11 things you should NEVER do after uploading a YouTube video

Are your videos stuck at less than a couple hundred views? You're probably thinking that it has something to do with your niche or editing. Well, what if I told you that there was 11 innocent mistakes that almost every YouTuber makes without even realizing that they're essentially killing their channels? Now, I personally run multiple different YouTube channels, and I work with a community of over 11,000 YouTubers, and what I've discovered is that what you do in the first few hours and days after uploading a video can literally make or break its performance. I've seen channels with amazing content get stuck at only a couple hundred views or less because they were sabotaging themselves after uploading. And I've seen channels with decent content explode to hundreds of thousands of views because they knew exactly what not to do. And so by the end of this video, you are going to know the same exact mistakes that are killing your video's performance and more importantly how to avoid them. And if you implement what I'm about to show you, I'm almost positive that you will see a massive difference in your channel's performance. So let's jump right into it. Mistake number 1 is sharing your video link too early. Now look, I understand the excitement. If you just uploaded a video, you wanna share with your friends and family, you wanna share it on social media. That's a totally natural instinct for us to have, especially after we put a bunch of hard work potentially into making a video and getting it uploaded onto YouTube. However, that's actually one of the worst things that we could possibly do if we care about getting views. And the reason is, is that when you share your content to an audience that isn't necessarily interested, even if it's friends or family or whatever, they're likely gonna watch 20, 30 seconds, maybe a minute of the video, which is gonna give your content a very low amount of audience retention. And you might be saying, "Matt, why does that even matter?" Well, YouTube is trying to figure out who to promote your content to, especially in the first few hours of uploading your video, and if your content is good enough to then go ahead and recommend to other people. And if the first 10 or 20 people who watch only stick around for a fraction of the video length, then YouTube is gonna automatically assume that your content is not engaging. Instead, what you wanna do is to wait until your video has gained some organic traction and let YouTube figure out your organic audience first. Then if your video's performing well after 24 to 48 hours, that's when you can potentially share it to your personal network if you want, if you really wanna do that. Now you don't have to share with your friends and family at all. Typically I don't for the majority of my channels, unless it's something that I just really wanna share with a particular person, then I'll go ahead and do it if I think they might be able to get some value, whether it's entertainment or educational value from it. But I did a whole video recently about why you should never share your videos, and you can check that out on my channel if you want. But the second mistake I see so many people making is watching their own videos immediately. So just like it's bad to share your video with people who are likely gonna watch a very small percentage of your video, if you think about it, you also are likely to watch a pretty small percentage of your video if you click to watch it. You're likely not gonna watch the full thing. And if that's the case, you might not wanna go ahead and watch your video directly after uploading it. Now you could make the argument that YouTube is smart enough to know that, hey, if it's your video that you uploaded, then they're gonna be able to differentiate between you and somebody else watching the video. But in my opinion, it's best to play it safe and it's best to not watch your own video after uploading it In fact, the time you should be watching your video is before uploading your video if you want to check for mistakes or anything else. Now, this next mistake is super important that you do not make this, and you would be shocked at how many people still do this and completely ruin their channels as a result. And that is buying likes, views, or subscribers. Now, these companies will tell you, "Oh, these aren't bots. They're gonna be real views. They're gonna be real subscribers." But it doesn't matter if these are real people or not. What matters is that these people are not your target audience. A lot of times what these websites do is that they pay people to watch a bunch of different videos, likely stuff that they're not even interested in at all, just to drive up engagement, which first of all is against the YouTube terms of service. So if YouTube catches you doing this, you'll get completely banned off of YouTube. And second of all, they're not even interested. So even if you don't get banned, at the very least you're gonna be getting people who are not even interested at all in your content, which is gonna tank your video's performance and make it even harder to grow with future videos. Let's say for example, you upload productivity videos. And the algorithm sees a bunch of people who aren't even interested in productivity coming to watch that video. So the algorithm will start thinking, "Wait, this productivity video is attracting people who usually watch cooking content. That's weird. Maybe this video isn't really even about productivity." And then it stops recommending your content to people who are actually interested in productivity. It'll kill your organic reach potential, and not only that, it poses a huge risk to your channel. So please, please, please never buy views or subscribers. Now mistake number 4 is so sad, and I see so many people fall into this. This because they upload a YouTube video and it doesn't perform necessarily to their expectations, so they delete it after a day or a couple days after uploading it. You need to understand that YouTube's algorithm does not work on a 24-hour cycle. Sometimes it takes weeks or even months for the algorithm to find out who your ideal viewer is. I've seen videos that had fewer than 100 views in the first month suddenly explode to getting millions of views because the algorithm is constantly testing and retesting content. A video that doesn't perform today might be the algorithm be one of them's favorite next month. You never know, and you won't know that if you just delete the video. Every video you create, you need to view as an asset. Even if a video doesn't go viral immediately, it's still discoverable through search, it can still bring you subscribers, it's still establishing your authority within your niche, and the moment you delete it, you lose all of that forever. It's a cliché at this point, but a lot of people say you're always one video away from everything blowing up on YouTube, and as cliché as it sounds, it's actually true. And oftentimes videos blow up weeks, if not months down the line. The fifth mistake is manually moderating every single comment that you get on your videos. Now I'm not saying that you should ignore your comment section completely. Engagement is important, but sitting there for hours deleting every single negative comment is not a good use of your time. Here is what you should do instead. Go to your YouTube Studio, click Settings, and then Community, and then scroll down until you see the options for automated content moderation. And then you can go ahead and add keywords that you don't want appearing in your comments. Things like "this video sucks," "waste of time," "fake," "scam," "unsubscribe." Basically any phrase that might discourage people from watching the rest of your video or subscribing to your channel. The thing is