Are you looking to boost your Instagram presence and get more followers? Follow these tips to optimize your account and make it more visible to your target audience:
Use a clear, eye-catching profile picture: Your profile picture is the first thing that people see when they visit your account, so make sure to use a clear, high-quality image that represents your brand or personal identity.
Write a compelling bio: Your bio is a brief summary of who you are and what you do, so make sure to include relevant keywords and information about your niche. Use emojis and line breaks to add some personality and make it more visually appealing.
Use relevant hashtags: Hashtags are a great way to increase the visibility of your posts and reach a larger audience. Use a mix of broad and specific hashtags that are relevant to your content, and consider using popular hashtags in your niche.
Post consistently: Consistency is key when it comes to growing your Instagram presence. Make sure to post regularly and stick to a specific posting schedule so that your followers know when to expect new content.
Engage with your audience: Building a community on Instagram is crucial for success. Make sure to respond to comments, follow accounts in your niche, and engage with other users to build relationships and increase your visibility.
Use Instagram stories: Instagram stories are a great way to connect with your audience and share behind-the-scenes content. Use a mix of photos, videos, and interactive features like polls and quizzes to keep things interesting.
Utilize Instagram’s paid features: If you want to reach a larger audience, consider using Instagram’s paid features such as promoted posts and sponsored content. These can help increase the visibility of your posts and reach a targeted audience.
By following these tips, you can optimize your Instagram account and increase your presence on the platform. Remember to be authentic and have fun – the more you enjoy what you’re doing, the more likely you are to succeed on Instagram!
Here are some tips for picking Instagram tags:
Use relevant tags: Make sure to use tags that are relevant to your content and your niche. This will help your posts show up in relevant search results and reach a more targeted audience.
Use a mix of broad and specific tags: Using a mix of broad and specific tags can help you reach a wider audience while still being relevant to your content. For example, if you’re a travel blogger, you might use tags like #travel, #adventure, and #wanderlust, as well as more specific tags like #bali or #tokyo.
Use popular hashtags: Including popular hashtags in your posts can help increase their visibility and reach a larger audience. Just make sure to use them sparingly and in a way that’s relevant to your content.
Avoid using irrelevant or spammy tags: Using irrelevant or spammy tags can actually hurt your visibility on Instagram. Avoid using tags that have nothing to do with your content, or tags that are commonly used by spam accounts.
Research hashtags in your niche: Take some time to research popular hashtags in your niche and see which ones are being used by other accounts. This can help you get a sense of what’s working for others and give you some ideas for your own posts.
By following these tips, you can choose Instagram tags that will help increase the visibility of your posts and reach a more targeted audience. Good luck!
Sponsored content: One way to make money on Instagram is by partnering with brands and creating sponsored content. This can include creating sponsored posts, hosting giveaways, or creating sponsored stories. Make sure to disclose any sponsored content as required by law.
Affiliate marketing: Another way to make money on Instagram is by using affiliate marketing. This involves promoting products from other brands and earning a commission for each sale that’s made through your unique affiliate link.
Selling products: If you have a product or service to sell, you can use Instagram to promote it and make sales. This can include physical products, digital products, or services. You can use Instagram’s shopping feature to make it easier for users to purchase directly from your account.
Offering services: If you have a skill or talent that you can offer as a service, you can use Instagram to promote it and find clients. This could include things like photography, graphic design, or social media management.
Monetizing your Instagram account: If you have a large following on Instagram, you may be able to monetize your account by working with brands or offering sponsored content. You can also monetize your account through ads or by selling merchandise.
By following these tips, you can find ways to make money on Instagram and turn your passion into a profitable business. Just make sure to follow all necessary laws and guidelines, and be transparent about any sponsored content or partnerships.
So you’ve decided to start a YouTube channel? Perhaps you’ve had one for a while and just never got around to writing a bio. Regardless of the reason you’re here right now, the important thing is that you are here.
The YouTube bio—or “about” page—is often overlooked, and not without good reason. Think about it; how often do you check out a YouTuber’s about page? It’s a few clicks off the beaten path, and the chances are you already know what you need to know about them from the video. And, of course, the fact that so many people neglect their YouTube bio is another reason why so many other people never bother to look at them.
