Are you a YouTube creator putting sweat equity in producing engaging videos yet failing to get visibility on them?
Don’t worry.
Today, I’ll share twenty-six ways on how to get more views on YouTube. Best of all, each one is FREE to implement.
See, the essence of getting more YouTube views is producing videos that are worth watching for your audience. If viewers stick around on your channel, it increases your watch time and session time — sending positive signals to the YouTube algorithm.
The result?
Your videos start raking spots in YouTube search and recommendations in the “Up Next” section.
So to create engaging videos and earn visibility for them, there are three broad steps in your YouTube workflow. They are: planning your videos, uploading them with appropriate metadata, and promoting them outside of YouTube to drive early momentum.
Based on these steps, I’ve organized the article also into three sections. Let’s begin with the first set of strategies.
Planning And Filming Your YouTube Videos Right
Getting more YouTube views can’t happen with trickery. It requires research and planning — even before you film videos. So let’s begin with getting things right from the get go.
1. Let Keyword Research Inform You Editorial Calendar
Numerous people use the YouTube search every day to find information through videos. If you can snag a top spot for phrases searched regularly, then you’ll keep earning “evergreen” traffic to your channel.
I like to use TubeBuddy for YouTube keyword research. You can plug a phrase inside it, to get an “Overall Score.” What’s nice is you get an “Unweighted” metric telling you the prospects of ranking specific to your channel.
Once you find a few subjects with “great” scores, add them to your content calendar for YouTube.
Pro Tip: For advanced practitioners, I recommend trying the multi-level keyword strategy. It involves targeting a long-tail phrase which has low competition when publishing your video. But it’s short-tail version is the real keyword with more search volume, and something which is your ideal target.
https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-improve-YouTube-video-views/
3. Leverage Jenga Storytelling
Have you watched any videos from the YouTube Channel, MrBeast?
Owned by Jimmy Donaldson, it’s one of the fastest-growing YouTube channels, managing tens of millions of views on every video. In his YouTube journey since 2012, he has accumulated over seven billion views.
There’s one thing you can take away from his video — increase the stakes in your video as the video duration increases. Oh, and you and the viewers already know the end result. Yet they watch the entire video because the tension keeps building up as it progresses.
It’s apparent how MrBeast has leveraged this structure from his first viral video. In January 2017, he counted to 100,000 in a 23+ hour-long video — which was his first major success.
Since then, MrBeast has performed numerous such seemingly “mundane” tasks in his videos, and gone viral by accumulating watch time through this format. The achievements he mentions in his channel description sumps it up.
Filmmakers and YouTube creators, Colin And Samir, coined a phrase for this phenomenon: Jenga Storytelling. And Blake Robbins, a partner at Ludlow Ventures, illustrates how this format works.
If you can’t do outrageous experiments like MrBeast, the takeaway is building tension as your video sketch progresses.
4. Keep It Casual…
Being a visual platform, YouTube is personality-driven. Viewers like watching informal and conversational videos from people like them. That’s why Vlogs are so popular.
How can you adapt the Vlog style to your channel if it’s a technical subject?
Get comfortable on camera and directly talk to it — assuming real people are actually there in your audience while filming.
Also, don’t try to “sell” your ideas like snake oil salesmen. Instead make the viewers feel like they are hanging out with you, having fun over candid conversations. If it feels okay to show around your home or personal space, then film yourself there.
As an example, look at the SEO Vlogs by Dan Shure below. Though he can do with fewer jump cuts, look how he’s moving around his house and engaging in everyday activities like making himself coffee — all while the plot of his Vlog progresses.
What if a casual style doesn’t suit your brand’s personality? Cool then go the usual route of wearing a suit and renting a studio for filming. Remember it’s still humans who are watching your videos, so include personal accounts of your successes and failures relevant to the subject matter of your videos.
5. Experiment With The Duration Of Your Videos
Do you know that 70% of YouTube views are powered by its artificial intelligence algorithm? That’s huge!
How about a proven way to show up in the suggested videos on YouTube more often?
Well, creating longer videos — between 10 to 15 minutes — seems to be it. Because YouTube recommendations progressively point to longer content.
And it makes sense because YouTube wants to keep their users longer on the platform so that it can show’em more ads.
Remember though to add value and keep your videos relevant to your audience. If you ramble and drag while sharing advice, your viewers will get turned off.
