YouTube 101 Strategies
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With the ability to make somewhere around $5 on every 1000 views on your uploaded content, YouTube is the place where you want to be at if you have tons of content for viewers to watch.
Though you don’t get paid for subscribers, they are indefinitely valuable as they are more likely to comment and share your videos, thus bringing in more viewers.
If you do the math correctly, a YouTuber can make $5000 per 1 million views. For a modern-day influencer, this is perhaps as lucrative as things get in current times.
Furthermore, it should be noted that the more views you get on your YouTube channel, the more likely you are to earn viewer’s likes for them.
According to a recent press release by YouTube, there are nearly 2 billion users, and the platform widely reaches audiences all across the world, with smartphones being the most popular choice of device.
Furthermore, YouTube has been localized for more than 100 countries and accessible in more than 80 different languages.
In light of this information, let’s take a quick look at some of the ways through which you can grow your YouTube channel’s likes organically:
How to Grow Your YouTube Channel
Ten tips and tricks to increase your YouTube channel like organically:
1. Art of Using Thumbnails
Thumbnails on YouTube can be evidently used as ‘click-bait,’ and for that reason mastering the art of creating the perfect thumbnails should be a priority on your list. Thumbnails do matter as they are the first thing people see in their feed before they even visit your video online.
This is where you grab their attention and make them crave for more.
Hence when you professionally design your YouTube thumbnail, it can make your brand or channel to improve CTRs (click-through rates). This means that with the likelihood for them to be watched increases so does your ability to earn likes improves.
For starters, you should consider the right thumbnail size, which is around 1280 x 720, with a minimum width of 640 pixels. YouTube favors the aspect ratio of 16:9, so stick with that.
However, keep the image size under the 2 MB limit, so essentially PNG, JPG, and BIMP file formats would do fine. Picture quality has to be impeccable as your thumbnail is ideally a teaser for what the video is all about.
You can also include title text to categorize your videos like reviews, top picks, unboxing, most popular, limited stock, discount offers, etc. But make sure to be consistent with your theme. Make sure that the fonts you use are easy to read.
Lastly, branded YouTube thumbnail templates work great to make your videos look distinguished and easily identifiable, amongst numerous other suggestions. This makes them easy to pick out by a subscriber or user. Naturally thumbnails that showcase exciting video content are more viable to receive likes from users.
2. Brand Your Channel
We already have an understanding of branded thumbnail templates for YouTube videos; however, let’s take branding for your YouTube channel up a notch. Since we are talking about an online streaming service, visuals will undeniably play an important role.
You can find a reasonable quick starters guide on the YouTube Creator Academy that can get things started. However, it is important that you understand your niche first and make targeted approaches through your YouTube channel.
Secondly, it is important that you understand one superpower that you have that you can play with throughout your content; every person has at least one talent where they are unbeatable. Hence this can allow you to earn likes on your videos from likeminded people who are interested in the type of content that you produce.
Canva and Picmonkey are great for beginners to create templates that can be used over and over again for those who are not prodigies at Photoshop. Next up, you have your channels’ Homepage where most subscribers show up. Here is where the majority of the artwork (banner) for your channel lives.
However, understand that people love consistency, so you can’t just go around changing this portion of your channel every now and then. The artwork should speak about you and your niche. You can also add a brief reflection if you prefer. A professional logo will do wonders nonetheless.
Apart from a bright profile pic for your channel, make sure to choose or create a great channel trailer for your audiences and prospects. This will eventually get them hooked and offer you a tremendous opportunity to garnish their likes in the future.
3. Optimize for Watch Time
The first thing you need to do is to find out the Watched Hours for your own channel. To do this, you simply need to log into YouTube and visit the Creator Studio. Here when you click on the ‘Analytics’ option, you can change the view to the ‘last 365 days’.
This will inform you of how much time people spend watching your content. Whenever the watch time for your content improves it also increases the possibility of earning more likes from viewers. Now let’s focus on improving your watch time.
One of the best strategies is to utilize user preferences and upload posts at the right time. Posting earlier on the weekends can be a reasonable approach as most users have time on their hand, plus you can avoid posting on Mondays because that is when the workweek starts.
