4 HIDDEN YouTube Features That Will DOUBLE Your Subscribers

what if I told you there was a way to double your YouTube subscribers in around about 5 minutes without creating a single video you call me crazy right and with these glasses you're probably right to do so but after 16 years of making videos on the YouTube platform I'm here to tell you that there are four features that a lot of creators miss that actually make all of this possible all you need to know is what they are and how they work work and your channel will be flooded with tons of new views and subscribers

in fact when we tested number three on this list in one of our videos it doubled the amount of subscribers we gained with only a few minutes of extra work but before I break down how I did it let's tackle the first feature on the list it's a simple yet powerful tool inside the YouTube Creator Studio it will save a retention on your videos and make your channel a magnet for subscribe criers many of you are constantly stuck in a state of fear and anxiety over the growth of your channel you're wondering why your views

are going up and while you're no closer to that fabled 1,000 subscriber Milestone even though you think you're trying everything if that is the case this is probably one of the big reasons why notice these small dips and tiny drops in the graph well they're actually a big problem they represent critical moments where your audience has lost interest and clicked away if your retention graph looks anything like this it's a clear indicator that certain parts of your videos are boring your audience these stale and dull points in your audience retention graph signal to YouTube that

your content isn't satisfying the audience and therefore not worth recommending to more viewers and if your content isn't being recommended that kills Impressions meaning that nobody sees your content so you don't get views and you're definitely not going to to get any more subscribers but there is some good news even after you've published your video to YouTube there is an opportunity to salvage these retention black holes there is a tool in the desktop YouTube studio called trim and edit that allows you to surgically remove those boring parts of the video and the best part is

this tool only takes a couple of minutes to use which is a lot better than spending hours on a brand new video so let's walk through an example together to show you exactly how we might save one of your videos in the YouTube Studio go to the content screen then find a video you want to optimize and click on the analytics button next in the analytics section you want to scroll down to the bottom and you'll see audience retention graphs a brief analysis of this graph shows that there is value in the second half of

a video because the audience retention graph is flat no one is leaving but perhaps it takes too long to get to this value here earlier on in a video we see a prolonged decline in retention and then it picks up at a chapter Tim stamp where the video shifts topic this would suggest fluff filler that's boring to the viewer so with all of this in mind let's head on over to the editor section of the video you can see an option here called trim and cut click on that now to remove a part of a

video drag the timeline over to the bit that you want to cut and click new cut a red box will appear drag this over the section you want to remove and align this with the dips you saw in your retention graph you can make multiple Cuts if you need to and preview it to see what it looks like like when you're done click save and depending on the size of a video and the number of edits you've made it might take an hour or two for the changes to be reflected in the public video that

viewers watch now obviously you'll probably want to pay a bit more attention to the edit than I have done here so that the video that's left still makes sense to the viewer the key principle here is that once you upload a video to YouTube you can add new footage to that video but you can remove footage that your audience clearly isn't interested in and when you add that to the fact that you can completely redo the packaging the title and the thumbnail it always means that a video that was struggling on on YouTube has a

chance to be resurrected okay so now you know how to double your subscribers by optimizing the retention on your videos let's move on to the next feature this is without doubt one of the oldest subscriber tricks in the YouTube Playbook but it only takes 30 seconds to set up open up a new tab in your browser and go to your YouTube channel homepage then I I want you to look at the URL and the address bar and it should look something like this now this is where things get a little interesting we're going to add

a special piece of code to the end of a URL that will make it so that whenever someone clicks a link they are immediately prompted to subscribe to your YouTube channel so place a cursor at the very end of the channel URL and type in this exact text the new URL should look like this and now when you click enter you immediately get this popup asking if you like to subscribe it's pretty good right and if you want to test this for yourself click the link in the video description and you can also copy that

special bit of text you'll need and paste it on your url now obviously you don't just have to use this link in your video description it could be in your social media posts your email newsletter the reason it's so effective is because it Taps into something called Choice architecture this basically means that people are a lot more likely to take action when they're presented with a clear and easy option to do so and if you stick around until the end I'll show you a very visual version of choice architecture but first we need to look