So put the effort in research, scripting, and prepare a bit before you shoot your video. For instance, vidIQ creates educational videos, majorly for beginner YouTube creators. They go incredibly deep on the topic of their videos and create videos over 10 minutes each.
Only one of the videos on their YouTube channel homepage is shorter in length, at five minutes.
If you’re already producing long videos, then challenge yourself to cut down the length. Industry studies like the above one are largely based on correlations, so don’t point blank adapt their “best practices.”
Also, YouTube uses different ranking factors for different search queries. And longer videos would just be a drag for some topics. For instance, on an industry study, a digital marketing consultant, commented how her clients in the real estate industry do well with short videos.
6. Don’t Forget The Basics Of Filmmaking
As discussed, accumulating a significant amount of watch time will put you on the map and get rewards from the YouTube algorithm. Sure, tactics like an interesting hook and creating long videos are cool.
However, the overarching strategy that determines if a viewer is emotionally engaged is your story. Ideally, you want to have one big idea for one sketch. All the elements in your video should then support this central theme. If you digress from it, it’s a distraction and will lead to your audience losing interest.
As Casey Neistat put it, “You need to find something that an audience is interested in. And then share it with them in a way that they are also interested in.”
A couple of other aspects you should take care of:
Jump Cuts: When used judiciously, they are a great way to get back the attention of a viewer. Don’t overload them in your videos, though. Here’s a sarcastic Reddit comment that summarizes how they can become annoying.
Even on Quora, people have asked questions on why YouTube Vlogs overused them. And fellow video creators understand you’re trying to play the “how do I keep my viewer interested” game.
So be judicious in their usage. And use these other transitions:
B-roll footage:
It’s All About Audio: It’s not about buying expensive gear to produce sexy visuals. However, maintaining a high-quality audio output is crucial for a great listening experience.
7. Piggyback On Trends
I mentioned creating evergreen traffic to your channel in the first tip. Pairing it with topical content could be your ticket to virality and growth at an exponential pace.
For example, Jennelle Eliana charted a dream YouTube journey by touching a million subscribers with two videos. What did she do right? The first aspect is that she cherry-picked subjects that were proven demand. Just look at the number of video views on the subject of “van life.”
The second key aspect is that she picked up a trending subject. It means the time of the year and the content influx on “van life” show an upward trend on YouTube. As you can see below, vidIQ shows that the search term “van life” was starting to surge.
How can you find out such subjects that are probable to garner higher viewership? You can plug your ideas for videos in a keyword research tool. You want to find a window of opportunity – high demand coupled with low competition.
You can use vidIQ to set up trend alerts depending on its proprietary visitors per hour (VPH) metric. It can send email updates when a topic starts to pick up momentum in your niche.
8. Use Humor 
I’m sure you want your audience to have a good time on your YouTube channel. Using humor in your videos for the same is a great tool.
For one, research suggests, “favorability toward humor over serious entertainment especially when the message is intended for goods classified as low involvement and emotionally motivated.”
And two, YouTube in 2012 shared how it’s attempting to quantify humor. Now their focus here was channels in the comedy category. But YouTube also shared something interesting about the viewer comments.
“Viewers’ reactions, in the form of comments, further validate a video’s comedic value.”
So get goofy, use corny jokes, and make your audience laugh. Feel free to play with the video’s title, thumbnail, and description as well. I love how Noah Kagan, even while addressing a business audience, keeps his channel amusing to watch.
Getting viewers to comment through sounds associated with laughter such as “hahaha”, “hehehe”, or the acronyms “lol”, “lmao”, their variations, and the like could be beneficial for your channel. Because YouTube understands such reactions.
Here’s a comment on the above video thumbnail by Kagan:
I also like how Jenna Moreci frequently uses funny facial expressions to express the frustrations of her audience of writers.
Oh, and did I forget to mention how humor can make your audience stay longer on your videos, thereby increasing your watch time?
So entertain yourself to more views.
Sprucing Up Your Metadata To Help The YouTube Algorithm
In the initial phase of a video’s lifespan, YouTube doesn’t have any usage data from viewers. So it relies on the combination of metadata provided by you — the creator — to understand what it’s about.
In this section, we’ll look at the data points you can share with your YouTube videos to drive their early promotion on the platform.
