.png){kind=logo}
Contents
By now, you should be aware of the fact that YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine after Google. This highlights the major role YouTube can play in the growth of a brand.
When it comes to YouTube videos, one crucial element that everyone looks for is views.
How do you get more views on YouTube? Without spending a penny?
This article is going to tell you exactly how to do that.
Tips to get more views on YouTube
Now, it's time to dive deeper into the tips covered in the infographic:
1. Create good content
Well, duh! None of the points given below would mean much if your video content is something people don’t want to see.
So, how do you make engaging content? It’s quite simple.
You just need to identify what your customers want to know about the most, and then make videos on such topics. How? We’ll discuss that in some time.
Your video is highly likely to gain more organic searches with good content. Here are a few ways you can make good content.
- Provide value:
You need to aim at giving viewers value for their time. Your video shouldn’t be made just for the sake of it.
Whether you’re entertaining, educating or simply engaging with them, make sure your video leaves an impact. They should have gained something useful by the time they've finished watching your video.
When your viewers find your videos valuable to them, they’re sure to come back for more.
- Script or Outline Video to Stay on Topic:
It’s easy to get carried away with too many ideas as you come up with the content for your video. In order to overcome this, script or outline your video so you know which direction your video content is heading.
This helps you stay on track and avoid mistakes that might arise as a result of not having a script to guide you.
- Practice Makes Perfect:
If you are starring in the video, it helps to prepare yourself well beforehand. This ensures that the final video will go off without a hitch.
Essentially, practice your body movements, diction, pronunciation and the overall flow of speech.
2. Nail the thumbnail
The first thing that a person sees when they find your video is the thumbnail. So yes, you need to give it an extra thought.
When you upload a video, you have the option of choosing a thumbnail suggested by YouTube.
Here’s another suggestion for you. Don’t choose any of them.
Instead, make your own video thumbnail. According to YouTube, 90% of the best performing videos use custom thumbnails.
Don’t make it an afterthought. In fact, think of your thumbnail well before you start making the video so you can capture options for it as you shoot.
Here are a few things to remember when trying to make one thumbnail that stands out.
- Be vibrant with the thumbnail. Use contrasting colors to really make the thumbnail pop.
- Use close-ups of faces with text overlays (preferably including your target keyword) that complement the thumbnail.
- From the technical side of things, YouTube recommends a 16:9 ratio video with a 1280 x 720-pixel resolution. While trying to keep a good resolution, make sure the file size isn’t bigger than 2MB.
- Your image should in one of these formats--.JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG.
3. Give the title the same amount of thought
A good, attention-grabbing title is just as important as a catchy thumbnail. Again, this is one of the first few things a person sees of your video.
A well-written title can be the deciding factor on whether they want to watch the video or skip right past it.
For instance, take a look at these two titles by Vsauce. Who wouldn’t want to know about it right?
Even if you’re going to be creative with it, it’s best to use a title that describes the video for what it is. This lets the viewer understand if your video is what they’re looking for.
If you can, it helps to add numbers to your title. This could be the number of tips you’re going to discuss, or simply the year.
Why is this important?
By having an accurate title for your video, the number of youtube views you get increases. This lets YouTube recognize your video as something people are actually looking for.
4. Optimize your channel (Title, Description, and Tags)
By now, you should know that CTR or clickthrough rates are important to increasing your video’s viewership.
A crucial step to increasing your CTR is keyword research and optimizing for SEO.
YouTube, being a search engine, values this above all. So yes, SEO matters.
Optimizing for SEO makes sure your video shows where and when it should, including ‘related videos’ and search listings.
The process starts with making videos on topics that people are interested in. Luckily, there are a lot of ways you can determine this.
To start with, there’s the YouTube search bar! Yup, you can just check out the ‘suggested searches’.
Here, you simply input your keyword into the suggestion bar and see what suggestions appear. This will help you determine what phrases or alternatives to use to gain a higher SEO rating.
Apart from this, you can use tools such as Google Ads Keyword Planner or Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer that clearly show you the interest rates of keywords and how often they are searched for on the internet, by country.
Once you’ve done research on your keyword, use it in your title, video and channel description, and tags.
