Ask any YouTuber and they will tell you that generating significant views and subscribers isn't easy. But with the right strategy and tools, any video creator can build an engaged subscriber base when they understand what those subscribers want to watch.

Appealing to an audience to watch content you are passionate about making is just the first step, you need to know how to reach them and get your videos discovered. Our guides to how to guide more views on YouTube will give you the best tips to succeed on the platform.

How To Get More Views on YouTube

Do you want to make money on YouTube? Millions of creators are earning a very good living from the platform by uploading content that drives huge views and engagements. Whether that income is from advertising revenue, merch sales, or brand deals, we keep you updated with best practises and ideas.

How To Make Money on YouTube

Do you know how to do keyword research so you understand what videos people are actually searching for on YouTube? Do you know how to create a custom YouTube thumbnail? Do you know how to create a Playlist on YouTube?

vidIQ has a ton of tips that will help every creator maximise their video content. We publish content every week to keep you up to date with all the best practices.

YouTube Tips & Tricks

If you’ve put off creating your own YouTube channel because you’re overwhelmed with the choices you need to make or are panicking because you feel you lack the right skills to succeed, worry no more and welcome to the only resource you’ll need to fulfill your video creator dreams.

If this is your first time here, we have a 

 that aims to educate you on your YouTube journey. And if it is your plan to grow your channel, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, and click on our notification bell so you don't miss any of our latest tips, tricks, advice, and news.

How to Start Your YouTube Channel: 10 Top Tips

We promised 20 tips to kickstart your YouTube channel, so let's start delivering on that promise with 10 tips in this post and 10 tips in the 

. All the tips are covered in this video too:

So amazingly, there are still some people out there who are thinking of starting a YouTube channel and have been for months, possibly even years. My advice to you is, ready or not, start now. And I'm not telling you this as a New Year's resolution. Every moment you hesitate or procrastinate, there are thousands of video creators starting their YouTube channel today, and gobbling up all your potential audience. You don't want that.

Feel the fear, do it anyway. Start, press record. Record whatever you want today. It doesn't matter if it doesn't end up on YouTube. You need to gain experience in getting in front of the camera, getting behind the camera, using your editing program. You need to start creating content to find out whether or not you enjoy making videos before you know whether or not you enjoy being a YouTuber.

Tip #2 Learn How YouTube Works, No Seriously:

The chances are, that the first video you make is going to absolutely suck. Fantastic, you've made a video. You've made the first step, and in six months’ time, you'll look back at that first video and think yeah, that really was terrible, but you've gotta start the journey somewhere. And with that, you've gotta start your YouTube channel somewhere as well, even if you're not ready. Create a YouTube account, upload a video to YouTube. You don't have to publish it, that's the important thing.

You need to gain experience going through the workflow of uploading videos. The last thing you want is having a brilliant video ready to upload, but you don't know how the YouTube system works. Again, experience is going to trump any advice any of us can give you, so record a video, upload it to YouTube. You don't have to publish it.

Tip #3 Develop a Strategy you Will Actually Follow:

While getting some practical experience behind you is obviously a good thing, you also want some form of strategy. So, answer these questions:

What do you want your channel to achieve on YouTube

, and when you're answering this, try and answer it from a viewer's perspective, not your perspective. So I don't want to hear about hitting 10,000 subscribers, a million views, or whatever. If your viewers know that you're in it for your own self-gain, they will see through it and immediately switch off. Viewers want to know what they can gain from the content, and you want to sell that as much as possible in your videos.

 Again, try and be as specific as possible. What age range? What gender, if you are going to a particular gender? What type of demographic? What are they interested in? You need to know who's going to watch your content.

 There are millions of gaming channels out there, hundreds of thousands of Fortnite channels out there. How are you going to distinguish your content from everybody else who's already on YouTube making content? You need to disrupt the status quo, not join it, because you'll never be seen.

how are you going to deliver this content?

 Is it going to be every day, once a week, at a particular time of the day? Think about when your audience is most likely to watch YouTube, and how much YouTube they can watch per week, and then tailor your content to those watching habits, and think about whether you're going to do video on demand, live streams, what's going to be best for you and your audience?

Tip #4 Find Your Niche and Build the Hell Out of It:

live streams, you'll know this one off by heart. Niche down. Let me give you a quick example. What's your channel about? If you're giving an answer such as, "My channel's about beauty, and it's about travel, "and it's about vlogging," then it's about too many things. 

