YouTube is the #1 place where people spend most of their time. In-fact on average, a person spends 45 mins scrolling through YouTube. And the reason? It’s content, YouTube has almost unending content that can keep you occupied for hours and hours.
And it’s also a great place if you want to gain fame and earn some bucks. Earning money online through YouTube is easy, they say but that’s a lie. If you want to gain fame on YouTube, you’ll face lots of competition right from the beginning and you might also get crushed. So if you want to avoid get crushed and wish to stand among the bigwigs; read this article carefully as it’s full of useful tips that’ll help you survive.
Understand the planning for a good video
The first and the most important step for doing anything are always “Planning” and “Research”. Without them, you’re already headed to your doom. And this applies to YouTube too, especially when you wish to improve the number of your subscribers.
There are 5 key elements behind every good video ever posted on YouTube. And those 5 include–
- Keywords: Keywords help you gain a high-quality and constant stream of YouTube views and Subscribers but only if you use them correctly. I hate keywords, but they’re exactly what you need if you wish to boost your subscribers. Wondering what “Keywords” are? They’re simply texts and phrases which people use for searching particular content on YouTube or anywhere on the Internet. There are plenty of sites that’ll help you find the hot keywords but none beats Google’s Keywords Tool.
- Transcript: Transcription is one of my favorite features on YouTube. You may see that many YouTube videos lack Transcript but the ones which have a Transcript or CC, nearly always have over 100k likes. Why so? Because good transcripts make your video stand out from the crowd. Your viewer is the whole world and not everyone might understand your language especially people watching videos on mute and hearing-impaired people. Hence the majority of the people are more likely to follow you if you have a good Transcript.
- Social Media Engagement- This is simply sharing your videos on various social media sites. Well, Sharon, YouTube won’t just send you views and subscribers for free, you’ll have to work for those and sharing them on your other accounts is the best way to achieve that. You can even ask your close friends to promote your videos.
- Blog: Here you just take the video, dump it on your blog (if you have one) and share it all over again. This is the most preferred method of proficient Bloggers like myself. It gives us double benefits.
And those are the 4 methods that you go through before and after you post on YouTube.
Engage with your viewers
Just like other social media sites, YouTube also requires you to connect with people. You might underestimate this but getting feedback and having communication through comments can help you in improving your content by leaps and bounds and in learning about your audience.
They can be your savior when you are running short of ideas. You can simply ask your audience about the kind of content they would like to see, and you’ll be flooded with great ideas. Don’t forget to appreciate them later through shoutouts.
So take initiative and have a conversation with your audience, reply to people’s comments, follow back if you like their content, and show gratitude. Encourage them to be interactive by doing Q&A and by appreciating their work.
Create personalised engaging videos
With billions of videos out there, you need to make your content engaging if you want people to watch your video till the end.
Use your creativity and have some fun with your script. Using humour and the art of storytelling are the key but of course not with the regulated industries. If you have natural humour then it can take your channel to the whole new level, but if not. Then you’ll have to do some work like:
- To grab your audience’s attention you’ll have to make your thumbnail stand out. It lets them see the snapshot of your video. Make them curious with the help of your thumbnail and title.
- In order to gain more subscribers, you’ll have to be direct, there is no shame in it. Try asking questions and your audience’s opinion for more engagement. If that doesn’t work according to your expectation you can run a contest and giveaway.
- Apply basic SEO principles to youtube as their working is similar to the other social media sites.
- Keep your video short and interesting.
- Add some nice music if you like.
After all that you can be sure that you’ll get plenty of views and subscribers.
Monitor attention score
Another of my favourite steps to boost your subscribers. Basically it’s the same as Keywords but I like to think of it as spying on people. Attention score shows you the levels of attention, as well as the length of time people, spend watching your videos. In short, the Attention score lets you understand what people liked in your videos.
Once you understand how the attention score works and people find most interesting in your videos, you can create more videos according to that data and also help you gain more subscribers, likes, and views in a short span of time.
There are mainly 2 types of YouTube content. Entertainment and Informative.
If your videos fall in the Entertainment category then you’ll have to write interesting “Headlines” and “Attractive Thumbnails”. There are also other things like-
- 5-second rule: Every entertaining video must grab attention in the first 5 seconds. You can do this by adding the feeling of suspense in your videos. Why? Because people love suspense.
- Storytelling: I’m pretty sure you’ve watched those animated videos by Disney Pixar. They have the best possible storytelling on the whole of YouTube. And they don’t even use the voice or CC, but you can still understand what the story is about.
- Length: A good entertainment video should be around 1 to 3 mins. Pixar followers this, you must’ve watched Disney Pixar’s “Piper” it’s a 3 min long video and I daresay it is one of the most entertaining videos on YouTube.
Let’s not forget that there’s an informative category too. It’s too different from the Entertainment category. In this category, the early attention is quite low, while the late attention is quite high. Also, the length doesn’t matter as long as it’s informative.
Promote your videos at the end
Last but not the least, let me start by asking you a quick question. How would you make a viewer watch more of your videos once that person has watched 1 of your videos? By using that “Next Video” thingy at end, right? You may not believe it, but that simple “Next Video” trick can visibly increase your viewers and Subscribers.
To do this first you need to add 10-12 seconds of additional time at the end of your videos and then use YouTube End Screen Editor to add a link to your (good) video. Simple eh?
Summary
And so we’ve reached the end. There are many other tips and tricks I’d love to add but for now, those 5 would be more than enough to improve your YouTube Subscribers, Likes, and Views. You can even watch videos from most subscribed pages and take notes.