3 Overlooked tips to gaining more Traction on YouTube

Plus ten tips you should already know

With video content becoming more and more popular, and YouTube, the king of video content, available to just about everyone, how do you capture more views and build a successful channel?

Photo by Sam McGhee on Unsplash

I’m not here to tell you about these 10 things that you should already know:

1. Create good custom thumbnails
2. Promote your video on social media
3. Comment on other YouTubers’ videos
4. Create clickworthy headlines
5. Use keywords to optimize your title and description
6. Have your entire profile setup
7. Offer real value
8. Create good quality videos
9. Engage with your audience
10. Include a call to action

These are all things you should already know how to do. Here are 3 things you should definitely do to increase your watch time and overall views.

Here’s the first tip:

Giveaways

Nothing strikes more than giving me something of great value for free! Having a monthly giveaway as part of your strategy is a great way to get your viewers to not only stay engaged but encourages them to share your videos in participating. Just be sure you follow through and mention the giveaway winner. How do giveaways really work for a channel though? Here is a rubric you can follow.

Step 1

Mention the giveaway in the video title and within the first 2 minutes of your video. Tell the audience to stay tuned if they want to participate. Be sure to state the offer that will be given.

Step 2

In the last 2–3 minutes, establish the guidelines for the giveaway. What should they do in order to get it. Should they leave a comment, follow or share your video with a friend?

Step 3

Give a cutoff date to create a sense of urgency and let the audience know the winner will be mention in the next video.

By using giveaways you ensure that most if not all your participants come back to watch your next video to find out if they won. Try mentioning the winner of the giveaway in the middle of your next video if you’re looking to build up watch time.

Next up:

Series posts

Having a series is another great way to grab the audience attention. Imagine the end of an episode from a tv show. Note they often times give you a snippet of the previous episode and a preview of what the next episode will be about. This encourages the audience to check out the next video if they’re interested in seeing or hearing about that topic and also to check out the previous video to see more of the series of posts.

Simply mentioning and linking a previous video is also a good way of gaining more views. Try to keep your series under 10 videos as you want to keep it short and the audience engaged. You can do many short series to gather attention. For example:

5 DIY swimsuit outfits could be the series title where in each video, you would simply cover how to create just one.

While having short series post is great, that doesn’t mean the longer series don’t work. You could do a whole channel recording behind the scenes for podcast episodes or an entire channel simply on a talk show. Gary Vee has a whole channel on simply wine tasting with each video being an episode. You can too!

Finally:

Offer a free gift.

Remember I started by saying nothing screams louder than giving me something of great value for free? Freebies are one of the best ways to really grab and hook your audience and, if done right will bring so much more value to you in the long run because if I really enjoyed a tv show, I’ll tell my friend about it. That referral traffic is the real power. Imagine having just 100 referrals on each video. If you’re doing 2 videos each month, at the end of 1 year you would have amassed 2400 possible subscribers. That’s crazy if you’re just starting out.

If you’re looking for even more traffic, here’s a bonus tip. Post short 15 second clips of your videos on Pinterest. This works especially if you’re video fits in the informative/educational category. People are always searching for answers to “how to”. Give them one.

I must mention that while it’s possible to make a great video and have it go viral, going viral is not a marketing strategy. Always put out work that you can identify with and keep creating.