One of the most important channels next to typical social media channels for promoting yourself is YouTube. YouTube is interesting for artists, yoga teachers, gym instructors and mere content creators, because it can be both your main content channel and also just a supplementary force for you to manage your online presence.

What do I mean by this? Well, let’s say you want to upload videos of different yoga positions, such as “position of the day” and you can fill your channel with educational yoga videos. This can go both ways: In the first scenario, this will help you fill a great online profile if you are an offline yoga teacher, and it will help you reach out to more studios to teach with potential students and for potential business for yourself.

In the second scenario, perhaps you will have so much following that your videos are generating serious buzz in the social world and you are actually generating good income through your videos. It might happen so that you will have to create so much content for YouTube that you might not have time to teach classes offline anymore, or you won’t have to. So why am I telling you all this? It’s because YouTube has different functions, in which your content may result in drastic ways that might have to change your career plans and your strategy as an artist. It’s certainly worth exploring and brainstorming.

There are many different strategies and ways you can go about increasing YouTube audience. The most obvious and common one is to upload content reviewing something about trending topics – such as recent movies, games, TV shows, sports events, books, politics, lifestyle and basically doing reviews of bigger, mainstream content that might be buzzing on social media. People love this type of content and the results can be seen very fast. This is a potential risk for the DIY artist, because all these reviews are getting the potential audience from the artists. But we shouldn’t be so grim – as this is also an opportunity in 2 ways:

The first, as artists, we can partner with these influencers, YouTube reviewers or whichever you might call them – to partner up and to either create content together, or have them review our own content. The second potential is to simply position ourselves in a ‘reviewer’ position every once in awhile. So, for instance as a musician I will mostly post my own videos, but I can also have a decent following if I talk about my favorite albums in 2017 or a great concert I went to, or a good book I’ve read or a good movie I watched. This would help me as a musician move from my nice crowd into a more mainstream audience, which could be beneficial to my subscribers.

Moreover, you can utilize your current videos by creating call to action buttons to increase your subscribers. You can use the annotations and cards to simply embed these in your videos. This can also be done by creating a YouTube widget that you could embed to a platform where you’re generating decent traffic. This way people could subscribe to your YouTube channel with a single click.

What are some ways you use to boost your YouTube subscription? What worked for you and what did not work? Feel free to comment below!

Alper Tuzcu is a Berklee College of Music and Denison University alumni, and a Boston based guitarist, songwriter and producer. His new EP ‘Lines’ will be released on November 17, 2017 and his debut eclectic album ‘Between 12 Waters’ featuring 8 different vocalists is available on Spotify. You can follow him on Instagram or Twitter @alpertuzcu, or visit his website http://www.alpertuzcu.com