You just finished pouring your heart and soul into creating a great piece of video content. With so much content being uploaded to YouTube every minute, I can’t stress enough how important it is to properly optimize your video on YouTube. You need to get your video in front of your target audience in order to the most views possible. Here are some simple tricks to have your video standout.
Custom Thumbnail
Creating and uploading a custom thumbnail is an easy way to summarize your video in the picture. YouTube states that 90% of the best-performing videos have a custom thumbnail. Craft your thumbnail using high-quality images or screenshots from your video, making sure your image accurately tells the viewer what the video is going to be about. It’s important for your thumbnail to transfer well to mobile as the majority of YouTube views come from a mobile device. You can check this before posting by shrinking your image down to see how it looks when it’s tiny. A great custom thumbnail can get your video even more clicks.
Title, Description, Tags
It is important to give your video an accurate title that contains keywords about your video. Use those focus keywords in the video description and in the tags section as well. This is what YouTube crawls when it is looking for keywords to rank your video. Try to be as detailed as possible when writing your description: be sure to use the keywords you want to rank for in the title, description, and tags. The better the description, the better chance your video has to get ranked higher. You can also link to some of your other work in the description. Bonus Tip: you can even upload a transcript of your video and YouTube will crawl the text as well.
Share With Your Audience
To get your videos a base of view to start, share it with your existing audience right away on all of your social media channels. If you have email subscribers, send out a quick email with a link to your video. The quicker you build views to your video, the more YouTube will show your video and the more likely people will be to click on it. A video with 1,000 views looks better than a video with 100 views.
Share with External Audience
If your audience is viewing your video but not always sharing it, you might have to search outside your existing audience and find an external audience that would appreciate your video. Look into groups on Facebook or search hashtags on Twitter to find an audience that enjoys the theme or topic of your video. Reddit is a great source to use to get your video in front of a large audience. Find an appropriate subreddit on Reddit to post your video, but make sure your post follows the subreddits rules.
The trick to getting a lot of video views when you are creating video content is to find and develop your unique audience. Learn how we created unique videos for our clients and brought them over 10,000 views. It almost never happens overnight, but you have to create and develop your audience over time. Remember, consistency is key. Create and post videos on a consistent basis, and constantly reach out and try to expand your audience.
