VidCon 2019 is over and it was another spectacular success for the online video community - creators, brands, influencers, publishers, and the community alike. I've been lucky enough to attend VidCon in a professional capacity for the last 7 years and here are 3 insane lessons I've learned from speaking and auditing YouTube channels at the event:

#1 Most Big Creators Make the Same Mistakes as Small Creators

Let's say you have two channels one with 100 subscribers and one with 100,000 subscribers. How is it they can both be bad at titles, thumbnails and still only one does well? (keep reading for the answer).

#2 The Difference Between Most Small Creators and Big Creators is Focus, Consistency and Time

If you don't know what your channels about, how will YouTube know whom to send to your channel and why would someone subscribe?

If you're not uploading every week how will you grow?

And if you have not consistently known whom your viewers are and uploaded every week for years why would you expect to be a big channel?

Confidence and mindset is the biggest factor in YouTuber & video creator success I've seen over the years. If you believe you will have 1 million subscribers, you're doing the work and putting in the time and nothing can stop you then you might just reach your goal.

If your studying, learning and thinking about what you want to create then you are failing every second your not uploading.

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level and 

 then make sure to download vidIQ. It will help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

Speaker presenting at VidCon conference with large audience and colorful stage backdrop

VidCon 2019 is the biggest online video event to celebrate YouTube, and we've learned 3 invaluable lessons from auditing YouTube channels at the event.

3 Insane Lessons We've Learned from 7 Years of VidCon

More people watch YouTube on mobile than they do on desktop, and the way mobile works is becoming even more sophisticated. I'm sure you've seen this feature whereby it auto plays a video before you even tap on it. Now usually this is a good thing. I don't mind YouTube suggesting me new content because that's the way to discover new creators that you've never seen before on the platform.

However there are times when YouTube suggests something far too often, and there are times when they suggest something that's completely opposite to your preferences. And until now you've never been really able to tell YouTube, stop! I don't want to see this. Well YouTube has finally given you that sort of control. Here’s how:

As you browse through content on the Home Page of the YouTube Mobile App, tap the three dots button to the right, and you'll be presented with this new option, ‘Don't Recommend Channel.

If you change your mind, tap on the ‘Undo’ option

Now let's be clear what that means. YouTube say that once this option is selected that channel's video content will not be suggested to you. But it still means the channel and its contents will appear to you in the subscription feed, if you have subscribed to the channel. The channel's videos will also appear in search. You can still find the channel and watch the video content. And their content might still be visible if it is trending on YouTube.

So I think what this basically is, is a channel mute button. If you do say you're not interested in that channels content you're going to have to do the work to find it once again. Oh, and do me a favor, I know you like to test out these tutorials, just don't do it on our channel please. But, just in case you do tap the, Don't recommend channel option, by accident this can be rescued by immediately tapping the Undo option.

And while we're on the subject, YouTube has added more recommendation tools. As you browse through the app you may see at the top of the screen quick topic shortcuts. The options that you see here are based on your existing personalized suggestions and are meant to help you find what you are looking for faster.

That content could be, videos relating to the one your watching, videos published by the channel your watching, or other topics which may be of interest to you. And of course, as you browse through all of this weird and wonderful stuff you will always have the option to tell YouTube you're not interested in that channels content. Except for us. You're not allowed to tap this option when it comes to vidIQ. This is not reverse psychology. Don't press it, for us. I think, I think I got the message through, yeah?

You may also start to see information boxes appear under videos when YouTube is trying to suggest content to you that viewers with similar interest to you have watched. Yep, that is indeed how much YouTube knows about what you watch, and what they expect you to watch next.

Controlling YouTube Recommendations on Desktop

Now so far, we've exclusively looked at mobile, but what about desktop? Well you can click on the three dots next to a video and tell YouTube you're not interested in that video. But you can go even further by clicking on the ‘Tell us why?’, and from here you can say you're not interested in the channel itself. The chances are you will be using these tools a lot to tailor your YouTube preferences.

But what if you want to clear all of this and start all over again, without actually creating a new YouTube account? Well you can point your browser to myactivity.google.com/myactivity click on, Other Google activity, and scroll down to, YouTube 'Not interested' feedback, which you can reset.

What are your thoughts on the YouTube recommendation engine? Is it sending content you want to watch, or is it still as bad as it has been in the past?

YouTube recommended videos with red prohibition symbols over multiple thumbnails and titles.

Want to know how to control the content YouTube recommends to you? We have the complete guide for 2020!

How to Control YouTube Recommendations - Complete Guide!

