Because I get asked so often about how I grew my channel from 0-35,000+ subscribers in a few months, I’ll share exactly what I’ve done and what I’ve learned along the way. Now keep in mind these are just my thoughts and theories - while the exact YouTube algorithm is kept confidential and no one really knows what’s up, I’ll share what I’ve done and what I think works best to get your video pushed and get you a ton of activity to your channel.
To get this out of the way, one of the most important small things to do is allow monetization. From what I’ve seen, YouTube is aimed towards doing what makes it the most money - by allowing monetization on YouTube, you allow YouTube to have a financial interest in your video succeeding. This will likely heighten the chances of your video being promoted and pushed by YouTube because they make money off of it. So if you have a channel, turn on monetization.
If you’re first starting out, these are the most important things you can do to increase the engagement of your videos and increase the likelihood your video will begin showing up in search results, and subsequently pushed, is to start with this:
1. Good Content. Content is everything. My first video, which now has over 300,000 views, was pretty poor quality. It was the first video I ever recorded of myself, on my iPhone. I essentially just talked to my phone for 20 minutes. BUT, the content was good - and that’s why people watched.
2. SEO is really, really important. When you start out, you need to get people to find you - this is where SEO comes in. Make titles that people frequently search for and keep your titles as specific as possible.
3. With the above, your title, description, and tags should ALL MATCH UP. I spent a lot of time on my description, writing as much as I can, hoping that certain terms or phrases will be picked up by analytics. It worked. Most of my videos rank on searches within the first page of specific terms.
4. Upload OFTEN. YouTube favors creators that upload frequently and regularly.
5. Engagement is key - the more people comment, like, share, and subscribe, the more YouTube sees your video as being desirable, and the more likely they are to recommend it.
6. Use good, custom thumbnails. Seriously, a thumbnail makes a huge difference on getting people to click on your video.
7. Social proof is real. The more subscribers you have, the more likely people are going to be to subscribe to you. Plus people see you have a history of regular uploads after a certain amount of time.
As a new YouTuber, these methods above help you get started - but it doesn’t give you the big views. This is where YouTube’s algorithm gets REALLY interesting. Out of the 400,000+ views I’ve received this month, less than 10,000 views came from search results. The vast majority came from recommended and suggested videos - this is where you want to end up. From what I've seen, the larger you get, the less important SEO become. YouTube changed up their algorithms to favor videos with higher watch times, higher retention rate, and higher engagement rather than the number of views or how searchable your videos are. Instead of promoting short videos that people will watch all the way through from search results, YouTube likes to promote longer videos with a higher watch time and higher engagement. It's less about coming up with searchable titles/topics than it is about making good, engaging content, and hoping that YouTube decides to push it out to viewers.
YouTube sees how many people like, comment, share, and subscribe per view you get - the higher the ratio of engagement to views, the more likely it is that your content is good and the more likely it is to be promoted by YouTube because they make money off good content that keeps people watching YouTube. It seems like most YouTubers aim to be in the 11-18 minute mark - I’m not sure if this is on purpose, but it seems to be just the right amount of time for people to watch without losing interest super quickly.
While I can pretend to know what works and what doesn’t, in the end no one really knows and these are purely just speculations about what happens. These are totally just my theories from what I’ve experienced, and I figured I’d share them with everyone interested.
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Suggested reading:
The Millionaire Real Estate Agent: http://goo.gl/TPTSVC
Your money or your life: https://goo.gl/fmlaJR
The Millionaire Real Estate Investor: https://goo.gl/sV9xtl
How to Win Friends and Influence People: https://goo.gl/1f3Meq
Think and grow rich: https://goo.gl/SSKlyu
Awaken the giant within: https://goo.gl/niIAEI
The Book on Rental Property Investing: https://goo.gl/qtJqFq