YouTube Tips: How to Get More Views Today

If you’re a creator, a brand, or anyone with a message, you can use YouTube to get eyes on your ideas.  After all, people watch one billion hours of video every day on this platform.  

Are you currently using YouTube? If you’re not, you’re missing out. Find out the top YouTube tips on gaining more views for your account today.

Master the Fundamentals

You may feel like skipping over the basics but understand that they’re fundamental to growth because even the pros don’t overlook them.  

Embrace the Liking and Subscribing Ritual

If you look at the most successful YouTube channels, they always have a ritual for building their following. 

Typically, creators will say a line during the intro of the video that sounds something like, “If you like this video, make sure to give it a thumbs up.  Subscribe and ring the notification bell so you can see all my latest content.”  

This is a reminder for viewers to respond to the content they’re watching instead of clicking away and immediately forgetting what they just saw. 

Yes, sometimes it seems too intuitive to say.  However, even the most successful YouTube creators continue to do this in every single video.  

From zero to a million subscribers, successful channels have kept this ritual ever since their first videos.

Optimize Your Videos

Optimizing your videos simply means priming them for YouTube search and viewership.  

– Use Strategic Topics: Talk about relevant subjects in your niche to increase your engagement.

– Thumbnail: Design your thumbnails to catch the viewer’s eye.  Play with symmetry, colors, and title fonts.  One strategy is to simply look at the videos that rank successfully in search and emulate their thumbnail styles.  If it catches your attention address the reasons why.

– Titles: Use keywords to increase the chances of your video’s discovery.  Sometimes you need to base your titles on nitpicks like hyphenated words or the order of words 

– Audio and visuals: It may seem obvious that you need decent audio and visuals for a video, but it’s vital to your channel’s success.  Note that you don’t have to have the most expensive equipment.  Just make sure audio and visuals aren’t potential turn-offs to your viewers.

– Tags: These days tags are growing less critical to video optimization than thumbnails and titles.  However, you should still use them to help YouTube organize your content within certain topics or niches.

Optimize Your Channel

If your videos look great, but your channel lacks style or information, viewers aren’t always inclined to look for more of your content.

This is especially important for businesses offering products or services.  People want to see official YouTube pages get information before they make a purchase.  So here are some features to focus on:

– Channel Banner and Profile Icon: Your banner is the blank border that stretches across the homepage of your channel. Your profile picture is the small circular icon next to it. You have a lot of freedom here, but your border and icon should have attractive colors, themes, or descriptions that reflect your niche.

– Channel Homepage Video: Give potential subscribers a quick video that summarizes your channel and what you’re about.  If they like it, they might subscribe without even watching your videos first.

– Channel Homepage Posts: One of YouTube’s newest features is the community post option.  Creators with more than 1,000 subscribers can post images, GIFs, videos, and messages for the subscribers to increase engagement.  

– Channel Playlists and Links: Organize your content for subscribers by creating playlists.  The easier it is to navigate through your videos, the more viewers are inclined to watch more of them.

Learn YouTube Tips and Tricks

Once you master the basics of YouTube creator culture, you need to learn the tips and tricks that will give you an edge.

Link to Your Other Videos

– Comments Section: If you post links to your other videos in the comments section, there’s more room to add descriptions and other helpful information.  

– Beginning or Middle of the Video Links: If you’re a performing artist, sometimes viewers will see that your performance is coming to an end click off of the video without seeing your links.  To avoid this, you can schedule links to appear earlier in the video.     

– End of the Video Links: Viewers are always looking for the next piece of content after the video they’re currently watching.  If you link to your other related videos, they won’t have to go searching for something else. 

Ride Trends: Use Keywords to Rank Your Videos in Search

There are two main tools that you should be using to find the best keywords for your video content, and they’re completely free.

Google Trends

If you want to see what’s hot and popping, Google Trends is one of the best tools that will find trending keywords.  Since YouTube is owned by Google, the search results will often include YouTube searches. 

Google is the number one search engine in the world.  That means that its trending topics are prompted by a large audience who are actively searching for given information.  

You can use Google Trends to see if certain topics in your niche are rising or declining interest.  Sometimes you’ll come across what’s known as “evergreen topics” which consistently stay relevant in search. 

Topics can change quickly, but Google Trends helps you predict what questions are already circulating so that you can create video content around them.  

Google Trends also has a YouTube filter tab that allows you to specify your search for YouTube material only.  There are also time filter tabs that show you how certain keywords perform in a longer or shorter period of time.      

The Google Search Engine

You can also use the good old Google homepage to check trends. 

When you type in a search, you should see a “People Also Ask” section below the first few results that pop up. This shows you any material related to your topic that people are searching for.  

Now that you have two powerful tools for keyword searching, the real trick is to test them against each other.  Compare the results that are trending individually on Google Trend’s YouTube section and the regular Google search. 

If you find that the tools share certain topics, those topics are most likely going to have the strongest performing keywords for your videos. 

