A Few Smart Tricks that Will Get You More Views on YouTube

According to Emarketer’s report, only 9% of small companies invest their time and effort in YouTube marketing strategies. Not much, right? Recording videos might be demanding, but…

YouTube has over a billion users–almost a third of all people on the Internet–and everyday, people watch hundreds of millions of hours of YouTube videos and generate billions of views.

So if you’re not investing your time, effort and creativity in a YouTube presence, you might be missing out … big time. Discover how to get more views on YouTube and what to do to keep the number of views increasing regularly.

YouTube has a crazy impact on our generation; it’s the second most popular social media giant when it comes to user base size and activity.

YouTube carries a massive traffic potential and thus lots of talented people — like singers, YouTubers and Vloggers — have gained worldwide fame thanks to uploads to the platform.

You might not believe it, but many artists’ careers can prove it: Check out the best artists discovered on YouTube.

Example: Do you recognize The Weekend?

As Teen Vogue reports, the band started out on YouTube:

“The Weeknd’s name and music were an enigma at first — only static images were featured throughout all of his music videos in his earlier days. (His account is still named “xoxxxoooxo.”) Meanwhile he was still able to develop impressive following, proving that his infamous climb up the charts was based solely on his signature voice. He totally earned it.”

And the same source also names Ed Sheeran as another example of an artist discovered on the giant video-sharing platform.

Humble Ed Sheeran now has 49, 604, 415 monthly listeners on Spotify.

One can assume that these numbers refer to musicians only… but the fact of the matter is, on YouTube, only the sky is the limit.

Various brands have managed to succeed on YouTube.

Take GoPro for example. Behind the success of their YouTube channel are user generated videos. GoPro owners upload their real and fabulous footage, and this makes GoPro’s curation so unique and authentic. Each video presents an exciting story that is sooo nice to watch.

Take a look for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlDzYIIOYmM

And the best part is that this high-quality footage was recorded with a little camera (and sometimes the GoPro Karma).

All the best marketing guides confirm that nothing engages more and better than a unique, high-quality video with a clever concept behind it.

Of course, it takes talent (in the case of a singer, a voice), creativity, a passion… and a lot of work and strategic thinking to produce engaging videos that are capable of generating followers and attracting views like magnets.

But this is possible to achieve for non-singers too.

So, if you don’t use YouTube yet, brainstorm with your team ways of how you could leverage YouTube in your own content marketing strategy. It doesn’t matter what field you’re in..

Also, even if you:

• have already created a YouTube business channel to present brand and company products (or services) better visually and share product/service details in a more user friendly way
• supplement the channel with hi res pics, well thought-out descriptions and catchy title tags
• upload great videos frequently
• promote them on Facebook and Twitter diligently
• set ambitious goals and specific KPIs to measure your YouTube channel’s performance efficiently (and one of the KPIs are channel views, in particular, the monthly growth of views on that channel)

This write up is still for you.

Although the above points may seem like a complete list guaranteed to maximize views, unfortunately, they’re not enough. These bullet points can’t ensure a stable growth of views.

And that’s where we come in.

We’ve collected some smart and proven-to-work tricks that will help you out, increase your YouTube views, and rescue your strategy.

A Few YouTube Basics

There are a few basics of a well-curated YouTube channel, and they must be met in order to leverage your profile’s fullest potential. Let’s go through the deets of all the 10 rules one by one.

1. Content Quality — Rule Number One

For many, this may sound obvious, but this rule is necessary to state in every guide covering a topic of a similar nature. Quality, quality and once again quality. The quality of your videos must be flawless if you want to see any growth at all.

Low-quality videos will look spammy and discourage people from watching them.

2.Copy on your YouTube channel — descriptions, filenames, Titles and Tags

Filenames, descriptions, titles and tags should work to strengthen the value of the videos you upload. They should explain what a particular video presents, provide the broader context, and maximize the reach.

They’re also a great place to include keywords and their variations. Putting keywords here will strongly boost the findability of the videos.

Before adding a video, do some research — using Google Suggest, for instance — to see what phrases for a specific topic people search for frequently.

Then include these phrases in your descriptions and in other fitting on-page elements.

Pay special attention when crafting your titles and filenames. It’s highly important that these two contain head keywords for a given topic.

The filenames should accurately express the name of a video in one or two words and also correspond to a targeted keyword.

A title has an extensive role: it should be appealing, attention-grabbing, but short and straight to the point at the same time.

Also, don’t ignore your YouTube descriptions. Write around two paragraphs so people know what to expect from your video.

