How to Get More Views on Youtube and Grow Your Youtube Channel
We are going to discover how to Grow Your Youtube Channel by optimising your existing content in 10 easy to follow steps so that we can get more views. But that is not all. In the second part of this video, I will show you 15 steps you can take to ensure that your new videos are even better and will help to further accelerate the growth of your channel by giving them the best chance to be ranked right out of the gate.
05:07 Step 1 – Keyword Research
06:49 Step 2 – Search Volumes
08:39 Step 3 – Checking Out the Competition
12:43 Step 4 Channel Optimisation
14:06 Step 5 Title Optimisation
14:41 Step 6 Description Optimisation
17:23 Step 7 Tag and Thumbnail Optimisation
18:52 Step 8 Giving Your Video’s a Boost
20:07 Step 9 Branding Subscribe Button
21:31 Step 10 – End Screen Cards
22:43 Step 11 Summary of Key Steps to Grow Your Channel
25:49 Step 12 – Rinse Repeat and Track
26:26 15 Step Check List to Better Youtube Videos
Why is this important?
If you want to make money on Youtube by monetising your channel you need 1000 subscribers and 4000 public watch hours in the past 12 months. Growing a channel and getting more views has never been more important.
But how do you get more views?
You have to create a virtuous circle.
Step 1 Create a great video and publish it the right way on Youtube – we are going to show you how
Step 2 Get views on your video – also part of this tutorial
Step 3 Get your audience to like and comment on the video and subscribe to your channel showing Youtube what a great video it is – yes we explain that too!
Step 4 Youtube will show it to more viewers which helps it to get more views.
Step 5 Create your next video and on you go!
Let me ask Do you have this problem?
I Have one Business Development video which has nearly 60,000 views but my other Business Development videos have nowhere near to this. If I want to effectively monetise my channel my content is going to have to start performing. Having made over 4,000 videos for online courses, I have the skills and now need to apply them to Youtube – and I am going to show you how to do this.
I am going to show you how to grow your channel, increase your subscribers and views by optimising your existing content for Youtube today.
This will help your existing videos work harder for you and if you implement all the steps I will show you – while I cannot guarantee results – I am confident they will work and help your channel to grow faster. I am so confident about this that I am doing them myself.
In Part 1 I will share 12 Steps to help you to grow your Channel by optimising your existing videos.
But that is not all…
In Part 2 of this video, I will share 15 steps you can take to ensure that your new videos continue to accelerate this growth in subscribers, view time and monetisation.
If you are new to Youtube then this is still going to work for you even if you have no views and no subscribers.
Before we get started, don’t forget to subscribe to my Channel to make sure that you don’t miss any of my future actionable videos and if you enjoy the content drop me thumbs up. If you have any questions, ask them in the comments below – and I will do my best to answer them!
So lets get started right away
Step 1 – Keyword Research
The first step is to discover the main keywords which are driving your existing videos and see if we can improve them
In an ideal world we would do all this keyword research before we even started making our videos and we would ensure that these keywords are reflected in the name of the video file itself as well as the Youtube video title which should be the same.
The title of my “star” video is: Business Development and Sales: The Keys to Success in Business Development and Sales
Open an incognito window to remove your browsing history and cookies.
The Keyword Business Development in the search bar delivers a range of longer tail keywords:
[Business Development Keywords.png]
Business Development Manager
Business Development
Business Development strategies
Business Development executive
Business Development manager interview
Business Development recruitment
Business Development plan
Business Development representative
Business Development executive questions and answers
Business Development director
Business Development associate
Business Development course
Business Development training
Business Development interview
Business Development and Sales offers
[Business Development and Sales Keywords.png]
Business Development and Sales
Business Development and Sales interview
Business Development and Sales skills
Business Development and Sales job description
Difference between Business Development and Sales
Business Development representative salesforce
Business Development associate sales
Business Development associate in the sales and marketing team
Sales and Business Development manager interview questions
If we go into the analytics for our “star” video, Youtube shows us which keywords have been used to find the video and it ranks them in order
This shows that these are the top 5:
Business Strategies – 364 views (29.9%)
Business Development – 225 views (15.4%)
Business Development Manager – 94 views (6.4%)
Business Development Course – 33 views (2.3%)
Business Development executive – 24 views (1.6%)
Interestingly the video also has a high percentage watch time for many of these metrics – greater than 50% and this must be helping it to rank.