. It should be about one specific topic, when you start your channel, because you need to appeal to a very specific audience.

Once you've grown your channel, and you've got millions of subscribers who fall in love with you, you can take them on a journey wherever you want, but to begin with, the audience is only interested in the content. They have no investment in you. Try and remember that. It's a cruel lesson to understand, but it will help you when you first start out on YouTube.

Once you've thought about and answered all of these questions, I want you to wrap it all up in a nice little present, called your value proposition. This is your elevator pitch. Try and tell your audience who you are, and why they should watch you, in around about six words.

. It tells you the who, YouTubers, video creators, and why they should watch, because they will learn how to grow their channels. But we've managed to do that in four words. Now it's your turn.

Tip #6 Invest in the Right Audio Equipment:

If you've just started out on YouTube, and you're wondering what your first tech upgrade should be, it is 100% audio, and here's why. Bad audio is so much more distracting than bad video, and everybody hates onboard microphones. 

So if you can, get yourself a dedicated microphone for your camera,

 and if you're recording from a computer, you can't go far wrong with a Blue Yeti.

Tip #7 Create a Formula with Template Videos:

Videos need structure, so when you make your next video, try to think of how you will develop a show formula, that you can use as a template for your future videos. Remember at the beginning of this video, I literally gave you a hook. An introduction, a teaser to what's going to be going on for the rest of this video. Then we have the branded intro, followed by an introduction to who we are for new viewers, a call to action to subscribe to our channel, and then we jumped into the meat of the content where we are right now, and at the end of this video, you'll see how we round this all up.

Your show formula will take time to structure, and it will evolve over the course of your YouTube journey. Try and keep an eye out for this when you watch your favorite YouTubers. As rough and as random as they might appear, there is always structure and story behind each video, and that's why you watch them.

Some people love analytics, others hate them, but there are a couple that are crucial to keep an eye on, whether or not you want to look at that analytics. The first is 

This represents how enticing your titles are, and how clickable your thumbnails are. Check the click-through rate for your channel as a whole, and on individual videos as you test. I'm not going to give you all of the same target to reach. Check what your current click-through rate is, and whether it's two, four, six, or eight percent. I want you to try and improve that by two to three percent this year. It will bring in so many more views.

The other metric, as it always has been, is 

. Generally speaking, the more watch time you get, the more YouTube is going to promote your content. But if you make shorter videos, that doesn't necessarily mean you must make longer videos, because your audience might not react very well to those longer videos.

What I will say is maximize the value of your watch time in the videos that you have. That's by looking at relative audience retention. How does your video stack up to similar videos, in terms of whether people are still watching or not, and try and improve the relative audience retention. Having said that, if your average view duration is 60, 70, 80%, you're doing really well, and it gives you a license to try testing longer videos.

Verify your YouTube account. That will give you access to the most important tool on YouTube, which is custom thumbnails. We've got a video here on how to do it.

Tip #10 Create an Engaging, Interesting Channel Banner:

If I see another generic cityscape, or rolling hills in the channel banner when we do channel audits, I'm going to rip out my hair.

10 more tips or creating and growing your YouTube channel

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

 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 

Members of the vidIQ family that have upgraded to our Boost and Pro packages get immediate access to the Academy 

 so you can kickstart your YouTube success today! Access to the exclusive vidIQ academy will give you a huge advantage over your competitors from the get-go. 

Kick off your YouTube dreams with the tools you need to launch YOUR channel. We've got the top tips just for you!

How to Start a YouTube Channel: 10 Brilliant Tips

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.

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

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

There used to be a time where you could only make money through YouTube from AdSense, and you would have to generate any other income, such as affiliate links, brand deals, and merchandising, off-platform.

But YouTube has got a lot more sophisticated in the last couple of years, now giving you several options to make money officially through them. On top of that, YouTube have recently announced some upgrades, as well as some facts and figures about how you can make money on YouTube.

Now, just before we go into the details, there is something that you video creators do need to bear in mind. All of these tools are part of the YouTube Partner Program, which means you need 1,000 subscribers, 4,000 hours of Watch Time, and have applied and been accepted into the program. If you haven't yet got there, please watch the following video which is full of tips, tricks, and advice to help you get there.

