your video is a helpful addition to the optimization process and can help more people find your videos. I use rapidtags.io to quickly generate a large list of tags by simply inputting my video’s title.

6. Proper Description

A good description is also very important to make your video the best it can be (in YouTube’s eyes). The first line of your description should always be the title of your video. This makes your title double as strong in the YouTube search algorithm so people who search that title are more likely to see your video. Another key element to the description is adding chapters. Chapters/timestamps allow viewers to skip to certain parts of the video and to see as they are watching which chapter they are viewing at each respective time. Make your description full of words, links to other videos and parts of your ministry, and lots of keywords related to your video.

7. Subtitles and Comments

Having captions and subtitles is very important for your videos. YouTube has auto-generated captions, but my team goes in and spell checks and grammar corrects these auto-captions so they are clean and professional. You also want to be replying to, hearting, and liking viewers’ comments as they come in. This increases the video’s engagement and drives more publicity.

8. Monetization

Proper monetization is essential to being able to grow your channel more and receive the funds to continue the growth. Also, monetizing your videos makes YouTube value your videos more because that’s where YouTube makes their money, from ads. So by having some ads on your videos, YouTube will promote your video more so THEY can end up making more money. Be sure to NEVER put “non-skippable video ads” on, but instead leave those off and everything else on. Also, waiting 30 minutes after your video is uploaded before adding monetization allows the YouTube algorithm to recognize that your video has all the essential optimization elements and in turn makes your video more expensive for advertisers to place ads on.

9. Live stream

Last but not least, live stream. Live streaming can drive an awesome engagement to your channel and community, while also feeding people in a live-time format. I use OBS to stream and Restream.io to schedule the streams. After each stream, I trim the video so when people watch the uploaded stream it doesn’t start at the 5-minute countdown, but instead right when I start my message. This allows more people to see the video and to stay on the video instead of instantly clicking off or trying to find the beginning of the message themselves.

10. God Blesses Hard Work

God blesses the work of your hands. He doesn’t bless your wishes, He doesn’t bless your dreams; He blesses your work. One thing I’ve learned is that God’s grace doesn’t fall on laziness. When you work hard, God pours His grace out in that area and begins to use your channel as a platform to reach thousands of people for His kingdom.

Once more, thank you to everyone who supported me on this journey to 100k! I hope this content will bless you as you pursue to make God’s name known!