Category: HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE

YouTube Tutorials, YouTube Tips and Deep Dive Blogs about How To Get More Views on YouTube

Categories
HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE LISTS YOUTUBE

12 Super Simple YouTube Video Ideas Without Showing Your Face

Video Ideas Without Showing Your Face

YouTubers aren’t always the lively extrovert bunch they are often thought as.

Not every YouTuber is eager to plant their face in front of a camera for the world to see. Fortunately, thanks to the enormous range of variety within the YouTube audience, there is still plenty of things you can do on YouTube without showing your face.

Why Avoid Showing Your Face on YouTube?

The most obvious reason you might want to avoid showing your face on YouTube is because you are very shy or self-conscious.

There are arguments to be made about how it could be good to push through those discomforts, but that’s not what this post is about; we’re just looking to give you ideas to work within your current situation.

Of course, there are other reasons why you might want to keep your face off camera, the main one being anonymity. While there are some quite serious reasons for wanting anonymity (such as those living in a country with questionable laws about free speech), the most common reason is one of reputation.

Perhaps you’re a forward thinking parent who’s making slightly risque content and doesn’t want it to come back in ten years time when your child is old enough to be embarrassed.

Perhaps you’re a happily employed individual who makes content with unpopular messages and doesn’t want to get “cancelled” from your place of work. Maybe you have you no specific reason for wanting to keep your identity hidden, but you’d rather it not be out there just in case.

Whatever the reason, keeping your face off-camera is an important part of maintaining that anonymity.

Video Ideas Without Showing Your Face 1

Our 12 YouTube Video Ideas Without Showing Your Face

Now, to the bit you here for; our video ideas without showing your face. Of course, this list is not a definitive collection of all potential faceless video ideas, just the top ones in our humble opinion. If there’s something you think should be on this list, drop it in a comment!

And, as always, the best solution for you is the one that you are most comfortable with, but it doesn’t have to be a single idea. Don’t be afraid to experiment, mix and match, and create something that truly works for you.

1. Commentary

Commentary videos can cover a wide range of things, from commenting on live events to giving a kind of directors commentary style of video for a film or TV show. Another popular version of this type of video is reacting to new trailers and announcements.

The key point here is that, while your voice is a pretty crucial part of the formula, your face never needs to be involved if you don’t want it to. Just be careful not to breach any copyrights if you are doing something like commentary on a film.

2. Gameplay Videos

The gaming industry has steam rolled over the competition to become the biggest entertainment industry in the world, so there’s naturally a lot of content being made around it. With gameplay videos, the game is the focus, so you don’t need to be onscreen.

While the typical image of a gaming video is the Twitch streamer setup, including a face-cam in the corner, there is no requirement to make your gameplay videos with your face on display. Indeed, many gaming YouTubers have made very successful channels without ever showing their face, and some without speaking, either.

3. Screen Recorded Tutorials

Screen recorded tutorials can be thought of as basically the same as gameplay videos but for software instead of video games. Of course, you should also be teaching the viewer how to do something with said software, which is a bit of a departure from gaming, where you can literally just be playing the game.

With screen recording, you will ideally be showing the viewer how to perform specific tasks, or perhaps doing a series where you make something from start to finish using the chosen software. If you have expertise in any software, this could be a good niche for you.

4. Whiteboard Videos

If you have expertise in something like physics or mathematics, you could make whiteboard videos where you explain concepts and techniques while using the whiteboard as a learning aid, much in the same way that a classroom teacher would. Also, don’t let the name fool you; it doesn’t have to be a whiteboard specifically. You could also use pen and paper, chalk boards, or even digital tablets.

5. Meditation and Mindfulness Videos

Some people love to tune out of the world and take a moment with their own thoughts. The practice of mindfulness and meditation has been embraced widely over the last few years as a why to help people sleep, study or relax.

Make videos that people can unwind to, feel comfortable with or can meditate to like on the Meditation Mindfulness channel.

6. Crafting/Cooking/Building Videos

These types of videos obviously require some skill on your part to carry out the thing you are demonstrating, but assuming you have that skill (or want to learn it) there is no reason to put your face in the frame.

If you are making a model house, you only need to show the house and the tools you are using. The same goes for cooking videos, and we can also throw things like repairing tech, and anything else small enough that you can carry out your task with your hands while otherwise staying out of shot.

How to Make Money on YouTube Reviewing Products

7. Product Reviews and Unboxing Videos

Not a million miles away from the last idea, unboxing and review videos don’t need you to be on camera either, and for those parts that benefit from your physical interaction, you can just have your hands in the shot!

This style of video works best with smaller items that can be handled, though you can review things of any size if you don’t need to physically touch it.

8. Point of View Content

This one is a little more out there, but point of view content is something that definitely has its place in the YouTube pantheon of niches.

Point of view videos are videos where the YouTuber straps a camera to their head and does things while the camera records, giving the viewers a first-hand look at what its like.

This style of video is very popular for things like extreme sports (see what it’s like to base jump from a skyscraper), but is also finding a home among the ambient experience YouTubers, with videos like “Relaxing Walk Through a Japanese Village” becoming increasingly common.

9. Interviews

If you can find the interesting enough subjects to interview, this could be your niche. Not only do you not need to have your face on screen for an interview video, it is often preferred that way. After all, the subject of the video is your interviewee, and the focus wants to be on them.

It’s worth remembering that the subject of your videos doesn’t need to be a celebrity or someone noteworthy to be good content. Think of the topic; there would be plenty of viewers interested in seeing a video with a power plant foreman talking about how it all works.

10. Animated Content

Now, granted, animation isn’t something you can just pick up straight away (though you can hire people to animate for you), but if it’s something you can do, there is a wealth of video types to take a crack at. You could make an animated show, animate yourself, do sketches, and any number of other types of content.

11. Compilation Videos

From top ten videos to endless clips of hilarious animal videos, compilation videos allow you to string together video content while keeping your face safely away from the lens.

Just be sure to make sure you have all the permissions you need to use what ever clips are going to feature in your videos.

12. Become a VTuber!

VTubers are being increasingly popular these days, so there’s clearly a growing market for it. VTubers are YouTubers who represent themselves with a digital avatar. This could be a posable 3D model, a live face-tracked image, or even a hand-drawn animation.

Many VTubers choose to create characters and make their videos as though the character is the YouTuber, while others just make content as themselves while using the digital avatar as a mask between them and the audience.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully we’ve made it abundantly clear that it is not necessary to show your face in a YouTube video to have a successful channel, and there is no shortage of ideas for what to do without your face being in shot.

In truth, as long as your videos deliver what the viewers are coming there for, your content has a good chance of succeeding, regardless of the style or whether your face is onscreen. The trick is working out what you are trying to deliver, and then honing in on the best way to deliver it within your chosen style.

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube

Very quickly before you go here are 5 amazing tools I have used every day to grow my YouTube channel from 0 to 30K subscribers in the last 12 months that I could not live without.

1. VidIQ helps boost my views and get found in search

I almost exclusively switched to VidIQ from a rival in 2020.

Within 12 months I tripled the size of my channel and very quickly learnt the power of thumbnails, click through rate and proper search optimization. Best of all, they are FREE!

2. Adobe Creative Suite helps me craft amazing looking thumbnails and eye-catching videos

I have been making youtube videos on and off since 2013.

When I first started I threw things together in Window Movie Maker, cringed at how it looked but thought “that’s the best I can do so it’ll have to do”.

Big mistake!

I soon realized the move time you put into your editing and the more engaging your thumbnails are the more views you will get and the more people will trust you enough to subscribe.

That is why I took the plunge and invested in my editing and design process with Adobe Creative Suite. They offer a WIDE range of tools to help make amazing videos, simple to use tools for overlays, graphics, one click tools to fix your audio and the very powerful Photoshop graphics program to make eye-catching thumbnails.

Best of all you can get a free trial for 30 days on their website, a discount if you are a student and if you are a regular human being it starts from as little as £9 per month if you want to commit to a plan.

3. Rev.com helps people read my videos

You can’t always listen to a video.

Maybe you’re on a bus, a train or sat in a living room with a 5 year old singing baby shark on loop… for HOURS. Or, you are trying to make as little noise as possible while your new born is FINALLY sleeping.

This is where Rev can help you or your audience consume your content on the go, in silence or in a language not native to the video.

Rev.com can help you translate your videos, transcribe your videos, add subtitles and even convert those subtitles into other languages – all from just $1.50 per minute.

A GREAT way to find an audience and keep them hooked no matter where they are watching your content.

4. Learn new skills for FREE with Skillshare

I SUCK reading books to learn, but I LOVE online video courses.

Every month I learn something new. Editing, writing, video skills, how to cook, how to run a business – even how to meditate to calm a busy mind.

I find all of these for FREE with Skillshare – Sign up, pick all the courses you want and cancel anytime you need.

5. Shutterstock helps me add amazing video b-roll cutaways

I mainly make tutorials and talking head videos.

And in this modern world this can be a little boring if you don’t see something funky every once in a while.

I try with overlays, jump cuts and being funny but my secret weapon is b-roll overlay content.

I can talk about skydiving, food, money, kids, cats – ANYTHING I WANT – with a quick search on the Shutterstock website I can find a great looking clip to overlay on my videos, keeping them entertained and watching for longer.

They have a wide library of videos, graphics, images and even a video maker tool and it wont break the bank with plans starting from as little as £8.25 ($9) per month.

Categories
HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE YOUTUBE TUTORIALS

Why Do YouTubers Zoom in and Out?

Why Do YouTubers Zoom in and Out?

If you’ve ever watched a YouTuber in the conventional mould of YouTubers—the kind of frenetic, upbeat YouTuber who talks fast and stares directly into the camera in front of a carefully arranged background—you’ve probably noticed the way they frequently zoom in on their face. Perhaps you’ve even wondered why.

If you are an aspiring YouTuber, you hopefully have wondered why, since it is something that is used all over YouTube, implying there is a good reason for it.

But it is not enough to simply ape things you see if you want to be successful; you need to understand those things. Otherwise, you may find yourself using them wrong, and looking pretty silly in the process.

In this post, we are going to take a closer look (pun very much intended) at YouTubers’ tendency to zoom in and out during their videos, why they do it, what benefits it might have, and whether you should use it in your videos. So, without further preamble, let’s expose the truth!

Why do YouTubers zoom in and out? – Zooming in and out can help with the pace of the video and hide mistakes. You can also use it to add emphasis to something said like jokes or something dramatic. Zoom cuts can also make for a more distinct look and feel in some niches verses simple stand and shoot videos.

YouTube Best Time to Upload 4

Why Do YouTubers Zoom in and Out?

There are several reasons why YouTubers work zooming in and out into their videos, and we’re going take a look at some specific examples in a second, but we can confidently say that almost all of the time you see a zoom-in used in a YouTube video, it is for aesthetic reasons. This is a very broad reason, of course, but it covers just about every instance of using a zoom-in in a video. The aesthetics of your video play a huge part in how successful they are, so it makes sense that a popular technique for editing would be used by a lot of YouTubers. So let’s take a look at why it’s popular.

Hiding Cuts

Starting off with one of the least likely reasons a YouTuber might use this technique, zooming in and out can help to disguise cuts in the video. Any time you make a small cut in a video, it is incredibly obvious to the viewer if the scene remains the same. This is because you get an instant change from one frame to the next, and it is a little jarring for the viewer. If you change the next frame more substantially—for example, if you cut to a zoomed-in shot—the fact that the next frame is significantly different to the previous one makes the fact that there was a cut less obvious.

Now, we said that this is one of the least common reasons that a YouTuber might use zooming in their videos, and that is because jump cuts have become a regular part of YouTube, so there isn’t typically much of a need to hide them. Still, for the YouTubers who want to maintain a little more mystery about their editing process, this is one method to do that.

Emphasis

From time to time, a YouTuber will make a pointed facial expression. It may be during a video talking about current events, and the YouTuber has just mentioned someone doing something particularly silly, for example. In these instances, a quick zoom in on the YouTuber’s face adds emphasis to the moment, reinforcing the non-verbal opinion that the YouTuber is presenting.

Comedic Effect

This one is very similar to the above example of emphasis, with the main difference being that the expression the YouTuber is pulling does not have to be intentional. Sometimes the YouTuber will notice they have pulled an amusing face unintentionally and will use a zoom-in to draw attention to it. Usually, in these cases, it will be apparent that the YouTuber did not mean to make the face, and that they themselves are the butt of the joke.

Add Variety

If you’ve ever watched a mainstream news program, you might have noticed that they frequently cut from one angle to another. This is because having one continuous show for long periods quickly becomes monotonous, and the simple act of changing the camera angle breaks things up and makes it visually more interesting.

YouTubers faced the same problems when they started making vlog videos in the early days of the platform, but most people could not afford to purchase a multi-camera set up that would allow them to switch angles while recording. Indeed, many YouTubers can’t even afford a decent camera when they first start out, let alone multiple cameras.

Recording multiple takes of the same video with the camera in different positions is not a feasible alternative, especially since many videos are not scripted, and it would be almost impossible to ensure everything fit together coherently. And that is where zooming comes in.

In precisely the same way that cutting to different angles works, zooming in and out breaks up the content visually, adding a little interest and making things look less monotonous. And, since zooming can be done entirely digitally, it can be done with a single camera and one take, which is ideal for smaller YouTubers who don’t have thousands to spend on their camera setup.

Good Places to Record Videos in Your Home

Should I Use Zooming in my Videos?

The answer to this question is simple enough to say, not so simple to execute. Whether or not you should use zooming in your videos will be entirely determined by whether it adds anything to your content. If it doesn’t noticeably improve your content, there is no reason to add it.

Of course, improvement is a subjective term, and it may be that the “improvement” it makes is just that you prefer the look of the video. That is why we would always recommend getting second opinions whenever you can. Be sure to take those second opinions onboard, and get reasons for why your testers feel the way they do. It may be that, ultimately, you get second opinions on your new format and decide to go against the general consensus, but you should do so fully informed and aware of why the people who looked over your video said what they said.

Zooming Tips

If you are going to employ zooming in your videos, you might like a few tips on making the best use of it, so that’s exactly what we’ve got here.

Camera Quality

Okay, we know we said near the top that one of the reasons zooming became prevalent on YouTube was because YouTubers didn’t have the money for expensive multi-camera setups, so saying “get a good camera” might seem like a bad tip. Remember, these are just ways to improve and get the best video you can; if you can’t use one of these tips, don’t worry. It doesn’t mean you can’t use zooming in your videos.

But yes, camera quality. We’re assuming that you’re not planning to zoom in and out in real-time as you record, which means you’ll be doing it in the edit. If you have ever zoomed in on a picture (and, in these days of powerful handheld phones, who hasn’t?) you might have noticed that the more you zoom in, the worse the quality of the picture gets.

The same thing applies to video, which is essentially just a lot of images shown quickly one after the other. The closer you digitally zoom in to your face, the grainier and more pixellated your video will come. If you are starting off with an already grainy video, it’s going to get very bad.

It’s worth noting that some YouTubers do this intentionally as a stylistic choice. You may want to do this as well, but we can’t really guide you on artistic choices.

Don’t Overdo It

This should be fairly obvious to most of you, but over-using the zoom-in will quickly become tiresome to your viewers. Having a lot of zoom-ins in a short space of time for comedic effect may be fine, but if you bounce in and out continually throughout the whole video, you are going to annoy your viewers.

Don’t Get Too Close (or Not Close Enough)

If you zoom in so far that the viewers are getting nothing but a blurry close-up of your nose-pores, or you barely zoom in at all, and the view doesn’t appear to have perceptibly changed, you risk losing any benefit you might have gotten from the zoom-in, as well as making your video seem awkward and badly put together.

The right amount of zoom will depend on the effect you are going for, but if you are barely zooming in at all, you may want to ask yourself if a zoom-in is right for what you are doing at that point in the video.

Other Editing Tricks To Use

Zooming in is but one trick up the sleeve of your average YouTuber, and making use of a wide variety of techniques can help to give your video that special sauce that separates it from other videos in your niche.

We’ve talked at length about zooming in, but what of the other methods you commonly see on YouTube channels? We’ll save the details for a post on editing, but we thought we’d at least touch on some of the other methods here.

 

Jump Cut

Another technique that has become synonymous with YouTube is the jump cut. This involves cutting from one part of a video to another.

It is distinctive from a smash cut because it is not cutting to a new scene but rather skipping over something that has happened in this scene.

A common example is a vlogger talking directly to the camera who might cut out a bit they thought felt stilted or unnecessary, or even parts where they sneezed or messed up their lines. Jump cuts tend to add a sense of speed to a video since they cut out long pauses and things that might otherwise have broken up the flow of the content.

Funky Transitions

When you are transition from one scene to another, you might want to make use of interesting transitions, rather than just smash cutting from to the other. If you are using an application like Adobe Premiere, there will be a lot of built-in transitions that you can simply drag and drop into your video. Beware, however, these transitions can often appear tacky and cheap because of how often they have been used.

If you can tie your transitions into things that are happening in the video—a slide swipe timed to follow the swipe of a hand, for example—that can also add a nice touch to your content.

Sound Effects

This is another technique that belongs firmly in the category of “don’t overdo it,” but the occasional sound effect can add a little flavour to your videos. It might be something like adding the sound of a smashing plate when something is knocked off a table. In this case, the more unlikely it is that the knocked off thing would make that much noise, the better.