How to Make Money on YouTube through the Partner Program

If you have reached that target and you have been accepted into the YouTube Partner Program and you have monetized your content, congratulations, but at this point, you're probably feeling a little bit like this. Oh, is that all I get?

Now, don't get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with earning money from the adverts on your videos, but you don't earn that much compared to what you could potentially be earning from other income sources, and of all of the income sources you have control over, AdSense is probably the least reliable.

With changes in CPM, changes in season, and the demonetization of videos from YouTube, you have almost zero control over any of this, so by all means, have AdSense running in the background as a nice bit of extra cash, but start to think bigger with these YouTube tools.

Super chats allow viewers to make a financial donation to a channel and then have their message prioritized in their livestream chats and during YouTube Premier chats. The best thing about this feature is that it's pretty much available to all monetized channels as long as it's available in your country. To find out whether you're eligible for Super Chats and to turn them on:

Click on the Monetization link on the left hand navigation bar in the new Creator Studio

Click on the Live Chat tab at the top on the page

On this screen, if eligible, you should see a simple Super Chat toggle to turn this feature on.

Now, we here at vidIQ do live-streams every single week, and we occasionally get Super Chats from you, the awesome community. Thank you very much for that. And YouTube recently said this about Super Chats, and the numbers, to be honest, are mind-boggling:

There are now over 90,000 channels who have received Super Chats with some streams earning more than $400 per minute.

Super Chat is now the number one revenue stream on YouTube for nearly 20,000 channels - an increase of over 65% over last year!

The simplest way to explain this is that Super Chats come from your biggest fans because they feel involved in your journey. They are part of your community. They feel invested in you, and through the medium of the livestreams that they're watching, they want to give something back to you.

Now, live-streams may get a fraction of the views that your video on-demand content might get, but those people watching your live-streams are your most dedicated followers, and if I, the video creator, make sure that these livestreams are all about the audience, that's where Super Chats can really work.

And the funny thing is, here at vidIQ, we do live-streams every Tuesday where we audit your channels. It's all about you, but we actively discourage people from sending us Super Chats, because we don't want to favor people who have sent us money and audit their channels. We wanna do it for free, but people still send us Super Chats as a way of saying thank you. That's the power of the Super Chat.

Now, of course, there is a personal/content barrier to entry. In order to get Super Chats, you need to do livestreams. Now, if you're a gaming channel, this is very easy to do. You just start screen recording a game that you're playing on and livestream to your audience and talk to them as you're doing it, but if you're new to livestreaming and you're not a gamer, just be honest with your audience.

Post in your Community tab that you're gonna do a hangout session or a Q&A or you're gonna look at important questions that have been asked on your videos and try and answer them. Make sure that, when you go live, you're talking to your audience, so being a little unplanned is not a bad thing, and just enjoy the experience. Live-streams can be crazy things, but once you get used to them, they are fantastic, and at the end of that journey, you have Super Chats to financially support you. Incredible stuff, do try it.

With the Super Chat tool already highly successful, YouTube announced a new feature called Super Stickers. This will allow fans to purchase animated stickers during livestreams and Premiers to show their favorite creators just how much they enjoy their content.

Stickers will come in a variety of designs across different languages and categories, such as gaming, fashion, beauty, sports, music, food, and more.

Generate Revenue on YouTube by Selling Merchandise

I'm sure you've seen the merch carousel that's now directly baked into YouTube channels that allows you to buy merch directly from the video watch page. The requirements for offering this feature are a little stiffer. Being in the YouTube Partner Program is the prerequisite, of course, and for this, you will need more than 10,000 YouTube subscribers and have zero Community Guidelines Strikes. To set this functionality up:

Go to the Monetization screen in the new Creator Studio

Click on the Merchandise tab and then toggle on the Display Merchandise option.

Set up merch items from the merch store you intend to use.

