7 FREE WAYS To Promote Your YouTube Videos (FOR MORE VIEWS)

You just published your YouTube video. Now how are we going to get more people to watch that YouTube video? If you're ready to hear 7 free ways to start promoting your YouTube videos, hit that like button and let's dig in. As you've probably experienced, it's kind of hard to get Momentum here on YouTube, to get more views, to get more subscribers. Sometimes it can really be a grind. So When I started YouTube over five years ago, I decided I wasn't going to leave it up to YouTube to decide whether or not they're going to show my videos to more people. So I became a promotion machine. I did everything that I could to get the word out about my video, and here are the seven things that I've actually done to promote my videos that work. First off, let's talk about social media. And yes, let's talk about social media in a non overwhelming way. I get asked all the time, Trena, what platform should I be on to promote my YouTube videos? And so here's my take on this. Each social media platform that is, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, all need to be treated differently. If you really want to leverage these platforms to help you grow your YouTube channel and get more views on your videos, this is how you will need to really use these platforms to your advantage. So when it comes to Facebook, you cannot just post your YouTube video link over on Facebook. You see, Facebook knows that that's a YouTube link, and YouTube is Facebook's number one competitor. So what happens is Facebook really just doesn't let that post reach anybody. So you're pretty much wasting your time just posting that link over on Facebook. Now, one thing that you could do is post a teaser reel of your video, like maybe the first 15 seconds, which is the hook of your video, or maybe like a good piece of content from your video as a teaser, and then have a call to action on the posts or in the comments to go watch the full video over on your YouTube channel. Another thing that you could do is post the thumbnail photo and talk about what you just posted, why it's important for them to go watch it and really just talk up that video and then leave the link to that YouTube video, maybe in the comments of that post. The third thing that you can do is just upload that entire video natively to Facebook. Now, this will not count as a view on your YouTube video, but that video could get more reach on Facebook to get more people aware of who you are and the type of content that you share that could eventually get them over to your YouTube channel. So it's more of a long term game here. When it comes to Instagram, the only place that you can link off of the platform is your bio. So in your bio there's a website that you can add a link to, or if you have 10,000 followers or more, you have the swipe up feature in Stories. So you could post the image of your thumbnail. But remember, Instagram sized photos aren't the same as YouTube sized thumbnails. So you may want to tweak your thumbnail or you may want to even add a different type of photo that does well on Instagram and talk about that video in the captions. And in the captions tell them to go click on the link in your bio to watch the video. What's also really, really good on Instagram right now is Stories. So what you could do is either post that teaser clip that you created for your Facebook video onto stories in 15 second chunks, or you could just pop on Stories and talk about why this video is important, what they're going to learn and tell them in the story to go click that link on your bio to go watch the full video. One little secret strategy that I've been using on Instagram is when I talk about that video, I then ask them, hey, do you want me to send you the direct link to this video? And then I will use the polls feature for them to say yes or no. And all the people that say yes, I just send them a message saying, hey, thanks, here's the link to my video. Let me know what you think and then paste the link to that YouTube video right in a direct message to them. Now this third social media platform has kind of been my bread and butter and where I have really loved to shine because not a lot of YouTube educators are on it and it's Pinterest. But how do you use Pinterest to promote your YouTube videos? Before I tell you, I would love to know, are you on Pinterest and do you share your videos on Pinterest? Let me know down in the comments. I want to see who all heroes. YouTube is actually utilizing Pinterest. One thing that you need to understand with Pinterest is it's a long term game. When you publish a pin on Pinterest, you're not going to expect a lot of traffic immediately. It's going to take a little bit of a slow burner for that pin to take off. But if it does take off, you have amazing benefits from that pin. There are three different things that you can do to promote your video on Pinterest. The first thing that you can do is just share. Right below this video, there's a little share button that goes directly to Pinterest. That is one way. The second way that you can promote to Pinterest is creating creating a Pinterest specific graphic. So you can use something like Canva or Photoshop to make a graphic in the Pinterest dimensions, which I'll pop up here on the screen. And you can either use the thumbnail photo that you created or grab some stock photos. Canva, which is a program that I use, has a lot of great stock photos and a lot of great templates to get you started creating Pinterest pins. Then what you will do is you'll take that image, you'll upload it to Pinterest where it says add pin. You can pretty much copy the summary that you put in your description box and then link to your YouTube video. Pinterest also allows you to link to your YouTube video on your profile, so make sure you do that as well. One pro tip here is if you are going to put pins on Pinterest that are going directly to YouTube, I suggest having like a play button or a YouTube button somewhere on that pin. So that