Step 2 – Search Volumes
But what are the search volumes for these keywords – for this we turn on Keywords Anywhere, a chrome plugin, and include suggested keywords
Business Development Search Volumes.png
Business Development and Sales Search Volumes.png
This shows us that Business Development has 14,800 searches a month but Business Development and Sales has only 170 searches a month. The competition for Business Development is also high as the price per click is $5.24 whereas Business Development and Sales is only $0.03
Other interesting keywords (>1,000 searches a month) are:
Business Development Strategies 1,000/mo
Business Development Representative 2,400/mo
Business Development Director 1,9000 /mo
So we have to ask how is our “Star” video doing so well. The answer lies in the video analytics
If you look at the analytics and check Traffic Sources over the past 48 hours – I can see that the video gets 58.8% of its views from Suggested Videos and 35.3% from Youtube search. This is a major step forward.
If we look at the same stats over 28 days a similar but more balanced picture emerges
Suggested Videos is 45.4% and Youtube Search is 41.7%
This is also a strong pointer towards the strategies we need to follow for our other videos.
Step 3 – Checking Out the Competition
Lets do a search, with VIDIQ turned on so we can see tags and other useful data, on our major keywords
Business Development
Business Development and Sales
Business Development Strategies
We want to see what keywords this throws up and what tags it reveals. We also want to identify the main competing videos which we can use to our advantage later.
We need to put our keywords in to Youtube Search and then filter by Highest View Count
I suggest that we focus on English language videos only
This page has a lot of valuable information on it for us to absorb. Note that I have the free version of VidIq running (https://app.vidiq.com/) and I suggest that you download and install it.
Competition
The competition score is 59/100 and the competition is rated low which means this is a great keyword to work with. The overall score is Medium which is still worth working with.
Top Channels
Top Channels for Business Development.png
The three top channels for this keyword are shown. None of these are English language channels which is interesting – India and China being the leaders. However, we can still learn from their keywords.
Related Trends
This shows us more related keywords
How To Business Development
Business Development Manager
Business Development Executive
Web Development Business = not relevant
Business Development Strategies also appears on the second page.
We can look directly into Google Trends to see for ourself
The trends for this search term are consistently strong over time
Video Titles
Some of the eye catching video titles are:
Top 10 Most Effective Strategies for Marketing
10 Revolutionary Steps for Business Success
10 Keys to Business Development
What is Business Development?
Creating a Strategic Business Development Plan
We can also take a look (incognito) at the videos which are suggested against my “star” video. This is very revealing
Business Development Basics: A Client-Centric Approach –
31K views
Business Development
67K views
The Psychology of Selling: 13 Steps to Selling that Actually Work
430k views
How to Improve Your Sales Process and Increase Business
647k views
7 Strategies to Grow Your Business | Brian Tracy
101k views
Selling The Invisible: Four Keys To Selling Services
1.01M views
These videos are all potentially useful when we come to optimising our videos to compete in Youtube.
Suggested Videos in Video Analytics
The analytics for our “star” video help us to identify which videos are “suggested” along side our video
These include
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Interview Questions And Answers
What is the job of a Business Development Manager about, Katharine?
What Is Business Development
What is a Business Development Executive?
Lets summarise here:
These suggested videos are useful to identify keywords in the titles, competitor channels and tags.
Step 4 Channel Optimisation
Lets start the process of Optimising my Business Development Videos in my Channel.
The first thing to do is to establish the benchmark so I have created a spreadsheet of all 30 videos and want to record their name, link, date of publication and number of views today. I am also making a note of how long the videos are as view time is such an important metric.
This means that we are going to be able to measure how these videos perform in the coming weeks after we have optimised them.
If you want you could dive more deeply into the analytics and get average watch time and Click Through Rate (CTR) but this is optional at this point.
The goal is to optimise all the videos to a limited extent but to focus our optimisation on the most successful and longest videos. 80:20 really works here.