A good YouTube bio about us page summarises in the first 170 characters the core premise of the channel. WHY they would watch your content, what value they will get from you. Do not lead with who you are, you can add that later in the bio. Your bio is there to hook people – make them curious.
These are perfectly valid reasons for thinking a YouTube bio is unnecessary. However, they are built on a flawed premised. You see, the YouTube bio isn’t for viewers.
Of course, it should be there if they want it, but the reason to have a well written bio has more to do with Google than it does the person clicking on your videos.
Why a YouTube Bio is Important
One word. Or, rather, one acronym; SEO. Search engine optimisation is the reason you should put some effort into your YouTube bio. And your video descriptions, for that matter, but that deserves a post of its own.
The YouTube recommendation algorithm is not the be-all and end-all of video discovery. Sure, getting favoured by the algorithm will see mountains of traffic flowing your way, but Google’s regular old search engine shouldn’t be neglected.
Many people come across YouTubers, not through searching YouTube itself, but through searching Google and having a few video recommendations thrown their way. But Google needs to know that the videos—and the YouTuber making them—are relevant to the search term in question, which is where you bio comes in.
How to Write a YouTube Bio
So, hopefully we’ve impressed upon you how important your bio is for comprehensive growth, but how do you go about making sure it is up to the task of bringing in those organic search results? Why, with our handy list of tips, that’s how!
Tell Viewers What to Expect From Your Channel
This one isn’t as important from an SEO point of view—though search engines are getting smarter all the time—but it is important for those few intrepid users who do find their way to your about page.
Remember, even if the only reason a page exists is for SEO purposes, you should always aim to write it so that it reads naturally and contains useful information. If for no other reason than search engines are always improving, and they could well come up with a way to detect whether your bio reads naturally before long. It’s better to write good content from the start than have to go back and change things because of a search engine update.
Put the Important Stuff First
Humans, sadly, have a remarkably short attention span. And its getting shorter all the time. If you have something important, something that you want viewers to know if they read your about page, put it at the top.
More than that, make it compelling. In an ideal world, someone reading your bio would take in the whole thing before moving on, but in the absence of that ideal world, you should aim to make sure they take in the vital stuff before they click away.
Use Keywords
This is where we start getting into that SEO we talked about. You’re going to want to squeeze a few keywords in there. Again, your priority should be to write useful, natural-sounding copy, so you might need to put your thinking cap on for some of the more awkward keywords.
As for what those keywords are, this is where you’ll need to do a little research. There are many ways—both free and paid—to find keywords, including just using Google auto-suggest. The trick is to find keywords that are as underserved as possible while still being in demand enough to bring an audience. A plumbing company in Toronto would be foolish to try and target “plumbing” for their keyword because there would be far too much competition, but “emergency plumbers Toronto” would be a good fit with a smaller audience.
If you focus on a specific type of content, highlight that. If you primarily do Photoshop tutorials, don’t just target “image editing”, mention Photoshop.
Treat it Like a Business Page
This part is important because, SEO aside, a lot of people who seek out your about page will be looking to contact you for some reason or other. In the best cases, that reason will be something like a brand deal offer, or to talk about a collaboration.
Make sure your contact details are up-to-date. Google hides your contact details, so you don’t just get inundated with spam from bots scraping the page, but you want legitimate enquiries to be able to reach you. You can also take this opportunity to politely mention any kind of correspondence you are not interested in. For example, tutorial channels often get inundated with requests for direct help, which, for larger channels, is not feasible. In these cases, a little note asking people not to use these contact details for that reason might save you a lot of time in the long run.
Final Thoughts
In truth, your bio is not the most important thing you will craft for your YouTube channel. Organic Google search traffic is important, but, for most YouTubers, it is far from the largest source of traffic. And most of the organic search traffic ends up going directly to a video page.
Still, if you are looking to get noticed on YouTube, there is no denying that SEO is a factor, so there is no sense in neglecting your bio for the sake of half an hour’s work. Just remember to research keywords, put the important information up top, and give an accurate account of what your channel is for.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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’.
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 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.
You can also change the filter to show data from YouTube.
Google Trends also provides other related topics and keyword ideas for your seed keyword at the foot of the page.