person that sees it expects to be going to a video. Pinterest for so long has been blog focused content. So a lot of people expect to go to a blog. You just want to make sure they're not just like, hey, wait a second, why am I on YouTube? So by putting a play button or a YouTube button somewhere on that pin, it just really gives them that expectation that they are going to a video. Then to really leverage that one video, you can create multiple pins. Sometimes we have up to five different pins out in the Pinterest universe directing traffic to one video. We have image pins, we have video pins. We've also used the first 15 seconds of my video with captions on it as a pin as well. Again, this is just creating more content for more people to potentially see on Pinterest to get to your YouTube video. And you can create as many pins as you want for one particular video. There's no rule on that. Again, it just maximizes the amount of content that can get out there for more people to see. Now if you aren't sure which social media platform you should be on or you're thinking, I cannot do all of these platforms, I absolutely get it. When I got started on YouTube, it was the same way. And I looked at my analytics. So if you go into your analytics and you look at your traffic sources, you can actually see, are any of these platforms actually driving you traffic? Which one is driving you more traffic? In my case, back in 2016, it was Pinterest. So I went all in with Pinterest and that's why I know so much. I also brought on a Pinterest strategist as well, Vanessa Kynes, who's really helped me with Pinterest. But the reason why I put my eggs in the basket of Pinterest was because again, I was actually seeing results from Pinterest. So I went all in. But now that I have a better structure in place, a better process in place, I'm able to recreate content a lot quicker and schedule it out so that I can be posting on all of the platforms without really making more work for me. If you want to see a full in depth workshop on how I do that, I'm going to link to that workshop down below and in there I'm going to teach you how I create one YouTube video and then repurpose it on all these platforms. So the templates that I set up and how I publish on the YouTube and Pinterest and Instagram. So if you want to see exactly how I'm doing that, check out that workshop. All right. That was a lot about social media. So let's move on to the second way to promote your YouTube videos and it's to do collaborations. I've done quite a few collaborations here with Cassandra Thompson, with Meredith Marsh, with Michelle B. But the key to collaborating with people that's really going to help you promote your YouTube channel and your YouTube videos is finding people who are talking to your audience, the type of people who are watching your content. So in the case of Meredith, she talks to a lot of bloggers and how they're getting started on YouTube and how to start YouTube. So I knew that audience would also probably be interested in the similar content that I talked about here on my YouTube channel. I've also collaborated with Ashlynn Wrights and she's a copywriter. Again, she's talking to a lot of business owners who are figuring out how to take that next step in their business. Again, usually my audience. So to make sure those collaborations actually work for you is to reach out to channels to collaborate with that are talk talking to your target audience as well. Because if I was to reach out to a gaming channel that had, say, a million subscribers, that gaming channel's audience does not align with mine, so it really wouldn't pay off. For me, because that audience isn't going to probably watch my content or end up filtering in through my business to buy any of my programs or work with me one on one. You see how that works? The third way to promote your YouTube channel is just engage. We sometimes forget that YouTube is a social platform, and I'm guilty as well. Sometimes we post and ghost, meaning I post my YouTube video. Most of the time they're sketched and I don't engage. But the more you engage here on YouTube, whether the comments on your videos or you go to other channels and you comment. So those people you're thinking about collaborating with, go to their channel, start commenting on their videos. Not only are you going to connect with that creator or that business owner, but you're also going to start connecting with those people in the comments as well. And you're going to be more likely to get those people over to your channel to check them out. So maybe just set a timer, you know, 20 minutes a day or maybe even 30 minutes, just one week, to sit down and connect and engage on YouTube videos. Another way to promote your YouTube videos is an email list, whether you have one already or you don't. The reason why it's really important to have an email list is because not everybody that is subscribed to you is getting notifications that you published a video. So by taking that into your own hands and having your own email list that you can then send to people saying, hey, I have this new video. Here's what this is about. Here's how you can go check it out and link them to that video. That's really going to cut out that middleman of expecting YouTube to tell your audience and you just doing it yourself, you're gonna have a bigger deliverability rate, and you're probably gonna end up getting more people to watch that video than if they were to see a notification from YouTube. Because if we think about it, people are usually subscribed to 10, 20, 30, sometimes hundreds of YouTube channels. So just because you published one, they may have got a notification with it, but they probably got 20, 50, 100 more notifications about someone publishing a YouTube video. Whereas it's an email from you that might stand out more and allow you to get more clicks over to that video. Now, if you don't have an email list yet or you want to get started with one, I'm going to link to a video right up here that you can watch after