Next up, you should consider creating playlists for viewers to watch as this exponentially increases their time spent on your content and stack up on minutes and hours. You should also consider adding links to other content in your video and description to keep users watching your content even when they finish watching your video.
The idea is to keep them hooked. End Slates here can also be used to keep viewers from ending their watch time on your channel.
In order to keep your users from getting bored, consider adding teasers at the very start of your video, the first 15 minutes are the key and can be used to excite viewers to watch till the end. This is also the primary window where you can score the majority of likes on your videos.
4. Use Existing Content for New Content
Now there are times when you simply run out of ideas, and this is similar to an author experiencing a writer’s block where new notions or concepts just stop and there you are sitting with an empty mind. However, the pressure to create new content and excite your viewers is always there.
In times like this, consider the option of creating new content by using old content already existing on your channel. For instance, you are a tech geek who regularly reviews consumer electronic items, so here you can create a round-up list for the best headphones or speakers by selecting them from reviews you have already made in the past.
Or you could simply post sequels or reflections on the posts you had created before that got a nice review from your audiences. This will help you acquire more likes for those videos that are a continuation of previously liked videos.
Plus, you always have the option to repurpose your old content or make it more enhanced. You can add additional information to older videos or create a separate video that you may consider helpful or informative for your audiences.
You can even look for content that you may have produced for other social media platforms and find a way to integrate them into a video. It is much easier to multiply relevant topics into different interesting pieces, then trying to find a new subject or theme.
Plus viewers who have appreciated your previous efforts are also likely to share their love by liking videos for content that they found fascinating and deserved another mention.
5. Feasible Production Workflow
When you decide to promote your channel, there comes a situation where you just cannot manage everything alone. While many channel creators and owners on YouTube do a fine job of handling and managing the flow of production, there are times when a hands-on job simply doesn’t cut it anymore.
This is where you might look forward to professional assistance and services. Like video editors, cameramen, graphic designers, scriptwriters, and other tidbits specialists. Together when you divide work equally, the workflow and your production of new content receive a definite boost.
This also improves the chances of increasing likes on your videos as you will be able to produce and publish more content for your audiences.
You suddenly experience more time on your hands to do more. Then there is automation that can simply carry out repetitive tasks that are necessary, take time, but are an obligation. You can easily search tools online that can relate to a particular function to drive your business.
For instance, social media tools help you analyze performance, manage bulk scheduling of uploads, and share videos on multiple platforms. Likewise, financial tools like Bill.com and InvoiceSherpa can help you manage invoices and billing activities.
In the end, you must decide to stick with those tasks that you are good at and try outsourcing the rest to get more time for yourself and manage your workflow effectively. This will also help improve the quality of your videos, with enhanced use of graphics, and superior editing. All of this in return will make your video more likable for the audience.
6. Develop Keyword/Topic Focused Content
If you want to amplify your channel and videos’ ability to show up in suggestions of users and their feeds as well as recommendations, keyword research can do a great job for you. This involves the study of people and their use of search queries for video content online.
This will augment your videos visibility and thus automatically increase the probability for them to be watched and liked by users.
Many critics and experts consider YouTube to be the world’s 2nd most popular search engine. Therefore there is a huge room for you to optimize your videos around popular keywords. This will, in the end, help you get significantly get more views.
The autocomplete option on YouTube suggests popular keywords or phrases, and this could be a good starting point to consider in your research. You can also find a lot of long-tail keywords that specify user intent and purpose to a great degree.
These keywords go directly into not only your video’s title but also the decryption for each. The same goes for Channel’s description. Optimizing your channel keywords boost your overall rankings, and this undeniably affects YouTube SEO ranking.
Always consider user preferences when using keywords for your channel. They should directly relate with the type of content you create, plus use several but limited keywords as much as 7-10 to keep yourself safe from diluting the importance of each mention on your channel.
The reason why we are emphasizing this is because catering to user demand offers you a great possibility to satisfy audience through gratifying content thus leading to increase in the number of likes on your videos.
7. Creating & Publishing Content Frequently
It is important here to realize that as a publicly accessible domain that fosters social interaction, YouTube viewers are always on the lookout for new and exciting content. On average, a user can have multiple subscriptions, which makes it all the more enjoyable for them to find published videos and choose from what is suggested on their feed.