There are many YouTube channels that have built entire financial empires out of merchandising, and as you grow your channel and build your community, you will start to develop brands and slogans and characters that people might want to get a piece of in terms of merchandise. Being able to sell your stuff officially through the YouTube platform is pretty awesome. However, the drawback to date has been only one available merch provider, Tee Spring, but the good news is YouTube recently announced five new supported vendors, and those are Crowdmade, Don't Forget To Be Awesome, Fanjoy, Represent, and Rooster Teeth. We recently featured Crowdmade on TubeTalk and you can read more about them and 

how to make money from selling merchandise on YouTube

How to Make Money from YouTube Channel Memberships

YouTube Channel Memberships allow viewers to join your channel through monthly recurring payments. In return they get membership-only perks like badges, emojis, and other goods you offer, like exclusive live-streams, extra videos, and even discounts on merch. The eligibility requirements are pretty strict for this one.

You need 30,000 subscribers, be over the age of 18, be located in a country where channel membership tools are available, agree to the terms of service of the feature, and have zero strikes on your channel. Even then, you might not be eligible, as it's still rolling out.

Now, of all of the monetization roots you can go down, memberships probably requires the most effort from you. Super Chats are pretty much taken care of by YouTube. You don't have to do anything for them. In terms of merchandising, you can pick one image and create dozens of items from it and have a shop set up within the hour, but with channel membership, you are making a commitment to your audience to create exclusive content for them. So, think about the creative juices and the time, energy, and resources you're going to have to put into your channel members.

Think back to when you were first starting your channel and you were committing to a video schedule, whether it be once a week or once a day. Well, channel memberships is like that, but on an entirely new scale. You need to make a commitment to those channel members to provide what you're promising, because they're paying for it.

With all that being said, recently, YouTube have massively upgraded this tool with one of the most requested features, membership levels. With levels, creators can now set up five different price points for channel membership, each with varying perks. This is how the Fine Brothers are using membership levels on their React channel, going all the way up to $30 a month. According to YouTube, this has increased revenue from their channel memberships by 600%!

YouTube recently announced even more ways that creators can generate revenue from their video content. Find out if you can take advantage of the new features via the YouTube Partner Program.

How to Make Money on YouTube! [New Updates]

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.

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

How does that saying go? If you've done what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten? Well, I'm afraid for YouTube that no longer applies due to the constant changes to the platform's algorithm. It's time to unlearn the old stuff and get with the new. Let's dive in to some YouTube changes that you need to know about.

Welcome to another episode of TubeTalk. I'm here with Greg Jarboe, an expert on YouTube, and the President and co-founder of 

. He is a prolific contributor to many industry publications (including 

), and is also an author and an instructor at Rutgers for the Mini-MBA Digital Marketing program. In this podcast you will learn:

If all you do is chase what changed recently, you're always chasing the latest change

How to recognise what's important to YouTube

Why what's trending on Google doesn't always means it's trending on YouTube too

Subscribe to TubeTalk: The Video Marketing Podcast

TubeTalk has been informing video creators and marketers since 2014, and is one of the most respected and listened to podcasts in the online video industry. Subscribe today so you never miss an episode! You can find vidIQ's TubeTalk at:

Don't forget to leave us a review if you love the show!

How to Start Again with YouTube: Full Transcript

	Thank you Liron. It's nice to talk with the techie guy.

	Greg, is there anything I left out on this kind of vast list of items?

	You're merely summarizing the last 15 years. I have a long checkered career, but let's not go into that.

	How does it go, the famous saying? The only constant is change. These one thing that you do well is understand things that are changing and work out how to get around them and unpack this beast, unscramble this egg and give us some amazing insights.

	If all you do is chase what changed recently, you're always chasing the latest change. Sometimes it helps to step back and see the direction things are headed and then sometimes you want to forecast the direction as opposed to just know what happened lately.

 I have a YouTube channel, I am a regular YouTuber like a lot of people trying to make it, trying to find a little corner of YouTube. Where do we begin?

	Well, you have to begin with great video, so I don't want to understate that. But over the years there are elements of YouTube's algorithm that have changed and we generally focus on those because that's what we do. But there are elements that have remained the same.

Now I uploaded my first video to YouTube in August of 2006 and I thought I was late to the dance because YouTube had been around for a whole year and I was finally getting to it. But over all that period of time, one of the constants in the YouTube's algorithm has been relevance. So if you've made great video, terrific. Then when it comes time to write your title, write your description, select your tags, they need to be as relevant as possible. And that part, it hasn't gone out of fashion. There are people who would skip over it because, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's the same, the answer is, yeah, it's one of the few things that hasn't changed. So focus there.