The first step to optimise my Channel is to create a Business Development Playlist and to add all the videos to it.
This is simple to do. Create a new Playlist.
Then simply search your Video list by the Business Development search term, show all and then add them to the new Playlist. It takes less than a minute to do.
Step 5 Title Optimisation
We have learned a considerable amount about Keywords and the main keyword we are going to focus on is “Business Development”
While most of the videos have this in the title, we can still amend the titles to try to optimise for search and this is what I am going to do next.
The Star Video repeats Business Development and Sales twice in the title. in parentheses to most of the titles to reinforce the search impact.
Step 6 Description Optimisation
In optimising the video descriptions I am trying to address a number of issues, not just Youtube SEO, as you will see.
I will add a line or two at the beginning of each video repeating the keywords and provide a few suggestions for other videos they might like to watch which are related to Business Development.
I will also include a Call To Action to subscribe to my Channel and ask them, in the comments, which strategy are they going to implement first – please comment below.
I have a call to action to subscribe to my Six Minute Strategist Academy and links to show where they can follow me on Social media.
I am also including a Call To Action linking to my three main Udemy Business Strategy Courses which ought to help with a few sales there over time.
This can be a cut and paste exercise: This is what I have created as a template for my Business Development videos
Business Development Strategies and Sales for Business Development Directors, Business Development Representatives, Business Development Managers and Business Development Executives. These videos will help you with your Business Development interviews if you are looking for a job.
This is one comment from a viewer after watching one of my Business Development videos:
“I prepared my whole interview for the BDR role I was applying to with your video and I GOT THE JOB!!! Thank you!” S.B.
SUBSCRIBE NOW: If you liked this video make sure that you subscribe to my Youtube Channel right now. That way you won’t miss out on more actionable videos like this one. Just click on the subscribe button on this page now.
QUESTION: Which of the actionable strategies in this video are you going to implement first? Share this with us by leaving a comment below.
You may enjoy these videos from the same course:
“Business Development and Sales”: The First Meeting – https://youtu.be/hDHvsH9NP3Q
“Business Development and Sales”: Materials and Reports – https://youtu.be/FkSu1HIt_hk
“Business Development and Sales”: The Pitch – https://youtu.be/YMEgJWdP9Hk
Business Development and Sales: The Keys to Success in Business Development and Sales – https://youtu.be/RgNV2D2c5_w
❤ Are you ready for my Business Strategy Courses?
❤ Business Fundamentals: Business Strategy 2 Business Plan –
❤ B2B Sales: Sales Skills To Close High Ticket Sales
❤ Business Development Coaching for Cold Calling and Sales
❤ Follow me:
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LEARN: https://www.udemy.com/user/johncolley/
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Join my Online Learning Club Facebook Group to discover more about creating, publishing and selling profitable Online Courses
Step 7 Tag and Thumbnail Optimisation
Tag Optimisation
I also want to optimise the tags to match in with my Star Video and then improve them, although I am not touching anything on the Star video. These tags you can see below come to 487 characters of the 500 character limit.
Business Development,
Business strategies,
Business Sales,
Business Development Strategies,
Business Development representative,
Business Development Director,
sales, Business, development
corporate strategy,
Udemy,
Plan,
online course,
Leadership,
Marketing,
small business,
home business,
business startup,
sales training,
Success,
Selling,
Presentation,
Prospecting,
small business marketing,
channel marketing,
business strategy,
6msacademy,
john colley,
six minute strategist,
Thumbnail Optimisation
I want to get more impact with my Thumbnails and so I am going to use Keynote (Powerpoint is fine) to create higher impact Thumbnails for all my Business Development Videos
The key to the design is having a background colour that really pops out.
When I look at the top ranked video in this space and the videos that Youtube suggests, the thumbnails are all very busy but also very mono chrome.
I am going with:
Simple design with me on the front as I always to
Three Short Words with (Business Development Strategies and Sales) in parentheses underneath
And….a bright green background.
This means, following the colour wheel opposites that my words need to be in Violet Red to stand out.
