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YouTube is a great platform for creating and promoting video content, and with Google's partner program it can be lucrative, too. In order to leverage YouTube effectively, though, a solid subscriber base is essential - more subscribers will ultimately lead to more video view growth, and allow you to reach a wider audience.

Here we're taking a look at three fundamental rules to ensuring steady YouTube subscriber growth.

Video Quantity

The first rule is simple: produce videos, as often as is feasible.

A larger number of videos nets you a larger search cross-section, meaning you will instantly have a leg-up compared to a smaller number of videos. Furthermore, a regular flow of content indicates to your viewers that you are an active producer, giving them much more incentive to subscribe than an apparently-inactive account.

It's critical to properly populate the description and tag fields for each of your videos, ensuring they match your content closely. Extraneous or 'spammy' tags will do you no favours, as viewers will quickly lose attention if they come through an irrelevant search keyword, potentially harming your search strength.

Keep tags strongly focussed - and diverse, as having the same tags on all your videos will reduce your cross-section. It's worth spending a little time on, to ensure you appear in relevant YouTube search results, as many new viewers (and potential subscribers) will find your videos this way.

Video Quantity is a sure way of increasing search cross-section, subsequently traffic, and ultimately subscribers for your videos, but you will find this rule is in conflict with the second - you must ensure consistent quality of your videos.

Content Quality

The second rule: Ensure your videos are of the highest quality possible.

It might help if we can better define 'quality'. Essentially, a quality video is one more likely to entertain, and more likely to encourage a positive response - a 'like', a positive comment, or a subscription.

There are many different factors to this notion, and far too many to effectively cover here - but ensuring your videos are well-written, well-produced and formatted in an interesting way is a good start.

You must ensure your videos are entertaining to watch - and the more entertaining, the better. Pacing is an important factor - you don't want to bore your audience. (I've written more on this here).

There are no hard or fast rules in determining quality, as it's down to your individual viewers. Be sure to value any feedback you get, and factor it into any future videos you produce. If you can, try and visualise your videos from the viewpoint of your audience. The better you can do this, the easier it will be to make improvements.

Understanding your audience is part of the third rule, too - you must be aware of the expectations of your subscribers.

Thematic Consistency and Serialisation

The third rule: ensure thematic consistency in your videos.

This third rule is somewhat more nuanced than the other two; It relates to the theme and topics which you cover in your videos. In essence, you want to ensure a continuum of theme between all the videos you produce.

So what does that mean? Well, say you produced a few videos on a certain topic - a series on 'Car Maintenance', for example. You should ensure that any future videos you publish via that channel are thematically related - interesting to your existing subscriber base. You would risk alienating your existing subscribers if you suddenly started posting videos about knitting, for instance.

When somebody elects to subscribe to your channel, there is an implicit promise your channel makes to produce further videos of relevance to the first. While quantity is important, you must also consider the consistency of your themes.

Having a strongly defined theme will help people to understand your intended niche better, and will also help you when producing future content if you have a clearly defined demographic or interest to produce for. A tightly focussed channel with attract more subscribers.

Another thing you can do is make the implicit promise of future videos more explicit - and running video series is a great way of doing this. If you can come up with a topic that can be covered in multiple parts, serialisation can help build a persistent interest in your channel that will very often lead to an increase in subscribers.

Be sure to emphasise the fact that the videos your viewers watch are part of a greater whole - set up playlists, mention the other episodes in video itself (previewing the forthcoming episode at the end of a video is a great way of doing this!). If your viewers know there are more videos to come - of a similar theme, and of sufficient quality - your subscriber base will see rapid growth.

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