- Title:
Use the keyword in your title. This helps YouTube understand what your video is about and also helps in finding your video with more ease. It helps to add the keyword at the beginning of the video as YouTube puts more weight when it’s the first thing in the title.
For instance, if your video is about making desserts, specifically how to make a chocolate cake, you could have a title that reads “How to Make a Chocolate cake in 10 minutes” with chocolate cake as the keyword. While this is a good title, it can be better.
Instead, a title that reads “Chocolate cake in 10 minutes” will have more weight because the keyword is at the beginning.
- Description:
This part of your video and channel is super important. It is almost like a mini-blog that helps YouTube and Google understand what your video is about. Try to keep the description length at about 250 words.
You must include your target keywords within the first two sentences of your description for the same reason that it has more value at the beginning. Do try to include your target keywords at least 2-3 times in the entire description.
You can also use the description to link the video to your website or blog to generate more traffic to them as well.
The same goes for your YouTube channel’s description.
- Tags:
While this is the least important of the list, they are still helpful in SEO ranking. As for the above, include the target keyword as the first tag and then add a few more relevant tags.
A good way to go about this is a technique explained by SEO expert Brian Dean, which he calls the TAB formula - Target, Alternate(2-3), and Broad(2-3) keywords.
Say, for instance, we take the same chocolate cake video. Chocolate cake is the target keyword, so use that first.
Alternate keywords (variations of the target keyword) could be ‘chocolate cake in 10 minutes’ and ‘chocolate cake recipe.’
Broad keywords (overall topic) could be ‘dessert recipes’ and ‘desserts.’
A very important point to note is not to add too many keywords or irrelevant keywords. This will give your video poor viewing experience. In fact, YouTube will penalize you for using too many or irrelevant keywords.
5. Check your transcriptions
YouTube is smart enough to automatically transcript your videos for you. However, for reasons like regional accents, it may not always get it right, so it’s best you double-check it before uploading.
Transcriptions or closed captions are very useful for you, especially if you’re an international business. It lets people from other regions understand your video too and that increases the organic traffic to your video.
This also lets Google and YouTube understand 100% of your video’s content.
6. Include a strong call to action
Don’t hold back from telling your viewers what to do with regards to your video. You need to tell them clearly whatever it is. Do you want them to subscribe, comment, like, share? Tell them.
One of the easiest ways to get more youtube views is by encouraging your audience to subscribe which increases the number of views on every new video you post.
This doesn’t just help with the videos. It helps with the overall channel.
It also helps to prompt your viewers to comment on your videos. Higher the number of comments there are, the more recognizable your video becomes to YouTube.
Don’t simply ask them to comment, however. It pays to specifically ask them what to comment on, like “Which method are you going to try?” or “What is your method of making a chocolate cake?”
Don’t just stop with subscribe and comment though. You might want to prompt them to hit the notification button too. This way, every time a new video is uploaded, they'll know.
7. Use youtube cards and end screens
User interaction within the video can prove beneficial to increase your watch time and session time (we’ll talk about those in some time).
There are two ways to do this: cards and end screens. They are both used to link to other related videos, blogs, websites or polls to ask viewers what more they’d like to see.
YouTube cards are those little pop-ups that appear at certain parts of the video. You can add them anywhere.
A good way to use them is to add them at points in your video where you have related content elsewhere that they might want to look into.
For instance, in your chocolate cake video, there comes a point where you mention alternate recipes for chocolate cakes. You can add cards at that portion linking to another recipe video for chocolate cakes.
You can add up to five cards in your video.
End screens are similar to cards, except they appear at the end of the video (surprise, surprise!).
You can use these to prompt your viewer into watching another video from your channel relating to the topic they just watched, or to add an on-screen subscribe button for them.
These are useful tools to present call-to-actions, leading your audience to watch more videos of your channel, thereby increasing youtube views.
8. Create playlists (and pay attention to title and layout)
YouTube’s biggest boon to content creators is the Auto-play function, that’s become the cause of almost thousands of youtube views. Let’s face it, when you’re on YouTube, you rarely stop with one video. That’s thanks to this feature.
Make use of it. How? Playlists.