at a psychological trick when we tested it on one of our videos it literally doubled the amount of subscribers we gained with only one to two minutes of extra work for example as you can see from this graph without using this feature we gained 931 subscribers but with this feature we gained over 2,000 subscribers more than doubling our growth rate which is pretty crazy but just before I share it with you I do have to confess technically this isn't n a YouTube feature but this technique has got such amazing results for our Channel whenever we

use it that I've got to share it with you and all that it requires you to Simply do is ask your audience to subscribe to your channel now that sounds pretty obvious and outdated at this point doesn't it but let me explain the key to this technique is nailing when you should ask somebody to subscribe to your channel I don't know about you but something that really frustrates me when I'm watching a video is when in the first 30 seconds of a video when the Creator should be focusing on the hook of the value of

the content they're asking viewers to subscribe to the channel my immediate reaction to this is why you haven't given me any reason to subscribe to the channel so instead in our test video for the first 4 minutes and 42 seconds we gave the viewer nothing but value on monetization it talked about updates the typical pain points for a Creator trying to get monetized the emotional Strife it was only then after all of that time time when we knew the viewer was emotionally invested in the video and that they had gotten value from it that we

made the ask and not only that but we tied it into the value that we just given to the viewer so instead of using the stock line of don't forget to like And subscribe we said this if you do want to stay up to dat with all of these monetization changes yeah I think you need to subscribe and turn on a notification Bell I can't believe I said that notice how by linking the request to the value that we just provided it gives a logical reason for the viewer to subscribe to the channel so if

you are going to ask your viewers to subscribe to your channel in your next video I challenge you to test this technique I want you to wait until you are at least halfway through the video so that you know you've provided a significant amount of value to that audience and I also want you to tie the Subscribe call to action to the value you've just provided in the video for example if you are finding these techniques about how to get more subscribers useful that is just the beginning of your YouTube Journey here at vid IQ

so make sure to subscribe will help you grow your channel now compare that to asking people to subscribe in the first 30 seconds when the viewer at that point has very little context so give it a try and then come back to this video and let us know in the comments how well it performed and by now you should have seen the visual Choice architecture I mentioned earlier in action if you ask people to subscribe to your Channel or like the video within a video itself you you will detect this and those buttons in the

interface will offer a visual prompt and satisfying animation if clicked that's some Next Level gamification right there all right the next feature that's going to help you double your subscribers leverages The Power of YouTube shorts but probably not in a way that you think it is no secret that YouTube is in a short form content war with Instagram and Tik Tok as a result YouTube shorts get an insane level of reach and Discovery when compared to long form videos and you've probably noticed this yourself when you post a short you tend to get more views

faster but here is where there is a problem the value of a subscriber that comes from a YouTube short is different to the value of a subscriber from a long for piece of content I like to call subscribers from YouTube shorts fast food subscribers they're quick easy convenient to get they make you feel good in the short term but they're not good for the overall long-term health of your channel subscribers from YouTube shorts are less likely to become fully engaged members of your community but what if I told you there was a way to convert

those fast food subscribers into loyal fans and with this relatively new YouTube feature it's now possible let's take a look at this example if you look down at the bottom of this YouTube sh you can see this link this is the new YouTube shorts feature that allows you to link long form videos directly to your shorts so now when you post shorts that are related to your longer videos you simply just add this link and you'll be able to attract a much higher quality of subscriber so to use this feature find the short you want

to link a long form video to and then scroll down until you see this related link option click it and then locate the long form video you want to link to and that's it just make sure to save the changes at the end while these four YouTube features are incredibly powerful for getting more subscribers they are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to actually growing your channel because subscribers don't mean anything if they're not actually watching your videos what if I told you there was there's a brand new strategy out there that's

helping channels get millions of views seemingly out of nowhere I'm talking about Channels with zero subscribers getting 400,000 views on their first video that sounds pretty enticing doesn't it this is how they're doing it and how you can replicate it