that people will comment negative stuff no matter how good and how useful your video is, so blocking these words is a great way to secure your channel. Also, make sure to enable the option that blocks links in comments. Because you don't want people dropping random links to redirect viewers to other channels. The key here is automating this process with YouTube's internal tools so you're not spending hours every single day being the comment police. That way you can focus on responding to genuine engagement when and if you want. Mistake number 6 is spending way too much time and energy focusing on when you upload your videos. There's so many myths when it comes to this and people claim they have the best upload time and to upload at this time because it's the best time. But really, especially in the beginning of your channel, this matters so insignificantly small And when I started my first channels on YouTube, I would actually upload at 3 in the morning on my channels due to the fact that that was the only time that my family had unlimited internet access 'cause we had satellite internet. And I still had tons of videos that got over a million views each uploading at that time. And even to this day, I upload a lot of videos at different times according to my schedule. And a lot of times I'm traveling in different parts of the world, so I'll upload a video at a time that isn't necessarily the best when it comes to the audience that I'm trying to get, and my videos still perform very well. That being said, if you are trying to target a Western audience, specifically people who live in the United States, my recommendation would be to not upload at 3 AM if you can avoid it. However, it's not the end of the world if you do, and if you prevent yourself from uploading as a result of that, that is much worse than uploading at a non-ideal time. Typically the best time to upload if you're trying to reach a US audience is gonna be around 5 to 7 PM Eastern Standard Time. That being said, it really doesn't matter that much, and the importance of this really only grows once you get a lot of subscribers to your channel. Then you can go into your analytics, go to your audience Audience tab and then see when your audience is mostly on YouTube and then upload according to that. You want to look at your peak hours and then upload 2 to 3 hours before that. Now the 7th mistake is a technical one, but it is still very crucial, and that's uploading your videos incorrectly. Here's what I mean. Instead of instantly setting your video to publish as soon as it's done uploading and as soon as all the checks are done, you'll notice that if you do that, a lot of times the video might be blurry and it might not have fully processed and that's due to the fact that only the standard definition version of the video has finished processing and the high definition version hasn't yet. You'll actually see this, you'll see an SD and an HD down at the bottom when you're uploading videos. You wanna wait until the entire video has finished processing, including the high definition version. So typically, I'll set my video to private or unlisted before I go ahead and actually publish it after the video is done uploading. Another benefit of keeping your video as unlisted before uploading is you can go ahead and copy that unlisted link, paste it into my tool TubeMagic, and then TubeMagic will generate you a great set of titles, descriptions, and a set of tags that you can go ahead and instantly optimize your video as much as it possibly can be. Mistake number 8 is not utilizing your community tab or external social media or sources that you could potentially get views from. So yes, you could go ahead, go to your community tab, post your video there. That's just one more place that you can get views if you remember to do it. But on top of that, if you have other social media or even an email list like I do, that's related to the niche of your channel, go ahead and post the video to that social media or send it to your list because it's the perfect audience to then funnel to your YouTube channel. That being said, do not do this if your external social media has nothing to do with the niche of your channel. The 9th mistake that I see all the time is constantly changing your titles and thumbnails after a video is published. I get messages in my community all the time, "Matt, my video isn't performing great. Should I change the title? Should I change the thumbnail?" and my response is almost always no, do not do it. Because the reality is, especially for smaller channels, it's so inconsequential due to the fact that you're not getting statistically significant data to make an informed decision as to changing a title or a thumbnail. When MrBeast changes a thumbnail, it might make a meaningful difference because he has massive data to work with. But if you have 1,000 subscribers and you change a thumbnail, you're not going to be seeing a meaningful impact. So instead of wasting time tweaking old videos that may or may not help, and even if it does, it won't be huge statistically significant difference, my recommendation, what I personally do, is I put that energy into making my next video better. So do your best to be 100% confident in your title and thumbnail prior to uploading the video. Model what has already worked on YouTube and then go ahead and focus on the next video. Mistake number 10 is constantly checking your analytics over and over after uploading videos. I know this one is hard. You uploaded a video, you wanna know how it's doing, but constantly refreshing your analytics is not going to make your video do better. In fact, it's probably hurting your productivity and your mental health. So my rule is don't look at the analytics at least for the first 24 to 48 hours after uploading a video, because you want to give your content time to find the right audience and establish its initial performance pattern. And when you do check your analytics, look at the metrics that truly matter: click-through rate and average view duration. Those are the two numbers to focus on, but relative to the rest of your channel. You just want your videos doing better than your channel's average. So if your channel's average is 4% click-through rate and your video has less than 4%, then your thumbnail and your titles need work for your future videos. But checking these numbers every single hour is not gonna give you meaningful or useful data. You need at least 1,000 views to have statistically significant analytics, and you need to give the algorithm time to optimize your video's reach. Now here's a final mistake, and this one ties everything together, and that's treating the 24 hours after you upload a video like it doesn't matter. The truth is that the first 24 hours are crucial to your video's long-term success because this is when the YouTube algorithm is paying closest attention to your performance metrics and deciding whether or not your video needs to be promoted. So in my opinion, during this time, don't obsess over the analytics, but instead use that time to respond to some of the genuine comments that come in on the video. Thank people for watching, encourage discussion, and go ahead and focus on your next video. Also, ideally make sure you have an end screen so you can point people to another video, ideally a really long one as well, so you keep people on YouTube for an extended period of time, kind of similar to what I'm doing right here. You can check out this video right here, which is a very long video. However, it's packed full of value, basically a free course which will show you how I run faceless YouTube channels without ever showing my face or stepping in front of a camera and building a real business out of doing it. Check out this video right here. My name is Matt Parr. Great to meet you, and I'll see you there.