Using Silence

If you, like many, use background music in your videos, don’t be afraid to make creative use of silence in your videos. If you are talking over the music, and you suddenly mute the music at a certain bit of speech, the abrupt silence draws the attention of the viewer. This can be used for emphasis, but like sound effects, should not be over-used.

Final Thoughts

Zooming in and out, like jump cuts, smash cuts, and a host of other visual tools is just another way to add a little visual interest to your videos.

It just happens to be a method that can be achieved without the need for expensive equipment or professional-grade software, which is a massive part of why it has become so prevalent on YouTube—a platform that has been responsible for countless people who could not afford an expensive camera in the beginning making their fortune.

Like all visual tools, zooming in should not be over-used, as it will quickly become tiresome for your viewers, and maybe the reason they switch off. And, once you have lost a viewer because your video irritated them, they are as good as gone for good on a platform with as many options as YouTube.

Categories
HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE LISTS TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube 5

Growing on YouTube can be hard.

It’s even harder if you do all the heavy lifting yourself and not use tools to make your life easier.

It time to build yourself a YouTube toolkit that can help you make amazing eye catching content with minimal effort.

Here are the 5 tools I used EVERY day in the last 12 months to grow my YouTube channel from 0 to 30K subscribers.

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube

1. VidIQ helps boost my views and get found in search

I almost exclusively switched to VidIQ from a rival in 2020.

Within 12 months I tripled the size of my channel and very quickly learnt the power of thumbnails, click through rate and proper search optimization. Best of all, they are FREE!

VidIQ goes beyond just hammering in keywords and tweaking titles in the vain hope of getting more views.

Did you know you can compare your thumbnails to rivals?

A great way to see what the top competitors in your space is doing and gives you a jumping off point for when you make you next video on that topic.

Machine Learning based Automatic Content Creation ideas! 

Imagine waking up every day with a list of hot topics suggestions for you channel.

VidIQ has a new tool that will do the research for you, take a look at your niche, your rivals, your channel data and suggest topics that could be a good jumping off point for you in the future.

Never get stuck on what videos to make every again!

I could go on about the powers of VidIQ all day but that might derail this top 5 list, but I have made a blog post about the best VidIQ feature you might be sleeping on here.

I highly suggest you check out this real super weapon of a tool, it’s FREE, easy to use and packed full of tools you wish you had found sooner.

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube 1

2. Adobe Creative Suite helps me craft amazing looking thumbnails and eye-catching videos

I have been making youtube videos on and off since 2013.

When I first started I threw things together in Window Movie Maker, cringed at how it looked but thought “that’s the best I can do so it’ll have to do”.

Big mistake!

I soon realized the move time you put into your editing and the more engaging your thumbnails are the more views you will get and the more people will trust you enough to subscribe.

That is why I took the plunge and invested in my editing and design process with Adobe Creative Suite. They offer a WIDE range of tools to help make amazing videos, simple to use tools for overlays, graphics, one click tools to fix your audio and the very powerful Photoshop graphics program to make eye-catching thumbnails.

Best of all you can get a free trial for 30 days on their website, a discount if you are a student and if you are a regular human being it starts from as little as £9 per month if you want to commit to a plan.

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube 2

3. Rev.com helps people read my videos

You can’t always listen to a video.

Maybe you’re on a bus, a train or sat in a living room with a 5 year old singing baby shark on loop… for HOURS. Or, you are trying to make as little noise as possible while your new born is FINALLY sleeping.

This is where Rev can help you or your audience consume your content on the go, in silence or in a language not native to the video.

Rev.com can help you translate your videos, transcribe your videos, add subtitles and even convert those subtitles into other languages – all from just $1.50 per minute.

A GREAT way to find an audience and keep them hooked no matter where they are watching your content.

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube 3

4. PlaceIT can help you STAND OUT on YouTube

I SUCK at making anything flashy or arty.

I have every intention in the world to make something that looks cool but im about as artistic as a dropped ice-cream cone on the web windy day.

That is why I could not live on YouTube without someone like PlaceIT. They offer custom YouTube Banners, Avatars, YouTube Video Intros and YouTube End Screen Templates that are easy to edit with simple click, upload wizard to help you make amazing professional graphics in minutes.

Best of all, some of their templates are FREE! or you can pay a small fee if you want to go for their slightly more premium designs (pst – I always used the free ones).

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube 4

5. StoryBlocks helps me add amazing video b-roll cutaways

I mainly make tutorials and talking head videos.

And in this modern world this can be a little boring if you don’t see something funky every once in a while.

I try with overlays, jump cuts and being funny but my secret weapon is b-roll overlay content.

I can talk about skydiving, food, money, kids, cats – ANYTHING I WANT – with a quick search on the StoryBlocks website I can find a great looking clip to overlay on my videos, keeping them entertained and watching for longer.

They have a wide library of videos, graphics, images and even a video maker tool and it wont break the bank with plans starting from as little as £8.25 ($9) per month.

BONUS TOOLS

Lowerthird, Call-to-Action Graphics – Need help with quick simple overlays, call to action, subscribe buttons, and social media links graphics – check out this mini bundle from my friends at the Underdog Collective.

The Underdog Collective was set up to help these people with easy to use, slick YouTube artwork that’s easily used with most desktop editing software.

High Quality, Low Cost Hosting – A great way to promote yourself, your videos and your brand is to have your own website.

I have been in the web development space for over 12 years and in that time the biggest lesson I have learnt from hundreds of clients is – a great website can be killed off by CRAPPY hosting, while an “okay” website with GREAT HOSTING can be a huge lead magnet for any project or product.

I recommend bluehost should you wish to start a website (or blog like this one) for a reasonable fee, with great expandability and top level reliability.

 

 

Categories
DEEP DIVE ARTICLE HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Which Language is Best for YouTube?

Which Language is Best for YouTube?

The question of which language is best for YouTube is one with no universal answer that can be applied to every YouTuber in every region.

Ultimately, the best language is the one in which you can make videos coherently and comfortably, but there are other mitigating factors that can pull your choice of language this way or that.

In this post, we’re going to lay out all the different factors to consider when deciding what language (or languages) to release your videos in, as well as some alternatives to consider if you don’t speak the language that would be best for your particular videos.

How to Make Money on YouTube Without Showing Your Face

Most-Viewed Languages

Let’s start with the basics.

The raw numbers, as it were.

If you were purely concerned with reaching the largest possible audience on YouTube, you would naturally want to make content in the language that has the largest possible audience bases such as English Spanish and Hindi.

As per Twinword’s analysis of YouTube statistics, we can use the following numbers as a guide for how the languages are spread out on YouTube from the creator’s side, meaning this is the percentage of videos that are made in each language.

Language Percentage
English 66%
Spanish 15%
Portuguese 7%
Hindi 5%
Korean 2%
Others 5%

It’s worth remembering that these kinds of statistics change all the time, but there is unlikely to be a significant change in terms of the share of those languages. For example, Hindi could creep past Portuguese without much fanfare, but Spanish would be very unlikely to overtake English any time soon.

Still, these are the percentages in which YouTube content is made but do not necessarily reflect the percentages in terms of the potential audience. For example, English is a second language in many countries, and while the primary language of a given region may not be English, many people in that region will speak it, which would mean they could happily consume English-speaking content, even if they would be more comfortable with a different language.

From a practical standpoint, this detail doesn’t make much difference. If you are primarily concerned with reaching the largest possible audience, you would make your video in the language with the most potential viewers, even if not all of those viewers consider English their first language.

YouTube Audiences

So what of the audiences themselves? It is all well and good saying that the vast majority of the content on YouTube is made in English, but that is a creator bias and doesn’t necessarily reflect the language of the people who are watching that content.

There are no reliable statistics that we could find on language specifically when it comes to YouTube viewers, but there are statistics on things like region, which we can use to make a few educated guesses about the primary language of YouTube’s overall audience. Here are the top ten countries in terms of YouTube views (source).

Country Number of Views
USA 916 Billion
India 503 Billion
UK 391 Billion
Brazil 274 Billion
Thailand 207 Billion
Russia 207 Billion
South Korea 204 Billion
Spain 169 Billion
Japan 159 Billion
Canada 158 Billion

As you can see from this table, there is quite a diverse spread of nations in the top ten countries viewing YouTube. We can see English, Hindi, Portuguese, and Thai in the top five languages, with plenty of other languages in the rest. Russian, Korean, Spanish, and Japanese.

However, things are not as diverse as they may first appear. For one thing, the three overwhelmingly English-speaking countries in that top ten—the USA, the UK, and Canada—account for 45% of the total views in that table. Granted, 45% is not a majority, but remember that none of the other countries in the top ten shares a primary language. India mainly speaks Hindi, Thailand primarily speaks Thai, Russia speaks Russian, South Korea speaks Korean, Spain speaks Spanish, and Japan speaks Japanese.

Further muddying the waters is the multilingual nature of some nations. For example, India lists both Hindi and English as their official languages, although it is thought that only around ten percent of India’s residents speak English. Still, India is second in our table with over half a trillion views—a potential ten percent bump of that half trillion for English is substantial.

It is also worth noting that, while the vast majority of Canada can speak English, they also have French as an official language, and around a fifth of the population can speak it.

So, what do we take from this? The first thing to take away from all of these numbers is that there is no clear cut statistic or table we can look at that will tell us which language has the most potential YouTube viewers. We can look at the languages which content is made in, but that doesn’t tell us if people are watching content in a language they are not fluent in. We can also look at the nations with the most YouTube viewers, but that doesn’t tell us what language the viewers are watching in.

If you are looking for a single broadest appeal language to make your content in, it is hard to argue with English, which makes sense as YouTube came from and rose to prominence in English-speaking countries.

How to Record YouTube Video Outside 5

Working With What You Got

All of the numbers and statistics on which languages are most viewed on YouTube may be irrelevant to you. If you only speak one language, or you can speak another language, but it is difficult to understand, you will struggle to make content in those other languages.

The first gatekeeper along your road to YouTube success is how watchable your content is. You could manoeuvre your videos to be in front of the largest potential audience possible, but if it is not watchable, you will not succeed. The phrase “content is key” may be cliched at this point, but it is cliched for a reason. It is 100% true.

If you have lofty ambitions for your YouTube channel, you may consider learning a language so that you can make content in that language.

For some people, learning a new language is intuitive. They can pick up the structure of the language relatively easy and, with some time and practice, speak the language with more clarity than even some native speakers of that language. On the other hand, there are people who have moved to a foreign country and lived there for most of their life and still have thick accents that make them hard to understand when speaking the local language.

This isn’t a linguistics blog, so we won’t pretend to know the reasons some people can pick up new languages easily and others cannot, but if you are the latter—if no amount of speaking a particular language makes it feel comfortable on your tongue—you would be better placed putting your energies into making the best possible content you can in your own language.

There are other options, of course, but more on that below.

How Important Is Language to Success on YouTube?

This is an important question to ask yourself because the work involved in making your content available in a language other than the one you are comfortable with—especially if you are going to learn a whole new language just so you can speak it in your videos—is considerable.

It is important to establish a realistic sense of what “success” means for you when starting out on YouTube. If your idea of success is being able to pay the bills and live comfortably with the revenue generated from your YouTube channel, you probably don’t need to conquer the world. If we take the data from the top countries viewing YouTube above, the twenty-fifth country on the list—Romania—still accounts for an impressive 63 billion views. The average CPM (the amount you make per one thousand views) on YouTube is typically around the £2-4 mark (after YouTube takes its cut). If we go for the middle ground and assume you will make roughly $3 per thousand views, and we take the average US monthly salary of around $3,500, we can say that you would need to get around 1,200,000 monthly views to match the average US citizen’s salary.

Without a doubt, 1.2 million views per month is a lot, but it is only approximately 0.002% of the total views coming from Romania. Would it be harder to get that many views from a purely Romanian audience than the much larger English audience? Of course. But it is certainly an attainable goal.

Of course, if your idea of success is to conquer the world of YouTube and overtake PewDiePie as the most successful individual YouTuber, that’s different. You’re probably going to need to make videos in English to do that.

At least, for now.

Translations/Captions

We mentioned alternatives to settling for your own language or learning a new one, so let’s talk about that. Making your content available to other languages doesn’t necessarily mean creating that content in those languages.

First of all, YouTube makes it very easy to caption your videos in multiple languages, even to the point that they have an automated captioning service that, while not perfect, is getting better all the time. There are also many transcription and translation services on the web for very affordable rates—typically a dollar or two per minute of audio. Captioning your videos is a good practice to get into regardless of language because it makes your video more accessible to people with hearing problems, but it also provides a way to make your content more accessible to other languages.

The other option is to have your videos translated and recorded so that you can upload alternate language versions of your videos with the translated voice-over dubbed onto it. There are services that will take care of the translation and voice over for you, or you might choose to have the translation handled separately, such as if you have a particular voice-over person you want to work with, but that person doesn’t do the translation.

If you go down the route of alternative language versions of your videos, it is important to make it clear that you have those alternative versions out there. First impressions tend to stick on YouTube, and if someone comes to your video because the content of the video is exactly what they are looking for, but they land on a version of the video using a language they don’t speak, they may dismiss you entirely because they can’t speak that language. Always put links to alternative language versions of a video in the descriptions of those videos, and it would be wise to have some kind of note in the video at the start mentioning that the video is available in other languages.

Final Thoughts

In an ideal world, you would not be concerned with the global reach of your videos. You would make the content you want to make to the best of your ability, continually looking for ways to improve and grow and let the views pan out how they may. That being said, we understand that reality is rarely ideal.

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to reach viewers in the largest markets, but it is important to ensure your content is good. Creating a hard to understand video in English when your native language is Japanese, for example, will not just not help your channel; it may actively harm it. If you get a reputation for creating videos that are hard to understand, the people who would have watched that content in the first place may not come back when you have improved further down the line.

If you are learning a new language, use your time making content in your first language to improve and grow as a YouTuber, and hold off on making content in your additional language until you can speak it fluently and clearly.

And, remember; there are plenty of views out there no matter what language you speak.

Categories
HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

How to Make Videos Without Showing Face

How to Make Videos Without Showing Face

For a long time, the image that often came to mind when someone thought “YouTuber” was that of a bright and bubbly youngster talking earnestly into the camera, oversharing and jump-cutting all over the place. While there’s still plenty of this today, and though there’s nothing wrong with this format, there is certainly more variety on display these days.

This is fortunate for a lot of would-be YouTubers since it is the idea of getting in front of a camera that acts as a deterrent to them following their YouTube dreams. One of the great things about YouTube is that it provides a path for you to get started in content creation without having to go down the conventional routes of getting a book published or self-funding a short film. It is a low-barrier-to-entry medium that you can cut your teeth on, hone your craft, and, all being well, make a name for yourself. But for those of you that are not comfortable being in front of the camera, it can be a scary prospect in the beginning.

In this post, we’re going to look at some of the more popular ways in which you can make YouTube content without showing your face in the camera, including plenty of examples. So let’s get into it!

Faceless Video Ideas

We promised you ideas for videos that don’t involve showing your face, and that’s exactly what we’re going to give you. Please note that this is by no means a definitive list of all possible videos styles you could make without having your mug in the shot. There are always new and interesting ways to make content, and, while there are usually reasons that these types of videos are most often seen, that doesn’t mean they are your only options.

Of course, you’ll want to be realistic about things—at this point, YouTube is a maturing platform, and there has been plenty of time for people to work things out. The most popular types of content are the types that work. That being said, YouTube is a big platform, and there is room for a lot of different styles. If you dream of being the next PewDiePie, you’re going to have stick to things that have broad appeal in order to capture that large audience. But, if you are happy with a smaller audience, you have much more creative freedom with your content. Don’t be afraid to experiment, think outside of the box, and find your feet as a YouTuber. You just might be the first to think of something new and innovative.

Please note that some of these video ideas have overlap. For example, we mention the “Hands-On” style of video-making and the “Review” video. Many review videos utilise the “Hands-On” method to make review videos. If you think two (or more) types of video listed here might work well together, have at it!

Clip Shows

Just as the name suggests, clip shows are videos that are made up of several different short clips along the same theme. There is no specific type of content that you have to stick to with clip shows, but one of the most popular examples is short, funny clips, such as animals acting weird, people having amusing (hopefully non-lethal) accidents, and generally, anything you might expect to find on the UK TV show, You’ve Been Framed, or America’s Funniest Home Videos.

The tricky part about this kind of video is getting the amusing clips in the first place. We’re going to assume that you don’t have an enormous stash of original funny clips waiting on your hard drive—if you do, great!—but it’s important to remember that content ownership is taken increasingly seriously these days, and you will need to at least try and get permission to use any clips that aren’t your own.

If you can’t find the owner of a particular piece of content and you decide to use it anyway, make every effort to find the original source of the content and credit it in your description. Many pieces of content are managed by companies who will license the clips to you for a fee, which may be something to consider as your channel grows.

What Programs do Virtual YouTubers Use? 9

Animated Content

If you have a knack for animation, you already have the perfect avenue for making videos that don’t involve your face being on camera. As an added bonus, if you are looking to parlay your love of animation into a serious career, getting your work out on YouTube is a great way to add to your portfolio to show future employers.