Video creator legends are not born - they're made. Most the creators I know that are famous now really sucked in the beginning, so how did they go from nothing to everything? It's all about mindset and I'm going to tell you the six secrets of the winning video creator mindset:

I've been a Youtube Strategist for over a decade, and my clients have billions of views so I'm going to let you into the secrets behind every successful video creator.

The first video creator mindset I want to talk about is knowing your superpower. You may love and have a lot of passion for something, but you really need to determine what you were put on this earth to do. Are you a great entertainer or an educator? In my case I love my family, I love fishing and I skateboard every day.

I absolutely LOVE skateboarding but I was put on this earth to educate people. I've been a teacher most of my life and this is what my superpower is - I love to help others succeed so based on that I'm leaning into that superpower and I'm helping people become better creators.

Once you know your superpower then you can create your messaging around it. You must focus your channel so that you become the perceived thought leader for what you do. This also helps your audience know what to expect from you and allows YouTube to know who to send to your channel based on watch history.

My messaging is video creator motivation. I got to that based on knowing my superpower. Now that I know that I'm a video creator who can help other video creators it was pretty easy to get to my message.

The third mindset rule I want you to think about is really knowing your audience. In my case my audience are people that want to become better creators, and who need to be motivated in video creation because it's such a hard process. Again because I know my superpower it was easy for me to get to my message, and then from my message it was pretty easy for me to really understand who my audience.

The fourth winning video creator mindset is 'belief'. I picked up this word from Evan Carmichael, and it really is the foundation for any video creator. When you believe in your superpower, and you believe that you can help or entertain an audience, unfortunately, you are immediately going to get opposition. You're going to get haters, and you're going to get family members and friends that don't believe in you. You're going to have to have a core belief that you're worth a million subscribers, that you're worthy of turning on the camera every single week showing up for the game and getting things done.

The difference between you and Gary Vee and Evan Carmichael is tenaciousness. Gary Vee has over 2100 videos on his channel with two million subscribers. In Fact, Gary Vee did over 1,000 episodes of Wine Library TV before anyone really knew him! Any creator that thinks they can replicate that success in just a few weeks or months is going to be disappointed.

I've really struggled with this for the last decade and in fact you guys probably haven't seen me on camera very much because of this, but Evan Carmichael really helped me. He said "hey Jeremy, how many times did it take you to 

" I said, I don't know, I probably tried about 10,000 times before I was able to ollie good on a skateboard. Then he asked, "how many takes do you do when you shoot a video," and I said one and he was like "then how can you expect to be good at something if you don't practice?". I actually started to do 15 or 20 takes every time I made a video so that I could get used to staring at a weird lens and a camera. That’s very foreign to introvert so believing yourself is a very true conviction that you must possess if you want to become a big creator.

You also have to create content every week. When Evan Carmichael recently broke his neck the dude created content that week he was in a neck brace and it looked a horrible injury, but he got it done.

Number six is never give up. I know this sounds cliche and common sense, but trust me, you're going to have so much opposition from your family and your friends and people you know and all the haters online you're going to want to give up when you put out a video that takes you 5 hours to make and edit and takes 2 hours to make an awesome thumbnail and you get 10 views or 200 views it's really deflating to a lot of people.

What it Takes to Be a Successful Video Creator

You just have to understand that your core beliefs, and your superpower, are the reason you were born and they are greater than numbers, greater than subscribers. You're part of a bigger picture.

Another thing you have to do is you have to get 1% better every week. Listen to your audience and really understand that you're the beginning of a journey. I don't think if you started boxing last week that next week you can go knock out Mike Tyson. I just don't think that's reality, but for some weird reason creators buy a camera, start editing and uploading videos, and then a lot of them get really upset when they don't get huge view counts. They blame the algorithm, they blame their family, they blame someone else all because they don't have a million subscribers and it just doesn't make a lot of sense.

If you look at business, most business people fail two or three times before they succeed in having a successful business. It takes a lot of failure to succeed so I know my six rules are common-sense. I know they're nothing that you didn't already know but I hope this video helped you and inspired you to remember what's really important in being the creator.

Pop art style woman whispering secret with "PSSST...!" speech bubble in retro comic design.

If you're not yet the YouTuber you were born to be, it might have more to do with your daily habits and mindset, not your thumbnails and titles. We bring you the 6 secrets of highly effective video creators.

The 6 Secrets of Highly Effective Video Creators - Ultimate YouTuber Hack

First off, let’s confirm how you access the ‘Notifications’ feature on YouTube:

When you are logged into YouTube, you should see your channel logo in the top right hand corner of most YouTube screens, if you click on that, you have the option to go to YouTube Studio.

Click on the ‘Videos’ tab, this will show you the video details.

