Increase YouTube Views the Pro Way
YOU’LL NEED THIS
A GOOGLE ACCOUNT Creating a YouTube channel is straightforward and free, as long as you’re logged in to Google.
EDITING TOOLS Video and image editors are essential —don’t rely on YouTube’s gimmicks.
YOUTUBE IS A TRICKSY BEAST, as much a video-hosting website as it is a mysterious, unfathomable, and ever-changing algorithm. Getting your content seen initially is a massive crapshoot. There’s a vague chance that you’ll roll a seven, and pick up a huge amount of traffic, but those dice are weighted heavily toward snake eyes. The best you can hope for in real terms is to make your videos as interactive and fully-featured as possible.
Here we’ll lead you through using YouTube’s own back-end tools to add links, references to your other content, and quality enhancements to make the experience pleasant for your viewers, as well as covering a few ways to weight the algorithm in your favor. Like many Google projects, YouTube has introduced these tools piecemeal over time—there’s no great synergy between them, so there’s a fair amount to learn. But do it right, and you’ll see a marked increase in viewers. –ALEX COX
1 VIDEO DEVELOPMENT Hold your horses, hotshot. Before approaching YouTube’s tools, you need to start thinking along the right lines when creating your videos. If you ever refer to something from one of your previous uploads during a recording, make a note somewhere, as you’ll be adding a link to it later. Ensure you include a graphic with a subscribe icon in your video somewhere. Consider creating an end card, with footage of other episodes you’ve uploaded, to encourage viewers to enjoy more of your stuff. Or, if you’re running a series, think about including a little of the next episode as a teaser. These are all small things, but they’re important ways to grab that audience.
Think about the video thumbnail. This is your key tool to drag viewers in to your channel, and it’s far more important than any clickbait video title. Yes, there are people who’ve made a massive impact on YouTube without custom thumbnails, but they’re few and far between, and you’re probably not going to be one of them. Make sure thumbnails are eye-catching, exciting, and of a professional standard. Get your branding right, and the rest will follow. 2 INITIAL UPLOAD With your video and associated resources ready, head over to YouTube. Log in with your Google account, click your circular avatar, and head to the Creator Studio. If you don’t already have a YouTube channel, you’ll see a gigantic button encouraging you to create one [ Image A]; make sure you click “Use a business or other name,” unless you want everything uploaded under your real name. Head to the “Channel” tab when you’re done, and hit the blue “Verify” button to go through the process of verifying your account; you’re subject to certain restrictions until you do.
There’s an “Upload” button just to the right of the search box; click it, then drag your video on to the appropriate area, making sure you set the privacy away from “Public,” unless you want all and sundry to see your creation before it’s finished. While your video uploads and gets processed through YouTube’s coal-fired steam computer [ Image B], you can begin filling in the early key information. Give it a catchy title, fill in the description with as much detail as you can—you’re looking for decent search traffic, after all—and go to town on the tags field, adding as many appropriate words and phrases as come to mind. When YouTube looks to include your stuff in “related videos” lists, it’s assumed that it looks here first—nobody knows for sure, and it could all change tomorrow—so imagine the sort of tags your friends or rivals are using, and include them here. 3 MORE SETTINGS Before you’ve finished with the initial upload stage, head over to the “Advanced Settings” tab [ Image C]. You can do things here such as blocking comments and setting the license for your video—useful if you’re happy for it to be remixed by Creative Commons users. Things we’d deem as non-optional are setting a category for your video,
selecting its language, and allowing community contributions, which means your content can be subtitled in foreign languages by willing volunteer viewers. And absolutely ensure that you click the content declaration if you’ve been paid to feature a particular product—not doing so could land you in a world of legal hurt.
Click “Done” when you’re, er, done—you don’t need to wait for the video to finish processing, but do ensure you wait for the upload to complete. 4 THE REAL MEAT Head back to the Creator Studio and click “Edit” on the video you just uploaded. You’ll see many of the same options as before, but lots more are now listed on the top bar. Let’s start where we are, though; this first screen should give you a button with which you can upload your own thumbnail image. Make sure it’s in 16:9 format and under 2MB—you may have to use a compressed JPEG rather than a PNG, given the file size restrictions, and we tend to scale ours to at least 1920x1080. Alternatively, if you like to live dangerously, you can use one of YouTube’s three pulled-out images, but these are likely to be rubbish. When you’re happy, click “Save Changes,” then head to the “Enhancements” tab. 5 ZOOM, ENHANCE There are various silly tools on the “Enhancements” tab that you should never, ever touch, such as slow motion, time lapse, and stabilize. Leave them alone—if you’re after that sort of effect, do it in your editing software before uploading. Clicking the “Auto-fix” button can have beneficial effects for muddy videos; give it a go, and you’ll be able to view a side-by-side before and after preview of your video [ Image D]. Drag the center line to change how much of each is displayed.