Animation content can cover an enormous range of video styles and topics. For example, you could animate your commentary videos to show a quirky cartoon character talking along with your voice. You could make full-featured cartoons with plots and story arcs that continue from video to video. You could make unusual art pieces with important messages.

The main point is that you do not need to have your face on the screen to make an animated video. Or you could strike an interesting middle ground and animate your face, using that instead of your real one.

As countless shows like South Park and Rick and Morty have shown us, cartoons don’t have to be visually artistic masterpieces in order to be popular and successful. If you are putting your animation out there with a view to using it in a future portfolio, do your best work. But if you are making something bigger and animation is just the medium you have to work with, don’t get too caught up in making every frame look perfect. Animation is a lengthy process, and you don’t want to end up taking months between videos.

Also, as a brief side note, animation does not necessarily mean hand-drawn art brought to life. You could also use claymation (or any kind of stop-motion animation) as well as 3D animation, just like VTubers do. If you have a skill, put it to use!

Reviews

Reviews are an excellent way to create content on YouTube without showing your face since the focus of the video is the product or service that is being reviewed. In many cases, the viewers won’t have any interest in your face, especially if the review is of a video game or physical product. In those cases, the viewer often prefers to get a good look at the subject of the review, and having your face in the way makes that harder.

If you have a burning interest in a particular field—such as a particular type of electronic gadget, or a certain genre of game—reviews are also great in the sense that they are easier to monetise away from the YouTube Partner Programme. You can join affiliate programmes like the ever-popular Amazon Affiliates, and give your viewers a way to get to the product you are reviewing in a single click with the advantage that, if they buy said product, you get a cut of the profits. It should be noted that if you do go down this route, be sure to keep your reviews honest. If you get a reputation for saying nice things about your subjects in order to get your viewers to click on affiliate links, you will pretty quickly lose those viewers.

How to Make Videos Without Showing Face 1

Hands-On Videos

Like animation, hands-on videos have a lot of range. For example, just as we mentioned at the top of this section, the hands-on style of YouTube video is a good match for the above review videos. But what is a “hands-on” video?

In this type of video, your shot is focussed on the subject, which will typically be something small. As a rough guide, no bigger than a typical portable electronic device or board game. The name for this style of video comes from the fact that only your hands play a part, visually speaking. You narrate your content while your hands demonstrate, manipulate, and generally give the viewers something to look at.

A particularly apt example of this kind of video is keyboard demonstrations. The community around mechanical keyboards is a vibrant one, and there are plenty of videos that involve talking about a particular keyboard and then giving a typing demonstration, with nothing but the keyboard and the YouTubers hands ever being in shot. For the review style videos we mentioned, you would use your hands to move the subject to see different angles, highlight different features, and so on. All the while, you would be talking about the product and the aspects you are showing off with your hands.

How to Make Videos Without Showing Face 2

Documentaries

If you have a flair for storytelling and a healthy curiosity and interest in things, you might want to try your hand at making YouTube documentaries. One thing that the Internet has helped to fuel is an increasing interest in all things by making it easier for people to find those things that they are interested in. The net result is that even the most obscure interests can typically be serviced online, and that applies to documentaries as well.

Documentaries are no longer limited to people braving the wilds of nature to capture breathtaking shots of beautiful but dangerous animals in their natural habitat. These days, YouTube has plenty of smaller documentary makers, making short but interesting pieces on a huge range of things, and the chances are there will be an audience somewhere for whatever you choose to make a documentary about.

Try to remember that documentaries are more than just raw information delivered in the form of a video. You should try to tell a story in your content to keep the viewer engaged, but without distorting or twisting the truth to make things more interesting. The best documentaries are engaging regardless of whether the viewer is interested in the subject matter.

How to Make Videos Without Showing Face 3

Commentary

If your healthy interest and curiosity revolve around more current events, such as the latest news, celebrity gossip, political events, and things of that nature, you might prefer a commentary video to a documentary. This type of video allows you to voice your opinions on things, deconstructing them and putting your point of view across. And, because you are just talking, you don’t ever need to step in front of the camera.

You could choose to combine this type of video with the clip show method, showing related video clips as you speak. You could even have an animated version of your face.

The scope of commentary video potential is vast. You could be talking about the latest atrocities committed by some government or another, the results of a big sporting event, even a just-released trailer for a new comic book-based movie. With this kind of video, it is especially important to inject plenty of personality into your content. Remember, there are lots of people online making these kinds of videos, and you need to give viewers a reason to want to come to you over a different YouTuber. Your personality may put some people off, but appealing to the lowest common denominator only works if you can get into a position of immense success, to begin with.

How to Make Videos Without Showing Face 4

Recaps

Recap videos are a little like commentary videos but with less personality. These videos revolve around current events, and there are two significant factors in their success. The first is timing, and the second is exclusivity.

If you are targetting a recap—rather than a commentary video—you are generally going to be delivering content based around something that has just happened and that many of your viewers might have missed. An example of this might be a high-profile boxing or MMA fight that was only available through an expensive pay per view. In an example like that, getting a recap video up as soon as possible after the event will typically net you a lot of views. And the fact that many people will not have access to the fight itself (exclusivity) will also get you a lot of interest.

Now, we mentioned that you don’t necessarily need to inject as much personality into these videos to succeed—and that is true—but it should be noted that if you can get the timing, exclusivity, and personality, you will have a strong foundation for success on your hands.

Final Thoughts

There are, of course, more ideas for how to make videos without showing face, as you will find in the video above. But, if you are looking at this topic because you are a little camera shy, why not try the video below.

 

Categories
DEEP DIVE ARTICLE HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

YouTube Shorts Explained [What, Where, How, When & Why?]

YouTube Shorts Explained [What, Where, How, When & Why?] 2

YouTube shorts is the first new and large feature to be added to the YouTube app and platform for years.

This could be the start of a land grab for attention that we all need to pay attention to as Youtube positions itself to take on the vertical video format platforms like TikTok, SnapChat and Instagram Reels.

Quickly, what are YouTube Shorts? – YouTube Shorts are vertical format videos like TikTok. 0-60 seconds in length, uploaded using the YouTube Shorts App or uploaded as a normal video and tagged with #shorts in the title or description. These can be displayed on the stories shelf under suggested videos on mobile devices.

YouTube has even started a YouTube Shorts Creator fund to monetized YouTube shorts (something I deep dive into here).

This could be the next big land grab in the YouTube platforms history so in this article I am going to step you through all I know about the new feature.

What Are YouTube Shorts?

TikTok has rocked the digital world by grabbing the attention of the younger generation who want to share their videos and express themselves – and where the youth goes, so does the potential future of digital media.

We have seen this play out time and time again when a platform ages up too much that something new and “cool” comes along for the younger generation to play with.

MySpace was killed by the new Facebook.

Facebook got too widely used with even your grandma having a profile so people started to take selfies on Instagram and Snapchat.

Instagram got swamped with professionals and people worried that it was “too late to start a  YouTube Channel?” and so TikTok was the new home of the younger up coming demographic of content creators.

YouTube saw this trend and understood that if they want to stay on top of the video creation wave, they will need to win over the next generation of video makers back from TikTok – enter YouTube Shorts!

How To Make YouTube Shorts

Initially the YouTube Shorts tool is a closed beta in India to capitalize on India’s ban on TikTok leaving a very large gap in the market for YouTube to convert into new users.

How do I make a YouTube short? – You can make a YouTube short in the YouTube Mobile App by clicking the + icon at the bottom of the screen and choosing “create a short”. If you can’t see this feature you can upload vertical video under 60 seconds in length and tag it with #shorts in the title or description.

When using the feature via mobile tool (as of Oct 2020) it has very limited tools to assist with content creation but you can speed up your footage and set a timer for hands free recording.

While uploading the video as a normal video might give you a little more flexibility to record a vertical video and then edit it just like a normal video with overlays, music, transitions etc

  • Create: Creation is at the core of short-form video, and we want to make it easy and fun to create Shorts. We’re starting to test just a few new tools for creators and artists with our early beta in India:
    • A multi-segment camera to string multiple video clips together,
    • The option to record with music from a large library of songs that will continue to grow,
    • Speed controls that give you the flexibility to be creative in your performance,
    • And a timer and countdown to easily record, hands-free.

Why make YouTube Shorts?

You have been on the YouTube platform for years and you have always been told to stick to horizontal rather than “ugly looking vertical£ videos – why start making vertical videos now?

YouTube wants to win the new young creator demographic away from TikTok and to do that they are pushing the feature very hard to viewers.

Your videos could show up under the first suggested video on the mobile app giving you a large boost of views. Adopt it early and you could see great results before EVERYONE uses it! Make eye catching relevant videos and you could get featured against established large youtube channels.

Imagine if you could be one of the first people on YouTube all those years ago. Or one of the first people to grow an audience on Twitter and Instagram… this is your chance at a fresh new medium, but this time its supercharged by YouTube!

Even YouTube is exited about the tool

Get discovered: Every month, 2 billion viewers come to YouTube to laugh, learn and connect. Creators have built entire businesses on YouTube, and we want to enable the next generation of mobile creators to also grow a community on YouTube with Shorts.

I have been testing YouTube shorts and seen huge jumps in views even when the channel has only 65 subscribers!

YouTube Shorts Explained [What, Where, How, When & Why?]

Where Can I See YouTube Shorts?

YouTube shorts are currently curated by YouTube and displayed under videos on the mobile app.

It has its own shelf that you can swap through and the youtube shorts normally match the topic of the main video above – for example if you are watching a tech tips video you might see tech related short stories.

YouTube Shorts Explained [What, Where, How, When & Why?] 1

What is YouTube Shorts sizes? ratio?

The standard aspect ratio for YouTube Shorts 9:16. YouTube may add more padding for optimal viewing. The padding is white by default, and dark gray when Dark theme is turned on.

Recommended resolution & aspect ratios for YouTube Shorts.

For 9:16 youtube shorts aspect ratio, encode at these resolutions:

2160p: 2160×3840
1440p: 1440×2560
1080p: 1080×1920
720p: 720×1280
480p: 480×854
360p: 360×640
240p: 240×426

Can I monetize YouTube Shorts? YouTube Shorts Monetization

As with all video platforms people want to know if they can monetize it – because what’s the point of a large audience if you can’t make some pocket money from it.

Can you monetize YouTube Shorts? – YouTube has start to monetize YouTube Shorts with the YouTube Shorts Creator Fund. This is decided by YouTube selection the best shorts created per month. This fund will expand overtime to more creators, content and countries.

YouTube Shorts FAQs

Does YouTube Shorts watch time count towards monetization?

I the YouTube Short is viewed as a short from a YouTube Shorts shelf under a view then the watch time does not count towards monetization totals. However, if the short is watched on the YouTube channel as a native standard video then it does count towards channel totals.

Do I Have To Pay To Make YouTube Shorts?

No, YouTube Shorts are free to anyone. You can make them using the mobile app by clicking the “+” icon at the bottom of the screen and clicking “Make A Short”. Alternatively, you and upload the vertical video that is under 60 seconds as a standard video and tag it with #shorts in the title or description.

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube

Very quickly before you go here are 5 amazing tools I have used every day to grow my YouTube channel from 0 to 30K subscribers in the last 12 months that I could not live without.

1. VidIQ helps boost my views and get found in search

I almost exclusively switched to VidIQ from a rival in 2020.

Within 12 months I tripled the size of my channel and very quickly learnt the power of thumbnails, click through rate and proper search optimization. Best of all, they are FREE!

2. Adobe Creative Suite helps me craft amazing looking thumbnails and eye-catching videos

I have been making youtube videos on and off since 2013.

When I first started I threw things together in Window Movie Maker, cringed at how it looked but thought “that’s the best I can do so it’ll have to do”.

Big mistake!

I soon realized the move time you put into your editing and the more engaging your thumbnails are the more views you will get and the more people will trust you enough to subscribe.

That is why I took the plunge and invested in my editing and design process with Adobe Creative Suite. They offer a WIDE range of tools to help make amazing videos, simple to use tools for overlays, graphics, one click tools to fix your audio and the very powerful Photoshop graphics program to make eye-catching thumbnails.

Best of all you can get a free trial for 30 days on their website, a discount if you are a student and if you are a regular human being it starts from as little as £9 per month if you want to commit to a plan.

3. Rev.com helps people read my videos

You can’t always listen to a video.

Maybe you’re on a bus, a train or sat in a living room with a 5 year old singing baby shark on loop… for HOURS. Or, you are trying to make as little noise as possible while your new born is FINALLY sleeping.

This is where Rev can help you or your audience consume your content on the go, in silence or in a language not native to the video.

Rev.com can help you translate your videos, transcribe your videos, add subtitles and even convert those subtitles into other languages – all from just $1.50 per minute.

A GREAT way to find an audience and keep them hooked no matter where they are watching your content.

4. Learn new skills for FREE with Skillshare

I SUCK reading books to learn, but I LOVE online video courses.

Every month I learn something new. Editing, writing, video skills, how to cook, how to run a business – even how to meditate to calm a busy mind.

I find all of these for FREE with Skillshare – Sign up, pick all the courses you want and cancel anytime you need.

5. Shutterstock helps me add amazing video b-roll cutaways

I mainly make tutorials and talking head videos.

And in this modern world this can be a little boring if you don’t see something funky every once in a while.

I try with overlays, jump cuts and being funny but my secret weapon is b-roll overlay content.

I can talk about skydiving, food, money, kids, cats – ANYTHING I WANT – with a quick search on the Shutterstock website I can find a great looking clip to overlay on my videos, keeping them entertained and watching for longer.

They have a wide library of videos, graphics, images and even a video maker tool and it wont break the bank with plans starting from as little as £8.25 ($9) per month.

Categories
DEEP DIVE ARTICLE HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Best Time to Upload Videos To YouTube for MORE VIEWS

YouTube Best Time to Upload 6

YouTube has been around long enough now and made enough people quite wealthy that succeeding on the platform has become something of a science.

People analyse the way the algorithm behaves to try and glean what it considers to be recommendable content. They test different thumbnails styles for better click-through-rates and experiment with alternative titles.

They even consider the placement of their “don’t forget to subscribe” pop-up down to the second. And, yes, they put a great deal of thought into when the best time to upload a video is.

The truth is, all of these things can have a surprisingly large impact on the success of any given video.

In this post, we’re taking a look at those upload times specifically. We’re going to take a deep dive into what factors are at play when you upload in the morning versus when you upload in the evening, and whether the middle of the week is better than a weekend.

Unfortunately, there is no single YouTube best time to upload that we can throw out there as a one-size-fits-all solution. But when people ask “When is the best time to upload videos to YouTube?” I tell them – An upload schedule is unique to each channel. Look at your audience location and age range then match your uploads to their live patterns. For example school kids before and after school, adults more evenings and weekends. Overtime your audience will show you what they like and when.

However, this a complex topic with a lot of moving parts, so make yourself comfortable, and let’s dive in!

YouTube Best Time to Upload 1

Why Are Upload Times Significant?

The first part of this question is simple enough—YouTube places a lot of stock in popularity. If a video is getting lots of views, YouTube is more likely to see it as something worth pushing out to recommendation feeds.

The fleeting nature of viral videos and trends leads to a “strike while the iron is hot” mentality in which YouTube will want to capitalise on the popularity of a video while it is hot so as to avoid missing the window since they don’t know if the interest will still be there in a few days.

So, it pays to get a lot of attention to your video in a short space of time, even if you are making evergreen content that will still be relevant months or years down the line. And the easiest time to get a lot of viewers at once is when you first upload.

YouTube users are typically very liberal with their subscribing finger. For most of the people reading this post, the chances are that if you look in your subscriber list, there are far more subscribers than you actively keep up with.

There’s nothing wrong with this behaviour—most of us do it—but it does mean that notifying you about new videos can be problematic. If you have a hundred channels you are subscribed to (not uncommon) and at least fifty of them upload on a weekly basis, there’s a good chance that some of those videos are going to clash.

The next problem is that we are not looking at our YouTube notifications all day every day, so we don’t always see notifications in real-time.

The problem here is that YouTube does not like bombarding users with notifications. It isn’t very pleasant, and a surefire way to push people to turn their notifications off entirely, and YouTube certainly doesn’t want that.

So, if you open up your YouTube app and there have been eight new videos from channels you are subscribed since the last time you looked, YouTube won’t always show you notifications for all of those videos. Indeed, they might only show you one!

Even getting your subscribers to “ring that bell” is not a guaranteed way of ensuring they are notified since your video could hit the same bottleneck if a subscriber has multiple videos vying for notification attention at the same time.

YouTube Best Time to Upload

TV is not a Good Model

In the early days of YouTube, as the platform started to settle into more than just short videos of people visiting the zoo, many YouTubers took a cue from broadcast television when deciding their upload schedule.

TV show schedules have been carefully honed over years of experience, and typically involve saving your best content for the evening. This is when the most people are going to be sat watching their TV.

For the younger members of our audience, it might be worth pointing out that this kind of system was worked out long before video-on-demand services like Netflix, and even before DVR capabilities. There was a time, not too distant, where shows were broadcast live and if you wanted to watch a show, you had to be in front of your TV during that live broadcast, or hope for a rerun in the future.

That may have worked for those early YouTubers, but the paradigm has well and truly shifted since the late 00s. People have come to know YouTube as a new medium that isn’t beholden to the restrictions of TV, rather than a mere extension of it.