	Making good content. That is what people are there for. We want to be entertained, we want to be educated, we want to do it in a way that we can relate to. And if you are not producing that kind of stuff, doesn't matter how awesome your thumbnail is. We're just simply not interested.

	Bingo. So, again, it's easy to skip over the basics and go to the, how can you fake them out? Well, the answer is it's getting harder to fake them out and good content is number one and relevant titles, descriptions and tags is number two.

	All right, so assuming for the sake of this discussion, we understand this. People have been onto the vidIQ YouTube channel. They have read your blog posts, they have read our blog posts.. Now they understand they're going to get the basics. They've made a commitment to really, really get in there. But then YouTube goes and says, okay, we're going to change the game a little bit. Have you noticed some big changes happening recently?

	Oh sure. Huge all the time. And again, there is a whole army of people who chase the latest algorithm change and God bless them and good luck. That way madness lies. So one of the things that hasn't changed and won't change is relevance, and let me go back to the basics. If YouTube starts serving up irrelevant content, when you do a YouTube search, it will stop being the world's second most popular search engine.

	So yeah, they have fiddled with that over time, there were occasions when they threw in ringers because they thought people were finding content that was just too relevant. And so they would throw stuff in and oh, by the way, people stopped paying attention to their suggested videos. Okay. So by force of human behavior, YouTube can't deviate very far from serving up relevant content.

Now the big mistake rookies make is they go off and they will use a Google keyword tool to come up with the search terms to use in YouTube and oh no, no, no, no, don't go there. Don't go there. In fact, if you want to just see this for yourself, go to Google trends and the default result for any keyword that you put in there is going to be what they call web search, which is a search on Google. But guess what? There's a tab that you can go and look for YouTube search and you will often find that the term that seems to be trending in Google doesn't exist at all on YouTube. So, again, recognize that it's a different set of users who know they are on a video sharing site. And so the terms that they're looking for are frequently similar but different.

	Oh, I love that. And I can tell you from personal experience, literally yesterday I had someone telling me that they're about to launch this new channel. They have done all their research, they've listened to all the advice, was all to do with RVing and kind of how to buy your first RV. And I said to her, "Well is there a marketplace for this? Are people interested in this topic?" And she says, "Yes. I went to Google trends and its cooking." And I did the exact same thing you just said. I put in the same search terms and instead of saying web search, I said YouTube and the results were flat. Now had she just simply gone ahead and done that, she would've essentially had a channel that might be amazing, but the search volume is not there. People don't care for that kind of topic on YouTube. Is there an overlap between Google searches and YouTube searches? We've seen those snippets coming up now in search, we've seen video coming up in search. Are the two worlds going to collide at any point?

	Oh they do on occasion, yeah. And if you are let's say a type A personality that wants to overachieve, you go look for the overlapping terms that are both popular on Google as well as YouTube and you hope to get that incremental hit from Google search results on top of the YouTube search results. I think it's a two bank shot. Okay. All right. But guess what I can do just fine. Thank you very much, focusing on YouTube search terms instead of trying to contort myself into thinking, the only thing that counts is Google. And the answer is turning up in Google's nice that I'm not going to sneeze on that, but turning up in YouTube is nice and you have a lot more elbow room to work with.

	Maybe experiment on the other occasion, maybe even write a blog post and have all these things kind of intertwine, but it shouldn't be your pass or fail metric.

	Got you. I am looking at my YouTube trending. I am doing my research. What's my next step?

	Well then you have to choose but choose wisely is, I think the movie line goes. In the early days, I would take advantage of every last character in the title, in the description. The tags are always a sort of guesswork as to how many tags YouTube wanted. But in the title that you had up to 100 characters. And so I used to advise people, if you can come up with a title that is 99 characters long, then you haven't left anything on the table. Because who knows, maybe you'll get found for the fifth search term that you've stuffed into that title. Well, it turns out stuffing is stuffing and YouTube over the years has not rewarded that behavior. And so what may have been good advice, oh, 5, 10 years ago is now bad advice today. The right number, according to the research that I write about in a recent post, in Search Engine Journal, is about half of that.

