Brief Summary
This video outlines five critical elements for growing a YouTube channel: understanding audience retention reports, creating a "watch time trap" by strategically using playlists and references, optimizing videos for search, making effective thumbnails, and ensuring good production quality. By focusing on these areas, creators can increase watch time, engagement, and subscriber growth.
- Understanding audience retention reports
- Creating a "watch time trap"
- Optimizing videos for search
- Making effective thumbnails
- Ensuring good production quality
Understanding audience retention reports in YouTube Analytics is crucial because watch time is a key metric. Better retention leads to videos performing better and new viewers being more likely to subscribe. Increased watch time also encourages viewers to engage with the channel through comments, likes, playlist additions, and shares, further boosting channel growth.
A "watch time trap" involves creating content centered around playlists and referencing other videos to keep viewers engaged and watching more content. This includes verbally referencing other videos, using on-screen prompts, pinned comments with links to playlists, and series playlists. The goal is to create multiple opportunities for viewers to consume more content, increasing engagement and subscriber potential.
Search is a significant traffic source, and optimizing videos for search can provide additional traffic. While browse and suggested features may eventually become the primary traffic sources, search provides a valuable boost, especially for smaller channels. Using SEO techniques and tools like TubeBuddy can help creators optimize titles and tags to improve search rankings.
Creating effective thumbnails is essential for winning clicks. Even the best content will be overlooked if the thumbnails and titles are not appealing. For mobile users, there's a video resource available on how to create thumbnails using a phone.
Viewers have certain expectations for video quality. This includes decent lighting (natural light is acceptable), good audio, and proper framing. Videos with poor lighting and bad audio are unlikely to succeed. Improving production quality, even when filming on a phone, is crucial for leveling up and meeting viewer expectations.
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Transcript
Full transcript of “How to Grow Your YouTube Channel - Best Tips”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 if you really want to grow a YouTube channel I'm gonna tell you five critical things that you need to keep in mind and we're starting right now what is going on my name is Nick welcome to another video if this is your first time here and you want to learn how to grow your channel make videos and all types of other YouTube related stuff start now by subscribing and clicking the bell so you don't miss anything okay if you're making videos for YouTube then it makes sense that you're wanting more people to see those videos and you want more people to keep coming back to your channel to watch even more of your videos right so the things that I'm going to cover today are critical elements that you need to keep in mind for growing your channel number one it's important that you get very familiar
0:46 with your audience retention reports inside of your YouTube analytics but why is this important you might ask because on YouTube watch time is key the better your retention the harder the videos are gonna work on your behalf plus the longer that new viewers watch the more likely they are to subscribe to your channel which is extremely important if you're trying to grow your channel plus the longer the people watch the more likely they are to take other forms of engagement on your channel comments likes a subscribe adding to a playlist sharing your videos which can also help your channel grow because it's pulling more people into your content in addition to the positive signals that you're sending into YouTube the second critical thing is that you look at the platform itself with all the different options that it has and you take advantage of all of those options to
1:33 build yourself a rock-solid watch time trap watch time trap you say what does that even mean a watch time trap in a nutshell is where you create all of your content based around playlists based in reference to other videos and things like that so that you can constantly be sending people to more and more of your content so that since you're tapping into their interests they're more likely to watch more and more of your content because you're verbally making the references for them to go watch your content and you have things popping up on the screen to draw their attention where they can go watch more of your stuff you've got pinned comments links to other playlists and your descriptions you've got series playlist put together so that YouTube is recommending your content next to each other and all that stuff all of it the idea is basically to where once buddy watches one video you're creating all of these other opportunities for them to watch and consume more of your
2:19 content which then again increases your chances of engagement than being a subscriber then watching more of your content and so on next one on the list is learn to rank your videos in search now hang on here a second search is a major traffic source and if you're not tapping into it then you're missing out on all of the additional traffic that you can get from search now of course once things start swelling up most of your traffic is most likely going to come from browse features and suggested features but you're getting all of the traffic that you get from those features plus you're getting the additional let's say 20% 25% 15% whatever it happens to be from search so if you have a lot of views it gets amplified if you have a little bit of use and it helps you pull in more traffic which is critical when you're trying to grow a YouTube channel there are tons of videos about how to rank your videos in search so make sure
3:05 that you spend the time educating yourself on how to use SEO on YouTube also to buddy can help you with coming up with titles tags learning how to rank your videos and search and things like that I'll put a link to them down in the description below next up is making great effective thumbnails the importance of making thumbnails is something that I can't emphasize enough you have to win the clicks you can have the best content on earth but if your thumbnails suck and your titles suck nobody's gonna know if you're a mobile user I'm also gonna put a link in the description to my brother's channel he just recently put out a video about how to make thumbnails on your phone so that one will take care of you if you do all this stuff on your phone next up is production quality here's the thing it's not the 1980s we have expectations you have to make sure that your video quality is at the very least up to par and what I mean by that is you have
3:51 decent lighting in your videos you don't have to go buy stuff you can use the Sun if you need to your audio sounds decent which is also extremely important and adds a lot to the production quality even if you're making videos on your phone this stuff is still critical you frame the shot at least sorta right look these days making a video in a dark room with bad audio it's just not gonna cut it you have to level up your game go outside if you have to make your videos there but the truth is I'm just being real with you here the truth is you have to level up in addition to these critical elements of growing a YouTube channel I have an entire playlist on how to get subscribers on YouTube I'll put a link to it up here go those videos because all of the stuff that I share in those videos are gonna help you grow your YouTube channel if you want to learn more about growing your channel making videos and all types of other YouTube related stuff start now
4:38 by hitting the round subscribe icon so you don't miss anything thank you so much for watching I'll see you next time