Click on ‘Advanced’. Scroll down to the bottom of this screen, and you'll see the following option: ‘Publish to the Subscription feed and allow notifications to subscribers’. To clarify what that means, your subscribers will see this video in their Subscription feed and will receive notifications if eligible. This is always defaulted on, as you would expect, so if you want to stop this from happening when the video goes public, untick this box, and save the change.

Notifications have already been sent out for public videos, so for a private or unlisted videos.

The Difference Between Unlisted & Public Video YouTube Notifications

I know you've got a burning question you want to ask. What's the difference between a unlisted video and a public video that doesn't send out notifications? Good question.

Unlisted videos are those that are only designed to be found through a shared link, they don't appear in search results, and they don't appear on your channel page either. Public videos, on the other hand, are totally transparent and visible, they can be found through search and appear on your channel.

Some rare reasons why you might need to do this is for your channel trailer. You want it to be discoverable on YouTube, but you don't want to notify your subscribers because it's not required. Or, you might have some sort of Easter egg or secret game you're playing with your audience which they need to find, but obviously you don't want to notify them that the video exists.

And now let's go back to our question, what is the maximum number of notifications a viewer will see from a single channel in 24 hours?

So if you intend to upload multiple videos, maybe five or 10 a day, for whatever reason, and you only want to make sure that the most important videos reach your audience, then you can use that checkbox to untick the ones which you don't think are as valuable.

Notification settings banner with YouTube and vidIQ icons on blue tech background

Did you know there is a limit to the number of video uploads and livestream notifications a viewer can receive from a single YouTube channel in a 24-hour period? Find out more.

How to Control YouTube Notifications YOU Send to Subscribers

I'm going to let you in on a little YouTube secret today. One that's been earning our channel hundreds of thousands of views per month, and will likely earn us millions of views in the future. Thought you'd be interested in this one. Let's do this!

Have you ever had a video that just keeps churning out views, months, even years, after you've made it? The reason I ask is because those are the types of videos you can build entire channels around. And that's exactly what we've been doing here at vidIQ over the course of 2019. And the best news is this has nothing to do with 

The story starts back in July 2018 when YouTube introduced a new hashtag feature, and the moment we heard about this, we decided to make a tutorial video on the topic. Now it turns out that a lot of people wanted to know what these hashtags were and how to use them, so much so that this video a year later has over a quarter of million video views. Now that's pretty cool isn't it.

A simple tutorial on something that turned out to be a bit of a bust, but here is the craziest thing. A year after that video was made, it is still generating between five and six hundred views every single day, that's more than 3000 views per week, 15 thousand views per month. And it's been like this pretty much all year.

Yes the daily views have dropped maybe 25 percent - but most YouTube videos do not do this. They sink without a trace after the first month. So, obviously there's a question here, why is this video still being served up to viewers a year after it was made?

Well first of all it's a fantastic thumbnail, wouldn't you agree? For once I'm not actually joking, the click through rate on this video is ten percent, which is at the top end of the typical average. And one of the reasons why this is happening is because from the moment we launched this video it has sat on the top of the search page for YouTube hashtags. And we know just how important being at the top of these search rankings is, because we have a second video all about hashtags which we launched a few weeks after the first one which has a fraction of the views and click through rate to match.

And how did we immediately find ourselves at the top the search rankings? Well it was because we were the first channel to make a video on YouTube hashtags on the platform and get it out there before anyone else. Obviously it goes without saying, if there's anything new in your topic of interest, if your the first onto YouTube and video content you have a distinct advantage. And if there's a lot less competition, like there was with YouTube hashtags, which is a relatively minor news story, then you can dominate the search rankings and be the authority.

And now here's where there's a really important distinction between two different types of content. On the one hand we have trending news, that's here today, gone tomorrow. It's all about shock and awe, aiming to be in the right place at the right time for a viral video. And on the other hand we have brand new information, not trending news per say but something to add to a knowledge base that people may need to learn about for weeks, months, even years to come.

Evergreen Content on YouTube: The Key to Success

We've got a word for that, it's called evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that is always relevant or at least relevant for a very long period of time. We often joke that the gold standard of evergreen content would be to rank a video number one for how to change a car tire, or how to unblock a toilet. It doesn't matter how old that information is it's still relevant today. And yes, if you are brave enough to do a search for this term, and yes I have blurred out some of the thumbnails, you will find videos made over ten years ago with millions of views, that still get 70 views per hour today.

So ranking on YouTube for evergreen content could potentially be your superpower. The problem is, and forgive the very intentional pun, it is very difficult to unclog existing evergreen content. Unless of course that existing evergreen content suddenly becomes obsolete and is replaced by something new. You can see where we're going with this one folks.