So if you've got up to 100 characters, that's the max. If you can find a headline that's oh 47, 48 characters long, that's the sweet spot. So you don't have to take advantage of every last word. But what that does mean, this is the implication, and it goes back to my question about you must choose but choose wisely. Okay, if I'm going to leave the fourth and fifth search term out of my title, then excuse me, what were my top two or three? And I can't be all things to all people and apparently I'm not even rewarded for trying to be five things to all people. So, what are the most important ones? And that's a question that only you and your marketing plan can determine. What are the key things that ought to be in your title?

	So I mean, again, YouTube is making us focused. The old days of your channel can do cooking today, vlogging tomorrow, text the next day, motoring the next day. Those days seem to be, the variety days seem to be a little bit behind us. Now it's all about focus, focus, focus, and really kind of use that first punch, that first 50 characters to get it out there.

	Exactly. Exactly. And even people who are in the news business understand this because in the old days they wanted variety and now people like news now basically are spinning off new channels that focus just on political news, for example.

	Oh, I was one of the first and again, believe it or not, I've got a book called YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day, that was published in 2009. Do not read it. Do not buy my book.

	It is so out of date. Its 10 years out of date. Think about that for a second.

	But back then I was the first to crack the code to say, "Oh wow, you could have up to 5,000 characters in your description. Thank you, YouTube. That's about 800 plus words, depending on how long your average word is." And so again, back in the old days, I would recommend that, write as much as you can. And if you're a writer, God bless you. That makes you stand out from the crowd of just people who can shoot video and don't know how to write. Well, it turns out that was then, this is now the new best practice is again something underneath about half of what you could stuff into the description.

So if you can get 300 to 350 words into your description, you've done a good job. You've gone beyond the two or three sentences that most videos have, but you haven't filled it into the brim with words may not have been quite as a useful. So a little under half, 300 to 350 words in your description. And again, that means you're going to have to choose, what do I put in that it's going to be more than a sentence or two, but it's not 800 words anymore and be selective, tell the most important element of your story.

	And do we still use keywords in our description?

	I think so, but I would use sparingly. I tend to try to write with synonyms as often as possible because it's good for humans, but it also turns out to be remarkably good for algorithms as well as they've gotten more mature over the years. They understand what synonyms are and they make the arbitrary and whimsical and capricious decision that synonyms are probably good writing, so guess what? It turns out if you use good writing, then you are doing what the algorithm is trying to guess at that you should be doing.

	Okay. Now the mixed pot is the one that's used to be insanely important. Now it doesn't seem to be, let's talk about video tags.

	Yeah. Actually, I think it's still insanely important. I think it always was, believe it or not, in the early days of YouTube you can actually see the tags that somebody was using. It was right there underneath the description and then YouTube decided, oh no, no, we can't let that happen. And so the tags became invisible, but just because they became invisible, I don't think that means that they became less important. It just meant that they became, I don't know, I got to guess. And now there's tools like the one that vidIQ makes that let you see the tags again. Oh, by the way, now they may have always been important, but now you can see them again. So I think tags are key. There are times where if I'm going to put a keyword in my description, boy, I'm going to put it in my tags.

If I've got a synonym in my title, you better believe I'm going to get that in my tags. But, here's the trick. Here's the new trick. I generally take about 80% of the space that I devote to tags. And you can have anywhere these days of anywhere between 30 and 40 tags. I try to set aside 80% of them that are unique to this video. And I'd try to take the last 20% and say, okay, those are the tags that I want to use on every video on my channel. I want people who finish watching one of my videos to realize, oh by the way, I have other videos and yes I got to get this video found. So I'm going to do that with 80% of the tags, but I want to take the last 20%.

	And again, at the end of the day, YouTube is a search engine. It wants to marry those relationships. You want to force those relationships between your videos and a tag is a great place to do that. I always put it in my channel name, I put in my name. That's my constant between all my videos, everything else becomes unique to that particular video. Giving YouTube the metadata that it needs to kind of understand what this particular content about. But I want to force those relationships between my videos. Let YouTube suggest the next one for me.

	And again, at one point in time I would recommend, oh, only pick 12 tags. And at one point in time that seemed to be the right number. The right number is now about three times that number. So does that mean tags got more important? No I think what YouTube recognizes is that only a small number of videos are going to be found as the number one result in search. More videos will get watched if the recommended suggested videos are also relevant and people then stayed longer. Sessions on YouTube are now somewhere north of 40 minutes. That's average. And as a result, I'm not making 40 minute videos. I don't know about you.