Users like videos and subscribe to those channels that offer them gratifying content.
Likewise, if you want to keep your audiences’ attention, you need to provide them with a solid reason to stick with your channel. Frequently uploading new videos and publishing content looks excellent for your library as well.
A user or a subscriber can smoothly go through the plethora of videos you have uploaded at that point in time and select several of them or add it to their watch list (watch later option on YouTube).
You can follow up on this periodic cycle or develop your own routine for publishing content. Many channels offer weekly updates and new posts every week. This allows them to live on the top of viewers’ minds while others even get addicted and request more videos on a certain topic, subject, or theme.
However, you can also stay flexible as it gives you a great opportunity to cash-in on current trends or timely events. Likewise, higher education students also use professional essay editing service UK from experts to help them put their focus on other essential tasks.
Plus when you publish content frequently you make users more engaged with your channel and this can lead them to comment, like, and share your video more often.
8. Pushing for More Subscriptions
You already know that subscribers act like advocates to your channel since their strength due to numbers brings in a lot of credibility and trust for your channel. Furthermore, they are the most probable users to like your videos and share them on other platforms.
This is why, as a YouTube Channel owner, you need to push for more subscriptions. Publishing long videos that are 10+ minutes is a nice way of achieving that. Then you can also create power playlists that categorize your media into broad or relatable topics.
Next up, you should consider promoting your own media at the end of your screen. The idea is to encourage users not just to watch one of your videos but get them to see a couple, several, or even a dozen of your content.
Make them addicted to your videos! Then, you can add to your videos the Branding Watermark, which lets viewers subscribe to your services easily. However, it should be noted that the YouTube user community highly favors quality over quantity.
The quality of your videos needs nothing less than 100%; otherwise, you can just keep building your library and still have no one watching your content. However once you build your family of subscribers, they will definitely bump up the number of likes on your videos.
9. Leveraging Social Networks for Sharing
While YouTube itself is widely recognized as a Social Media platform, it offers you the ability to share your videos on other social media networks as well. This can incredibly augment the traction you want to get for your efforts.
When your videos are shared on other platforms, it increases their visibility and thus improve your chances to earn more likes.
You can use various platforms to build up cohesive excitement, and you can bank on your followership from Facebook and Instagram to nurture your YouTube Channel.
All you need to do is simply introduce your channel to your followers and let the magic begin. For Facebook specifically, you can use the Native Video Uploader tool for your YouTube videos with a call to action, in the end, asking viewers to link, like, share, and subscribe to your channel.
Lastly, there are your fans who themselves are powerhouses when it comes to comments. They can provide you with delightful insights. No one amongst us can confess to be a ‘Know it All,’ fans and followers offer you terrific learning and improvements for your channel.
The more you share your videos the more viewership you get for your channel and this tremendously increases your chances of hogging up all those likes.
10. YouTube Cards
YouTube cards are the interactive cards that show up usually by the end of a video. This lets you and other creators share clickable links to provide relevant videos for your audiences and other sources.
You can add up to 5 cards to each video in order to promote a relatable video, your YouTube channel, user-generated content (polls), your website, or even to a charity (for US-based users only at the moment).
To add YouTube cards to your video, simply visit the Creator Studio on YouTube, select any video as per your choice, click on edit, and select ‘Cards’ from the drop-down menu. With YouTube cards you can undoubtedly monopolize by continuing to receive likes for several videos at a time.
11. Giving Incentives
Lastly you can always give incentives to viewers online to promote your video content online. You can set milestones for each user when they agree to participate and in return you can offer them some tangible benefits or noteworthy rewards. Perhaps the easiest gimmick that you can run is to offer them promotional items or giveaways for liking and sharing your videos.
Conclusion
There is still a lot that you can do with your YouTube channel, and there is no doubt that social media influencers use this popular platform to earn millions of dollars in revenue. People like PewDiePie, Logan Paul, Nastya, Ryan, and Jeffree Star top the list for the richest YouTubers in the world right now.
I sincerely hope this post was able to offer you some meaningful pieces of advice to grow your channel. For more questions regarding the topic, feel free to share your thoughts and feedback in the comment section below.