Over the past decade this screen has become part of the daily fabric of my life, and it helped transform my career path. But it's time is coming to an end, if not already, replaced by YouTube's new creator studio. This is a monumental change, hundreds of screens, analytics, channel setup and video management all changing from something we're all very used to, to something new, arguably improved but quite different, and unfamiliar. And this isn't just affecting me, it's affecting every single one of you watching this video, and reading this post, and millions more besides.

It’s a bit like saying, I know we've been learning about the Marvel universe for the last ten years, but going forward we're going to learn about the DC universe, it's kind of the same but everything is different. So if everybody on the platform needs to learn something new, who's going to teach it to them?

Let me give you a very simple example. How to delete a YouTube video, a basic function you might need to know, and the top video on this search result has one million views, nicely done. But sitting in the number two slot right now is a video we made in the beginning of 2019, which shows you how to do it in the new creator's studio.

Now doing keyword research for this was pretty simple, it was the first thing that came into my head. How to delete a YouTube video. Everybody's searching for that term if they want to know how to do it. The thumbnail is pretty straightforward as you can see, my key concern was to make sure that it stood out against the rest of the thumbnails and looked different in some way. And no text certainly helps that.

Now that is all standard YouTube practice, but here are where things get a little more complicated when it comes to evergreen content. Evergreen content is often solution based in its nature, answering questions to commonly asked questions. And more often than not those asking the question just want the answer as quick as possible, nothing else. And that can lead to a counterintuitive YouTube video strategy.

On purpose I made the video relatively short, under three minutes and showed viewers how to delete a video in the first 30 seconds of this video, all the value was up front, the rest was saved for detail and a bit of bonding with the vidIQ community. Of course the common mantra is that watch time is the most important metric on YouTube. But what YouTube is also telling all of us more and more is to stop making videos for an algorithm and make videos for your audience.

Time is one of the most valuable currencies in the world and when a viewer spends it with you they want value from it. I can't and will not try to fool a viewer into a ten minute video on how to delete a YouTube video. And in this particular scenario YouTube completely agrees with me.

The second thing you need to appreciate with this strategy is your video will almost definitely perform worse to begin with, you just need to have unshakeable faith in the system. Through the vidIQ video comparison tool we can see that the blue line that represents this video on how to delete a YouTube video underperformed against channel expectation which is the pink line, at least to begin with, given time as the video grinded it's way through the algorithm, more people searched for it, clicked on it, and got value from it. By the end of its first 28 days this video was performing well above expectation from the channel. That's what a cumulative view kind of looks like, but the daily view count graph looks even more impressive.

It is not uncommon for evergreen content to tank very quickly after it's launch. It's usually not a sexy topic, a small number of people may be searching for the keyword, but the power of evergreen content is that the same number of people will likely be searching for the term tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and if your video delivers the value the expectant audience wants this is what can happen. Almost as many view per day as the day the video was launched. Already that video's doing pretty well, but if I'm honest with you I expect it to do even better in the future.

At the moment YouTube are currently running both the classic studio and the beta studio, but at some point they're going to turn off that classic studio, which means all of those videos on the old method of how to delete a video will be obsolete and whose video is be there waiting in second place to take the top spot? Yep, it makes perfect sense now doesn't it? So that's one evergreen piece of content up and running.

But hang on I just said that the entire YouTube creators studio is changing, that gives me an idea. This has been our side project throughout 2019, creating simple tutorials to do important things in the new YouTube creator studio. As you can see some videos have been more successful than others, but each and every one of them is still getting views today and fingers crossed, those should be guaranteed views for years to come.

To date these new creator studio beginner guide videos have collectively brought in over a million views and we still have dozens more videos on the list we need to make. Admittedly this is a rare occurrence, for absolutely everything in a topic, YouTube analytics and channel maintenance completely change and that has given us a rare opportunity to dominate a huge topic as if it was starting all over again. But this type of thing in smaller doses is happening all the time.

When a new season starts in a sport, such as basketball, baseball, NFL, there's always potential evergreen content that could last you 6 to twelve months. When a new version of a phone or a new operating system for a program is released, again there is evergreen content potential. It could last you 12 months even two years. New games, beauty products, back to school, these all have potential evergreen content.

And when you do identify these evergreen opportunities in your topic, if you apply some of these basic principles you could be onto thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands even millions of views, over the course of a very long time. Something to build your entire channel on.

Man surprised by rising YouTube analytics graph with vidIQ logo and "HOW!?" text.

The right evergreen video content can earn your YouTube channel an incredible amount of views per month. Find out how.

Why Evergreen Content is the Key to More Views on YouTube

You're here because you want to change your YouTube channel name. Well I've got a couple of questions I want to ask you first. What are you changing your name from and to, and why are you changing it? Whether you are on Android or iOS the method is the same.

