Here are the 5 most valuable lessons I learned about how to
increase YouTube views and how to build a profitable YouTube Channel
1. METADATA
Creating and releasing new videos is fun. It’s the sexy part of publishing online video content. There is an immediate sense of gratification as your video goes live and the feedback and comments start pouring in. However, for long term success, meta data is critical.
2. CREATE THUMBNAILS
Custom thumbnails are still only available to YouTube Partners, but if you’re a partner, definitely take the time to create good thumbnails. If you’re not a partner, you will have a choice of three thumbnail options auto-generated by YouTube. Pick the best one and don’t sweat it too much. This is what I did for our first 80 or so videos. Once you have the option of creating custom thumbnails, focus on thumbnails that will look good in search engine results. This will result in more views.
3. ANNOTATIONS ARE AN EFFECTIVE TOOLS FOR INCREASING VIEWS AND SUBSCRIBERS
Annotations are the little bits of text you can add as overlays to your video. In addition to adding additional text information, you can also link to other videos and your subscription box. I’m sure there is even more that can do with them because I’ve only started to scratch the surface. Use them and experiment with different ways to present them. We’ve been able to increase views to related videos and greatly increase subscribers to our YouTube channel.
4. RUNNING TIME SHOULD FIT YOUR TOPIC
Recent studies have shown that people are more willing to watch longer content online. This is particularly great news for creators of narrative content. But everybody’s time is at a premium. When it comes to instructional videos, a running time of 5 minutes or less is probably ideal.
Our goal is to do something a little different than simply produce cooking demonstrations. If our only plan was to work the YouTube system and ramp up our revenue there, we would probably change the format completely and make short, fast-paced step-by-step cooking videos. But we aim for a blend of personality, humor, entertainment and information. We still try hard to keep our videos as short and to-the-point as possible. One of the ways we’ve streamlined is to lose the opening credits. They were cool and based on the feedback we’ve received, people loved them. But we could see a steep decline in viewers as soon as the credits started to roll. Now, we open the episode, get to the “food porn” shot as quickly as possible and roll right into the recipe. This has really helped our engagement rate with more people watching the episode for a longer amount of time.
5. ENGAGE WITH YOU AUDIENCE
YouTube is not a video hosting site – it’s a social network.The cold hard truth is that you have to engage with your audience. This takes a lot of time, but it makes a HUGE difference. None of our videos have millions of views so it’s manageable for now but takes more and more time every day. Once Hilah started showing up on a regular basis and responding to comments, the quality and quantity of comments increased. This engagement also increased our YouTube views, shares and video responses. Once the YouTube algorithm detects action around a particular video, that video is a LOT more likely to get featured and getting a video featured is a sure way to explode your channel growth.
That it, do the best , for future... ok. see you