9. Design Compelling Custom Thumbnails
Once you release a video on YouTube, the video platform’s algorithm sends it in the subscription and other feeds of a few relevant users to evaluate how they respond to it. Here, it competes for attention with lots of other videos and your thumbnail is its first visual impression.
What happens if the thumbnail doesn’t interest a prospective viewer?
They scroll past your video and this impression of your thumbnail goes waste.
So you need to convert each opportunity to earn views by designing compelling thumbnails. Get people to click through and start watching your videos.
When starting out, using screenshots from your videos as thumbnails is cool. That’s what Vlog style, entertaining channels continue with even in their long-term.
But for your newer videos, challenge yourself. Click a picture for the thumbnail and design on the top of it with a thumbnail template from tools such as Canva or Stencil. Educational channels creating evergreen content especially need such compelling custom thumbnails.
Look at the elegant usage of fonts and the red colored “review” word popping up in the thumbnail below. It complements the video title and description nicely as well.
Also, ensure a consistent look and feel of your thumbnails. Stick with a few colors and fonts that people can instantly recognize with your channel. The brand recall thus created will help you in getting repeat viewers — that can turn into your loyal subscribers.
For instance, look at the consistency in the thumbnail colors, fonts, and overall style from the The Great War channel below. There’s usage of yellow, black, and a relevant image from their videos.
10. Craft Persuasive Titles
Along with thumbnails, titles are the information a prospective viewer relies on to determine if your video is worth watching.
So how can you hook’em?
Try to create a curiosity gap and use emotional words (refer to a vocabulary list for the same). But don’t overpromise and underdeliver — else viewers will drop off in a few seconds after clicking on your video.
Use a free headline analyzer such as this one by the Advanced Marketing Institute to evaluate your titles. Suppose you create stock market tutorials on your channel. Here’s a possible title that earned a 60% score.
You can scroll to get detailed insights on what the score means.
I recommend you to write about 5-10 titles for every video before settling on the one which pairs well with your thumbnail.
Also, keep your titles succinct. Stuffing keywords and long phrases can get them truncated and decrease your CTR. Here’s an example:
But if you’re targeting video SEO, Briggsby data suggests some level of keyword usage as essential in the title. That’s how you’ll snag top positions in Google and YouTube SERPs.
What if you’re an entertainment channel?Then get informal in your titles. If you’re a solo creator, then use the pronoun “I” — your viewers will like it. Look at the example from Jaiden Animations below which I picked from the YouTube trending section (at the time of writing this article):
Here’s another one where the creator “Addison Rae” uses ALL CAPS and three exlacimation marks to show excitement!
Remember YouTube is a social media platform as well. So emojis, textspeak, and even the occasional slang are appreciated by users.
Sidenote: Earn more views by optimizing the headlines of your older videos
How would you like a few extra views from the existing videos on your channel?
Login to your YouTube analytics, find your videos with a low CTR but getting a decent number of impressions. If their content is still relevant, try updating their titles to include the current year. Also, use the tips in the above two tactics to make their thumbnails and titles click-worthy.
11. Write Crisp Video Descriptions
Your description informs the YouTube algorithm about your video’s topic. So for every video an educational channel publishes, it makes sense to write a unique 200 to 300 word description. Inclusion of your target keyword early on in it can improve your chances of ranking in search.
But don’t go overboard. As per Briggsby research I referred earlier, long descriptions could lead to a worse performance. So stay “tight & focused.”
Also, the first 125 characters of your description appear in the search results. So a prospective viewer might rely on them, along with the thumbnail and title, to decide which one they watch.
For example, look at the three descriptions below for the keyword “managing my budget.” The second video is an example of how not to do your description: focusing on yourself and using ALL CAPS.
The third video has a decent description but contains a typo. The first one has nicely used this sparse space — it contains the target keyword and introduces a rule to create intrigue. The title and thumbnail also go well with it.
You can also add links to other related videos, your website, and other social media profiles in your description.
Let me share an example of a Location Rebel video about becoming a freelance writer. They share three links at the top of the description. Two of them are from their website and relevant to the video. And one of the links is for subscribing to their channel.
As you scroll below, he links to two other resources from his website, which he recommends the viewer to check out after watching the video.
There’s a separate “Resources Mentioned” section:
And his social media links come at the bottom.
He has also used YouTube hashtags in his description, which you can also consider for your video.
You don’t need to get so extensive with external links, so adapt it as per your style and business requirements.
