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7 Tips for Growing Your YouTube Channel

Written by Wipster Content Team | May 17, 2018 11:45:00 PM

As marketers continue to track their ROI, 83% of businesses polled by Wyzowl indicated video gave them a positive ROI. From a viewer’s perspective, a separate survey from Tubular Insights showed 64% of consumers make a purchase after watching branded social videos.

All of this means a ton of great opportunities for businesses on YouTube. But do you feel your channel(s) could be performing better? Take advantage of these 7 tips to boost your channel.  

1. Be Economical

Keep titles and openers short. On average 20% of YouTube viewers bounce after the first 10 seconds of a video.

The opener should be about the subject of the content as it’s the reason they clicked on your video in the first place.

2. Optimize End Screens

Add end screens to encourage further engagement. For the next autoplayed video, YouTube will give you the option to either include:

  • Your most recent uploaded video
  • Videos from your channel recommended based on their viewing habits
  • A specific youtube URL

The more content from your channel they watch, the more YouTube rewards your channel with their algorithms.

Include no more than three links on the end screen with one being a subscribe CTA.  

 

Review your end screen analytics to find which performs best based on clicks. You can then grab the end screen and select import from video to use it on any other videos.  

3. Encourage Engagement

YouTube also looks at content’s like/dislike ratio and comments as they factor in videos into their organic search rankings.

Channel managers should be responding to relevant comments. Each time you do, the commenter receives a site and email notification from YouTube, thus reminding them to check back on your channel.

4. Create YouTube Content Around Paid & Organic Search

Advertise your channel on pre-roll based on the keyword search intent to target people with similar interests. 

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. You can also use search intent in developing more organic content for your channel. KeywordTool.io, KeywordsEverywhere, and Google’s Keyword Planner are great, go-to tools here.

Once you have identified keywords, search on YouTube and watch the top ranked videos. Take notes on what you believe is missing from their content and how you can deliver a superior and more comprehensive piece.

Incorporate your targeted keywords in the script. When YouTube generates closed captions from the audio, there are strong indicators it helps in organic search.  

Matt Risinger built his $20 million custom home building company largely through his YouTube channel with organic content generated around keyword research. His channel has over 136K subscribers.  

Initially paying out-of-pocket to produce his content, he found material suppliers he was already using to build homes were willing to sponsor his content as an influencer. With those earnings, he's able to fund his video production budget and then generate additional revenue.

5. Don’t Overlook the Metadata

Make your titles and video thumbnails engaging and relevant to the content. Just like on Google, YouTube values clickthrough rates in rankings.

There are plenty of proven thumbnail strategies to draw from including:

Personality-driven thumbnails

Branded thumbnails for instant recall and recognition.

You can also utilize series level branding so your subscribers can quickly see what series they are about to click into as Sephora does for PLAY!

Text dominant thumbnails are especially useful for videos with static compositions.

Emphasizing the subject of a video using arrows within the thumbnail.

Stand out by using vivid colors.

Incorporate keywords in both your title and description. The description should read like a summary with keywords naturally fitting your content and not keyword stuffing.

Also, incorporate relevant tags, TubeBuddy can help with identifying tags.

6. Leverage YouTube’s Analytics

Review the Audience Retention metric and subscription conversions to see your most successful video content. Try to identify patterns in your analytics of what’s performing whether it’s a specific topic, the number of edits, length, etc.

You can also see the specific points where viewers drop off for each video. Add a recommended video card to that time stamp to keep them on your channel.

7. Get Eyes From Your Ideal Audience

Partner with influencers and other brands that have similar audiences. Tools like Social Blade can help as you try to identify potential collaborations.

KFC teamed with YouTube and Instagram personalities Callux and Charlotte de Carle to create their YouTube series, Around the World in 99 Gigs.

As hosts of the series, they scoured the globe for undiscovered, talented musicians. KFC incorporated their loyalty program by giving members the chance to win concert tickets along with the opportunity to join Callux and Charlotte in their travels with a KFC purchase.

 

The 12-part series has over 2.5 million views.

“We were very clear on the role of what that channel was trying to do and very clear in its scope and who we were trying to produce content for,” said Meghan Farren, chief marketing officer at KFC UK & Ireland at Yum! Brands. “Being super clear on how you want to use YouTube is important. Also, we were very strict on the brief to the hosts, so they were clear on the job that they were doing, and we worked very closely in partnership with them.”

Bonus Tips for Growing Channel Offsite

Post natively

When posting YouTube videos on Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites, their feeds may not reward a post just linking out to a YouTube video.

So for example, on Facebook page, instead upload a short version of the same video with a link back to your channel or full video.

Channel Subscription link

You can also share the link you provide to your channel on any other website to automatically prompt viewers to subscribe by appending “?sub_confirmation=1” to the channel URL.

For example, this is Wipster’s standard channel URL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKopV_PKwSqWDYx3NB5XlVg/

With the subscription message,  it would be: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKopV_PKwSqWDYx3NB5XlVg?sub_confirmation=1

Clicking the second link, you’ll see.

A few other ideas you can try offsite:

  • Blog about a specific video piece and embed the video file.
  • Include a channel URL link to your Instagram bio.
  • Link out to videos in any downloadable content you’ve created such as eBooks and PDFs. Include a thumbnail of the video containing a video link to make it more visual.