this. I'll also put it in the description box, but it goes into full detail on how you can start with an email list, all the things you need to do step by step. Another way to promote your YouTube videos for free is to make better content. I know this is going to be a hard one, a hard pill to swallow, but hear me out here. You see, YouTube will actually promote your videos. YouTube will do all the work for you if you are creating good content. So what qualifies as good content? You need to go into your analytics and look at your videos individually. You need to see how you can improve them. First, you need to see how can you improve your click through rate. So if you're getting like a 2% click through rate, how can you get that click through rate up to a 2.5 or a 3% click through rate? Now your click through rate is really how well your title and your thumbnail is getting people to click. So if this number is low, YouTube's algorithm thinks, okay, if we put this video in front of people, nobody's really clicking on it. So why take up the real estate on YouTube, right? YouTube is going to push videos that people actually want to click on. So that's one reason why you need to focus on working on your titles and thumbnails. The next piece of analytic you need to be looking at is your audience retention. So the way the algorithm looks at this is, okay, if people are clicking on this video, is it good? Are they watching it? And if you have a steep decline in your audience retention in like the first minute, YouTube's gonna think, this probably isn't that great of content since nobody's watching past that first minute. So we're not going to take up real Estate on YouTube to promote this video because no one's watching it. And the third way to determine if your content is good for YouTube to promote is how well are people clicking on another video after they watch yours. So this is one I talk about all the time, end screen click through rates. Because if you do all three of these click through rate audience retention and end screen click through, that kind of becomes this YouTube trifecta that makes your video check off all the box for YouTube and for YouTube to want to promote that video because people are clicking on it, people are watching it, and they're watching another video, so you're continuing that watch session. So if you want YouTube to start promoting your videos for you, make sure you're checking these analytics and you're doing everything that you can to improve moving right along the other way to promote your videos is on your videos. So you may have noticed When I was talking about growing an email list, I talked about another video that I had that you could go watch after this. So I'm promoting my videos on my videos. So I just talked about end screen click through rates. So why not talk about what video your viewers should go watch next of yours after they watch your videos? So you're getting people to click on cards to another video of yours. You're getting people to click on end screens to another video of yours. You probably want to have a list of your most popular videos down in your description box. If you scroll down to mine, you'll see that I have a list of my most popular there as well. So any way you can self promote to get more people to know you have more content and tell them why they need to go watch, that is a great way to start promoting more of your videos. Let's keep this promotion chain rolling. And another way to promote your videos is making sure you're doing your research ahead of time. You don't just want to create whatever video pops into your head. You want to do the research to make sure people are actually searching for or watching the type of content that you want to create. In fact, I took about 30 minutes to not only research this particular video that I'm shooting for you, but to also script it because I really wanted to set it up for success so that YouTube would end up doing the promoting for me. And if you found it was very helpful, you would do it for me by hitting that share button and sharing it with your friends. So the best way to start researching whether it's a good idea to move forward with is just go to the YouTube search. You can start typing in your niche and seeing what are the words or phrases people are actually searching on YouTube for. As you start typing it in, YouTube's going to pre populate a bunch of different words and phrases and that's what people are searching on YouTube for. Now if you want to take it even step further, you want to go to one of those terms, look at the videos that are showing up in search. Ideally you want to be looking for the videos that are getting more views. Then that channel has subscribers. Because key here, that means YouTube is promoting that video because that video is getting more views than that channel has. Meaning YouTube's doing some of that promoting, right? Then you click on that video, watch it, see, you know, how is that person opening that video? How are they delivering the content? Pro tip here, look at the comments. What questions are people having? What comments are people saying? That was amazing about this video. That's how you can really start to structure your videos and make sure the content you put time into will actually succeed and be promoted by YouTube and other people. Because if those people are liking that kind of content, the people that watch your video are more likely to share your content as well. Now, remember, if you want to check out that workshop where I show you how I create an entire month's worth of video content in just eight hours, I'm gonna link it on your screen right now. I'm gonna put it in the description box. I'm gonna tell you exactly how I promote on YouTube and Pinterest and Facebook and LinkedIn. Pop over there, put your email in, and I will send you the link to that workshop. And don't forget, if you're ready to get your email list started, video that's on your screen right now where I'll show you exactly how to do it. I'll see you over there.