Playlists are a bunch of related videos that you can group under a specific topic or theme. This lets the audience continue watching related videos consecutively, which hugely increases youtube views and session time.
You can create playlists on your own videos or you can use videos from other channels. However, since you’re trying to get views on your channel, it’s best to use your own.
Just like single videos, the playlist title is very important, helping in SEO ranking and catching attention when done right. So pay heed to the titles of your playlists.
Another point that might aid is the visual representation. While this may not be as important as the other points, it does play a part. When a page is visually appealing and easy to follow, attention is retained by a greater amount.
One way to do this is by alternating playlist layouts. You have the option of having a horizontal or vertical layout. By alternating between these layouts for each playlist, the page becomes easy to follow, which in some way retains your viewers on your page.
It doesn’t take much effort, honestly.
9. Get ‘Suggested Video’ views
The Suggested Videos are the related videos that YouTube promotes under the Up Next video.
These are videos that are generated based on what viewers may be interested in depending on what they were watching earlier, says YouTube.
YouTube uses your metadata (title, description, tags) to determine where you are ranked in the Suggested Video section.
How do you get suggested youtube views? Use tags that your channel’s competitors use. When they match those of very popular videos of your channel genre, they have a high chance of being ranked there.
Don’t underestimate the Suggested Videos list. It’s one of the biggest generators of organic traffic to a video or channel.
10. Understand the importance of watch time
YouTube has a complex algorithm. What you need to know, however, is that the way YouTube ranks videos is heavily based on ‘watch time.’
Watch time is simply the amount of time a viewer spends watching your video.
YouTube themselves mention that “videos are ranked by how much watch time they have and videos with higher watch times are likely to show up higher in search results and recommendations.”
Watch Time is what determines if your video shows up on the Homepage, Suggested Videos, Search Results or under the Subscriptions tab.
One good way to enhance this is by paying attention to your video length.
Now that you know how important watch time is, it only makes sense that YouTube would recommend you to make longer videos (around 8-15 minutes).
You can argue saying that our attention span has significantly reduced to lesser than that of a goldfish.
However, if your video content is fantastically engaging, people will watch the whole thing. And when that happens, your youtube views, watch and session time increases.
Every other step in this article are ways to maximize watch time and session time, which we’ll talk about next.
11. Understand the importance of session time too
You get how important watch time is. Now, you’ll see the importance of session time.
Session time is how much time a person spends on YouTube after watching a video. YouTube aims to get people to spend more time on the platform in general (duh!) so it’s best to increase session time as much as possible.
A simple way to maximize it is by placing your best videos on your end screens, channel page, and playlists. That way, you’re enticing people to watch more and more videos, increasing session time in the process.
Once again, like watch time, higher the session time, greater are your channel’s chances to be featured on the Homepage, Search and Subscriptions tab.
12. Enable video embedding
Assuming your video is going to be amazing (which it will be because we have faith in you), people might want to share it by featuring it on their blogs or websites. When this happens, it will be a bummer if they can’t embed the video!
Always make sure your video’s embed option is enabled. This way, people are encouraged to share it. When they do share it, you have a very high chance of gaining more views from a newer audience.
Oh, and also, you’ll start to rank higher in YouTube’s search results. It’s a win-win.
13. Feature it on your blog
Please do!
Embedded videos outside is a great way to receive tons of new youtube views for your video, so make sure to feature it on your blogs…...relevant blogs.
Don’t simply link it everywhere. It will be more a bane than a boon.
14. Promote on other social channels as native videos
Social media is a great promoter for pretty much anything if you know how to work it. Use it!
Remember one crucial point though. Like YouTube, other platforms like Facebook and Twitter try to keep people on their platform for as long as possible. This means when you link a YouTube video just like that, their algorithm will try to hide it.
How do you overcome this? Post them as native videos.
15. Answer questions on popular forums
Another great way to gain more views is by checking out online communities like Reddit and Quora. These communities tend to have a lot of people asking a lot of questions. And who knows, you might have the answer to some of them.
Dig through these forums to find a question of good value that you can answer. You can then simply link your video there (with some basic information as well, obviously), and you’ll never know how many other people benefit from it.
However, keep in mind not to go around answering irrelevant questions. There are better things you can do with that time.
