Your First 100 YouTube Subscribers - DOs and DON'Ts

When just starting out on your YouTube channel, you might wonder how to go about getting your first 100 YouTube subscribers. In this episode of my newly-named podcast, Your Thriving Side Hustle, I’m breaking down the Do’s and Don’ts of reaching the important milestone of gaining your first 100 subscribers!

Listen to Episode 50: DO’s and DON’Ts of Your First 100 YouTube Subscribers

New Podcast Name: Your Thriving Side Hustle

In Episode number 50, I’m rebranding the podcast to Your Thriving Side Hustle. We will still be covering topics such as growing on YouTube, creating videos and using social media and video content to grow your audience and income online, but the content that I will be providing here is going to be geared toward those of us who are in the side hustle stage of online business and content creation.

Your Thriving Side Hustle podcast is here to give you a weekly “kick in the pants,” if you will, to take action in your side hustle so that you can be the boss of your own future.

Now, does that mean if you’re not a side hustler, you can’t listen to this? No, absolutely not. If you’re a content creator, a video content creator, YouTube creator/blogger, then I think you’re going to get value out of this podcast. Where my heart and my passion really lies is for the people who have a full-time job, have a family, have a busy life, but also have ideas and goals and dreams outside of that traditional job structure, and have the desire to share that content with other people.

So that’s what I want this podcast to be. I want this to be a weekly call to action, inspiration for you to keep taking those small steps to grow your your online business, your YouTube channel, because honestly there is no step too small towards your goals and your dreams, right?

Gaining Your First 100 YouTube Subscribers

In this episode, I’m discussing some tips on things to do and not to do when trying to get more subscribers on your YouTube channel. This is often the first milestone that people who create YouTube content strive to reach, but there are some ways to reach that goal that work well, and some that don’t.

Your First 100 Subscribers on YouTube: What NOT to do

If you want to have that custom URL for your channel, you have to have at least 100 YouTube subscribers. One thing I have seen new YouTube creators do, is to self-promote their channel to friends or members of Facebook groups they are in, for the main purpose of reaching 100 subscribers just to get their custom URL.

When you ask random people to subscribe to your YouTube channel, you want the people who actually hit that button to be people who are actually legitimately and almost passionately interested in watching your videos and consuming your content. If they aren’t interested, then it’s ultimately going to hurt you over time. You may have those first 100 subscribers, but that number is not really going to do anything for you at all.

That being said, it does depend a little bit on what your niche is. If you have a niche where you’re doing crochet and you know that you have friends who also crochet, and who also like to watch YouTube videos of crocheting or crocheting tutorials, then by all means, ask them to subscribe to your channel. However, just asking everyone you know ultimately is not going to help you. It’s just not the best way to start out with growing your channel.

Your First 100 YouTube Subscribers: What TO do

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

I recently covered this in a video on my channel, called “Get Views on Your First 5 YouTube Videos.” SEO is really the thing you want to focus on when you have zero subscribers. If you have no audience at all on YouTube and you publish videos, no one is there to watch them, you want to publish videos that end up showing up as a search result.

So if someone is searching for a crocheting tutorial, for example, and your video can show up as a search result, now you have people getting in front of your videos and having the opportunity to hit play. Many people get overwhelmed with SEO.

It can be overwhelming and confusing if you’re talking about blogging, websites, and things like that because it is complicated. But with YouTube, it’s not that complicated as long as the title of your video is compatible, meaning nearly identical to the words that people are typing into the search bar, and your thumbnail looks professional and clickable.

2. Take an Objective Look at Your Channel

Does your channel look legit? Does it look enticing? Sometimes it’s really hard to look at our channels like that, especially when you’re just starting out. It’s hard to know, does this look good? Does this look bad?

Go and look at some of the other YouTube channels that are in your niche that have over 100,000 followers, and take a look at the channel artwork header image at the top, take a look at their thumbnails and how they have their homepage structured. Do you feel like you fit in with them in terms of the quality?

You want to look like you know what you’re doing compared to those other people, to look like you belong.

3. Channel Branding

Don’t wait until you have 100 subscribers or 1,000 subscribers to invest in your channel branding. If you have no skills at all when it comes to graphic design, then you could hit up a site like Fiverr or Eli Lance, or 99 designs,, or ask a friend of yours who is a graphic designer.

If you do have the design skills, go ahead and fire up Photoshop or Canva and spend some time and energy really looking at it, because in the long run, you need to look legit on YouTube in order for people to take you and your channel seriously.

4. Focus on the Videos, Not the Analytics

Studying your numbers is studying your channel and your audience. That’s not a bad thing, but when you have less than 100 YouTube subscribers, you likely don’t have very much data to be looking at. So it’s hard to get a big picture and figure out what’s really happening on your channel until you have more data.

That can end up leading to frustration, burnout, and people giving up on their channel too quickly after they pump out a few videos. They’re not seeing the growth and the views that they were hoping for, so they just give up. If you just keep going, if you create more content and more videos and ask yourself, “What does my audience need to hear from me today?” Then eventually things will start to pick up.

You have to focus on creating your videos rather than focus on what’s happening with your numbers. If you don’t like your number of views and subscribers, all you can really do is create more content, create better content, use SEO to get more views, and create content that people genuinely are interested in watching.

Reaching Your YouTube Milestones

After reaching the milestone of 100 subscribers, what milestone usually comes next? A pretty big milestone on YouTube is 1000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time, because that allows you to become a YouTube partner and apply for YouTube monetization. This means that YouTube can show ads on your videos and they will actually give you a cut of the revenue that they earn on those ads. Prior to that you can have ads on your video, but they don’t share a cut with you.

When I see a channel that has 1,000 YouTube subscribers or more, I know that that person put time, energy, and passion into that channel and into the topic and niche that they cover on that channel.