And, with YouTube views increasingly coming from mobile devices, the watching habits of users is further skewing away from those traditional TV schedules.

Timing for Noobs

Before we get into any specific talk about when you should post your videos, it’s worth pointing out that none of this really applies to new channels.

If you are just starting out, you almost certainly don’t have an audience you are trying to please, so there is no sense in trying to work out when the best upload times for that audience are.

In the beginning, you should focus on establishing a routine that works for you. Until you have built up an audience, the important thing is consistency, rather maximising your potential.

Pick a time that works for you and try to stick to it so that the viewers you attract can get used to your schedule. As you grow as a channel, you can begin experiment more with the things we are going to go into below.

YouTube Best Time to Upload 2

Knowing Your Audience: Timezone Edition

Before you can determine when the best time to upload for your channel is, you need to establish the timezones of your core audience. Unfortunately, this will be trickier for some channels than it will be for others.

On the plus side of things, this part being trickier is usually a sign that you are doing well as a YouTuber.

If your channel has a very clear audience geographically speaking, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

For example, if your audience is almost entirely UK-based, you can just mark it down as GMT (or BST depending on the time of the year) and move on to working out what the best time of day to upload is.

Unfortunately, if your audience is a little more widespread, things won’t be so simple. For example, English-speaking content that is not geared towards a specific region (people in America probably don’t care about local news in the UK, for example) could theoretically appeal to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand—countries that cover a whole gamut of timezones.

Depending on the exact part of each country we are talking, it could be the middle of the night in the US and Canada, early morning in the UK, late afternoon in Australia, and early evening in New Zealand. All at the same time.

Needless to say, working out the best time to upload in this situation is a little more complicated.

The best bet here is to try and determine if you have a primary market. For most YouTubers, it will likely be the region they live in, but if you have one region that consumes your content noticeably more than other areas, it might be worth focussing on that.

And, if you don’t have that one region you can zero in on, you can just pick the one you prefer, or go back to uploading at a time that suits you first and foremost. As we will explore shortly, the exact upload time isn’t the be-all and end-all of YouTube success.

YouTube Best Time to Upload 3

Knowing Your Audience: Age and Habits Edition

We talked a little above about how YouTube has well and truly moved away from those viewing schedules set out by broadcast television, but how does that help you establish your own upload schedule?

Before we get into this, we should clarify that none of these are hard rules—there are always exceptions. Also, we’re leaving out Generation Alpha, which consists of people born between the early 2010s and the mid-2020s.

Given that, at the time of writing, the oldest example of Gen Alpha will be around eight years old, there’s no sense talking about when the best upload times are for them, as there are a whole other set of rules to factor in when making content for children.

Zoomers

Firstly, let’s talk about the Zoomers, also known as Gen Z, which covers people born between the mid-to-late 1990s to the early 2010s. These are children and young adults who have always had the Internet—and mostly had YouTube—their whole lives.

They will usually be in some form of education (unless you’re reading this in ten years) which will put a limit on their viewing time. If your primary audience falls into this bracket, you probably want to focus on early mornings and late afternoons.

This age range is not particularly suited for late-night, as younger Zoomers will likely be in bed, and older ones will be busy being teenagers and young adults.

YouTube Best Time to Upload 4

Millennials

This generation covers people born between the early 1980s and late 1990s and is notable from a YouTube perspective as being the generation that YouTube’s success was built on.

Gen Z may be surpassing them in terms of user numbers, but it was millennials like PewDiePie, Philip DeFranco, TomSka, Jenna Marbles, iJustine, and countless others of that age group that ushered YouTube into the age of success it currently enjoys.

Millennials are mostly out in the world now, meaning they tend to have jobs, and not many jobs allow you to sit and watch YouTube while you’re working.

But, while this generation may remember a time before smartphones and broadband, they have nonetheless grown up with it, and are very comfortable using the technologies that are built around these things. In other words, you may lose your millennial audience during the mornings and afternoons, but you could still catch them on their lunch breaks thanks to the ease with which YouTube can be watched on the phone these days.

Evenings can be a bit hit and miss, however.

The millennial age range is both young enough to still be out socialising on an average night, but also old enough to have slowed down a little, and nights in more than nights out.

Generation X

Generation X, also known as the MTV Generation, the Latchkey Generation, and the Lost Generation, is a generation of people born between 1965 and 1980.

This generation had mostly hit adulthood by the time the Internet started changing the world, and so tend to be less embracing of technology than their younger counterparts.

This generation doesn’t tend to be accessible from a YouTube perspective outside of their downtime, which means you’re far less likely to catch them before early evenings.

You may get some traction in the mornings, but you are unlikely to get a significant amount of Gen X watching YouTube on their phones at lunch breaks.

Baby Boomers, Silent Generation, and Greatest Generation

Though some Baby Boomers are still young enough to be in the regular workforce, we’re lumping these generations together because they are all more or less in the same situation, which is retirement.

For older YouTube viewers, the upload times are far more flexible, Generally speaking, you want to aim for before early evening, but other than that you should be good to go.

YouTube Best Time to Upload 5

Experiment

Where possible, try experimenting with different upload times. Bear in mind that the videos will need to have a similar level of expectation for the experimenting to be effective.

There is no sense comparing a video that you expect to do really well with a video you hope will at least be average.

Ultimately, the congestion caused by multiple video uploads and the unpredictable schedules of individual users will always make the ideal upload time something of a guessing game, so experimenting may be your only surefire way to know.

Categories
HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Grow Your YouTube Channel’s Audience with THESE 4 Books!

Auto Draft 7

Launched a YouTube Channel and it’s not going so well?

Perhaps you are not getting the clicks in the search results you think you deserve. Maybe you lay awake at night wondering how your competitors get recommended in suggested videos, and you don’t.

It just isn’t fair!

Well, it may be that they are doing things a little different to you. It often only needs a tweak here or a small improvement there to make the difference between failure and success for a video.

So if you think you have what it takes, but think you are missing a piece of the puzzle, here are four books that should have useful information to help you along. Information that turns the tide on your lacklustre performance and increases your subscribers and views.

I am much more of an audiobook “reader” as I tend to take it in easier – I even use Amazon’s FREE Audible trials to load up on 2 free books every month.

Book 1: YOUTUBE MASTERY MARKETING 2020

Author: Robert Grow

Number of pages: 114

Published: 2020

Why should you listen to him?: Robert Grow is an author who regularly writes about social media and marketing. His has written six books about optimising your online social media presence. This book is part of a series that also includes marketing guidance for Instagram and Facebook.

Book Synopsis: In this short book, Robert Grow looks at how you can optimise your YouTube channel for more views and subscribers. Grow argues that to become successful on YouTube, you need first to understand how the YouTube algorithm works, which he explains in a manner that all should comprehend.

Building on this knowledge, the book details the tools used by some of the most successful channels, and how you can use them yourself to give your channel a boost.

YouTube is a search engine, so the book covers the SEO rules you should be aware of and the tweaks you can make to optimise your content for ranking.

Unlike some of the more basic YouTube introduction books, YouTube Mastery Marketing addresses more advance YouTube concepts. Broadcasting live and promoting your own branded merchandise from your channel, both have their own dedicated chapter.

Robert Grow also provides useful information on the video quantity vs quality debate and underlines how important consistency is.

The book is divided into 18 easily digestible chapters and is available on Kindle, paperback, and Amazon Audible. The book has also been well received, rating 4.8 out of 5 on the Amazon store.

Amazon Link To Book: Buy The Book Now.

Book 2: YouTube Optimization: The Complete Guide

Author: Tom Martin

Number of pages: 116

Published: 2018

Why should you listen to him?: Tom Martin is a certified YouTube Growth specialist who previously managed the YouTube channel for BBC Worldwide for several years. He has managed YouTube channels that collectively have had billions of views.

Tom now runs a specialist consultancy firm that works with YouTubers to help improve their channels and expand their audience. You can consider Tom Martin as an expert on YouTube.

Book Synopsis: The books full title is; YouTube Optimization – The Complete Guide: Get more YouTube subscribers, views and revenue by optimizing like the pros. Which demonstrates the actionable information you can derive from this book.

Tom Martin has lengthened his book title for Amazon, containing benefits and keywords to make sure he appears in many different keyword searches. YouTube Optimization teaches you similar tactics the pros use on their videos to draw in the viewers and increase their subscribers.

Tom Martin argues that even small changes can have a significant impact on your channel. And the book sets out strategies you can learn and apply yourself.

Equipped with this knowledge, you can then make subtle changes to your content and reap greater success. Tom says that by applying his lessons, you can turn a video that gets 10 views into a video with 1000 – an exponential impact.

The book is divided into ten chapters, and each chapter deals with a YouTube attribute, like watch time or tags, and shows you how to improve on the metric or optimise the content.

From your title, tags, and thumbnail; to your intro, content, and outro; Tom shows you how to improve on your output. Don’t be put off by the age of the book either. The tactics Tom teaches are evergreen strategies. It’s an essential book for anyone looking to improve their channels standing.

The book is available in Kindle and paperback formats and is rated 4.5 out of 5 by its readers on Amazon.

Amazon Link To Book: Buy The Book Now.

Book 3: Vlog Like a Boss: How to Kill It Online with Video Blogging

Author: Amy Landino (nee Schmittauer)

Number of pages: 220

Published: 2017

Why should you listen to her?: Amy Landino is an American lifestyle entrepreneur who runs the website SavvySexySocial.com and owns the YouTube channel, Amy Landino. Amy has 388k subscribers and vlogs regularly on productivity and entrepreneurship. Her easy-going vlogging style has won her legions of fans.

Book Synopsis: When you see Gary Vaynerchuk’s name on the front cover giving a testimonial, you know Amy Landino is something special. It doesn’t end there, Tony Robbins’ social media manager also says she is ‘the most authoritative voice in the how-to vlogging space’.

So why is she so good at what she does?

Some skills come to some people easily, and it appears Amy Landino is a natural when it comes to speaking in front of the camera. But, presenting a vlog is a skill you can learn. Amy sets out to show you how you can improve your presenting style, and help make your videos more pleasing to watch.

You won’t find in-depth coverage of YouTube’s algorithm or the importance of tagging here; it’s not that kind of book. Instead, in a witty and engaging manner, Amy Landino explains how you can best develop the confidence and poise to present your content and how to promote it via social media.

Amy Landino dares you to step outside of your comfort zone, launch a vlogging business, and go after your dreams.

Vlog Like A Boss is available in hardback, paperback, Kindle, and Amazon Audible – narrated by the author. It currently rates 4.6 out of 5 from hundreds of Amazon reviews and is in the top 30 books for video production.

Amazon Link To Book: Buy The Book Now.

Book 4: Read This if You Want to Be YouTube Famous

Author: Will Eagle

Number of pages: 128

Published: 2020

Why should you listen to him?: This book is part of a series about creative endeavours. The main attraction of the book is that Will Eagle (a former brand strategist at Google) has interviewed 45 of the top creators on YouTube and distilled their wisdom and tips for aspiring YouTubers into a single book. Each creator also shares their favourite video and favourite other YouTube creators.

Book Synopsis: Don’t judge a book by its cover. The plain dull cover, criticised by many reviewers, hides a good treasure trove of informative tips.

The book’s central premise is 45 of the top, and influential YouTubers share actionable tips for you to make the most of the videos that you create. Included in the book are YouTubers with vast numbers of subscribers, like The Icing Artist (4.1million) and Gizzy Gazza (2.1million).

It’s a bit of an arty coffee table book in some ways, and the design and layout are modern and cool. But it takes you along the journey of some famous creatives, from their first videos shot in a dingy bedroom to the polished productions they make now.

It also reminds the reader that you have to commit to the process (many YouTubers take years to find success). While it can be a little repetitive, because each creator is asked the same questions, it does underline that vlogging is a learned skill.

All in all, it contains some valuable insight into the minds of successful YouTubers and is a source of inspiration for those still on the path to success.

The book is only available in the coffee-table paperback format, currently priced at just £8.99.

Amazon Link To Book: Buy The Book Now.

So that concludes the list of books for YouTubers who want to grow their audience. I hope you find some of the recommendations useful.

Remember, if you sometimes struggle to find the time actually to sit down and read; there is an alternative. You can listen to a book when you are out and about—maybe travelling to work or out getting coffee.

You can download and listen to many useful books about YouTube and entrepreneurship using Amazon Audible. Every month for a small monthly subscription, you can listen to a book often narrated by the author themselves.

Educating yourself is the single best thing you can do for your career, so why not try listening to two of the books mentioned above with a 30-day trial of Amazon Audible.

 

Categories
HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Best Books for New YouTubers You HAVE To Read!

Auto Draft 2

When you start a new YouTube channel, it’s quite easy to feel overwhelmed.

There is so much to do; perfecting your spare-room set, mastering the art of clip editing, and remind-me-again does the red light mean the camera is recording?

Growing a YouTube channel by yourself from zero can be a lonely place. So why not learn from those who have been before you? Many successful YouTubers have distilled their years of experience and wisdom into best-selling books.

It makes sense for you to read a few. Maybe then you can move your channel forward faster than your competitors.

I am much more of an audiobook “reader” as I tend to take it in easier – I even use Amazon’s FREE Audible trials to load up on 2 free books every month.

This post looks four of the best books I recommend for new YouTubers. Here we go.

Book 1: YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and Making Money as a Video Influencer

Authors: Sean Cannell & Benji Travis

Number of pages: 194

Published: 2018

Why should you listen to them?: Sean Cannell and Benji Travis are two friends who got into vlogging and video creation in 2003, before YouTube’s launch. With over a decades’ experience, each author can claim significant success from running YouTube Channels.

Sean Cannell has helped businesses generate $5 million in revenue. Benji Travis’s videos have had over 1 billion views. Between them, they currently run around five channels and collectively have over 2 million subscribers.

Book Synopsis: YouTube Secrets claims that video has changed the world and created a whole new entrepreneurial channel for ambitious self-starters to make an impact on the world.

Thousands of vloggers are making soccer-star levels of income running YouTube channels, and YouTube Secrets aims to give you the roadmap to launch one yourself.

When researching the book, Cannell and Travis interviewed 100 top creators and drew on their own experiences, then compiled the knowledge into an actionable plan.

The authors divided the book into two sections; Strategies and Tactics. The Strategy section covers the best way to plan your YouTube channel’s content and launch. The Tactics section looks at how you can grow your subscriber base and scale-up your channel.

The book is in the top 100 best sellers in the e-business category and is available in paperback, kindle, and audible format, which is narrated by the authors.

Out of 800 global reviews on Amazon, the book is rated 4.6 out of 5 by its readers. Many say that the price of the book is alone worth it just for the section of pro-tips from the top YouTube creators.

Amazon link to book: Buy the book now.

Book 2: Tube Ritual: Jumpstart Your Journey to 5,000 YouTube Subscribers

Author: Brian G. Johnson

Number of pages: 268

Published: 2018

Why should you listen to him?: Brian Johnson started a YouTube channel from scratch and grew it to 10,000 subscribers in under a year.

That was four years ago, now Brian has uploaded nearly 600 videos and has 137,000 subscribers. Brian knows what it takes to launch a channel from zero subscribers and make a success of it.

Book Synopsis: Tube Ritual states the problem facing new YouTubers quite plainly: when you start with your new YouTube channel, you have no videos, no subscribers, and no views.

Furthermore, every minute of every day, 500 minutes of video are uploaded to YouTube. How do you compete with all that? Beginning from zero can seem an overwhelming challenge!

Brain navigated this problem himself through researching, testing, and tweaking his vlogging methods. Until he landed on a set of practices – he calls rituals – that resulted in video content that drew in subscribers and views.

YouTube Rituals is a year-long case study of launching a brand new channel. Brian helps you to steer through all the roadblocks of camera settings, editing, and technical details.

The book is nine chapters which each deal with essential concepts and skills you need to master to become a success as a YouTuber.

Brain covers the importance of planning, playlists, and thumbnails. How to win clicks in the search results and turn viewers into subscribers. He also shares his opinions about the need for creating content of value. The book closes out with a 30-day challenge you can test yourself against and provides a 12-step program for ranking well on YouTube.

The book is rated 4.4 out of 5 on Amazon and is available in Kindle and paperback format. Many reviewers say it is the book to get for YouTube startups.

Amazon link to book: Buy the book now.

Book 3: Crushing YouTube: How to Start a YouTube Channel, Launch Your YouTube Business and Make Money

Author: Joseph Hogue

Number of pages: 164

Published: 2019

Why should you listen to him?: Joseph Hogue runs a channel on YouTube that focuses on personal finance. He started his channel in 2015 and has grown it to nearly 260k subscribers. He claims that as of June 2019, he is earning $3,500 per month from ad revenue alone from the channel – and a similar amount from sponsorships and affiliate sales.

Book Synopsis: The central premise of Crushing YouTube is that it provides you with the keys to growing a YouTube channel from 0 to 75,000 subscribers in 18 months.

Hogue says it’s not too late to start a channel. In fact, Hogue claims that with the rollout of 5G, it’s just the beginning of the ‘age of YouTube’ and now is the perfect time to launch a channel of your own.

Hogue underlines that he knows the zero problem. Zero videos, views or subscribers, and the frustration that it can bring competing against ‘million-subscriber monsters’. So he gives you the tools you need to grow your channel and start seeing results quickly.