This can be known as a cross-referenced keyword search and it simply means that the audiences for the same keyword on different platforms are combined.  An overall larger audience usually means that content using that keyword will be more relatable to the masses.   

Watermark Your Videos

If you’re a business trying to grow your YouTube channel, watermarking your videos is a way to assert your credibility on the platform.  It lets viewers know you’re serious about creating content for them to return to.

A watermark on YouTube is a small subscribe button with your name that appears in the corner of the video. 

So, what about the original Subscribe button that sits just above the comments section?  Why do you need another one?

Once viewers go into full-screen mode, the original subscribe disappears.  Inserting the Subscribe watermark within the video frame lets viewers subscribe without exiting full-screen mode or waiting until the end of the video and ultimately forgetting.

Ask the People What Content They Want

If you don’t know what type of value to offer your subscribers, simply ask them.  This will tell you exactly what they’ll click on. 

Even if you do know what kind of content you want to continue with, ask anyways to get some perspective.  The viewer’s opinion is a hotline to your niche’s hot topics and interests. 

You can even host polls on your channel to get a more accurate idea of your subscribers’ interests.  

This way, you can tailor your subscribers’ needs and interests.

Enable Video Embedding

Embedding your videos is a way to diversify the traffic to your channel besides the main traffic sources.  When you “embed” a video, you allow it to appear on other sites other than YouTube. 

If YouTube is the second largest search engine, why would you want your videos to appear anywhere else? 

First of all, don’t underestimate the power of sharing.  If you encourage your subscribers to share your content, you can appear all over the internet instead of just on YouTube. 

Sometimes it’s hard to crack the YouTube search algorithm and get your videos to rank in search.  If this is you, embedding your content can help promote it on sites that already have an audience for your niche.

Check out the main types of traffic sources on YouTube below.   

Learn the Analytics

Sometimes winning on YouTube means looking at the numbers and learning how to influence them in your favor.

Track Your Traffic Sources Through “Click-Through Rate”

Your click-through rate is your ability to motivate potential viewers to click on your content.  When a potential viewer simply sees your video’s thumbnail, this counts as an “impression.”  

If you have increased impressions, but a low click-through rate, this means that your thumbnails aren’t connecting with potential viewers.

Half of all channels and videos on YouTube have an impressions CTR that can range between 2% to 10%.  Look at each traffic source and compare your impressions with your click-through rate.  Ideally, you want to fall in between that 2% and 10% range. 

Take notes on what you do differently in the videos with higher performances.  Whatever those small details are, use them in future videos to replicate the formula for your success.  

Use Watch Time to Structure Videos That Get More Views

Watch time is an analytical feature in your Creator Studio that shows you when viewers click out of your videos.  

Besides clicking the dislike button, watch time effectively indicates when, and sometimes why, a viewer loses interest in a video.   

The audience retention report shows how viewers respond to your content in a second-by-second outline. 

To understand this report, you can look at the average total watch time per viewer and the percentage of your video that was actually viewed.

The first metric allows YouTube to measure how much watch time each individual viewer spends with your video.  If the number is high, this means that viewers collectively stay engaged with your content.  

However, if your viewers only watch 60% of your video, this means you’re losing engagement even though you’ve hooked them in the beginning. 

Get Noticed Through Different Traffic Sources

In your Creator Studio, you’ll find a “Traffic Source” tab that lists all the ways your videos pop up in front of potential viewers.  Here are the main traffic sources YouTube uses.

YouTube Search

This is the big one.  The goal for any content creator is to have their video rank number one in YouTube’s search results. 

This tab on your traffic source page shows you what phrases viewers searched when they discovered your content.  To dominate the YouTube search, you need to understand the science of keywords.  

Suggested Videos

YouTube’s recommendation algorithm determines what 70% of what viewers watch.  Simply put, you want your videos to be suggested to viewers by YouTube itself.

Even if you’re using keywords, it can be hard to compete against larger channels for a place on the search results page.  With suggested videos, you somewhat avoid the clamber to the top.  

If you have relevant material and your analytics are strong, YouTube will recommend your content to a viewer watching a different video with similar content.  

Playlists

Did you know that YouTube creates playlists that are personalized to each user? 

The platform is designed to constantly recommend material for its viewers. One of the best ways to keep viewers hooked is to create playlists that lead the viewer from one video the next.  

Playlists are similar to the Suggested Videos traffic source.  However, the common thread between the collected videos is even more specific. 

If your videos are featured on a specific playlist, you can see what content is performing well.  Since you know the narrow subject that’s getting you featured, you can plan for follow up videos that target this subject. 

External Sources

This indicates sites outside of YouTube that engage viewers with your videos.  Embedded videos particularly come in handy here.  

If you find sources from a specific niche that are sharing your content, continue to target that niche. 

The Right YouTube Tips

Depending on your niche, there are YouTube tips that will work better for you than others.  It’s up to you to be consistent and test these tips until you find success.    

YouTube is one of the best platforms to express who you are and what you do.  

If you’re using YouTube or other marketing tools for your brand, check out how you can get a free marketing review and learn how to improve your reach.