Simply tap on your channel logo in the top right, and then tap on your channel.

Next to your channel name you will see a settings icon. Tap on that and then you should see a pencil icon next to your channel name.

Tap that and you should now be able to change your channel name.

Now before you go anywhere I did mention a couple of caveats and this is the first one. You can only change your YouTube channel name three times every 90 days. And secondly, do you have a brand account? If you have no idea what I'm talking about you need to bear this in mind as well.

When you change your name on YouTube you're not only doing it for your channel you're doing it across all of your Google services for that account, which isn't ideal if you want to keep the two things separate. Now why it's like this I don't fully understand. I think it's something to do with the legacy of Google+. However there is some good news. There is a slightly complicated way to fix all this.

If you want to separate your YouTube channel from your Google account what you need is a brand account. A brand account has several benefits, the first being able to use a custom channel name without affecting your personal Google account. It also allows you to manage multiple channels from one Google account, and you can add managers and owners to your brand account who can help you manage those YouTube channels.

The process involves creating a brand account and then moving your YouTube channel to that brand account, which does require several steps. You could probably do it on a mobile phone if you want to, and the place to start would be www.youtube.com/account_advanced. But it's going to be much easier and safer to do it from a computer.

YouTube channel name change screen with vidIQ channel page on smartphone display.

Want to change your YouTube channel name directly from your phone? We show you how to do it whether you use Android or iOS.

How to Change Your YouTube Channel Name on a Phone (Android and iOS)

If you do want to take advantage of a tool I'm about to show, then make sure to 

, as it will help you research YouTube, analyze any video on the platform (which is what we're about to do), audit your own channel, and suggest actual steps that will help grow your own YouTube channel. It is free to download.

All right, just before we jump into this tool, I need to explain a little bit of jargon, and that is freebase topics. To keep this as simple as possible, freebase topics is a way of assigning a common topic to places, people, songs, and so on. What's important about all of this is YouTube automatically tries to do this with your video and every single video on the platform. And that data is made available through the YouTube API.

, with it's 6.3 billion views, these are the tags that were fed into YouTube, but these are the topics YouTube automatically decided were associated with the video.

And a question you might be asking at this point is, "Does a video need a lot of views "to be assigned into a YouTube topic?" Put simply, the answer is no. A video can be published very recently, have less than 100 views, and different tags, and yet, the video still has these topics. So, this is all to do with metadata, right?

If I include certain keywords in the title, description, and the tag, YouTube's gonna be able to put my video in the right topic and serve it to the right audience. Well, PewDiePie is notorious for not caring too much about metadata. 

 only mentions Minecraft once in the title, description, and tags, and yet, YouTube still classifies the video within the video game culture topic.

On the other hand, when PewDiePie mentions Minecraft in the title 

, along with an action verb, "raiding", YouTube seems to have more information to work with and adds two more topics, action game and role-playing game.

Now, that all seems relatively straight forward. But what happens when the video content gets a little blurred? Say we have a video creator such as MrBeast. Well, this video titled "

" has YouTube clutching at straws a little bit, suggesting the topics of lifestyle and technology. If MrBeast buys a homeless man a Lamborghini, then swap out technology for vehicle, as a topic. But if MrBeast challenges people to stay in a Tesla, that's purely for entertainment value and nothing else, according to YouTube's topics.

Can you directly control these YouTube topics? Clearly not. Can you influence these YouTube topics? Yes, with metadata, but is more going besides? Although there is no hard data on this at the moment, YouTube is likely looking at captions, if you've included them, maybe even comments on your video, and watching the video in an artificial intelligence type of way. But ultimately, what does this all mean for you, the individual video creator? That's where we need to do some big data research.

We handed over our numbers on video topics to data expert and CEO of Little Monster Media, Matt Gielen, to come up with some answers. Matt was able to define the super topics and how competitive they are, as well as identifying topics with few videos, but high average views, presenting possible windows of opportunity.

I don't want to steal Matt's thunder on this one, as his videos are always a fascinating insight into the inner working of YouTube. So, do check it out over here.

Red YouTube play button with unlocked padlock icon and words "New Tool" on blue background.

So you've crafted the perfect title, description, and tags, and metadata is on point. But what does YouTube really think about the topic of your video? Well, it just so happens we got a brand new, free tool to tell you just that.

What Topic Does YouTube Think Your Video is About? (And Why That Matters)

I've got a question for you. What are all of the unique things you create for every single video, whether it be thumbnails, titles, descriptions, and tags? And the reason I ask you that is because some things you probably never change when you upload your videos and are always working in the background. But are they working smartly for you?

YouTube Default Uploads: Check Your Settings!

