8 Ways to Increase YouTube Views and Retain Your Audience
Everybody uploads videos to YouTube in an effort to increase their views. You can monetize your videos with more views and audience. YouTube is beginning to place more emphasis on audience retention, while views are still very important. Minutes watched are as important, and may even be more important in the future, than views. No matter what you think is more important, retention or views, the bottom line here is that we want our content to be watched for as long as possible. YouTube views are increased by creating great video content, optimizing it and linking to other sites. Each of these points requires planning, strategy and goal setting. We’ll be looking at 8 ways to increase YouTube views right now.
How to Increase YouTube Views
- Engage the bat
- YouTube Analytics Engagement Reports
- AdWords Keyword Tool
- Follow influencers on Twitter
- Link building from the bottom up
- Make video of your amazing posts
- Video SEO
- Content circles
Engage from the bat
It is important to pay attention to the first 15 seconds of any video. The majority of viewers abandon a video within this time period. To increase YouTube views and decrease abandonment, we must pay attention to the first seconds of a video’s production. Make those first seconds pop, whether you are making video blogs, sketches or tutorials. How do you engage? This is a blog post in and of itself, but here are some ideas. It’s easy to find catchy music that is energetic and lively, similar to television newscasts. Describe what the viewer will experience, learn, feel, and so forth. This is similar to the title of a blog post. If it doesn’t explain a benefit, viewers are unlikely to remember it.
YouTube Analytics Engagement reports
YouTube Analytics has a lot of information about your channel. YouTube Analytics isn’t easy to use if you are new to YouTube. Let’s pretend that you do have data. YouTube Analytics’ Engagement Reports section gives you an insight into your audience’s psyche. Each section includes subscribers, likes and dislikings, favorite, comments, and sharing. This gives you a top ten list. You can increase your YouTube views by using engagement reports. All you need to do is make more of the top 10 lists. These top 10 lists will tell you what your audience loves. To share and like a video takes more effort from the user. It requires a few more clicks, but it is a better indicator of your audience’s tastes and preferences. Produce more top 10’s, offer more what they love and increase YouTube views.
Twitter Follow Influencers
This does not mean Twitter Spam. It literally means “stalk” (be present but keep out of sight). An influencer is someone who has the ability to influence others, usually by gaining credibility. You can follow these people on Twitter to get a sense of their interests and, most importantly, gain insight into their questions, problems, and needs that you can solve, satisfy, or help them. What you want is to discover what they need and haven’t found an answer to, then you swoop in, produce a relevant video (obviously coherent to your brand/company/mission) and tweet it at them in the hopes that it scratches their itch, gets you retweeted to their audience and in turn helps you increase YouTube views.
Link building from the bottom up
My efforts to increase YouTube views have been a huge success. I ask for collaborations from other YouTubers and link-sharing from relevant sites. It’s not rocket science, but we tend to target the channels and people with the largest audiences. This is not a good idea. Reaching out is like trying to find a needle in the hay silo. Their inboxes are full all the time, their time is limited and your petitions never make it onto their radar. People with a little more influence than you, if any, are the ones you should reach out to. These channels and people are much more accessible as they share the same mission: to increase YouTube views. They are open to answering emails, fan mail, tweets, comments and even cell phone calls. It’s all about incremental growth starting at the bottom and using accessible channels.
Create video from your posts
You can also increase YouTube views by creating video that complements your blog posts. This redirects traffic away from your blog to your YouTube channel. Videos can be used as a complement to your posts and can create a dynamic audiovisual component that can engage even those who don’t have a lot of readers. You could create quick video summaries to help people who are busy or explain in detail complex ideas through video.
On-page video SEO
Your video title, description and tags should be treated the same as your website. You will not get any views on YouTube if people can’t find your content. Titles like SAN003498.mov and Video Blog 027.mov won’t help you. Make sure you do keyword research on each video’s topic. When you have settled on a frase for your video, use it in your title. This is the same as your site title tags. You could consider the description your meta description. This is a great place for keywords and longer tail frases. The description is an excellent place to add text if you are able to transcribe your videos. You can also place more research keywords and frases in the tags.
Content circles
The simplest and most effective way to increase YouTube views is not to let your viewers abandon your channel. It is possible to achieve this by using an annotation strategy and planned content production. It is possible to place annotations in one video so that you can easily see the following: “click Here to Watch the Previous”, “click Here to Watch the Next”, “click Here to Watch the Making of”, “click Here to View the…”, etc.