I'm by no means an "expert" on Youtube, so I'm not here to teach anything. I'm only sharing what I've learned so far, and maybe you can get some value from it.
- Networking is 50% of success
Be a constructive member of your community! It seems like the majority of people doesn’t know or just they don’t want to know what that means. It doesn’t mean to annoy people and spam your channel link on people’s videos, messages. It doesn’t mean sub4sub. It doesn’t mean promoting your videos in inappropriate places. Member of the community means TALKING TO PEOPLE!
Now go at YouTube browse random SMALL channels, find them in the comment sections of other videos, or in featured channels of other channels. Watch one or several of their videos, watch the whole video, and then leave a POSITIVE comment, write something you liked about it, or suggest improvement if you think it’ll help.Then move to another video, to another channel and repeat. The channel owner WILL respond back because everyone at that stage loves comments, actually it is in human nature we like to be NOTICED.
- Consistency
This one is obvious. People won't subscribe to a one time wonder. They want consistency. Stick with it no matter what. As long as you have other people who want to watch your stuff, even if it's like 2 people, keep making stuff.
- Interacting with your viewers
Reply back to every comment on your videos because it builds a community that keeps viewers coming back for more and entices new viewers to become subscribers. This used to be standard advice for blogs, and for some reason, people don't follow it on youtube. If someone takes time out of their day to comment on your tiny youtube channel, you owe it to them to at least thank them.
- Humans are visual creatures
I have heard people on the Internet suggest that as far as your channel is great, your branding doesn’t matter. This is wrong and dangerous. We are attracted to aesthetically pleasing views and we will always favor something beautiful to something ugly.
Now take a look at your channel art and profile icon - can you improve them? Same goes for thumbnails of every new video - check them twice before posting.
- Timing uploads
This really works. Upload when the majority of your subscribers are online. I learned that by uploading at peak hours (Fri and Saturday mid to late mornings) I was able to instantly increase my viewership. It's easy to do this with the "schedule" feature when you upload on YouTube. I didn't know about this until a couple weeks ago, but I'm sure this is probably common knowledge for most of you.
- Focus On Quality Traffic
You must know who is your target audience. Quality Traffic comprises of people you want to target who watch complete or most of your video. They find your content purposeful and engaging. These are the people who are likely to share and like your videos. You will get subscribers only by driving quality traffic to your channel.
- Personal benefit
I used to not be able to speak for 10 seconds uninterrupted on camera without getting shy and starting to stutter. Now, I feel more confident on camera and in my day to day life. If there's a single way to force yourself to become a better, more confident speaker- it's through making videos. This is HUGE.
Above all, YouTube is a second largest social media network and second largest search engine in the world. Go there interact with other people like on any other social platform and make sure you have optimized your videos for search engines.
If you are interested here you can read more tips on how to grow YouTube channel.