When you are logged into YouTube, you should see your channel logo in the top right-hand corner of most YouTube screens. We're going to start with something you should all review every couple of months and those are your upload defaults. Click on Settings in the left hand navigation bar and then, choose Upload defaults. When you begin the process of uploading a video to YouTube, elements of that upload will be pre-populated with what's currently in your Uploads default fields.

Starting with a title, it's probably best to leave this one blank as each title should be keyword specific and emotionally relevant to the video you upload. But if you are an educational or how-to channel, there may be specific phrases you want to include here.

On the other hand, you're description is where you want to pre-populate some stuff. Firstly, we have a top paragraph here that indicates the viewable description preview when people are scrolling through YouTube. It's a second opportunity to include keywords and grab the viewer’s attention. Imagine you are writing an old school tweet with 140 characters. Make it as compelling as possible.

Now, underneath all of this stuff you write about each video upload, you should also include new viewer information, such as who you are, what you do on YouTube, answers to common questions about your channel, links to whatever is important to you, and hashtags at the very bottom of the video description if you intend to use them.

A question you may be asking is, how do I use hashtags and should I be using hashtags on YouTube? Well, we do have a useful video that covers that topic and you can 

. And of course, always set you videos to ‘Private’ or at the very least, ‘Unlisted’, so that YouTube has a chance to process it properly, including giving warnings about monetization and so that you can set it to ‘Public’ at the exact time you want it to go live.

There are three tabs at the top of the Upload defaults screen, the second one being Extras and featuring tags and ad placement. Much like the title and description, your tags should be very specific to each uploaded video. We've got a couple of very broad default ones here and we usually delete as appropriate per video. And of course, once you have 

, you will be offered hundreds of tag and keyword suggestions to help optimize your videos along with loads of other tools, too!

if your channel is monetized, you’ll want to make sure you are serving up ads on your content that maximize your potential earnings. Imagine if you've uploaded 50 videos with default settings that haven't been set correctly - that's a lot of potential revenue down the drain.

Now, I'm not suggesting you stick as many adverts as possible on your videos, but, consider this. If you make longer videos, of say, 15 to 30 minutes or more and you have high audience retention, say, 70 to 80%, I think that gives you permission to put adverts in the middle of your videos. After all, you deserve that little bit of extra income.

YouTube Advanced Settings: What to Update

One more tab to look at now and that's the Advanced section. Unless you're happy for people to use your content for free, make sure your videos are set to the Standard YouTube License.

The ‘Category’ drop down can help you to advertise as much of your content to the correct target audience. And it just so happens we've got a dedicated video on YouTube categories you can check out for more information:

The ‘Video Language’ option helps YouTube to share the correct language captions to the right viewers.

Caption certification only applies to videos that have been broadcast on U.S. television, and community contributions allows viewers to submit captions for your videos.

Finally, you can manage how comments are posted on your channel, whether you want to allow all comments, review each one, or disable them. If you are a channel that includes children in your content or appeals to a very young audience, you may want to check this every week to make sure YouTube haven't disabled this, although they should tell you in an email if they do.

How to Change the YouTube Settings of Published Videos

Making changes to your Upload default settings will affect all the videos you upload in the future. But what about those that are already on YouTube? Well, you can make changes to them on an individual basis.

From the new Studio Dashboard, click on the Videos link in the left-hand navigation bar to list all of your videos. Next, click on the video you want to adjust and on the first page, you will see the title, description, and tags you can change, along with many of our vidIQ tools. At the top of this screen, there is an Advanced tab where you can adjust all the other settings found in the default upload page, along with additional options, such as video location, age restriction, and even more monetization options.

Next on the list are channel keywords. To get to those, go to settings once again in the new studio and click on Channel. On the first tab labeled Basic, you will find channel keywords that apply to your whole channel, not just individual videos. Historically, channel keywords helps YouTube to understand the content and audience of your entire channel. Now, I say historically because if you were to ask me today how important channel tags are, I'm gonna be upfront with you. I have no idea. YouTube themselves have been stressing for a long time that video tags are no longer as important as they used to be and we did some tests 

And if video tags aren't very important anymore, I would imagine channel tags are even less important. Take this as an example. We inserted this rather strange and unique tag into our channel keywords to see if we would be able to search and find our channel through that tag. We couldn't. The end result we did come up with was this channel. And I've gotta be honest, that kinda leaves me feeling a little woozy.

Next up is your YouTube branding watermark. To change this in the new studio, go to Settings and this time, click on Channel, and go to the final Branding tab. By setting this correctly with the right image, you can increase subscribers you get from this feature by over 500%. Yeah, you heard me right, 500%.

Going into Settings and then, Community will allow you to review a few things, including the management of your moderators for live streams. Blocking people from commenting on your videos and creating a list of words that, if picked up in comments, automatically send them to your held for review section.