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.
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.
Typing the same seed keyword of ‘pancakes’ into keyword.io and selecting the YouTube option returns 939 keyword ideas to analyse further.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can also use filters to narrow down large lists quickly.
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.
There are plenty of reasons why you might want to add captions to your YouTube videos beyond mere accessibility. Which is not to say, making your content more accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people is not a good enough reason alone.
We won’t try and tell you that adding captions to a video—especially a long video with a lot of words—is an easy task, but YouTube does make the process as frictionless as possible for you.
In this post we’ll go through the process with you, as well as laying out the reasons why captioning your videos is a good idea, and how you can make your life a little easier in the captioning process.
How to Add Captions to YouTube Videos
Captions can be added to your YouTube videos from within YouTube Studio.
Log in
Head over to the left-hand menu and click on “Subtitles”
Find the video you want to caption and give it a click.
Click “Add Language”
Next, click “Add” and begin scrubbing through your video, adding subtitles at the appropriate points.
Once you are done, simply click “Publish”
The subtitles editor features several shortcut keys to make your life a little bit easier, and you can find a full list of those on YouTube’s subtitles help page.
There are other options available, such as auto-syncing, which lets you add your transcription without any timecode information.
From there, YouTube uses speech recognition and your transcription to put all of the subtitles in the correct place. This is a very useful and time-saving option, but it does rely on speech recognition technology, which means it is only available for subtitles in the same language as the video.
For the same reason, it is not an ideal option for videos with poor audio quality, or where the words being said are not clear. YouTube also states that it is not recommended for videos that are over an hour long.
Another option available is to upload a closed caption file that already has the timecode information sorted. Of course, you will still have to create that closed caption file before you can upload it, but this option at least means you can use other applications to do that if YouTube’s built-in system is not to your liking. You can find details about what kind of closed caption files YouTube accepts through the subtitles help page linked above.
And, finally, YouTube has the option to caption your videos using speech recognition technology automatically. Automatic captioning has the obvious advantage of it requiring considerably less effort on your part; however, there is a tradeoff.
Speech recognition has made immense leaps and bounds in terms of accuracy over recent years, but it is not perfect, and the chances of it transcribing your video with 100% accuracy are minimal.
And, of course, the accuracy of this process will fall if the video’s audio quality is poor, or the spoken words are not particularly clear.
Bonus Method: Captioning Services
If you have a bit of money to spend on your YouTube channel, or if your channel is already at a stage where it is making money and you want to reinvest some of that in your channel.
You might consider a captioning service like Rev – I use them for all of my YouTube videos and can help boost audience retention and build on international audiences.
For a modest sum—typically around $1-2 per minute of video—you can have your videos captioned for you, getting all of the benefits of automatic captioning, while significantly reducing the inaccuracy rate you would expect from Google’s automatic option.
Captioning OTHER People’s Videos on YouTube
In some cases, you can also caption other people’s videos, which can be a great way to give a little back to a creator you like.
This is also an excellent opportunity to flex your bilingual muscles if you speak (or write) more than one language, or if your native language is different from that of the language used in the video.
The YouTuber in question has to allow subtitle contributions, so this is not an option on every video. For those videos where it is an option, simply head over to that video and click the menu button below the video (the three dots). In there you should see an option to “Add Translations”. Clicking that will take you to the same transcriptions editor we talked about above, with the difference that this will show any previously added or auto-generated transcriptions.
Up top you should see a “Switch Language” link which will allow you to select the language you want to add subtitles for, and, once you are ready, you can click edit and get transcribing!
Making Captioning Easier
Unfortunately, there is no way around the fact that captioning is something of a long and laborious process—especially for longer videos—but you can make your life a little easier with a bit of forward-thinking.
For example, many YouTubers plan their videos out in advance. And, if they don’t write an actual script, they at least tend to sketch out the beats of what they are going to say when the camera starts rolling.
If this is you, consider extending this process to a full script, and stick to that script when you record the video. In doing so, you will already have a transcription for your subtitles ready to go when you have uploaded your video. Remember; YouTube’s speech recognition may not be perfect, but it is incredibly close when given the correct words to use.