Instead, find videos that you think a majority actually want to know about. This way, your video becomes relevant to a lot more people and has a higher chance of gaining the views you desire.
16. Rank your video on Google search too
Understand this. It’s not just about being ranked on YouTube as #1. You should try ranking on Google’s search results too.
There are two ways you can do this.
One, say your target keyword out loud in the video. No, we don’t mean keep screaming chocolate cake out loud. That’s just weird.
Whenever you mention your target keyword (4 or 5 times should do), make sure you enunciate it clearly because Google actually picks up on this to understand your video better.
Second, use transcripts. This lets Google understand 100% of your video as we’ve already mentioned earlier.
You have a good chance of ranking your video on Google’s search results this way.
17. Pick a niche topic
For new content creators, it can be tempting to make a variety of videos. While this is lovely, it gets confusing for viewers because there isn’t a specific genre for them to follow.
Instead, pick a niche and stick to it. So if you’re niche is dessert recipes, stick to it. As simple as that.
18. Build a niche community and be active
YouTube is more than just a search engine. It’s a social network too.
This simply means, use YouTube like any other social network platform to gain more views. It’s more than just regularly posting videos. It’s about interacting with viewers to make them feel like a part of your channel.
When people comment, it helps to take the time and respond to those comments. And come on, it doesn’t take more than a minute to do that.
This encourages more people to comment and engage directly with you, building a set of passionate and loyal fans along the way. This also boosts your YouTube ranking.
In the same way, take the time to engage with other channels within your niche too. Comment on their videos, share them and show them you’re an active member of their community too.
This builds a healthy relationship between other channels who’ll actively want to help with promoting your channel too.
Viewers will notice when you generously comment on other communities, establishing your brand in the niche community as authentic and engaging.
19. Invite guests to your channel
Don’t feel shy to invite other influencers from your niche to feature in your videos. This is a great way to boost your youtube views.
When people recognize other familiar faces in your videos, they’re going to want to watch it.
As mentioned earlier, building healthy relationships with other prominent figures from your niche can be rewarding. They will share your videos in their community, which can lead to a huge boost in views.
Another plus point to inviting guest bloggers to viewers is the added opinion or skill to check out in your video. It adds variety and creativity that will keep viewers interested.
20. Be updated with trends
This is an important tip to keep in mind with regards to make interesting content. When you make videos on topics that are currently under viewers’ attention radars, it’s a sure-fire way to gain more youtube views.
One way to find out what’s trending on YouTube is by spending some time on YouTube’s very own Trending page. However, it can be heavily pop-culture oriented.
You can also use tools such as YouTube Trends Dashboard, or the Chrome extensions of VidIQ and Tubebuddy, which offers a ‘most viewed’ tool to see what’s trending.
21. Look at analytics
If people tell you YouTube analytics aren’t important, they’re wrong!
If you want to know how well your videos are doing exactly, you need to start using YouTube Analytics.
It has everything you need. Quoting YouTube themselves, Analytics helps you answer these four crucial questions.
- How is your channel doing?
- Who is watching and what are they interested in?
- How engaged is your audience to your videos and channel? Are they sharing and liking it?
- How much money are you making with your channel?
That’s right. It gives you detailed answers to all of them!
Watch time reports, real-time reports (great for newly added videos), interaction reports, what age, gender and even where they’re watching from!
Yup, we weren’t kidding when we said everything.
Pay close attention to the trends and stats provided by YouTube Analytics. They help you understand how you might need to improve your videos, and what other actions you must take to ensure more people watch and share.
It’s brilliant. Don’t take it lightly, regardless of what people may say otherwise.
It’s your turn now!
Voila! You’ve made it to the end! With 21 tips on how to get more YouTube views.
As you’ve noticed, YouTube’s algorithms are wildly vast, but not difficult to understand. It’s quite simple when you realize it’s a matter of connecting with your audience and knowing the vitals when actually uploading the video on YouTube.
We hope this guide is helpful to you. If you feel we’ve missed out on anything, go right on and let us know in the comments below.
Now that you know everything you need to get maximum views, it’s time to make yourself proud.
As always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact us. We’re here to help you anytime!
