Evan Carmichael shares ten YouTube growth strategies from a creator community: add captions for SEO, prioritize paid placements over free reviews, hook viewers in ten seconds, update old videos with new thumbnails and tags, publish daily, and use YouTube Analytics to convert viewers into subscribers.
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In today's Lunch and Earn, I'm gonna share the top 10 best YouTube tricks from successful YouTubers. So I'm part of an invite-only community that YouTube put together for creators, and it's been fun to kinda share opinions and advice back and forth, and somebody recently posted in there asking, "What is your top tip that's had the biggest impact on your YouTube channel?" And a bunch of people left comments, and they don't know I'm sharing this, so I'm going to mute out the faces and the names, but some of the advice is gold. So for those of you who are trying to launch your YouTube channel, I think it could help.
Mine is adding closed captioning to all of my videos. Not only is it a great thing to do for your viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing, but people who don't speak your language can also use YouTube Translate to translate your captions into their language. YouTube has made the process of adding captions super simple. It's also great for YouTube video rankings and search since YouTube will now know exactly what's said in your video. Mine has been refusing to take free products to review on our show and instead enforce monetary product placement in order to actually make money on the channel instead of giving out free press to every product that wants exposure. If I can summarize my general YouTube experience in regard to becoming successful, it'd probably be in this tip: Find a way to innovate within your niche or genre. Trying to copycat another YouTube personality will probably not get you very far. But if you're able to do something on YouTube that no one else has, attention will be called to it. It doesn't have to be a particularly Herculean or academic accomplishment even. Just one that YouTube has a lack of. A void you can fill. For me, it's to take advantage of old videos. You've done the hard part, filming and editing them. When an old video just peters out and isn't getting views anymore, go in and update the thumbnail, title, description, and tags. I call this reanimating the video. It can't hurt to try this, and I've been able to revive many old videos that were getting 100 views a day to getting 20,000 a day or more. Our best YouTube tip would be to pay attention to the magical analytics data that comes with every channel. It's a serious goldmine from which to gain insights into both your viewers and your content. Not only allow you to see and understand what it is that's getting you viewers, but also providing a better understanding of how to go about retaining and engaging them. The data is literally at your fingertips, and I'd say hardly any of us are utilizing it to its fullest potential. The more we know, the better we can optimize our present content, and the better we can plan out how, and what to produce, with full regard to future content. I was super excited when our first video went over 1 million views, but then I realized how we hadn't been successful in capturing those viewers in that moment and translating them into an even 1% increase in our channel subscribers. So we needed to adjust and look for and implement a new strategy. We've since added annotations to all of our most popular videos, and now we're working on the second string videos as well. And we asked and directed those new viewers to be sure to subscribe and to visit our website. Within 2 months' time, we'd not only had another of our videos go over the 1 million viewer mark, but we'd had a 20% gain in our channel subscribers too. Talk about an increase! Holy subscribers, Batman! Hook your viewers early. In the first 10 seconds, grab their attention or tease the cool thing that will come later. Movies and TV shows do this all the time with a cold open. I've been able to keep my average audience retention at above 80% by doing this. The best tips I can give are: 1. Focus on the title, tags, and description to be found on YouTube. And 2. Collaborate with other YouTubers so that you can grow your audience. Those two worked for me and got lots of views and subscribers in just a few days.
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Don't promote anywhere you can't. Check your analytics and drop communities that give you low audience retention. It will actually penalize your YouTube rankings.
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First impressions are sometimes the most important. Video thumbnails are one of the best ways to boost views, but make sure it's on topic and doesn't mislead the viewers. Hook them with a well-composed thumbnail and keep them around for the video content. Honestly, just have fun with it. If you're here just for the money or fame, you're gonna have a bad time. If you enjoy making the content, then your audience will know, and in the long run, you won't get burned out.
The tip that I added to it was consistency. To be consistent every day, put out content, your audience grows, you get better, your skills develop, your technique develops. And you get momentum coming, and people get used to coming to your channel and making you part of their daily routine. Consistency, consistency, consistency. It's so easy to start off and have tons of momentum and energy and ideas, and then it fades and fizzles, and then you try to get back on again, and then it fades and fizzles. So if you can be consistent every single day, you're much more likely to have success. So thank you guys for watching. I'd love to know which of the tips you're gonna implement, had the biggest impact on you, leave it below. And I'd also love to know what your number one tip as a YouTuber is. Share it in the comments, I'll join the discussion. Thank you guys so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.