12. Niche Down To Improve This Important Metric…
There are various reasons for you to niche down your channel. The first is getting more videos from your channel pop up in the recommendations in the right sidebar.
In the example below, all videos in the “Up next” section are by Authority Hacker. Indeed YouTube automatically created a “Mix – Authority Hacker” playlist with videos exclusively from their channel. How cool is that for their session time?
The second one is narrower niches are easier to dominate as the competition is less.
But the most important reason probably is it builds a more loyal raving following of your channel. Let me explain:
When you hone in on your niche, you’re more likely to find your true fans who follow your channel religiously. When you publish a new video, they will watch it within those crucial 24 hours after its release.
But engaging them calls for creating content around their key interests. That’s how you get an above average CTR and watch time. And even with less views and subscribers, get in the good books of YouTube. Then the video platform might slowly start promoting you in recommendations and ranking you higher in search.
Once you’ve created enough videos on narrower subjects, you can consider expanding into broader ones. All of this calls for staying away from creating videos on a broad topic such as “cooking” to a niche one such as “tasty vegan recipes for weight loss.”
An example is Ingrid Nilsen who started her channel over a decade ago with a focus on makeup and beauty.
She later evolved it into a lifestyle channel over a wide range of topics including wellness, intentional living, and lots more as indicated by her playlists. Ingrid managed to scale her channel to 3.6M subscribers before calling it quits.
13. Mention Related Videos In Your Script
Cards and end screens are great tools to drive your viewers deeper into your channel and watch more of your videos. But mentioning related videos in your script as well could specially draw attention towards them and earn some views.
Sam Oh from Ahrefs often does this in his YouTube videos. He mentions linking in the description to the “full video” on the subtopics related to the subject he’s discussing right now. Such remarks in his scripts pique the curiosity of viewers interested in learning more on the subtopics.
And they can conveniently access these videos from the top of the video description box.
Nice way to get a few extra views and drive deeper engagement on your channel, aye?
But mention only related videos in the script of your current one.
If you want to promote your latest video from the descriptions of older ones, then try the “Description Promotion” from Vid2Vid Promotion in TubeBuddy.
In the following screen, enter your promotional message and the position where you want it to appear.
14. Add Relevant Tags
Keyword tags have had an on-off relationship with creators. YouTube used to describe them as important metadata, but recently shifted its stance stating its algorithm cares about what the audience cares — so titles and thumbnails are now more important than tags.
Ah.
But even today, there’s a weak correlation between usage of keyword-rich tags and rankings of videos. Further data from Briggsby indicates that their importance fades over time. So they are the most valuable in the first couple of weeks of publishing your videos, after which they won’t help its rankings.
Now I’ve written a complete guide on YouTube tags, but to summarize quickly:
- Use a couple of branded tags such as your channel’s name and your name,
- Sprinkle a few broad tags indicating your video’s topic such as “recipes” and “cooking”,
- Install TubeBuddy to add tags from competitor’s videos using Videolytics.
And use its keyword explorer to find and evaluate relevant long-tail phrases you can use as tags.
Using relevant tags can garner some eyeballs for your videos from YouTube recommendations. So it’s worth putting in that hard work!
15. Jump On YouTube Features In Beta
On social media, fresh content formats and features present an untapped opportunity to get discovered by new viewers. As they are launched to a limited number of creators initially, they are less competitive. They also carry a unique appeal because of this scarcity and are effective at engaging your audience.
For example, the video platform recently launched YouTube Shorts to compete with TikTok. It’s a short-form video experience for creators to shoot vertical videos from their mobile phones. A separate panel appears in the YouTube app showing these videos — even from channels a viewer isn’t subscriber to.
A separate button to directly find short videos was also made available at the top of my app:
MrBeast launched a dedicated channel to house his Shorts — and it has already garnered 2M subscribers.
Similarly, YouTube had earlier launched Stories to channels over 10k subscribers for engaging with audiences on the go. These videos function much like ephemeral content on other social media such as Instagram — expiring in 7 days. Stories also get a dedicated panel and can appear in the feeds of your non-subscribers as well.
Keeping up with the YouTube blog will keep you attuned with announcements of new features and content formats. Experiment with a novel feature and gauge if it helps you reach a new audience or engage better with existing subscribers. More exposure is equal to more views.
Stepping Up Your Distribution Engine
YouTube is an on-demand video platform and users can view your channel whenever they like.