The book covers how you can earn additional revenue streams in addition to YouTube’s ad revenue sharing program. Hogue shows you how these revenue streams can be as lucrative, if not more, than earning solely from ads.

The book is divided into 18 easily digestible chapters, covering a diverse range of topics. It covers the essential information for the beginner, like choosing a channel topic and equipment required to get your channel up on the air.

Later chapters deal with more advanced subjects such as using analytics for growth, channel promotion, and subscriber growth strategies. The knowledge contained in the book can save you months of trial and error, and it’s well worth the read.

The book is rated 4.6 out of 5 on Amazon and is available on Kindle and paperback formats.

Amazon link to book: Buy the book now.

Book 4: YouTube Channels For Dummies

Authors: Rob Ciampa, Theresa Go, Matt Ciampa, Rich Murphy

Number of pages: 400

Published: 2020

Why should you listen to them?: The authors are a blend of successful YouTubers and YouTube advertising and marketing consultants. Matt Ciampa is a video producer at Buzzfeed. Rob Ciampa is a global media consultant. Theresa Go and Rich Murphy both work at Pixabililty, a company that advises large brands on video marketing.

Book Synopsis: A recently released updated and expanded version of the 2015 original, YouTube Channels for Dummies promises to help you attract some of the 2 billion sets of eyes that use YouTube each month.

If you are looking for comprehensive guidance on launching a YouTube channel, then you can do far worse than buying a for Dummies book. Yes, sometimes they can appear patronising, but for Dummies books assume that you have absolutely no prior knowledge on a topic.

This is a good thing. While other books may assume that you know how to log into your YouTube account, YouTube Channels For Dummies covers everything, which is excellent, if you want to know how to navigate the home page properly but were too afraid to ask.

The book is divided into five parts. The first deals with getting started – how to set up your channel and planning your aims. The second section shows you how to make a good YouTube video, and has helpful suggestions for different types you can shoot.

The third section helps you with understanding and growing your audience. The fourth sections looks at how businesses can use YouTube to their advantage in the modern world. And the final fifth section covers copyright and improving YouTube search rankings.

Typical for Dummies features are present in the book, with helpful summaries and graphics to help you digest the most important pieces of information.

The book is available on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback format. As it’s only just been released, there aren’t too many user reviews in as yet. However, the early reviews are promising, and it should be an essential addition to your YouTube learning library.

Amazon link to book: Buy the book now.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about this curated selection of books for the YouTube beginner. Learning from others who have succeeded before you can help you when you are a bit overwhelmed at the start.

For some people, it’s hard to find the time to sit down a read a book. Well, why don’t you listen to it instead!

You can get an Amazon Audible subscription FOR FREE and claim your 2 FREE DOWNLOADS, plus one new audiobook every month. Enjoy a free one month trial here.

 

Categories
HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE LISTS TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

5 Ways To Find the Best Tags for Ranking Your YouTube Videos

YouTube Tags

There are 720,000 hours of video added to YouTube every day. So the chance of your latest offering being watched by a large audience is pretty slim.

Building a following on YouTube can be a challenging task; so you have to use every tool at your disposal to promote your video.

When considering how to promote your video, it’s essential to understand that YouTube is a search engine. The second biggest search engine after Google, in fact. So the meta-data you add to your video when you upload it (title, description, and tags), can play a part in attracting some initial views.

This post looks at one part of the meta-data – Youtube tags. What they are, how to add them, and gives you five ways to find the best tags for ranking your YouTube videos.

Here we go.

What Are YouTube Tags?

In their help section for content creators, YouTube says the following about tags;

“Tags are descriptive keywords you can add to your video to help viewers find your content.”

YouTube is plainly stating that tags are keywords. Should your tags match with the keywords a YouTube user searches for, then you have a chance of appearing in the search results.

However, they then go on to say;

“tags play a minimal role in your video’s discovery.”

Hmm, it sounds like you don’t need to use them then?

Well, if you are a top YouTuber and receive thousands of views in the first few hours after uploading a video, then maybe tags aren’t as important for you. However, if you have a smaller channel, you need to seek every edge, no matter how slight, to drive initial traffic.

The right 4 or 5-word tag added when you upload new content, can kickstart your views.

Once you gain that initial traffic, metrics like watchtime and engagement take over, and YouTube can choose to suggest your video in viewer’s feeds.

Tags Help YouTube Categorise Your Video.

Tags also play a role in helping YouTube decide the precise topic of your video. The English language is a wonderful thing, but it can sometimes be confusing – some words have more than one meaning. So tags can be used to tell YouTube the topic and purpose of your video.

Here’s an example. The video below is about ‘irons’. An iron can be a household item or a golf club. But, the title of the video doesn’t convey to YouTube which kind the video is about.

Golf iron or steam iron

But, YouTube can use the tags and other video meta-data to help categorise the content. The tags for this video leave no room for doubt that it’s about a household iron.

steam iron tags

How Do You Add YouTube Tags?

You add YouTube tags in the video details section of your YouTube Studio. Navigate to your list of videos and click the ‘Details’ icon.

adding tags instruction

Underneath the ‘Audience’ section, there is a text entry box to enter your tags. Tags can be more than a single word; type in the tags hitting return after each one. Alternatively, you can paste in a list you prepared elsewhere.

adding tags further instruction

How Many Tags Should You Use on YouTube?

This one is a little tricky. On the one hand, YouTube permits entry of up to 500 characters in the video tag section. On the other hand, YouTube warns against adding excessive tags in their help section:

Youtube warning for tag misuse

A study conducted by briggsby.com concluded that ideally, you should use less than 300 characters. Which, assuming you are using 3-4 word keyphrases, puts the ideal number of tags at 30-40.

One of the key takeaways of the study recommended that as long as you stay relevant to the video topic, use as many characters as you can manage.

What Should You Use for Your YouTube Tags?

The tags you choose for your video should ideally be 3-word or more keyphrases that describe the overall topic of your video AND the content more precisely.

For example, if you uploaded a video reviewing steam irons, then some of the tags might be;

  • Best steam iron
  • Top steam irons
  • Best steam iron for clothes
  • Rowenta steam iron
  • Tefal steam iron for clothes

As you can see, these tags anticipate the kinds of phrases someone might use when looking for reviews of steam irons. It’s also a good idea to use some related brand names in your list of tags if appropriate.

Using some 5-word or more key phrases in your tags is recommended too. Unless your YouTube channel is a powerhouse with thousands of subscribers, you are unlikely to rank in the search results for shorter 2 or 3-word key phrases.

You can, however, appear in the top results for longer keyword search phrases, though these will have lower search volumes and drive smaller traffic.

5 Ways To Put Together a List of YouTube Tags.

So how do you put your list of tags together?

It’s best if you produce a long list of many possible tag key phrases first, then whittle it down to the best 30 or so. Start a new document or spreadsheet and as you collect potential tags, add them to the list.

You may be able to use some of the tags in another video you are planning; keeping tag ideas together in a file is not a bad practice.

As promised, here are five ways to find the best YouTube tags for ranking.

1.Brainstorm

One way to come up with a list of tags for your YouTube video is to brainstorm a list of keywords that someone might use to search for your video.

Imagine you know little to nothing about the details included in your video. What might a person in that situation type into a search engine to find the information?

It may sound like a silly idea, but you can come up with some out of the ordinary key-phrases using this method. Pretending you know nothing about your video topic can draw out some keywords that your competitors may not be using.

It’s worth a moment of your time before you use the same tag suggestion tools that everyone else uses.

2.YouTube Autocomplete

Autocomplete is a feature that predicts search terms when a user begins typing in the search bar.

It is there to save the user time. Google says that autocomplete reduces typing by 25% and collectively saves over 200 years of typing-time every day!

Because autocomplete predicts what users are going to type it also supplies a useful list of multi-word key phrases.

Here is an example using the steam iron keyword. Adding in extra words, or even a single letter, will reveal lots of keywords you can use in your tags.

youtube autocomplete example

3.Rapidtags.io YouTube Tag Generator

Rapid Tags is a YouTube tag generator that suggests a list of tags based on a seed keyword. You can copy all the suggestions with one click and add them to your list of possibles.

Rapid Tag does say in their about section that some tags may not be totally suitable for you purposes and you should remove any that don’t describe your video well.

rapidtags example

4.vidIQ

vidIQ is a tool designed to help creators build an audience on YouTube. The software has multiple tools for YouTube channels; one being their Google Chrome plugin. The plugin displays additional information about a video directly within the desktop version of YouTube.

Part of the information displayed is the tags used by a video. So, you can view some videos similar to yours and harvest the tags from those videos to add to your list.

vidiq example

5.Ytubetool.com

Ytubetool is a free tool you can use to harvest tags from a video if you don’t want to use vidIQ, or can’t install a Google Chrome plugin.

Simply add the URL of any YouTube video, and the tool will display a list of tags used by the video. With one-click to copy; it’s more potential tags ideas to add to your master file.

ytubetool example

Conclusion.

Using tags in your YouTube meta-data is not the most significant factor in ranking a video on YouTube. However, tags can play a small part in attracting initial traffic to your video.

Tags can also help YouTube to categorise your video, especially if the words in your title have more than one meaning.

YouTube themselves admit that tags only play a small part in your video discovery. So perhaps tags are best thought of as the finishing touches to your YouTube SEO. Necessary, but don’t obsess over it.

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube

Very quickly before you go here are 5 amazing tools I have used every day to grow my YouTube channel from 0 to 30K subscribers in the last 12 months that I could not live without.

1. VidIQ helps boost my views and get found in search

I almost exclusively switched to VidIQ from a rival in 2020.

Within 12 months I tripled the size of my channel and very quickly learnt the power of thumbnails, click through rate and proper search optimization. Best of all, they are FREE!

2. Adobe Creative Suite helps me craft amazing looking thumbnails and eye-catching videos

I have been making youtube videos on and off since 2013.

When I first started I threw things together in Window Movie Maker, cringed at how it looked but thought “that’s the best I can do so it’ll have to do”.

Big mistake!

I soon realized the move time you put into your editing and the more engaging your thumbnails are the more views you will get and the more people will trust you enough to subscribe.

That is why I took the plunge and invested in my editing and design process with Adobe Creative Suite. They offer a WIDE range of tools to help make amazing videos, simple to use tools for overlays, graphics, one click tools to fix your audio and the very powerful Photoshop graphics program to make eye-catching thumbnails.

Best of all you can get a free trial for 30 days on their website, a discount if you are a student and if you are a regular human being it starts from as little as £9 per month if you want to commit to a plan.

3. Rev.com helps people read my videos

You can’t always listen to a video.

Maybe you’re on a bus, a train or sat in a living room with a 5 year old singing baby shark on loop… for HOURS. Or, you are trying to make as little noise as possible while your new born is FINALLY sleeping.

This is where Rev can help you or your audience consume your content on the go, in silence or in a language not native to the video.

Rev.com can help you translate your videos, transcribe your videos, add subtitles and even convert those subtitles into other languages – all from just $1.50 per minute.

A GREAT way to find an audience and keep them hooked no matter where they are watching your content.

4. PlaceIT can help you STAND OUT on YouTube

I SUCK at making anything flashy or arty.

I have every intention in the world to make something that looks cool but im about as artistic as a dropped ice-cream cone on the web windy day.

That is why I could not live on YouTube without someone like PlaceIT. They offer custom YouTube Banners, Avatars, YouTube Video Intros and YouTube End Screen Templates that are easy to edit with simple click, upload wizard to help you make amazing professional graphics in minutes.

Best of all, some of their templates are FREE! or you can pay a small fee if you want to go for their slightly more premium designs (pst – I always used the free ones).

5. StoryBlocks helps me add amazing video b-roll cutaways

I mainly make tutorials and talking head videos.

And in this modern world this can be a little boring if you don’t see something funky every once in a while.

I try with overlays, jump cuts and being funny but my secret weapon is b-roll overlay content.

I can talk about skydiving, food, money, kids, cats – ANYTHING I WANT – with a quick search on the StoryBlocks website I can find a great looking clip to overlay on my videos, keeping them entertained and watching for longer.

They have a wide library of videos, graphics, images and even a video maker tool and it wont break the bank with plans starting from as little as £8.25 ($9) per month.

Categories
HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

13 YouTube Video Ideas Without Showing Your Face

Auto Draft 1

Do you cringe when you see a picture of yourself? Is it even worse when you watch a video of yourself moving and talking? Don’t worry; you’re not alone. Psychology Today says that you could be suffering from something called self enhancement bias.

A self enhancement bias means that it’s common to think that we are more attractive than we actually are. We’re used to our reflection we see in the mirror. But when we see ourselves on camera, our face isn’t mirrored – we get to see our actual face as others see it.

It’s the unmirrored image that makes us cringe.

This can be a problem for aspiring YouTubers. There is a bunch of money to be made on the platform. And you want in on the action too.

Well, there is a way for you, if you suffer from self-enhancement bias, to make a bundle of money from YouTube without showing your face on video. There are a whole host of channels with thousands of subscribers where the channel owner never appears on camera.

Here are 13 video ideas for YouTube you can steal, or use for inspiration, and launch your own YouTube channel without ever showing your face.

Meditation and Mindfulness Videos

Some people love to tune out of the world and take a moment with their own thoughts. The practice of mindfulness and meditation has been embraced widely over the last few years as a why to help people sleep, study or relax.

Make videos that people can unwind to, feel comfortable with or can meditate to like on the Meditation Mindfulness channel.

Origami

Crafts are a popular niche on YouTube, with lots of people looking for hints, tips, and tutorials on how to express their creativity.

PPO – Proud Paper Official – is a crafts channel that shows the viewers how to fold origami shapes and planes from paper.

PPO Origami YouTube channel

Social Blade (a social media statistics aggregator) says that they have nearly 5 million monthly viewers and earn as much as £12.9k per month from the videos.

social blade stats for PPO

Not bad for a channel that is seven years old but only has 77 videos uploaded.

Nail Art

Fingernail art is not a recent invention. The history of nail polish goes back over 5000 years, originating in ancient China. Today, nail art remains popular as ever.

The millions of potential combinations of colours and patterns mean there are always new nail designs you can demonstrate.

A nail art channel is ideal for top-down filming and only needs to show you applying the designs, plus a commentary explaining how to do it.

20 Nails is a channel that shows its viewers how to create all manner of nail art designs, from the simple to extravagant.

20 Nails Channel

With 59 videos uploaded in just under a year, 20 Nails has built an audience of 288k subscribers. Social Blade says that they get 2.33 million views per month and earn as much as £6.1k monthly from the channel.

20 nails channel stats

Drawing

Lots of people like to draw. Stephen Wiltshire, an autistic savant, can draw an entire cityscape from memory, and others struggle to make a stick figure look human.

Drawing is a skill, though, and can be learned with patience and practice. There are lots of people teaching the craft of drawing on YouTube using only the top-down camera shot.

Dan Beardshaw is one of those. Dan uploads short videos every couple of weeks demonstrating hints and tips on how to improve the different elements of drawing.

Dan Beardshaw Channel Page

He has uploaded 167 videos over four years and has grown the channel to 361k subscribers. Social Blade says he has about half a million views per month and earns as much as £1.3k per month from advertising.

Dan Beardshaw Social Blade Stats

Dan also supplements this income with nearly 400 Patreon members and affiliate links to art materials in his video descriptions, so is likely earning a full-time income from the channel.

Cooking

Cooking is an awesome niche for using the top-down filming angle. And while numerous channels focus on top-down cooking videos, there is also never-ending demand.

We all like to eat tasty food, and many want to try new recipes or improve their cooking skills.

You may need to find a unique angle to stand out in the niche. But if you can find a way to make your videos compelling, there is no reason you can’t make a successful cooking channel.

You Suck At Cooking has 117 videos that doesn’t do anything revolutionary with the cooking recipes but inject a large dose of humour instead.

You Suck At Cooking channel

The production quality is good, and the videos are well-scripted, but nothing that you couldn’t produce yourself with a bit of thought and planning.

Social Blade says that the 5 million views per month the channel’s 117 videos receive, earn £13.4k per month in advertising revenue.

You Suck At Cooking stats

The channel also earns money from sales of a cookbook and associated merchandise.

DIY

If you’re handy about the home, then one idea you could choose for top-down filming is DIY videos. YouTube is often the first place people go to when they have a DIY problem and need a quick solution.

It could be a simple as wiring a plug, or more complicated like changing a tap. Whatever the problem, your videos could help people save money by preventing the need to hire in a handyperson.

There is an endless amount of small jobs you can make videos about. Plus you could approach the niche with a different frame of reference. For example, how about DIY videos for people who don’t have a box of tools?

Ultimate Handyman is a DIY channel that has over 800 videos covering all manner of DIY tasks from big to small. While he does have his face in the video thumbnails, most of his content is simply the camera filming his hands.

ultimate handyman channel

Social Blade puts Ultimate Handyman on 1.7 million monthly views and earning as much as £4.5k from advertising revenue in the same period.

ultimate handyman stats

Unboxing

Everyone likes a good unboxing video. The idea is a simple one; buy a new product, wait for delivery, then film yourself taking it out of the packaging.

You get bonus points (and more views and subscribers) if you can make the process compelling. It helps if you can show some expertise with your commentary. Rather than merely stating what something is, as you pull it out of the box.