When it comes to blocking words, obviously, you can use it for inappropriate language. But what you can also use it for is those damn annoying comments when people say, "Sub for sub. "Subscribe to my channel. "Hey, check out my channel."

 then make sure to download vidIQ. Join over 1 million other users and use vidIQ to help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

Man pointing to a YouTube settings icon with text "Fix Settings More Views" for video SEO tips.

When you upload your videos to YouTube, there may be a few settings that you're taking for granted that could have a huge impact on the success of your video. So, let's take a look at them.

YouTube Settings You NEED to Know

Nobody likes nor wants to read sub4sub comments so here is how to block them from your channel.

Click on your YouTube profile picture in the top right hand corner of your screen

Click on ‘Settings’ in the left hand column

On the screen that pops up click on ‘Community’

You’ll see a screen that shows your channel moderators, people you've hidden from your channel, and a section at the bottom called ‘Blocked Words’

Add the list of keywords you want to block here

The Blocked words box works very much like video tags. You type in a word or phrase, press enter, and that will create the blocked word. You can use spaces as well to write complete phrases, such as, "Subscribe to me." You can remove blocked words by either clicking on the cross next to the phrase or by pressing the backspace key.

To help you get started, this is the list of blocked sub for sub words we use at vidIQ

You can also automatically place comments with sub4sub content, or other hashtags and links in them to be held for review. To view and review these comments, go to the ‘Comments’ page in the Creative Studio and you will see three tabs at the top.

 is YouTube's automated attempt to filter out comments such as, "Sub 4 sub?" Which sometimes it gets right, while other times it filters out completely legitimate comments.

 is where you will find those comments that have been weeded out from your blocked words list. Oh, and if you're wondering why some of our comments are blurred out, it's because they contain foul and abusive language, so feel free to add such words and phrases to your blocked list too.

You have several options on how you can deal with these comments, you can:

Permanently hide the user from your channel, so you never see any of their comments again

Now, while we're on the subject of comments, vidIQ has a cool little tool that allows you to create comment templates, so instead of typing the same response out many times, to the same question or the same comment, you can do a couple of clicks and it automatically places it in there for you. Saves me tons of time, every single day. And if you're wondering what that one tool is, it's all part of the vidIQ Chrome extension ⬇️

Stop sign warning against YouTube sub for sub exchange and spam comments.

Sub4Sub comments on YouTube are beyond annoying so here's a way to block them completely - for good!

How to Block & Remove Sub4Sub Comments on YouTube [Block List Included!]

Trust me, if you've been thinking about buying subscribers to grow your YouTube channel, this is going to save you a lot of pain. Because put simply, you don't want to do it. And this is the main reason why.

. You probably haven't read them, and that wouldn't surprise me because nobody ever reads them. Especially when they are this long. But if you have intentions of buying subscribers, then you may want to read Permissions and Restrictions section 6, which states that you are not allowed to do the following:

Cause or encourage any inaccurate measurements of genuine user engagement with the Service, including by paying people or providing them with incentives to increase a video's views, likes or dislikes, or to increase a channel's subscribers, or otherwise manipulate metrics.

So it doesn't matter where you bought your subscribers from, and it doesn’t matter how much they promise your subscribers are legitimate, and will genuinely watch your content. Ultimately, you have paid somebody to try and artificially grow your channel, and to manipulate YouTube's metrics, and that is against Terms of Service. And the buck stops there. YouTube are the gatekeepers, and if they find out what you've been doing, then your channel will most likely be suspended or terminated.

Why Buying Subscribers is So Bad For Your YouTube Channel

Now let's say for argument's sake that you do buy some subscribers and YouTube doesn't take down your channel. What are you actually going to get from those subscribers you paid for? Well it's kind of similar to sub4sub. And while we are on the subject of sub4sub, I hope that it won't come as a surprise to you to learn that this practice also falls under the fake engagement policy. Buying subscribers, sub4sub, you know it's wrong, don't do it.

Now let's put on my hypothetical hat for a second. Let's say you were on the other side of a fence, and somebody paid you to subscribe to a channel, and maybe watch a video. Once you've done what you were paid to do, you're under no obligation to watch any more of their content or to stay subscribed to their channel. You didn't choose to watch their content in the first place, there was a financial incentive. That's not really the relationship you want with your audience, is it? It's not a recipe for success.