Writing a proper script may also help you tighten up your content, making the video more concise and digestible, while also reducing the amount of time you have to spend editing slip-ups and tangents out of your footage.
Of course, scripted videos are not for everyone. Some people are far more comfortable turning the camera on with little more than a vague shape of what needs to be said in their mind and letting the creative juices flow. We would not recommend forcing a script upon yourself if you are this kind of YouTuber.
But if you are already scripting—or partially scripting—your videos, you are most of the way there to captioning your content.
Why Should I Caption My YouTube Videos?
There is an ethical element to consider in the sense that, as a civilised society, it could be argued that we have a responsibility to help those who need a little extra help whenever possible.
Captioning your videos makes it possible for people who are deaf and hard of hearing—two groups of people who fall into that category of occasionally needing a little extra help—to consume your content.
However, if the ethical argument doesn’t do it for you, there are also some numbers to consider. For example, around 466 million people worldwide have disabling hearing problems. While it’s true that not all of those people will be on YouTube, it still represents a sizable portion of a potential audience that you could be reading. And this doesn’t count fringe cases, such as people who just find it easier to watch content with subtitles, or people who do not speak your language but can read it.
Another reason is search engine optimisation (SEO).
There is only so much information you can organically pack into your video descriptions, and formatting it in a way that is useful to your viewers doesn’t always lend itself to SEO.
However, the actual content of your video is as pure as it gets in terms of SEO, and research has shown that Google likely indexes YouTube subtitles, with captioned videos seeing a noticeable increase in views over videos without captions.
The final reason we will give you for captioning your videos is environmental factors. No, not the environment, we’re talking about the environment your potential viewer is in at the time they might want to watch your video.
If you’ve noticed all those videos that pop up on Facebook and Twitter that have captions burned in, you might have reached the natural conclusion that this trend implies. That is trend is more people watching videos in situations where they can’t have sound on. This could be on a busy commute when they have forgotten to bring headphones, or in a situation where they are not, strictly speaking, supposed to be checking their phone.
Viral video makers have cottoned on to this trend, and that is why they burn subtitles into those social media clips.
Putting captions on your videos allows people to consume your content in those situations where they can’t listen to it, which, for the right type of video, may represent a significant amount of views.
How Much of a Benefit is Video Captioning?
We teased you with talk of increasing your audience through video captioning, so it’s only natural to want to know what kind of increase we’re talking. After all, captioning can be hard work, as we’ve explained, so you may want to do a cost-benefit analysis on whether the additional work is worth your time.
Studies have shown that adequately captioned videos can see as much as a 13% boost in the first two weeks—with a 7% increase over the lifetime of video—over uncaptioned videos.
While we’re not talking about doubling your audience here, a potential increase of around 10% is nothing to be sneezed at. For a video that gets 100k views, that would mean an extra 10k views.
Of course, pure view count would be a limited way to consider the benefits of captioned videos. Those additional views also represent potential subscribers and long term viewers. Especially when you consider that people who need captions in order to enjoy content on YouTube have far fewer options available to them owed to the fact that so many YouTubers don’t caption their videos. In this respect, captioned videos are something of an underserved market.
Not quite a niche, as the interests of people who need closed captioning are just as diverse as those who don’t, but a market that will welcome additional content regardless.
Foreign Languages
Before putting the time and effort into translating—or paying someone else to translate—your content into other languages, take a moment to consider the usefulness of the video to the people who speak those other languages.
Generally speaking, you can assume that someone living in a particular country will at least have a basic grasp of the native language of that country.
Of course, there will always be exceptions, but you usually assume that content that is specific to a certain country doesn’t necessarily need translating to languages other than the primary language of that country.
As an example, a video about how to apply for a building permit in Texas, America, is unlikely to get many views from people in central Europe. That means it would not be the best use of your resources to have your video translated into German, as all of the countries where German is the primary language are located in central Europe.
This is not to say you should actively avoid translating your content, of course. If you have money or time to burn, it certainly won’t hurt your channel to have it translated into as many languages as possible.
But if you are having to weigh up the pros and cons of translating it to other languages, consider where those languages are spoken, and how likely your content is to be viewed in those regions.
That being said, the reverse can also be true.