The Relaxing End is one of the more successful unboxing channels. Part of their continued success is that they can afford to buy in (or have a big-enough audience to get sent for free) some of the latest high-end products that people dream about owning.

Apart from the high-end products, the channel’s unique attraction is their use of sound. The host appears too shy to speak as well as not showing his face. Instead, he makes the most of every slash of sellotape or squeak of polystyrene, as he unboxes the item.

The Relaxing End Channel Page

The un-boxer also wears signature white gloves to add extra frills.

The Social Blade stats on this channel are impressive. With monthly channel views over 30 million, The Relaxing End pulls in as much as £78.8k per month in ad revenue.

The Relaxing End Social Blade Stats

TIP: Technology channels are some of the best earners on YouTube. The ad space is more expensive for advertisers to buy because of high competition for the slots.

If you want to get started on your own top-down videos, you need to make sure that you have some sort of rig to keep your phone and camera steady while filming. Check out Javier Mercedes’ video for how to film overhead shots.

Chest Down Video Ideas

A slight twist on the top-down video is having the camera facing you, but not showing your face in the shot. I’m calling these types of videos chest-down ideas. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.

Cooking Part II

There are a significant number of cooking channels already doing top-down videos. To make your cooking channel stand out from the pack, why not try a different angle?

That’s what Binging with Babish chooses to do for his channel. The camera angle gives the impression you are sat in the kitchen with him, making the effect more homely. Yet you don’t see his face in the cooking videos.

binging with babish channel page

Babish also has a theme for his cooking channel apart from the unusual camera angle; he recreates food found in TV and Movies. If you fancy some Pollos Hermanos from Breaking Bad or some Twin Peaks pancakes, head over to the channel for some mouth-watering videos.

As you can imagine the 7.82 million subscribers of the channel help Babish earn quite a bit ad revenue. Social Blade reckons the channel gets 58.63 million views and makes a tasty £152K, every month.

binging with babish stats

Household Hacks

A different spin on the DIY channel is short-and-sweet tips to help with day-to-day household chores. ‘Hacks’ has become the byword for ingenious tips that help people accomplish usually tiresome tasks.

Many of us often turn to YouTube, looking for a quick way to solve a problem. Get rid of Ants or spend less on groceries. Hacks help us improve our lives, so it’s not a niche that will disappear anytime soon.

Household Hacker makes short videos to demonstrate various hacks for the home, often making use of the chest-down camera shot.

Household Hacker Channel Page

Household Hacker has also branched out to demonstrating those silly products-you-never-knew-you-needed from the TV shopping channels.

Social Blade puts Household Hacker on 1.2 million views per month, which it says brings in the channel owner as much as £3.3k in advertising revenue. The channel also earns income from affiliate earnings for the TV products he reviews.

Household Hacker Stats

POV Video Ideas

So far, we have looked at top-down and chest-down filming without showing your face. But there is another angle you can use in your videos too. The POV – Point of View – camera shot.

This camera angle shows the audience the view from your eyes and guarantees keeping your face out of the frame.

Here are some ideas you can try for POV YouTube video ideas.

Restoration Videos

Do you have your own workshop? Handy with a belt-sander and happy to mix up some caustic chemicals? You could launch a channel to show you restoring old rusty tools and other whatnots to their original state.

It can be therapeutic for viewers to watch someone restore an item; I firmly believe that these types of videos are beneficial to people’s mental health too.

It’s a content type which is very popular on YouTube.

Awesome Restorations has 2.57 million subscribers and is one of the better channels in the restoration niche. Restoring an item can take some time, so if you choose the restoration niche, you might only be uploading a video every couple of weeks.

Awesome Restorations Channel Page

Awesome Restorations has built up their massive following in just over a year, and with only 38 videos.

Their work has paid off too. Social Blade puts them on 14.5 million monthly views and ad revenue earnings of £37.8k per month.

Awesome Restorations stats

If you don’t want to go down the tool restoration route, there are plenty of other objects you can restore: vintage handbags, antique books, even early smartphones. Restoration is a hot niche and perfect for POV filming because the object of restoration, not you, is the star.

Stop Motion Animation

Stop motion animation is nearly as old as the invention of film itself—the earliest movie dated back to 1898 and was based on Humpty Dumpty. Stop motion is an animation technique where figures are animated by snapping a single frame, then moving the model ever so slightly and shooting the next frame.

As an animation medium, Stop Motion is still hugely popular today. The most well-known is the Wallace and Gromit series of films, which earned three Oscars in the 1990s and 2000s.

Michael Hickox Films is a stop motion animation YouTube channel that uses Lego for its animated characters.

Michael Hickox Channel Page

The animated films are short, wholesome pieces that appeal to a broad audience – and it’s a large audience too.

With 1.47 million subscribers, Michael Hickox films have 3.86 million monthly views and earn as much as £10.1k per month.

Michael Hickox Stats

POV Sports Channels

Thanks to GoPro cameras and associated body mounts, the popularity of filming outdoor activities is on the rise.

At one time, the only way you could understand what it was like to jump out of a plane or surf a twenty-foot wave, was to do it yourself. Now lots of activities are available for a broader audience to experience by viewing a POV video.

There are endless types of outdoor activities you can launch a YouTube channel about with a GoPro camera, chest rig, and perhaps a friend or two.

Ampisound is a channel that makes Parkour videos. Many of the Parkour runs are shot POV-style, placing the viewer at the heart of the action.

Ampisound channel page

Ampisound only releases videos about every month or so, but the content resonates and has built an audience of 2.32 million subscribers.

What kind of YouTube channel could you launch using a GoPro camera filming from your point-of-view?

Maybe you could grow it as large as Ampisound and get nearly 7 million monthly views and pull in as much as £18k in ad revenue.

Ampisound Social Blade Stats

Driving Videos

There is nothing like hitting the open road, dropping the convertible roof, and admiring the scenery of the world’s best cities.

But not everyone can drive. And most people don’t live anywhere near the world’s nicest cities.

So, if you are one of the fortunate ones who does, then how about making videos of scenic drives and tours of famous locations?

J Utah is a channel that specialises in only POV videos of picturesque drives. From L.A. to Boston (and a few overseas), J Utah likes nothing more than mounting a 4K camera on the car and driving about.

J Utah channel page

You really wouldn’t think this idea would work – it’s just driving around for goodness sake! But it works. Perhaps people enjoy the content because it’s a familiar place to them, or maybe they want to live there one day.

Whatever the reason, the channel has built up 366K subscribers and has 5.4 million monthly views. Social Blade put the ad revenue for the channel as much as £14k per month.

J Utah social blade stats

Hairdressing

Hairdressing is perfect for a POV video channel, and Health and Beauty is one of the top niches on YouTube.

Now, some of the highest earners are in the makeup category, which by definition is a showing-your-face kind of gig. But there is an alternative for the shy. You can create videos that demonstrate hairstyling using a POV camera shot.

You will need a model to work on who won’t mind appearing on camera. But as you are showing mainly the back and side of the head, they won’t have too much face-time on camera.

There are hundreds of channels I could use as an example for this particular idea, so if you choose this niche, be prepared for stiff competition.

Making a big success of your channel would probably mean that you have found an angle that makes you stand out from all the rest. Perhaps you can be first with new, unusual hairstyles, or dazzle viewers with your humorous delivery.

Nina Starck makes videos about hair braiding. She is so good at braiding that she uses herself as a model, but never shows her face on the videos.

Nina Starck Channel Page

With only 38 videos, Nina has built a subscriber base of 149k people. She gets 650k views per month and earns as much as $1.7k in ad revenue for those viewers.

Nina Starck Stats

Conclusion

YouTube is an education and entertainment platform, and you don’t need to be a polished presenter to make some great money on the platform. If you can present content in a compelling, engaging way, it doesn’t matter if you show your face or not.

Most of the ideas mentioned above cover day to day human life; cooking, home hacks, shopping, beauty, sports, and hobbies. And can be filmed in a manner that doesn’t require you to show your face.

The star of the videos is whatever the camera is pointing at – that’s what the viewers will be interested in.

So don’t let your dislike of showing your face on camera prevent a channel you launch from becoming one of the next stars on YouTube.

If you need more ideas for your faceless youtube channel check out my blog where 1 give you 12 more youtube channel ideas you can do without showing your face!

 

Categories
HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE SEO TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

5 Best Tools for YouTube Channel Keyword Analysis

5 best tools for YouTube channel Keyword Analysis

 

YouTube might not be the first name that enters your mind when you try and guess who is the world’s second-biggest search engine.

But, when you learn that Youtube is owned by Google – the world’s biggest search engine – you won’t be surprised that keywords play a role in how videos rank on YouTube.

YouTube is so popular that 300 hours of video is uploaded the site every minute; way too much content for humans to watch and categorise. So, instead, YouTube uses the keywords in the video title and associated tags to help understand a video’s topic and rank it accordingly.

Keywords Are Important.

For SEO purposes then, you should choose the keywords you put in your title and tags carefully. Keywords could be the difference between success and failure for your video. It makes even more sense to perform keyword research first, before you plan and shoot your videos.

Understanding the content YouTube’s audience is searching for prevents you from wasting time making videos that no one wants to see.

But how do you find the hot keywords users are hunting for on YouTube?

There is no official keyword tool for YouTube like there is for Google Adwords with its Google Keyword Planner. But there are several third-party tools you can use to determine what is popular, and what topics should be left alone.

This post gives you five of the best YouTube keyword tools you can use to analyse the most searched youtube keywords. Some are free, and for some, you have to buy a subscription to access full functionality. Let’s jump into the list.

vidIQ

vidIQ is a free chrome extension which adds additional keyword analysis information directly on the page on the YouTube site. Search for any term, and the plugin displays keyword data on the right of the results, as shown below.

You can also toggle the plugin to display the tags used by the top ranking videos underneath each result.

picture of vidIQ in action

You can use the data to determine if a keyword has potential for using in a video title and if it’s worthy of a topic to add to your content planner.

vidIQ provides an ‘overall score’ for each keyword, rating them out of 100 and declaring how hard it will be to rank for them.

But you’ll have to take them on their word for this metric, as we don’t know the scoring system they use. It’s best if you use the score as an indication, then make your final keyword choice after further research.

vidIQ keyword stats display

Ideally, you will want to find keywords with high-volume and low-competition. But in reality, most of the high-volume keywords will already have lots of videos competing for the traffic, and should only be attempted by well-established channels.

Newer channels will have to seek out medium to low competition keywords, with correspondingly low search volume.

vidIQ also shows you the top-performing channels for the keyword, so you can dig into their content to see what’s working for them. Also displayed, is a selection of related keywords, which may contain ones that may be more suitable for you to target.

vidIQ alternative keywords

Only three ‘related opportunities’ display with the free version of the plugin; if you take out a subscription, you get to access hundreds more.

Video Tags

Underneath each video, you can toggle the display of the tags used by a video. You can use them for inspiration for other keywords, or steal them outright to use in your video with a one-click copy to clipboard.

vidIQ tags

Once you select a video from the results, vidIQ provides further information about the video and channel; daily views, country of origin and even displays the channel’s tags. So you can reverse-engineer a whole channel if you wish.

vidIQ keywords and tags

viqIQ provides plenty of helpful keyword suggestions for free, but so much more with a paid subscription. A monthly subscription of $7.50 gets you access to their full keyword research tool.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a free Google tool that shows the popularity of a topic over time. While it doesn’t show keyword volume, it is nevertheless helpful in narrowing down subjects for your video ideas.

Enter in any keyword, and the tool displays a graph showing the popularity of the keyword over the last 12 months. Here is an example using the keyword ‘selfie stick’.

Google Trends Graph for selfie stick

A scale between 0 and 100 is used to rate the search term, so you can see at which times of the year a topic peaks in popularity. Knowing when a subject is most searched for can help you time the release of your content.

You can see in the result above that interest in selfie sticks peaks just before Christmas. So if you were to review the top selfie sticks, it might be a good idea to plan your video for release in late September.

Before you commit to any topic, look at more than 12 months of data. From the drop-down menu, select ‘Past 5 years’.

google trends instruction to change date

Oh no! It looks like the selfie stick craze peaked in 2016 – perhaps this is not such a good content idea for a video.

google trend selfie stick 5 year graph

Google Trends also allows you to compare keywords to see which one is more popular. If you have two keywords that you are considering making a video for but can’t decide which one to go with, enter both terms.

The resulting graph shows you which is the most popular, and the peaks can help you time the video release.

google trend graph

You can also change the filter to show data from YouTube.

google trends graph

Google Trends also provides other related topics and keyword ideas for your seed keyword at the foot of the page.

google trends further details

Avoid using Google Trends as the only tool you use for keyword research – there is no indication of the number of people searching for the keyword. So it’s best used to compare topic ideas and time you release of content.

YouTube Autocomplete / Keyword.io

An excellent way to analyse keywords and identify content topics is by using the autocomplete results from YouTube itself. Start typing any words in the YouTube search bar, and a pop-down menu appears containing helpful suggestions.

It’s a typical search engine feature, designed to speed up the browsing process by ‘guessing’ what the viewer is searching for. It’s not a bad way to harvest keyword suggestions for video creators either!

In the example below, you can see the autocomplete keywords displayed in a pop-down menu for the broad term ‘pancakes’. Because YouTube wants to be a useful site, it only shows keywords that are relevant and will answer the searcher’s query.

YouTube is giving you keyword ideas that users are actively searching for.

I’ve underlined some long-tail keywords in the example below, which could easily be the topic of a video.

google autocomplete example

While a free method of performing keyword analysis for YouTube, it can be a lengthy process to harvest a bunch of ideas. Also, once you have your keyword list, you then need to check them individually using another tool like vidIQ.

Keyword.io is a tool that automates the process of harvesting keyword ideas from autocomplete search boxes. It covers more than just YouTube and Google, and scrapes autocomplete keyword data from other major search engines, as shown below.

keyword.io autocomplete search engines

Typing the same seed keyword of ‘pancakes’ into keyword.io and selecting the YouTube option returns 939 keyword ideas to analyse further.

keyword.io results

The free version of keyword.io only gives you keyword suggestions. To find out more information on the keywords, like average monthly search, you need to take out a subscription to their pro account. Alternatively, you can run them through another keyword tool that you have access to.

Understanding the average monthly search volumes can help you pick popular keywords and topics for your YouTube video content plan. Here is the sort of information the pro account grants access to.

keyword.io full results

Current pricing is $29 per month for a personal account. You could signup and do a mammoth keyword research session for your channel, so you’d only need to pay for a single month.

Morning Fame

Morning Fame is a Youtubers tool that links directly with your YouTube account. It provides enhanced analytics of your existing videos and suggests keywords it thinks you have a chance to rank for.

As we’re talking about keywords here today, I’ll skip the analytics part of Morning Fame and focus only on the keyword research capabilities.

Like most keyword tools, you can start by entering a seed keyword to work from. But Morning Fame has an alternative possibility as well. You can paste in any video URL from YouTube, and it will suggest keywords based on the topic of that video.

On the next screen Morning Fame presents it’s keyword suggestions in a unique and helpful way. It divides them into two lists based on the competitiveness of the keywords; one list it considers suitable for larger established channels; the other more appropriate for smaller channels.

If you are just getting started with your YouTube channel, then trying to rank for ultra-competitive keywords is likely to end in frustration. It’s unusual for a new channel to rank for popular keywords quickly, because of the way the YouTube ranking algorithm works. Your channel simply won’t have the sufficient authority that YouTube demands.

So a list for small channels, where you can compete for initial views and start to grow your channel, is a great feature.

morning fame keyword lists

When you select a keyword from the list, it goes to the next screen and displays a further analysis of the term. You can see in the screen below, that while the keyword scores an ‘A’ for relevance, it rates an ‘E’ for views, which means its a low-traffic keyword – probably best to try another suggestion.

morning fame results

At the time of writing, Morning Fame is still in the early days post-launch. Access to the tool is by invite-only, but if you hunt around on Google, you should be able to find an invite. Look for reviews of Morning Fame on blogs and on YouTube itself.

Ahrefs Keyword Explorer

If you want to really get under the hood of YouTube and perform detailed keyword analysis for your channel, then you need to pay for one of the professional-grade keyword tools like Ahrefs. Used by many content creators, it is frequently rated in the top 5 of all SEO tools.

Ahrefs has a database of 841 million YouTube keywords. So whatever your channel niche, you are likely to find many keywords you can target.

To get started, enter your seed keyword, select ‘YouTube’, and choose target country.

ahrefs keyword explorer

The tool returns the total search volume for the keyword, indicates how often people click a video after using the keyword, and provides suggestions for alternative keywords.

ahrefs keyword results

So far, so good. But Ahrefs true capabilities are shown in the variety of additional keywords it provides using the phrase match option. This feature returns all the keywords from their database, which include your seed word.

The phrase-match results page for the seed word ‘pancakes’ has nearly 13,000 results. Along with the search volume for each keyword, you also get the number of resulting clicks after entering that keyword.

This helps you to target keywords which attract a higher percentage of clicks. Click-thru rate is a crucial metric in YouTube analytics, and also plays a part in how YouTube ranks videos. So it makes sense for you to target keywords which have the best chance of getting a click.

ahrefs Youtube keyword results

You can also use filters to narrow down large lists quickly.

ahrefs keyword phrase match for youtube

Ahrefs is one of the best keyword tools on the market, but it comes with a hefty price tag. Plans start at $99 per month. However, you can stop your subscription at any time and restart it when you need it. Additionally, there is a one-off trial where you have access to the software for seven days for $7. Use it wisely.