Yet the viewership and engagement your video gets in the first 24 hours is crucial to its long-term performance.
Briggsby found that while older videos rank in search, new videos tend to have a “freshness boost” and snag higher rankings in their first few weeks.
So here are a few promotional tactics to maximize your YouTube views initially helping the video platform collect usage signals.
16. Sparingly Use YouTube Premieres To Create Anticipation
In its bid to emulate a movie/TV show premier, the video platform launched YouTube Premieres. It lets you schedule your pre-recorded videos and create a shareable watch page a few hours before they go live.
You can hang out with your audience, let them talk about video before release, and create some hype around it. But premiering videos sends a notification to your subscribers. Also, your viewers can’t scrub forward during the stream.
So use this feature sparingly for those “special” videos you feel are a “must watch” for your audience. How can you set a video as a premiere? Just check the “Set as instant Premier” box from the “Visibility” tab in your upload workflow.
If you’re launching a new series or show, then premiering its episodes makes sense to pique the curiosities of your subscribers. Here’s an Indian YouTube channel that premiered one of their show’s episodes to create some buzz.
Authority Hacker, an educational channel for affiliate marketers also likes to premiere every podcast episode they publish.
17. Schedule Videos To Give When Your Audience Is On YouTube…
YouTube has launched a “When your viewers are on YouTube” report, accessible by navigating from: YouTube Studio >> Channel Analytics >> Audience.
Here you’ll get a graph showing when your audience tends to be online on YouTube — not necessarily watching your videos. Smaller channels might see a “not enough viewer data” prompt.
Normally you’ll see a deeper purple color shade when a higher volume of your viewers are online.
Now, how should you use this data?
Well, the above report states “the publish time is not known to directly affect the long-term performance of a video.” But the view velocity of your videos tends to be the highest in the first couple of hours — unless they go viral.
So it makes sense to publish your videos when the maximum number of people are on YouTube (which is indicated by the darkest purple bars in the graph above).
Correct?
Not so fast.
Firstly, if you’re targeting a keyword for a video, it will take time to establish momentum. So the upload time won’t matter as much.
Secondly, scheduling a video at the peak time would mean competing with the hoards of other channels publishing their content and sending out notifications to viewers.
The opportune sweet spot to schedule your videos would probably be about an hour or two before the peak time. It lets your video accumulate views and engagement before the prime time of your channel. From there, the viewership of your video continues to grow.
Remember that uploading your videos also takes at least a couple of hours — especially if you tend to prepare your videos for publishing at the eleventh hour. You need to create thumbnails, add tags, fill in other metadata, and it takes time to process your video. So keep that in mind if you want the early momentum.
Note that if you’re creating topical videos around big events, news, and trends, then the days of the week and the time of publishing won’t matter as much.
18. Create Video Chapters
Just like a table of contents helps your readers better navigate your long-form articles, video chapters help viewers jump across long videos. For instance, here are the chapters of the Vidcon confessions video.
These chapters even started appearing in Google search results through their key moments feature. They let viewers start your video at the part relevant to them, or rewatch a section they found interesting.
The chapter markers also organize your content and let viewers scan videos — which is useful when viewers are watching your channel on-the-go. Even otherwise Google rankings are prime real estate for content creators. And the links to key anchor points of your videos can snag some clicks from Google SERPs — thereby earning views for your videos for free.
To add a chapter to a video, go to its “Edit Video” page. Then add timestamps with descriptive titles in the video description box. The first timestamp has to start at 0:00, and you need at least three chapters of 10 seconds or more in length to use this feature. Using either a space or hyphen will work as a separation between timestamps. Here’s an example:
Once you add the above information, chapter titles get updated and start appearing as segments in the scrubber bar of your videos — often immediately or latest within 24 hours.
Viewers can click on the chevron (“>”) next to the chapter titles of your video, to open a video chapters box on their mobile apps and on desktop. This makes it even more convenient to navigate across the video without scrolling down to the video description.
Use this feature for long interviews, educational how-to videos, and informational content. Comedy, entertainment, and any kind of fictional sketches are better off without them.
19. Embed Your Videos In Relevant Blog Posts
Do you also have a website with pages (blog posts or landing pages for your services/products) ranking in Google search?
Well, that free organic traffic could also get you a trickle of video views every month while improving the engagement on your website.