Sample Thumbnail.png
You can see the difference the update has made from this screenshot. Time will tell to see how this optimisation will impact future views!
Business Development Videos after update.png
Step 8 Giving Your Video’s a Boost
While we are working on our videos its very easy to set them up for some promotions and it will help them to get a refreshing boost from external traffic to bring them back to Youtube’s attention.
This will require some scheduling to Social Media Channels and I will do this with Promo Republic although any of the social scheduling tools like Buffer or Hootsuite will do just as well.
Promo Republic enables me to schedule posts to a range of social accounts simultaneously. These include Twitter, Linkedin, my Facebook Pages, my Facebook Groups and Instagram, the latter needs approval through the Promo Republic App on my mobile phone.
I can schedule these to go out one a day for the next month to all these accounts and can customise the messages for each platform if I wish. I create the main message and link in Youtube and add a short comment about Business Development Strategy and Sales with hashtags:
“Discover #business #development #strategy and #sales insights in this video from my Channel.”
I also use my Video Thumbnails as Images.
Step 9 Branding Subscribe Button
As we have seen getting subscribers is a critical part of growing your channel and getting more views. This tip is something that takes seconds to implement but will reap rewards long into the future. We are going to put a subscribe button on all your existing and future videos.
Go to your Youtube Studio and go down to Settings
Then go to Channel and then Branding
In the branding window you have a chance to put a 150px by 150px image with one or two colours in the bottom right hand corner of every video. Use a PNG file and make sure its 150 by 150 pixels
Create an image which has the Youtube Arrow Button and Subscribe or Subscribe Now underneath
Upload the image and then select custom start time and set this to 5 seconds. This means that the image will appear and catch the attention of the watcher. This is better in my view than having the image there for the whole video.
Now click save and you now have a subscribe button on every live video on your channel.
Step 10 – End Screen Cards
These are another opportunity to remind your watcher to subscribe to your channel. This is very simple to do whether your video is uploaded already or you can do it as part of the upload process. Creating the End Screen is the same process either way.
If your video is already uploaded and live, then I suggest it is still worth adding an end screen to further encourage subscriptions.
Go into your video editor and half way down on the right hand side you will see End Screen.
In the window you can include 2 video recommendations. The options are best for viewer, most recent upload or a specific video. These encourage your watcher to remain on your channel
The End Screen also includes an interactive Subscribe element which you should definitely include.
You can place these where you wish within a constrained area on the screen. Try to fit them in where they don’t overlap on anything else if you don’t have a template as part of the video.
The End Screen can be a maximum of 20 seconds long.
Step 11 Summary of Key Steps to Grow Your Channel
Lets take stock and summarise all the steps we have been discussing. This is like a checklist of things for you to follow.
- Do your Keyword Research first – before you create your video. If you are optimising an existing video, the keywords must fit the content of the video but its still worth optimising them.
- Use a tool like Keywords Everywhere to understand the search volumes for your keywords so that you focus on keywords with higher search volumes.
- Understand the level of competition for your keywords and if its too high, go for some longer tail keywords with good search volumes but lower competition.
4 Create a spreadsheet of your existing videos so that you can benchmark any improvements. Then put the videos which you are working on into a Playlist if they are not already in one so that the videos on a topic are grouped together. - Then optimise your video titles using brackets and parentheses where appropriate to help increase click through rate (they do apparently!). Make sure that your titles are keyword optimised. If uploading a video for the first time, make sure that your title and video name are the same.
- The video description can be optimised:
Ensure that you have a brief description at the start which incorporates your keywords.
Suggest some related videos to keep your audience on your channel
Include a call to action to Subscribe (this should also be mentioned in your video when you make it) and encourage comments and interaction by asking a simple multiple choice question and invite them to leave a comment. - I include some links to relevant courses and invite the watcher to join my Six Minute Strategist Academy – where they can get nearly all my courses for a modest monthly investment (check out https://jbdcolley.com/FREETRIAL, for seven day free trial too).
Finally I provide a range of social links where people can follow me.
That should all be enough to give Youtube help with ranking the videos. - Optimise your videos’ thumbnails to make them stand out. Keep them simple with a few words but make sure that the colours are striking, particularly the background colour, which will help them convert when presented in a list of other videos.