Conclusion.

Well, that wraps up this overview of tools you can use to analyse keywords for your YouTube channel. It’s worth reminding yourself when you plan your videos that YouTube is a search engine, just like Google.

The keywords you choose for your video title and tags can be easy or extremely difficult to rank for, and all the stops in-between.

Give your channel the best chance you can, by performing keyword analysis first with some of the above tools. If you want a helping hand, then contact me to arrange a consultancy call to help find the best keywords for your YouTube channel.

 

Categories
HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

What is YouTube Premiere?

What is YouTube Premiere? 3

In the competitive world of YouTube, getting viewer attention is one of the biggest hurdles to overcome.

Even when you have an established audience, most of your subscribers will still probably have dozens—perhaps hundreds—of other channels that they are subscribed to.

The unfortunate result of this is that, even though they are subscribed to you, your latest videos could get lost in the shuffle depending on what else is being released at a similar time. And with 500 hours of new content being uploaded every minute, there is always something else being released at a similar time.

“Ringing the bell”—clicking on the notifications icon—can help to get your videos into your subscriber’s feeds, but even that might not do the trick if your subscribers have notifications turned on for several other YouTubers.

YouTube Premieres are another tool in your arsenal when it comes to getting attention for your videos, but what is a YouTube Premiere?

A YouTube Premiere is a mini live stream of a newly published youtube video. Unlike normal scheduled videos a Premiere has a countdown before it starts, a live chat feature to interact with the content creator and an opportunity to gain some income as a creator with super chats.

By essentially announcing your video ahead of time and giving it a landing page, there is more time for your upcoming video to find its way into people’s feeds and consciousness. We’re going to take a deep dive into how Premieres work, why you need them, and how best to use them.

What is YouTube Premiere? 1

How YouTube Premieres Work

Being able to answer the question of what is a YouTube Premiere is only part of the battle; you still need to know how to use it! When you upload a new video, you can hit publish immediately and put it out to the world. If you are planning a little further ahead, you might keep it private for a little while.

Keeping videos private to start with is a useful tool because it means your video will be fully processed when you do make it public, and it means you will have a link for your video ready to go when you do make it public. But as useful as this method is, your viewers will still not be aware of it until it goes live.

If you have a strong social media following, you could always drum up interest for your upcoming video on places like Twitter and Facebook, but the effectiveness of even that is dubious when there is no immediate link to share.

Unfortunately, people tend to be a bit flaky about remembering things like that unless they are diehard fans.

A good way to look at a YouTube Premiere is as a way of uploading your video privately while giving it a landing page that you can link to. The landing page will look like a regular YouTube video page minus the actual video and will let your viewers know how long they have to wait for the video to premiere.

What is YouTube Premiere?

The page will also feature a chat window, allowing your viewers to socialise with each other while they wait for the video to premiere.

Perhaps most importantly, however, there is an option to set a reminder for the premiere time, which circumvents that pesky habit we humans have of mentally making plans and forgetting to follow through with them.

Premieres are especially useful for YouTuber’s whose videos have a limited shelf life. If your content is evergreen—meaning it maintains relevance for a long time after its initial upload date—getting viewers through the door on day one is not as important. If you are making content that is very much current, such as gossip videos, news commentary, or even personal vlogs, you want to get as many eyeballs on the video at release time as possible. Think about from the perspective of a viewer. If a current events video from three days ago pops up in your feed, you are much less likely to click on it—unless that channel was your only source of news—since the content of the video will already be out of date.

Another feature of YouTube Premieres is the fact that the video plays like a live stream when it does go public. Until the video has been premiered, viewers will not be able to skip forward beyond the point where the video has reached so far.

This helps to create more of a sense of an event, rather than just a new video upload, since everyone watching it live knows they are all seeing the content at the same time.

What is YouTube Premiere? 2

Making the Most of Your YouTube Premieres

Regardless of how much of a potential boost to your channel a YouTube Premiere can bring, there is no sense in using the feature if you don’t intend to make the most of it. But how do you do that?

It can help to think of it as similar to a movie premiere since that is essentially what it is modelled from. There are four basic stages to the process;

The Build-Up

The build-up is the period leading up to the premiere of the video, and begins when you first start promoting it. For most YouTubers, this will be when the premiere is created, and there is a linkable page to direct your viewers to.

During this period, you will be looking to draw attention to your premiere, and hopefully, get plenty of people clicking that “set reminder” button. You should make full use of any social media sway you have during this period, as well as the community tab on YouTube if you have access to it.

It is best to get the link up at least a day or two before the date you intend to premiere the video, as this will give you plenty of time to drum up the interest you need.

The Pre-Show

Though technically part of the build-up, here we are referring to the time immediately before the premiere itself. This could be as much as an hour before, but really the time that things begin to get going will be organic and determined by when your viewers start piling into the chat.

People generally love to be part of things, and somebody who is on the fence about watching your premiere will be more likely to stick around if they check-in and find a bustling chat room full of people interacting with each other.

Your role in this part is to be an active participant. Don’t just leave it to your viewers to chat amongst themselves while they wait for the video; get in there and join in. Talk to them about the video, get them excited for what’s coming. If people are interested enough in your content to be in your Premiere’s chat just before it goes live, the chances are they will be interested in talking to you. Your active participation in this stage will get the chat flowing which, as we mentioned above, is a good thing for retaining more viewers.

 

The Premiere

As we mentioned, a premiere plays like a live stream in that viewers cannot skip forward. This helps to create more of a sense of an event around the release of the video, and you should capitalise on that by remaining active in the chat while the video is playing.

Viewers like to feel part of things, and being able to interact with you during the video will certainly help to make that desire a reality.

After the Premiere

Once the video is live, and the excitement of the premiere is over, it’s time to switch back to regular YouTuber mode. Promote the video the same way you would for a regular non-premiere video, and try to catch any of your subscribers and other interested viewers that the premiere missed. For videos that aren’t evergreen, the first twenty-four hours after upload usually pull in the majority of that video’s views, so you definitely make the most of those twenty-four hours. Of course, if your videos are evergreen, there’s less urgency about this initial period, but it certainly won’t hurt to give your videos an extra push in the beginning.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

YouTube Premieres is an excellent tool for drumming up interest in your upcoming videos, but there can be an element of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” about it if you premiere every video you release.

In short, YouTube Premieres are intended to highlight special videos. For some channels, that may apply to every video that gets released.—for example a channel that releases videos months apart, or a channel with massive production values or big-name guests. If, on the other hand, you are putting out weekly videos—or even more frequently—and you are premiering every one of them, your viewers will very quickly stop seeing your premieres as something special that they should tune into.

How this will work for your channel specifically is something only you can tell, but use your best judgement when deciding which videos to premiere. Once your viewers have mentally assigned a negative sentiment to something, it is very hard to undo it.

Thumbnails Just Got Bigger

Good thumbnails are an essential component in any successful YouTube channel, but another dimension of importance is added by YouTube Premieres. Though there are some situations where your thumbnail may be shown in all its high-resolution glory, viewers typically don’t see your thumbnails as anything other than… well… a thumbnail!

The tiny little image that shows up in search results and recommended tabs is usually the only action your thumbnail sees, and so it can be tempting to only spend time making it look good at that size.

With YouTube Premieres, your thumbnail will occupy the space where the video would ordinarily be until that video goes live so that it will be much more visible than your usual thumbnails.

Now, we would advise that you put lots of effort into your thumbnail regardless of whether you intend to use YouTube Premieres. After all; they do get seen full size occasionally, and YouTube could change the way their platform displays things at any time. You don’t want to open YouTube one day to find they have doubled the size of the thumbnails and suddenly your videos look terrible in the sidebar. But if you have been making your thumbnails without much concern for how they may look on the big screen, now is the time to change that.

When to Use Premieres

We touched on this above, but there are times when YouTube Premieres are perhaps not appropriate, and times when you are missing out by not making use of them.

The primary reason you might want to avoid using YouTube Premieres is if you release a lot of content and you are putting out what amounts to a regular video at your usual interval. This is especially the case for channels that make daily videos since the viewers will quickly get fatigued by the constant barrage of updates; they will have only just finished watching the last one before the next premiere is popping up in their feeds.

If you release videos far less often—say once every two weeks or once a month—then premiering may be more appropriate for your regular uploads. However, an argument could still be made that you should save it for exceptional videos rather than your usual fare.

These special videos, however, are where you absolutely should make use of YouTube Premieres. These videos might include subscriber milestone specials, big announcements, or really anything that constitutes a noteworthy thing for your channel. Videos like this will already carry an air of excitement with your viewers, and using YouTube Premieres on top of that will only serve to build up that interest even more.

How to Setup YouTube Premiere

Setting up a YouTube Premiere is very easy. Once you have your video ready, head over to YouTube and upload it as normal. When you get to select how the video will go out (Public, Private, Unlisted, Scheduled), select “Scheduled”.

Let the video finish uploading so you can set all of the details for your video, being sure to cover things like monetisation, cards, and end screens, you should be able to see a toggle near the visibility options that says “Set as Premiere”. From there, make sure your data is correct, and as soon as you hit save, your video’s page will be live for your viewers to visit.

You may want to set your video to unlisted first, that way you can fill out all the details at your leisure, make sure you’re happy with the thumbnail and titles, and when you’re ready, change it to scheduled.

And you’re done!

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube

Very quickly before you go here are 5 amazing tools I have used every day to grow my YouTube channel from 0 to 30K subscribers in the last 12 months that I could not live without.

1. VidIQ helps boost my views and get found in search

I almost exclusively switched to VidIQ from a rival in 2020.

Within 12 months I tripled the size of my channel and very quickly learnt the power of thumbnails, click through rate and proper search optimization. Best of all, they are FREE!

2. Adobe Creative Suite helps me craft amazing looking thumbnails and eye-catching videos

I have been making youtube videos on and off since 2013.

When I first started I threw things together in Window Movie Maker, cringed at how it looked but thought “that’s the best I can do so it’ll have to do”.

Big mistake!

I soon realized the move time you put into your editing and the more engaging your thumbnails are the more views you will get and the more people will trust you enough to subscribe.

That is why I took the plunge and invested in my editing and design process with Adobe Creative Suite. They offer a WIDE range of tools to help make amazing videos, simple to use tools for overlays, graphics, one click tools to fix your audio and the very powerful Photoshop graphics program to make eye-catching thumbnails.

Best of all you can get a free trial for 30 days on their website, a discount if you are a student and if you are a regular human being it starts from as little as £9 per month if you want to commit to a plan.

3. Rev.com helps people read my videos

You can’t always listen to a video.

Maybe you’re on a bus, a train or sat in a living room with a 5 year old singing baby shark on loop… for HOURS. Or, you are trying to make as little noise as possible while your new born is FINALLY sleeping.

This is where Rev can help you or your audience consume your content on the go, in silence or in a language not native to the video.

Rev.com can help you translate your videos, transcribe your videos, add subtitles and even convert those subtitles into other languages – all from just $1.50 per minute.

A GREAT way to find an audience and keep them hooked no matter where they are watching your content.

4. PlaceIT can help you STAND OUT on YouTube

I SUCK at making anything flashy or arty.

I have every intention in the world to make something that looks cool but im about as artistic as a dropped ice-cream cone on the web windy day.

That is why I could not live on YouTube without someone like PlaceIT. They offer custom YouTube Banners, Avatars, YouTube Video Intros and YouTube End Screen Templates that are easy to edit with simple click, upload wizard to help you make amazing professional graphics in minutes.

Best of all, some of their templates are FREE! or you can pay a small fee if you want to go for their slightly more premium designs (pst – I always used the free ones).

5. StoryBlocks helps me add amazing video b-roll cutaways

I mainly make tutorials and talking head videos.

And in this modern world this can be a little boring if you don’t see something funky every once in a while.

I try with overlays, jump cuts and being funny but my secret weapon is b-roll overlay content.

I can talk about skydiving, food, money, kids, cats – ANYTHING I WANT – with a quick search on the StoryBlocks website I can find a great looking clip to overlay on my videos, keeping them entertained and watching for longer.

They have a wide library of videos, graphics, images and even a video maker tool and it wont break the bank with plans starting from as little as £8.25 ($9) per month.

Categories
HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE LISTS TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel 17

You can paint pictures using only your fingers, but it’s doubtful you’d be any good at it unless you are Iris Scott.

All accomplished artists use tools to help them express their creativity; one tool helps them draw perspective; another helps mix colour.

As a YouTube creator, if you’re only shooting a video quickly, then uploading it after basic editing, in your own way, you are painting with your fingers.

The top YouTubers use a range of tools to help create and promote their work.  Some help to make the videos more entertaining, while others allow their videos to rank well.

This article looks at ten products you could add to your YouTube video creation toolbox.  Five help the visual/production process, and the other five help you with SEO/ranking.

Let’s jump right in.

Visual / Production Tools For YouTube

These five tools help you to transform your videos from dull talk-to-the-camera sermons into more expert productions.

There are tools for graphics and editing, libraries of sound and b-roll footage, and tools for captioning your content.

Adobe Creative Cloud – YouTube Video Production Tool

Occasionally you want a tool to edit photos, sometimes you need a tool to polish audio, and you always have to edit your content.

Adobe Creative Cloud is a suite of tools that help you to produce professional-quality content. For one monthly price, you get access to over 20 applications that are used by many of the top creators in the business.

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel

You could hunt around for individual alternatives from other providers.  Some you’ll be able to find free of charge, others you’ll be able to hack together using free trials, but you should want to use the best.  And the best thing about Adobe Creative Cloud is that all the tools in the suite work happily together.  So you’ll never have to hunt down file convertors, and you’ll be able to use tools that you hadn’t consider trying before.

For YouTubers, the centrepiece of Adobe Creative Cloud is Premier Pro, the industry-leading video editing software.  You’ll need a decent computer to run it on as it’s quite resource intensive.

While there is no free trial for the Creative Cloud collection of tools, you can trial some of the individual ones for 30 days. Adobe Creative Cloud works on both Windows and Mac.

Website: adobe.com
Price: $49.94 per month for access to all tools.

Storyblocks – Youtube B-Roll and Audio Library

Give your videos extra flair with B-roll footage and sound effects. These types of assets are available free of charge on some stock-footage websites, but the choice of clips is small, and many are overused.

Storyblocks is a paid stock-footage website with 1.5 million videos, images, and sounds you can edit into your content.

All media is copyright-free and easy to find using categories and tags.

Want to cut to a person crying to emphasise a point? Storyblocks has a choice of over 1000 videos.

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel 1

Video is available in a variety of resolutions including 4K, and most clips are under 35 seconds long. The audio clips include sound effects, short tracks, and shorter loops which you can, well, loop to get the length you desire. If you need the sound of a hammer bashing on stone or an ambient backing track, you’ll find it on Storyblocks.

You can buy a lower-priced subscription to access only video or sounds, but these are quite restrictive.

Much better to buy a pass for unlimited access which is $65 per month. Plans are flexible, and you can sign up for only a month if you like.

You can also link your YouTube account to Storyblocks and let their automated software handle copyright infringement claims too.

Website: storyblocks.com
Price: Starting from $9 per month.

Placeit – YouTube Intro/Outro Tool, Channel Banners, Logos and End Screen Templates

Becoming successful on YouTube is very difficult to do without branding yourself. The immense volume of videos means you must build a recognisable image so that users can spot you in the search results and suggestions.

Of course, your branding needs to look good too. Crummy photoshop skills can make your videos stand out – but for all the wrong reasons. So use a service like Placeit to help you design and build a professional brand image.

Placeit has dedicated tool to help you design and produce YouTube intros and outros and has hundreds of templates to pick from. You can also design custom logos and animate them too.

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel 2

It’s likely as a Youtuber that you will want to cross-promote content on social media as well.  Placeit has tools for creating Instagram stories and videos, and templates for Facebook covers.

Placeit is cloud-based, so you use all the tools via your browser. One price of $14.95 per month allows you to access all the functionality, and you can make a small saving paying upfront for an annual subscription.

Website: placeit.net
Price: From Free to $14.95

Rev – YouTube Caption Tool

Not all the people watching your content will view it in the same environment. Some will view your content in comfort sat on the sofa, where they can hear your voice clearly. Others will be on the move, on a bus or in a cafe, where listening can be difficult.

For some viewers, the location doesn’t matter at all: you exclude the hard of hearing when you don’t make your content accessible to all.

Rev is a service for adding captions and subtitles to your videos. Captions are a transcript of the words that you say, allowing the hard of hearing or those in a noisy environment to watch your content. Subtitles translate your content from your spoken language to another, opening your channel to a broader audience.

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel 3

Rev doesn’t charge a fixed fee for its service; you instead pay based on the length of your video. Prices start at $1.25 per minute, so you always know exactly how much it will cost you upfront.

Website: rev.com
Price: From $1.25 per minute.

Lickd – YouTube Premium Music Library

If you want to use music by real artists in your videos, but worry about copyright issues, then you should try out the music licensing service from Lickd.

Designed expressly for YouTube content creators, Lickd has thousands of real songs to choose from by genuine artists.