Hit the “Trim” button to make sure the start and end points of your upload are properly set. The “Filters” panel offers up a host of oh-so-hip video filters that will probably just annoy your audience, and the “Blurring effects” panel offers up the only-slightly-useful option of automatically blurring out faces using Google’s tried and tested anonymity filter. Click “Save” when you’re done. Alternatively, you can save the results to a new video if
you don’t want your original spoiled, or click “Revert to original” if you’ve made a real mess. 6 SUPER SOUNDTRACK The last thing you want, if you’re a YouTube content creator, is a copyright strike. One of the best ways to get one— or at least have a third party take your ad revenue for themselves—is using audio to which you don’t own the rights. The “Audio” tab gives you access to the YouTube audio library, and provides you with a quick way to slap that music directly on top of your video, but (like so many of these tools) it’s clumsy at best. Pick your track, hit the “Position Audio” button, and you can trim and move your track, so that it appears exactly where you want it.
You may be better served accessing the audio library at the initial editing stage. Head to www.youtube.com/ audiolibrary/music to find it—everything here can be used without issues to add a little audible flash to your videos. Bear in mind, though, that you may be required to include some specific waffle in your video description if you do use certain tracks—check the license before you decide to download the file. 7 ANNOTATE AND ELUCIDATE Annotations, in the next tab, can serve several purposes. For instance, you can use them to issue corrections to elements of your videos, if you find out there’s a mistake after uploading—because there’s no way to replace a video once it’s gone up (other than removing it and then making a new upload, which destroys any comments and viewing figures), it can often be beneficial to place a big placard of culpability over the top of the offending scene. Also, many people put annotations to use by adding vastly annoying notes and plugs, which is a good way to get your viewers to switch annotations off
completely. The third, most critical use, is adding links to your videos, adding interactivity to your “Subscribe” button, or linking users to other videos that you may have produced.
Annotations come in five different varieties: translucent speech bubbles, notes (also translucent, like a speech bubble without the tail), transparent-backed titles, labels, which display text when viewers hover their mouse pointer over the top, and spotlights, which are basically just rectangles. Select them from the “Add annotation” drop-down, and they’re added to the video at the current time—use the anchor points around them to position them exactly where you’d like them on the video. You can then drag their edges in the timeline below the video preview [ Image E], or use the start and end boxes in the right column, to make them last longer or shorter, drag their meaty middles to make them appear at precisely the right time, and use the appropriate boxes to fill them with text, and change font colors or sizes. All types except for the title can be made clickable by checking the “link” box at the bottom of the right column—usually, content creators use spotlight boxes to add links, because they don’t cover up the video behind, but your mileage may vary.
8 CARD COUNTING Annotations are brilliant for giving desktop users additional interactivity, but they’re useless if your audience is on a mobile device. That’s useless as in completely, absolutely, utterly useless. They don’t display at all, at least at press time, and they never have. You need to add any appropriate links to your description, so that mobile users can follow them. Put explicit instructions to click those links in the video itself—don’t assume all viewers are idiots, but equally don’t assume that they’re not—and ensure you make use of the one interactive element that does work for mobile users: cards. Frequently ignored, these little drop-in white boxes are quick to add, irritate viewers less than annotations, and are actually pretty effective at pushing traffic around. Head to the appropriate tab to start adding them.
Cards come in four distinct varieties. With the first option, you can link directly to one of your existing videos or playlists, or to a video or playlist from another channel by copying the URL and pasting it in the appropriate text box. Use the drop-down box at the bottom of the window to customize what the card says, then hit “Create Card” to add it. The second option offers up specific promotion of a friendly channel—great for collaborations, or backing up any mention you might have made. The third enables you to create polls, which you can check later by navigating to the appropriate point in your video. The final one enables you to create an annoyingly restrictive link, either to a specific site associated with your account, or to one of YouTube’s list of approved retailers or crowdfunding sites.
Add a card and you’ll see it appear to the right of the preview window, with a note saying you’ve used one of your allocated five cards, and a draggable marker appears on the timeline below. Note that you can only adjust its position, not its duration—cards automatically stay active for 10 seconds, then get out of the way.
9 CAPTION CONTEST YouTube does have its own automatic subtitling engine [ Image F], which ranges in effectiveness from so brilliant it might as well be magic to hilariously bad. It’s fine to rely on it, but your audience—particularly if they’re watching without audio, or if your soundtrack is a little garbled or backed by music—deserves better. The “Subtitles and CC” tab enables you to add your own accurate captions, either from a text transcript or by typing them as you watch the video. The latter option works well; hit “Play” on the preview window, then start typing as soon as you hear the first line. The video pauses automatically, and you see your caption start to appear. If you want to add a line break, just hit Shift-Return, and click the blue plus icon when you’re happy. You can drag captions in the timeline below the preview to adjust their length and position, and add as many as you need. Your changes are automatically saved as a draft, so hit “Publish” when you’re done and ready for your captions to go live.
10 FINISHING TOUCHES The idea is to get eyes on your content, so there’s a few more things you can do. Organize your videos into playlists, for a start, which helps YouTube send your viewers to the next episode, once the current one is complete, and enables viewers to easily binge on curated content lists. Collaborate with other video creators to get your name out there. Post your stuff to social media. Reply to comments, however asinine they may be, so your audience feels connected. It’s hard work, but it’ll be worth it in the end.