Simply start embedding relevant videos — where available — to the subjects of your pages.
Don’t have existing videos related to the content in your articles? Then consider producing videos on the subjects of your top trafficked blog posts as indicated by Google Analytics.
Ryan Robinson, a blogger and affiliate marketer, has adopted this strategy of producing LONG videos on subjects related to his long-form blog posts. Here’s a video he produced on naming a blog, which is also the subject of an article he published as visible in the video description he shares.
This strategy will work for most kinds of channels because most visitors love spending more time on websites with multimedia content. So it promotes your YouTube videos while sending positive signals to Google. All of it simply by repurposing your existing textual content!
20. Integrate YouTube Videos In Your Guest Posts
Guest posting is a content marketing tactic majorly leveraged by bloggers to promote their brands. It involves contributing articles to third-party authoritative websites in your industry.
If you fancy writing and are creating educational content on your channel, then guest posting could prove effective at growing your video views.
For one, many media publications give special preference to videos because readers love multimedia content. e27, a renowned startup and technology publication, encourages videos. It lets you submit articles shorter than usual when you add videos.
Two, your guest post’s ideation becomes easier. Your article has to appeal to the third-party website’s audience and provide you an opportunity to organically weave a couple of videos from your channel.
Suppose your channel is on self-improvement with videos around motivation, morning routine, staying mindful, and the like. You can write an article for a website such as Thrive Global on a subject like “unconventional ways to start your day.” And in this article, embed a couple of your videos, where relevant.
If possible, get your guest post published within 24 hours of releasing your video.
What if the third-party publication you’re writing for isn’t accommodating such requests?
Well, then keep its visibility as “Unlisted.” Change it to “Public” only when your article on the third-party website goes live!
New to guest posting?
Ann Gynn, the editor at Content Marketing Institute, a prominent B2B publication, lays down how to go about it in the video below:
21. Promote Your Videos On Pinterest
Among all social media networks, Pinterest continues to be the one where some sort of organic reach is still available for brands. As I showed in my Pinterest case study, growing a monthly audience to 410k from scratch in a few months is still possible on the platform.
As a YouTube creator, it means Pinterest can act as a distribution channel for you within a few months. Let me set the right expectation though:
- Depending on the popularity of your YouTube video’s subject on Pinterest, don’t expect beyond a few hundred to thousand views,
- You’ll need to post 20-25 updates every day for about two to three months to start seeing any kind of traction. Of course, scheduling tools like Tailwind help, but you’ve got to put in the work.
With those understandings in place, watch how Cathrin Manning uses Pinterest to drive traffic to her YouTube videos.
22. Answer Quora Questions And Include Your Relevant Videos In Them
If you run an educational how-to channel, Quora is a goldmine for finding the burning questions of your audience. And it could earn you a few hundred relevant views on your videos.
Suppose you run a cooking channel on YouTube where you share recipes. If you enter “recipes” in the search box, Quora returns the top questions people are asking. There’s also a follow button below showing the number of people following that question.
As you can see, Maggi recipes and healthy recipes on a budget are really sought after — and they could be great video ideas for your YouTube channel.
But the healthy recipes question has 100+ Answers (and so does the Maggi recipes question). So your answer can get lost among others.
I’ll prefer the question below on avocado as it has 78 answers and 200 people are still following it.
You can also promote your YouTube videos already on your channel by finding out questions relevant to their subject matter. For instance, Ross Simmonds, a digital strategist plugged his video on building a career in marketing without any connections while answering a Quora question on a similar subject.
Don’t forget to cross-promote your Quora answers on your other social media platforms. It drives more upvotes — and thereby extra visibility to your embedded YouTube video!
Want to take the above Quora tactic to the next level?
Then find out the top questions in your niche that get traffic from Google. You’ll need a paid SEO suite like Ahrefs for the same.
Let me show you how to go about it:
Plug Quora.com inside Ahrefs and go to its report showing the top pages of the website. Here enter phrases relevant to your niche such as “recipes.”
And bingo!
You’ve a completely new set of questions that are ranking for keywords in Google:
If you’ve relevant videos to the above questions, then answer them and embed your videos — you’ll get doubly benefits of audiences from both Google and Quora.
How cool is that?
Analyze Your Channel And Iterate
Once you’ve established your YouTube workflow and published videos regularly for a while, it’s time to analyze what’s working. YouTube analytics is a great place to start, but I’ll show you how you can top up your analysis with other YouTube tools. Let’s get started with the reports I recommend you to check out.