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel 4

You have to license each track individually, and Lickd set the cost dependent on your YouTube audience size. If you have under 50 thousand views on average for your videos, then prices start at $8 per track.

You’re not allowed to remix or change the music in any way, though you can edit for length. And while there aren’t too many well-established artists on the site yet, it’s early days. The more creators that use the service, the more artists Lickd are likely to attract.

Website: lickd.co
Price: From $8 per track.

SEO / Ranking YouTube Tools

You might create the best content around, but if you don’t choose the right keywords, or make the most of your metadata, then your channel may as well be invisible.

The following five tools help give you the best chance of your content being seen.

Google Trends

Google Trends gauges the popularity of any topic over time. It’s a way to discover which subjects are hot or not.

Google Trends can also help you plan the release of content for annual events.  For example, if you want to know the best time to upload Halloween-themed content, the chart below shows you that interest starts to climb in mid-September. Maybe a bit earlier than you might have thought?

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel 5

You can also use Google Trends to compare subjects, which can help you to narrow your focus when brainstorming ideas.

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel 6

Google Trends is free to use and has lists of daily trends and real-time search trends, so you can see what’s creating a buzz online today. You also can view trend data by country, so you can find out what’s popular in your corner of the globe.

Website: trends.google.com
Price: Free!

VidIQ

VidIQ is a tool that aims to help you grow your channel in two broad ways.

First, vidIQ helps to maximise organic reach by helping you select the best tags, and choose the right keywords for your title and description. VidIQ works as a chrome plugin that displays extra data directly on the YouTube website.

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel 8

Once your videos have gone live, vidIQ keeps you on track by letting you know which of your videos performs well.  The software also audits your content and can highlight issues, like which videos aren’t part of a playlist, for example.

There is a free option for the software, though this is restricted in functionality. To make the best use of the tool, you need to buy a subscription. The ‘Boost’ level is the best option as it allows you access to vidIQ’s keyword engine and permits you to track 20 competitors.

VidIQ is popular with many large and successful channels.

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel 9

Website: vidiq.com
Price: From free, though you need a subscription to get the most from the tool. Starting at $7.50 per month.

TubeBuddy

TubeBuddy is a competitor of VidIQ and offers similar features, and uses a chrome extension to display keyword and video information on the page of YouTube’s website.

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel 10

TubeBuddy also offers ideas for tags and other metadata when you upload a video. It advises on best practices to have your video rank as high as possible.  It reminds you to add cards, end screens, and other essential parts that add up to make a successful YouTube video.

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel 11

There is a limited free option to give you an idea of what the software can do, but to get lasting benefits, you need to take out a monthly subscription. Pricing starts at $9 per month for the ‘Pro’ level, though you can save 50% if you have less than 1000 subscribers.

Of course, you will only need to use either TubeBuddy or vidIQ to manage your channel, while they are both excellent, vidIQ has the slight edge.

Website: tubebuddy.com
Price: From $9 ($4.50 if you have less than 1000 subscribers.)

YouTube Autosuggest

Sometimes thinking up new content ideas is hard. But it can be time wasted, too, if you don’t perform keyword research first to see if your ideas are even popular.

Fortunately, there is a free way to check if people have an interest in your idea, and that is on YouTube itself.

You may have noticed when you begin typing in the YouTube search bar a dropdown box appears with a list of options. These show a list of search terms that users are already using on YouTube to find content.

Use the auto-suggest feature to find and validate your content ideas.

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel 12

When you are compiling ideas from YouTube Autosuggest, also make use of the underscore character ‘_’. It acts as a wildcard when placed between two words. Here is an example.

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel 13

YouTube is giving you content ideas free of charge!  Take this method a step further and combine the autosuggest search terms with the free version of vidIQ. You can see which of the ideas are popular and which you have a chance to rank with.

Website: youtube.com
Price: Free!

Morning Fame

Morning Fame is a website rather than the chrome plugin functionality of vidIQ and TubeBuddy.  Morning Fame provides analytics for uploaded videos and a keyword tool to plan future content.

The analytics section gives a good historical overview of your channel’s performance.  And offers suggestions on which of your videos perform best for your audience, and recommends which type of videos you should try to replicate.

Morning Fame also benchmarks your channel against to similar ones.

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel 14

The keyword research tool suggests content ideas, and rates your chance of ranking for them considering your channel size.

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel 15

Once you pick a target keyword, Morning Fame rates your channel’s chance of ranking for the keyword.

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel 16

Morning Fame offers two levels of subscription.  While both have full access to analytics reporting, if you want more than occasional access to the keyword research tool, you’ll need to choose the Plus plan at $12.90 per month.

Website: morningfa.me
Price: From $4.90 per month.

Conclusion

You’re unlikely to establish a channel on YouTube without using tools. Some tools help to make your videos compelling, and others help find best keywords to rank. There are 500 hours worth of videos uploaded to YouTube every minute, and you need to work hard to make yours stand out.

You need to add intros/outros to brand your videos, use B-roll and sound clips to enhance your content, and then make sure to edit your content well so that it engages viewers.

Finally, if you don’t take advantage of tools to help you plan and promote content, you will fall behind your competitors who will surely be using them.

If you need more help with equipment, software, artwork and other YouTube things then I have a list of EVERYTHING I use on my resources page.

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube

Very quickly before you go here are 5 amazing tools I have used every day to grow my YouTube channel from 0 to 30K subscribers in the last 12 months that I could not live without.

1. VidIQ helps boost my views and get found in search

I almost exclusively switched to VidIQ from a rival in 2020.

Within 12 months I tripled the size of my channel and very quickly learnt the power of thumbnails, click through rate and proper search optimization. Best of all, they are FREE!

2. Adobe Creative Suite helps me craft amazing looking thumbnails and eye-catching videos

I have been making youtube videos on and off since 2013.

When I first started I threw things together in Window Movie Maker, cringed at how it looked but thought “that’s the best I can do so it’ll have to do”.

Big mistake!

I soon realized the move time you put into your editing and the more engaging your thumbnails are the more views you will get and the more people will trust you enough to subscribe.

That is why I took the plunge and invested in my editing and design process with Adobe Creative Suite. They offer a WIDE range of tools to help make amazing videos, simple to use tools for overlays, graphics, one click tools to fix your audio and the very powerful Photoshop graphics program to make eye-catching thumbnails.

Best of all you can get a free trial for 30 days on their website, a discount if you are a student and if you are a regular human being it starts from as little as £9 per month if you want to commit to a plan.

3. Rev.com helps people read my videos

You can’t always listen to a video.

Maybe you’re on a bus, a train or sat in a living room with a 5 year old singing baby shark on loop… for HOURS. Or, you are trying to make as little noise as possible while your new born is FINALLY sleeping.

This is where Rev can help you or your audience consume your content on the go, in silence or in a language not native to the video.

Rev.com can help you translate your videos, transcribe your videos, add subtitles and even convert those subtitles into other languages – all from just $1.50 per minute.

A GREAT way to find an audience and keep them hooked no matter where they are watching your content.

4. PlaceIT can help you STAND OUT on YouTube

I SUCK at making anything flashy or arty.

I have every intention in the world to make something that looks cool but im about as artistic as a dropped ice-cream cone on the web windy day.

That is why I could not live on YouTube without someone like PlaceIT. They offer custom YouTube Banners, Avatars, YouTube Video Intros and YouTube End Screen Templates that are easy to edit with simple click, upload wizard to help you make amazing professional graphics in minutes.

Best of all, some of their templates are FREE! or you can pay a small fee if you want to go for their slightly more premium designs (pst – I always used the free ones).

5. StoryBlocks helps me add amazing video b-roll cutaways

I mainly make tutorials and talking head videos.

And in this modern world this can be a little boring if you don’t see something funky every once in a while.

I try with overlays, jump cuts and being funny but my secret weapon is b-roll overlay content.

I can talk about skydiving, food, money, kids, cats – ANYTHING I WANT – with a quick search on the StoryBlocks website I can find a great looking clip to overlay on my videos, keeping them entertained and watching for longer.

They have a wide library of videos, graphics, images and even a video maker tool and it wont break the bank with plans starting from as little as £8.25 ($9) per month.

Categories
DEEP DIVE ARTICLE HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel.

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel. 19

Some people only visit YouTube to figure out how to unblock a sink.

But, many visit it to keep up with the latest from their favourite creators.  YouTube, by definition, is a social media platform.

Social media is usually thought of as ‘fast’, yet short-lived. Content that gets posted and quickly forgotten like posting a picture of something you’re eating or instantly reacting to breaking news, for example.

YouTube, on the other hand, seems like a ‘slow’ platform. It takes time to plan, shoot, and edit a video, and most content creators only upload new material two or three times a week.

There is another place, however, to enhance the social aspect of your YouTube channel, and I don’t mean adding hearts to the comments under a video. Look a little deeper on any established channel homepage, and you’ll find a tab entitled ‘community’.

What Is the YouTube Community Tab?

YouTube has a disadvantage over other social video platforms like TikTok and IGTV. Video uploaded to these platforms is quick to produce, often unscripted, and raw.

On YouTube, viewers won’t forgive lousy sound and shoddy camera work. Viewers expect a certain standard; video content has to be scripted, well lit, and edited well, which takes time. As a result, most channels only upload only two or three videos per week.

If you need help to make better videos, find a great camera or some eye catching graphics for your banners, youtube intros and videos check out my resources page – its the place where i hide the secret sauce 😉

Getting social on Twitter, Snapchat, or Instagram is like stuffing a quick sandwich in your mouth, whereas YouTube, in comparison, requires you to bake the bread first.

YouTube decided to fix this problem with the launch of the YouTube Community Tab in 2016.  It’s a space for channels to interact with viewers by posting text and image updates or seeking their opinions via polls.

YouTube chose familiar functions found on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and made them available to established accounts. Here’s the community tab from MrBeast’s channel.

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel.

YouTube says it’s a light way to interact with your audience in-between video uploads.  It only takes a moment to update and helps you boost viewer engagement, something you should be interested in as a channel owner.

Engagement plays a large part in how YouTube ranks videos, and if YouTube selects a video to suggest a viewer watch next.

The YouTube community tab then is a place to hook people into your content, start a conversation, and build a community.

There are several types of content you can post in the community tab.  Quick text updates, like a twitter post, though with the extended character limits you can use it to mini-blog too.

You can include static images or moving GIFs, giving you options to tease new content, show behind-the-scenes, or embed a video thumbnail.

One function also baked into the community tab is the ability to post polls, so you can ask your subscribers a question and get them to interact on a deeper level with your channel.

You may be thinking, why bother; I can do all of that on Twitter or Instagram?  Well, one of the best bits about the community updates is they appear in your subscribers feeds, the same as your videos.

It’s a no-brainer; you can quickly raise your profile through greater exposure to your YouTube subscribers.

If you have a YouTube channel but can’t see the community tab and thinks it’s missing, next, we’ll look at how you unlock the YouTube community tab.

How To Get YouTube Community Tab

The YouTube Community tab has an eligibility requirement; to qualify your channel must have 1000 subscribers.  When you hit this threshold a week, or so later the YouTube Community tab should appear for your channel.

If you have over 1000 subscribers, but can’t see it, then this could mean you haven’t activated the custom channel layout.

To do this, navigate to your channel homepage and click ‘Customise Channel’.

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel. 1

When the next screen loads, click on the icon for the settings (small cog).

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel. 2

Then make sure that the toggle switch for ‘Customise the layout of your channel’ is switched on.

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel. 3

Return to your channel page hit refresh, and the Community tab should now appear.

What to Post in The YouTube Community Tab

With plenty of content types to choose from in the Community tab mix it up to make your feed more engaging. You need to give viewers a reason to return to your feed, bland, repetitive content, or shameless self-promotion will work against you eventually.

Let’s take a look at each content type in turn and how you post to your feed.  First, you need to open Your Channel page and select the Community tab.

To do this, click on the menu in the top right-hand corner of YouTube then select ‘Your Channel’ menu option.

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel. 4

Next click on the Community Tab.

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel. 6

The Community Tab Editor

At the top of the community tab, you’ll see the editor, use this box to start creating your community updates.

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel. 7

Start typing to enter text, or use the three icons at the foot of the box to link to videos, run a poll, or post an image.

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel. 8

Text Updates

When entering text, the editor formats the first line for you in a larger character size. It works like an automatic headline as there are no tools in the editor you can use to change text appearance.

The only other text feature available is the @ symbol. This lets you tag in other channels or shoutout to friends.

There aren’t short character limits for an update, like Twitter, which in theory means you could use also use text updates to mini-blog.  Remember, though; users come to YouTube to watch videos. It’s unlikely that regular lengthy updates would benefit you in the long run.

Look at other channels to see how they use text updates.  If you find a style you like, emulate it, don’t copy directly.  You don’t want to risk your channel through accusations of plagiarism.

PewDiePie uses the simple text-based updates frequently to thank his viewers or shoutout to other channels.

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel. 9

But, if I’m honest, the solely-text update is a bit dull, there are better ways to drive engagement with your channel.  How about asking your subscribers a question instead?

Polls

Running a poll on your Community Tab is an excellent way to build a sense of community on your channel.  A survey requires participation and can help the participants feel part of something bigger – everyone likes to belong.

Select the poll button on the editor, which displays the screen below.

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel. 10

Choose between two and five options for your poll. You can use both text and emojis, and the character limit for each option is 65.

It’s also a good idea to add an extra ‘neutral’ option to the poll if you have space.  This option is for those who want to see the results and comment in the poll thread, but don’t want to answer the main polling question.

Rather than adding something boring like ‘I don’t know’, mix it up with something more humorous to help engagement.

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel. 11

While you can post engagement polls like the one above, you can also use polls to ask your subscribers about future content too.

Images

An image always helps with engagement, and you can use this option to illustrate text updates.

It’s an ideal way to show a glimpse behind the scenes of your YouTube channel. People like to ‘go behind the lens’, so try sharing some casual pictures of your studio setup or your regular home life.

To add an image, click on the image icon in the community editor and select or drag an image to the screen.  It’s best using a picture with a 1:1 aspect ratio or your photo could be automatically clipped.

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel. 12

YouTube allows JPG, PNG, and the new WEBP image formats, but also permits GIFs too. GIFs are by there nature more compelling.  Not many people skip past and image once it starts to move, so let’s take a quick look at how you might use GIFs for engagement.

GIFs

GIFs are posted to your community feed the same way as images. Naturally, the format has to be GIF, and the maximum file size you can upload is 16MB.

When posting a GIF, people instinctively think about posting funny memes.  But the GIF format is a great way to tease your content too. Use an online service like placeit.net to make promo GIFs and drive engagement with your channel videos.

Vanessa Lau is excellent at this and frequently teases new content.

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel. 13

Link To Video

Remember everything you post in your community feed has the potential to show up in subscriber’s feeds. So use the link to video icon to regularly promote videos both new and old and increase your watch time.

Clicking on the add a video icon launches the following screen.

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel. 14

Select from your existing videos to promote your latest upload, and mix in some of your older content as well.  Plus, you can add videos from other YouTubers using the search feature or by direct URL.

Once you have selected a video, you can add text, which when published to your feed looks like the following:

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel. 15

Picking the right text to go with your video link can further intrigue and prompt your followers to watch.

Schedule Your Community Posts

If you are the kind of creator who likes to get ahead of your content schedule, then you can schedule as many future community posts as you wish.

This feature is helpful for those who like to batch similar jobs together, or you could use it to keep your channel active while you are on vacation.

You can also use the scheduling feature to time content for followers in different timezones.  If you’re European and your channel has lots of fans on the West coast of the US. You can schedule a post linking to a new video, and time it for the morning just as people are waking up and checking social feeds.  Thus maximising the chance of a subscriber seeing the fresh content.

To schedule a post, compose your community update as usual, then to the right of the ‘post’ button, you will see a drop-down arrow.  Click on the arrow then select ‘Schedule post’.

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel. 16

You’ll now see three options to the foot of the community editor; date, time, and timezone.

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel. 17

Then it’s just a case of selecting the exact moment you wish your post to go live.

Once you have scheduled a post, you still have the option to edit or delete it before publishing.

Community Plus – Paid Memberships

If you manage to grow your channel to over 30,000 subscribers, you have the option to run an exclusive paid channel membership club.  You need to be a member of the YouTube Partner Program to take advantage of this additional option and further increase your YouTube earnings.

You can offer several levels of membership, like in the example below from travel vloggers Simon and Martina.

Youtube Community Tab: What It Is And How To Use It To Grow Your Channel. 18

The first level provides members with exclusive channel chat emojis, and the subsequent levels provide additional exclusive content unavailable to regular subscribers to the channel.

It’s not a step to take lightly, though. Members will want something of value in return, which means providing additional content regularly.  So you will need to plan carefully and make sure you can deliver on your promises before you take this step.

Conclusion

YouTube’s Community tab allows you to speedily interact with subscribers and viewers far quicker than the average time it takes to shoot and upload a video.

Whether you are driving additional watch time for old videos or building rapport with your followers, the community tab helps you to engage on a deeper level with them.

Mix up your community posts to take full advantage of content options to keep your feed refreshing and engaging. Post images, polls, and GIFs, and sometimes show different aspects of yourself than the one in your videos.

While it is no substitute for competing platforms, it can help your channel growth, video engagement. It should be an essential part of your content creation – once you meet the eligibility criteria.