	But what that does mean is that people in that session are not only watching my video, they're probably watching four or five or six other videos and hopefully a couple of those are also mine.

	And one of the things that really is intriguing for me is that YouTube has repeatedly said that tags don't have as much importance as they used to, right? But when I look at the new Studio beta, the one that's currently is being rolled at, guess what they brought across, tags. So if it's no longer relevant in the new upload flow that we've got access to, you upload your video and you put your title or your description and on the very next screen is ask you to put in tags. So if it's not that important, why are you bringing it across to a brand new platform?

	Yeah, I think it's actually unfortunately more fundamental than even that, it comes down to when you do a search in Google, Google can look at tons of texts and try to pick up signals about what is quality content. When you look at video, YouTube has very few signals that they can work with and most of those signals are in the metadata. So I think tags are one of those things that will continue to be important up until the day where YouTube is transcribing what is said on the video. And also interpreting accurately the visuals on the video so that they aren't faked out. And then maybe tags become less important. But we're not there yet.

	We get it, I mean the transcription is really getting much, much better. It's the AI is learning all the time. We already know about Cloud Vision, where you can upload your thumbnails that you can see what Google thinks of what things you're representing. So it just these tools are just becoming stronger and stronger and stronger, but I'm kind of getting the distinct impression that don't forget your basics, feed the beast, feed the metadata, at the end of the day it's still that search engine. I'm going to repeat that a bazillion times, but that's what it is. It's the world's second largest search engine.

	All right, let's move a little bit forward and now the one thing that you mentioned and I want to kind of go into that, all clicks are not created equal. Let's unpack that. I Love that.

	This has been an ongoing sea change that started way back in 2012 and that was when YouTube decided to dump the view as the key element in its algorithm and replace it with watch time. And so what YouTube is now paying attention to, and by the way, this is a huge difference between the YouTube algorithm and the Google Algorithm, which can't do this. But what YouTube is looking at is how long are you watching the video. Now they're actually going beyond how long you watched the video. They're also, how long are you staying in a session? Or is this the first video that you watch in a series of six. Views beyond your video are also factored in. Percentage that someone watches is factored in, et cetera, et cetera. And so all of a sudden you have a very robust algorithm that basically says, if I start watching this video and about 10 seconds in, I gag and go, "Oh, give me a break. This is corporate propaganda, barf. I'm out of here."

Oh, by the way, without even writing a comment underneath that video, which when people leave a video, they don't take the time to comment as much. They just leave. And YouTube knows that you just gave that video a thumbs down. You just spewed, "Do not waste my time with this kind of garbage, again." So YouTube is interpreting the viewer intent. Now if while I'm watching, I also do some nifty things like share the video after I watched it or I comment on it. Or even heaven forbid, give it a thumbs up.

	I know. I know, old school really old. Although really old schools, we go back to the five star system, but sort of old school. But if you interact with that video in a variety of ways, then those are a bonus brownie points. But the point is that YouTube is now looking for long clicks, not short clicks. And that thing gets back to, "Boy, your content better be good. It better be compelling. You better know how to tell a story or I'm out of here in 10 seconds."

	Cool. Can I tell you, I absolutely concur with that. I spent a couple of days with some of the world's largest YouTubers and amazing to me how most of them, by their own admission say they don't know this stuff. You know what they know? How to tell a good story. And that's all they focus on. It's just making it better and better for the viewer. And they get rewarded for that.

	Oh, and you're hanging out with the good people then because I hang out with a different crowd. I hang out with, oh, how do I say this? Agency types who know how to create a TV commercial in 15 seconds and think that's all you need to do on YouTube. Right? The answers. "Oh, man." So, I have to get them to unlearn what they learned in a different medium to take advantage of this new one. Well, maybe this is the part of the checkered background that I didn't delve into that I should reveal now. Once upon a time, way, way back, I was a journalist. Oh my God. I was an editor of a newspaper. I know. Print media. It's an old concept. Look it up in Wikipedia.

	You'll find a listing for newspapers. But one of the things we learned really quickly is you don't sell many newspapers today with yesterday's news.

	So maybe I got the right training and the wrong place, but I understood that this has got to be state of the art. You can't rest on last month's trend.

	Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, let's get back to 2019 for a second.