As a counter-example, a video about how to obtain a building permit in Los Angeles would greatly benefit from being translated into Spanish, due to the large Mexican population there. In this case, the content is specific to a relatively small geographical region, but that region can be considered bilingual.
As with many things on YouTube, it is all a matter of doing your research and knowing your audience. You don’t need to become an expert in foreign languages to determine best when and when not to have your videos translated; a simple Google search should be enough.
When it comes to your YouTube channel banner, you can take a great deal of guidance directly from any marketing 101 advice available on the Internet.
You want something eye-catching yet not overpowering—something that conveys the purpose of your channel in the purest, most digestible form possible, and gets the message across quickly.
Your YouTube banner tells new visitors to your channel what you are about, and in more ways than you might think. It can give subtle cues to your potential viewers that you might not have intended to give.
The banner on your channel is unlikely to be the first impression someone gets of your channel, but that doesn’t make it unimportant.
We’re going go into detail about some YouTube channel banner ideas, explaining why they work, and who they can work for. But first, let’s talk a little about why banners are so important.
Why are YouTube Banners Important?
A common—and incorrect—way to think of a YouTube banner is like a storefront. If you were running a brick and mortar store, you would want the sign out front to draw in passing shoppers where they would hopefully spend money on your products and services.
That is not what a YouTube banner is. Your channel is not a storefront in that sense, as very few people will come across it organically. You could funnel people to your channel page from other sources, such as your website, but then, if you can do that, you have already grabbed that person’s attention in some way.
In truth, hardly any of the visitors to your channel will arrive there not knowing anything about you. If someone is looking at your channel page, they will almost certainly have seen at least one of your videos already. In fact, the typical behaviour of a YouTube viewer is to subscribe to channels they are interested in from the video itself.
A good deal of your subscribers might never see your channel page at all! And for those who visit your channel that are already subscribed, the banner is less critical, since they are already on board.
For the most part, non-subscribers who visit your channel are people who have seen one or two of your videos and are on the fence about whether to subscribe to your channel or not. These are the people your banner is really for since they are the ones who could potentially hit subscribe—or not—based on what they see when they land on your channel.
Dos and Don’ts
As with many creative endeavours, there isn’t really a hard list of things you must do to succeed.
We could lay out a comprehensive set of rules that would be true for 99% of YouTubers out there, and there would undoubtedly be someone who breaks all of them and is a wild success. Bear that in mind when reading these dos and don’ts.
Professional Quality
One of the first things that will strike new visitors to your channel is how professional your channel banner looks. Does it look like it was made by a graphics designer who takes pride in their work? Or does it look like five minutes spent in Microsoft Paint?
Having a professional banner shows that you care about your channel, which tells potential subscribers that you take things seriously.
Nobody wants to subscribe to a channel in the hope of future content, only for that content never to come, or for the channel to get shut down by YouTube because of unnecessary community guideline strikes. It is a subtle cue, but if your banner suggests you might be a bit frivolous with your channel, they might decide against clicking that subscribe button.
Information
If a non-subscriber visits your channel page while deciding whether or not to subscribe, one of the first things they are going to want to know is information about your channel.
We would recommend an accurate and up to date “about” page for this reason, but before they get to that point, they will see your channel banner.
Having relevant information in your channel banner is a great way to get the essential details across to potential subscribers quickly. For example, do you have a regular upload schedule? Many viewers like to know that they are subscribing to a channel that puts out new content on a regular basis. It can also help to state—in as concise a way possible—what kind of content your channel produces.
One of the main things potential subscribers will be looking for is the assurance that there will be more of the type of content that brought them there in the first place.
Branding
Establishing an identity on YouTube is an essential step towards success, as it puts you or your organisation in people’s minds. This is especially important if you are running more than just a YouTube channel. If you have developed branding, it should be clear for all to see on your channel page, which means in your YouTube banner.
This does not simply mean having any logos or icons in the banner.
Make full use of any colour schemes that are part of your branding. If you have a website that has been styled in red and white, consider making your banner red and white also.
Of course, the logos and icons should be incorporated, but don’t stop at that. These subtle visual cues can be very effective, and help to establish your brand so that it can be recognised in other places, and hopefully associated with some good YouTube content.