Now, granted, that was hypothetical. But you know what I'm talking about, right? Nobody said YouTube was easy, and buying subscribers and indeed views makes it impossible, because your channel will be terminated. This is all blood, sweat, tears, and hopefully at the end of it, some success. But the important thing is, you need to do it organically. So no, this isn't a video on how to buy YouTube subscribers. This is a video on educating you why you shouldn't buy YouTube subscribers. And we hope you found it valuable. If you did, you may be on the cusp of subscribing to our 

. And if this little graphic down here helps push you over the edge, which is allowed by YouTube, then go ahead. And that's how you get subscribers the right way.

Hopefully. You did subscribe, right? Cheers. Now I know some of you at the back of the room are probably shouting at the top of your lungs, you've just told us not to buy subscribers, and yet you sell a YouTube tool that feels like a hack to me. Well let's address that point.

vidIQ software is certified directly by YouTube

, and that means we have to go through compliancy checks every year or two to make sure that our software isn't doing anything that it shouldn't. We follow Terms of Service on YouTube. And put simply, we are not a hack piece of software. There isn't a magic button in vidIQ that gives you more views and more subscribers.

What we do is signpost your journey. Point you in the right direction. Whether that be through researching YouTube, finding the right keywords to better serve your videos to the right audience, analyzing every single video on the platform to find out what's working for your competitors or what's successful for a particular channel, and how you can potentially follow that success. Auditing your own channel, going through all of those YouTube analytics and bringing the important ones to the surface with single clicks, and suggesting actions that will help fix problems on your channel and help you grow quicker.

Not necessarily help you grow by hacks, but by helping you grow organically. vidIQ is free to download. There is a link below. Make sure to check it out.

Now as we're on the topic of growing subscribers, there is one more gray area to take a look at. Giveaways. Can you encourage people to subscribe to your channel during a giveaway? You are allowed to hold a giveaway contest on YouTube, but there are lots of rules surrounding them and 

You and any third party may not manipulate metrics on the YouTube service, including numbers of views, likes, dislikes, or subscribers, such that those metrics fail to reflect genuine user engagement with the YouTube service.

I also spotted a Tweet from Team YouTube that says, "Giveaways are still allowed! What we don't allow is linking to sites that solely aim to drive up subscriptions or other engagement metrics like views or likes through external contests and other means. Since that's the case with this site, it violates our external links policy."

And what YouTube were talking about here was Gleam. This service helps users manage competitions by giving entrants multiple ways of entering a contest, such as following the user on Twitter, or subscribing to their YouTube channel, watching a video. But unfortunately, YouTube doesn't want you to do any of that anymore, because it manipulates their metrics.

So again, our advice would be to not use giveaways on YouTube that encourage the viewer to subscribe to a channel to enter the contest.

Red icons with white +1 symbols representing social media likes and engagement.

So, you want to know how to buy subscribers to help grow your YouTube channel? Well, it's pretty simple. You don't!!!

Why You Shouldn't Buy YouTube Subscribers - EVER!

Just in case you didn’t know, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Making it a magnet for educational and tutorial content, and for answering questions people are asking the internet.

Google of course, is the king of search. And if you do your YouTube titles, tags, descriptions right, you will discover just how much of a gold mine views from Google can be for your YouTube videos.

This very simple video on ‘How to Delete a YouTube Video’ has (at time of writing) over a quarter of a million views. Its part of an ever growing strategy that we've been working on over 2019:

Interestingly, this particular video has received over 90,000 views from external sources 60,000 views from Google Search directly. Just like topping the YouTube search rankings, topping the Google search rankings is prime internet real estate.

Google Key Moments: Helpful Timestamps for the Viewer

And so far Google has accommodated video either through video shelves, or through featured video snippets. But that's all about to change with an upgrade to Google search that's called ‘Key moments’. This feature works by identifying key anchor points on a video, and including them as links on the Google search page.

When Google returns a search result with Key Moments, it pops right out on the page. As well as being in the top of the video searches, the Key Moments creates an even bigger footprint, especially on mobile devices. I mean, basically, this is a search result you simply cannot ignore.

How to Activate Google Key Moments in Your YouTube Videos

So, now you know what Google Key Moments are, and potentially how powerful they could be, how do you get them to work for your YouTube videos? It's all to do with timestamps.

In your video description, or video comments, you can create time stamps by typing out hours, minutes and seconds separated by colon. As an example, we've added several time stamps to this video.

And, while they don't look any different here in the video manager page, to a viewer on a video watch page, they appear a blue clickable links. Which, when you click on them, take you to that timestamp in the video.

Now, timestamps as a YouTube feature are not new. They've been around for years, and video creators have been using them to chop up longer videos and also to provide an extra little bit of SEO in their video descriptions. But in the future, what Google search Key Moments are going to do is use those timestamps to create these chapters on the videos within Google Search.

There is a new feature rolling out on Google Search that could help you get more views on YouTube and it's all to do with Key Moments and timestamps.

YouTube Tips for Creators