	Moving along. All right, so as we kind of going down our list, we know about content, we understand we've got to make good thumbnails, titles, descriptions, and tags. We now understand that content is key and not all clicks are created equal, still love it. Not all clicks are created equal. We want to get that watch time. We want to get people to really stay on and perhaps watch another one of our videos. We're using end screens, we're using cars and we kind of call to action. Getting people to stay longer. Are we not going to win this? Are we going to get a million subscribers by tomorrow morning?

	Maybe. Possibly. Some people do. Yeah. So it helps, how many subscribers do you have? Because they're going to be notified that you've got some new content out. And if you've got, let's say PewDiePie numbers, then guess what? Every new video he puts up gets about a million views in the first day. So yeah, yeah, it happens. It happens. But for most of us mere mortals, you were going to have to work at that. But it's worth knowing that the YouTube algorithm is now looking at your channel and trying to figure out how many subscribers and total views your channel has. And that's part of the algorithm that sort of determines, you've got a track record, you are worse boosting in the rankings because you've demonstrated in the past that you could do this.

So that matters. Another thing that matters, and this is one that snuck up on me, is the length of videos. I have always argued that longer was stronger. But a lot of people thought that was just strange in an era where a long video meant two to three minutes. But again, we've seen new data that says that the sweet spot for a video is somewhere in the 11 to 16 minute range. And that's a lot longer than most of the content that most of us are making. And again, a place to the watch time algorithm, but if you know how to tell a story, why cut it off at four minutes or five minutes just because that happens to be the length of the normal, let's say popular music video? Guess what? Michelle Phan is the one who pushed to get the 10 minute limit on YouTube expanded to 15 minutes because she couldn't finish putting on her makeup in 10 minutes.

And guess what? People were watching all 15 minutes. So if you've got content that is compelling and useful and interesting and takes you on a roller coaster ride, wow. Boy does the YouTube Algorithm rewards you. And again, incrementally you're going to be building your total views as well as your subscribers and you're going to get all the other magic benefits that come with the metadata optimization.

	Oh, absolutely. Each channel is different. So know your own audience and know that the audience is critical. But I have a feeling you don't agree with that?

	Oh, well, okay. I'm very open to new ideas. Hit me.

	Okay, well here's the deal. If you're looking at your analytics, you're trying to drive forward looking through the rear view mirror because all it will show you is what you've done up to now. And frankly, what most people have done up to now has been pretty cautious. And I find very few people who are really, really experimenting by pushing the envelope and let's test something we haven't done before. Then if you see that, well that bombed, we'll never do that one again. Okay, fair enough. But again, I spend a huge amount of time struggling to get people to stop making 15 second long videos because that's what we've always done.

And what I have to do as a sort of a tactic to get their attention is, I'll take them to influencers. And I said, here's an influencer that you could sponsor if you want to. Let's look at the average length of their video. Oh my God, it's eight minutes long. And oh look how many views and shares and likes they got versus your 15 second long video. And so I have to hit them on the side of the head with other people's videos to get them to think, "Oh hmm, you're right. We haven't been doing those kinds of videos."

	Instantly jumps to mind is the how-to channels. So and I use myself as an example. I have a how to tick channels, how to fix your router, how to get better internet speed. People, they want the information, they're hungry for the information that they wanted in and out. If you start telling long stories, either I'm a bad storyteller, which are 100% possible, absolutely, or people just want to know, how do I fix my toilet? How do I unblock that drain? They just want the information. They don't care about the other stuff around it. What do you think?

	Well, it's almost, almost right, but here's how I would frame it. You don't want to tell people how to fix half of their toilet and then come back next week and we'll fix the second half of your toilet.

	In other words, believe or not, you are trying to tell a story is just the format is such that here's the problem, here are the parts that you're going to need to get ahead of time. Here's the right order to put those parts together. Here's the way to test that your solution is working. In other words, you still want to go through a sequence.

	And it may not be anecdotal, it may not be funny, although boy, it really helps if your personality helps make that process an enjoyable journey. But nevertheless, people still want to, "Get me to the conclusion." And so it is a form of storytelling. It's just not an entertainment based form. It's more logic based form. But guess what? If you want to find it, it's in a book written by Aristotle called Rhetoric and these storytelling methods and there are more than one of them, have been around for a couple 1000 years and they still work.

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