- Take the opportunity to set up a social media promotion to give your videos a boost in Youtube and bring in additional views. You have done all the hard work now so why not?
- Don’t forget to set up your Subscribe Button in the Branding settings
- Make sure that your existing videos all have End Screens providing more opportunities for your watcher to subscribe and to keep watching your channel.
So thats it for the summary of the key points, there is just one step more in this part of the video to discuss with you.
Step 12 – Rinse Repeat and Track
The final step in the first part of this video is to repeat this for the remainder of your video content. I suggest that you do it one playlist at a time.
Just as importantly you should watch to see how your videos perform and see if you can further optimise existing videos in the weeks and months ahead.
Remember Rome was not built in a day and building a Youtube video channel takes time.
Now we are going to turn our attention to how you can create amazing videos going forward, to create even better videos next time you do so.
15 Steps to create high quality, high view YouTube Videos
- The Hook: Make sure you grab the attention of your audience within the first 15 seconds. Don’t waste this time with a fancy intro video – get right to the point. You can always add the branding afterwards
- Boost Click Through Rate by adding brackets and parentheses to your titles. Make sure that they are keyword optimised
- Before uploading make sure that your video title is also keyword optimised and is the same as your Youtube Title.
- Always include an early reminder to subscribe to your channel and give them a reason – you won’t want to miss any of my new actionable videos! Include a big red “Subscribe” button on the Screen and down arrows showing the watcher where to find the subscribe button in Youtube.
- Video length should be 10 to 20 minutes. Longer videos have longer watch time which is what Youtube is looking for right now.
- Optimise your video description, including keywords, description of the video, links to similar videos you have on your channel, calls to action to subscribe and comment, links to courses or other off Youtube content you want to share and your social links to help people to connect with you.
- Make the most of Tags. The first ones should be keyword focused and don’t forget to include long tail keywords in your tags too. Look at the phrases people are using for search and put these in. Your tags can also include synonyms of your keywords and category tags which broadly describe the video subject matter. Business Strategy might include an Entrepreneurship category tag.
- Find similar high ranking videos and uncover their keywords and tags (use the free version of VidIQ for this). See how you can encourage Youtube to match your video to those which are similar and which have high view counts (Titles, Keywords, Tags etc.).
- Embed your videos on social platforms and on your Blog. Other platforms will give more reach to natively uploaded videos but if you are trying to grow your Youtube channel, go for an embed and take the hit.
- Don’t be shy about promoting your new video content to your audience, including your email list. It might be better to create an amazing blog post using the script and embed the video and send your audience to your own site rather than Youtube. If your video is embedded from Youtube you will still get the benefit.
- When making your video, make it as good as it can be and make the most of pattern interrupts. This is a technique where you keep changing the content of the screen to keep your audience interested for longer. If you don’t know what I mean, go and watch any film or programme on TV and see how short the sequences are before they cut to a difference angle or shot.
- Use your keywords in your Video, particularly in your introduction as YouTube can understand the audio to a surprising extent and having that consistency of keywords must extend to the script and the audio too.
- Add engagement stimuli at the end of your video.
Ask questions to get comments
Ask for likes and thumbs up
Ask a multiple choice question at the end of your video and encourage your viewers to put their answer below in the comments.
“Which one of these strategies are you going to implement first?” - Create an End Screen for your video with a call to action, which might be only to ask for subscribers one last time. Make sure that you have your Branding subscribe button set up for all the videos on you channel too!
- Go for maximum impact with your Thumbnails. Put yourself in the picture – you don’t have to be goofy, keep the words high impact but short and simple and go for really striking background colours and use the colour wheel to contrast your letters with your background.
So there you have it.
We have discussed the action steps you can take today to optimise your existing content and fifteen clear steps to help you make even better content in the future.
Don’t forget to subscribe to my Channel to make sure that you don’t miss any of my future actionable videos.
Now tell me in the comments below which of these steps you are going to implement first? Keyword Research, Competitive Research, Titles, Descriptions, Thumbnails. I would love to know and to hear what works best for you!