Moreover, extract all the keywords related to the video topic and insert them as tags underneath the description. The more tags you use, the easier your video will be to find. A specific tag pops out from the YouTube search box when someone types a keyword that it contains.

It’s necessary to find a balance between optimizing a copy for SEO and making it clickable, in other words, appealing for the user. Don’t overdo either approach.

3. Promotion on Social Channels, Site and Blogs

Once your video is published on YouTube, promote it on other social channels.

And you better do it as early as possible on multiple platforms simultaneously so that you create enough buzz to help it go viral.

Timing is crucial; so before you share your video anywhere, make sure you target the right hour on the right day of the week.

What’s more, connect your YouTube channel to other social media channels so you’ll be able to share YOUR next uploads automatically.

Take advantage of IFTTT applets to improve automatic post sharing across your networks.

Another thing you can do to promote your video is reach out to your newsletter subscribers, partners, coworkers and other “colleagues” from the business … or even beyond. Encourage them to watch the video and share their feedback.

Just remember, it doesn’t matter how good your outreach plan is if your video isn’t of exceptional quality.

Another thing you should definitely do to get more views to your YouTube videos is market them on your website.

Create a space dedicated to your YouTube videos along with their descriptions, summaries or transcripts.

This may be:

• a videos section on your website,
• a landing page or a blog section
• Somewhere within a blog post on a similar topic.

This trick lets you kill two birds with one stone because it helps your site visitors discover your YouTube videos and channel, and the embedded videos on your website will increase the time visitors spend on your pages.

Remember that videos are link magnets; people adore remarkable videos so this simple trick will also generate a bunch of links to your site.

If your video is newsworthy, based on your own research, or is unique in any other way, think of submitting it to popular platforms like Mashable, Adweek, Buzzfeed, or a portal related to your niche.

4. Edit your videos

Great videos are a combination of two factors: a great concept and great quality. Oftentimes, it’s not enough to simply film and post, you should definitely edit as well.

Use the right editing tools to remove long pauses, enhance the vocal, and cut out any distractions.

Depending on the video, you can go for color adjustments or add nice, calm background music.

There is a wide range of professional video editing tools that work for intermediate editors too. Read more about Top Video Editing Softwares — Expert Tools for Professional Video Editing.

Some of them have free trials available so you can test them out before you pick the right one for you.

Of course, you shouldn’t invest a lot of money on professional video editing software right away. Use what you have first, and let your uploads gain some initial traction before you decide on buying anything new.

Add a website link, Twitter handle or some branding elements to your video as well.

Your video will be shared and some people will probably watch it somewhere else other than on your YouTube channel; so adding your company information directly to the video will boost your channel and website views.

Add some bloopers or extra footage to a video. People love to see the extras, so your watch time may increase as well. Furthermore, those who have seen more of your videos are statistically more willing to subscribe to your channel.

5. Use Annotations on YouTube

What are YouTube annotations? The simplest way to explain them is by looking at a funny example. Take a look at the “Sesame Street Science: Sink or Float?” video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0OMLDZunqk

Annotations make videos interactive.

For example, you can put them at the end of your video and create a few different scenarios of one story. The annotations in this case will make your video much more engaging; viewers will feel like they have a say in how the story plays out.

You can add annotations to promote other similar videos from your channel.

Openly Ask for Shares, Likes, Comments and Subscriptions

Request the viewers subscribe your channel. There is nothing bad about requesting your viewers to do so. I often work out at home with a yogi whose channel goes by the name Boho Beautiful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX6I6vs1EFs

She asks that people subscribe to her channel in almost every video. Sometimes this is done in the form of a written message, and sometimes after the workout she just encourages subscriptions by saying, “If you liked this video feel free to like, subscribe, and share or comment below if you have any questions.”

And this just sounds very natural for anyone who completed the full workout along with her.

Reply to the comments fast and always in a kind and friendly manner.

6. Organize Your Channel

Once you start with YouTube, you want to post regularly and treat each video as one episode of a series. Name your series and campaigns. Have them organized within your YouTube channel in the form of playlists.

Playlists are great. They’re super useful because they let you keep all the videos from one project, campaign, or series (or whatever you want to call it) in one single basket.

And most importantly, once a person starts watching a specific playlist, all the included videos will be played one after another. So if the viewer doesn’t stop the queue, the entire playlist will play through.

Take a look at Headspace’s YouTube channel and see how beautifully organized their videos are.

Back to you

Have you implemented all of the rules mentioned above? Hopefully, after reading this article, you have a better sense of what should be done to get more views on YouTube. Do you have any additional suggestions for generating more YouTube views?

Originally published at unamo.com on June 29, 2017.