23. Use These Reports From YouTube Analytics
YouTube wants its users to spend more time on the platform so that it can show them more ads. That’s why retaining viewers on your channel is important. The metrics which you can track for this include your average view duration, your watch time, and session time.
But the most useful report is your audience retention. Try to find the reason behind abrupt drops in your retention. I found that adding a “click the bell icon” prompt at the beginning of my videos leads many viewers to suddenly drop off.
Maybe in your case, it’s usage of complex words that turns off your viewers. Whatever it is, your job is to fix your “leaky” idiosyncrasies in your future videos.
24. Conduct Regular Channel Audits
Regularly reviewing your channel could lend insights on how you can improve your ongoing content strategy. You can use reports inside YouTube Analytics to find out your videos sending you the most subscribers and your top sources of traffic on YouTube.
But vidIQ, a Chrome extension, has a channel audit functionality that shows how your content is performing in terms of percentages instantly. It includes key metrics of views, subscribers gained, and watch time with a default time frame of 30 days the top.
There’s even a “content to double down on” section which shows the videos trending right now on your channel. So you can create more of related videos.
I also like its section showing the top search terms for your channel, and the performance of the interactive tools: end screens and cards.
25. Perform Competitor Research
Is there a topic currently picking up speed and your competitors are gaining mileage by creating videos on it? Are they increasing their video uploading frequency for the upcoming holiday season? Or is there some other strategy they are following for interacting with subscribers?
You can monitor their views, subscribers, upload frequency, and other high-level metrics of your competition using the competitor scorecard by TubeBuddy. But I reckon manually visiting their channels, watching videos, and observing how they engage with subscribers.
For example, if you’re a marketing and business creator, visit a channel like Noah Kagan’s. He’s conducting live office sessions and recently offered coaching to three people.
This could inspire me to launch a similar challenge for my subscribers and get them hooked to my channel.
Watching videos could also provide inspiration for new content ideas for your channel, experimenting with the editing style of your videos, and working on your delivery.
26. Get’em To Subscribe
If you try to get a new audience to watch your new videos, growing your views will be a struggle.
What if you convert these new viewers into subscribers?
It builds a strong foundation for your YouTube channel. These subscribers can drop-in through bell notifications and updates in their subscribe feeds, providing an early momentum to your future videos.
So change your mindset from trying to increase YouTube views to considering how to grow your YouTube subscribers. Begin with making a direct ask to subscribe to your channel at the end of your videos. You can also use a clickable subscribe button from your end screen. Also, consider adding your highest-converting — viewers to subscribers — video here.
Replying to comments and trying to build a community around your YouTube channel can also help grow your subscribers faster. Additionally, I recommend you to read the other ways to get free YouTube subscribers.
Why You Shouldn’t Buy YouTube Views?
If you’ve come across a “free YouTube views increaser”, then know that using their services will probably be against YouTube’s terms of service.
Even if they promise “cheap YouTube views”, don’t buy them. Such tactics put your video and channel in danger of getting terminated. People who have experimented with such services reported views coming from an irrelevant audience and being taken down by YouTube.
You’re better off without such fake social proof. Put your energy in genuine ways to grow your YouTube brand — not some cheapskate way to “hack” the video platform.
Bonus: Leverage TrueView In-Stream Ads
While we discussed free ways to get your YouTube views, the quicker ways of growing are generally paid. In this case, investing in YouTube ads could provide flight to your videos.
But given that I persuaded you to not buy YouTube views, let me clarify my stance:
Third-party paid services that promise cheap YouTube views are unreliable and could get your channel penalized.
Paying for views to YouTube itself works well, especially if you’re monetizing your channel by selling your own products or recommending some as an affiliate.
Concluding Thoughts
The conversion of YouTube views to money ratio for most niches as low as $0.1 to $0.3. You need to experiment and integrate other strategies to make money from YouTube. But getting more views on every video you publish is how you grow your channel.
Now, none of the above tactics to get views on YouTube below would move mountains for your channel. But in the earlier stages of your channel — when your most viewed YouTube videos are a few hundred views — a little will go a long way.
Now it’s your turn to implement a few of the above tactics to boost your YouTube view count. Which ones will you start with? Let me know in the comments below.