Represent Your Niche
One thing that can be overlooked surprisingly often is the inclusion of themes that are relevant to a channel’s niche in the channel banner. This may come in the form of a game controller motif on a channel about gaming, or dumbells in the banner of a fitness channel.
Things like this offer quick visual cues that reassure viewers as to what the channel is about. To that end, you should avoid including anything that might confuse the issue, and this is where things can get a little nuanced.
As an example, say you are running a YouTube channel about programming video games. You could include the game controller motif we mentioned above, but that might confuse some people, leading them to think the channel is about gaming. Think carefully about the themes you include in your banner, even if they seem relevant, and try to avoid incorporating things purely because they “look cool” unless they fit with the content you produce.
YouTube Channel Banner Ideas
We promised you some ideas, so let’s get into those now. Here we will show a few different common styles of channel banner, highlighting the common themes in these styles and giving a few examples along the way.
The Informative Banner
You don’t want your banner to be a wall of text, but carefully dropping relevant information in there is a great way to give new viewers all they need in one quick glance.
The most obvious information to slot in here is the upload schedule, as it is something that viewers generally want to know, and can be conveyed clearly and concisely. One example of this is popular vlogger, David Dobrik.
David’s banner clearly states that he puts out new videos a few times a week, what days he puts those videos out, and even manages to fit his social media in there. All of this without making the banner look cluttered.
Another excellent example of this is gaming YouTuber, Barbara, whose banner not only conveys the upload schedule, the time of day, the type of videos but even incorporates art themes from the game she plays most.
While this may not mean much to many viewers, the viewers who know the game and want to see that type of content will recognise it instantly.
Note that in both of these examples, the YouTuber themselves are the brand, and they have made sure they appear in their banner.
The Straight to the Point Banner
If your channel has a specific aim in mind and a no-frills approach to getting there, you may want to take a similar tact with your channel banner. A good example of this is Mango Street, a YouTube channel that offers photography and video tutorials.
In Mango Street’s banner, you see a nicely shot photograph of the YouTubers themselves, illustrating what it is they do on the channel. You get their logo, and you get the tagline; “Photography + filmmaking tutorials that don’t waste your time”. And, in perfect keeping with that ethos, the banner doesn’t waste your time either.
While it may not set out the upload schedule for you, it does tell you everything you need to know about the content of the channel, as well as fitting in the branding and even an example of their work in the form of that photograph.
The Quirky Banner
Even a banner that seemingly contains no useful information at all tells viewers something about your channel. For example, incredibly popular YouTuber, MrBeast, has a channel banner that is plain white text on a featureless black background, with the text simply reading, “subscribe with notifications or i will take all your cookies”.
Of course, there is a call to action in there, demanding that people subscribe to the channel, but it is clearly a tongue in cheek statement.
This banner says a lot about the tone you can expect from the channel, which is playful, and a little cheeky. Granted, it tells you nothing about the type of content you will get, but it tells you how that content will be delivered.
A banner like this is ideal for a channel where the YouTuber’s personality is a significant factor in their success. With channels like that, people tend to subscribe for the YouTuber more than the content, and would likely watch a video from them regardless of what the video is about.
The Plug Banner
We don’t have an example of this because, by its very nature, these banners change often. The plug banner is a banner that includes information about upcoming events that the YouTuber will be involved in. The most obvious examples of this are musicians or comedians who have live shows coming up.
This kind of banner should include any branding—such as a band logo or a headshot—as well as the dates of the event that you are promoting. Sometimes the channel exists purely as a promotional tool, such as would be the case for an established band who just need somewhere to upload videos. In those cases, it will likely not be a great example of how to put your banner together.
If you are a YouTuber, however, you should include some hint as to what it is you do. If Eminem is promoting a tour, he can just have his face and some dates on the channel banner, and that would be enough. But if you are an up and coming comedian, you should give some indication of that in the banner, so new viewers know what they are getting from your channel.
Don’t Do This!
When looking for the key to success on any platform, it is natural to look at other people who have been successful there and try to emulate what they do. And, on YouTube, it doesn’t get more successful than PewDiePie. Having broken countless YouTube records, and currently being the most-subscribed individual on the platform, PewDiePie is easily the most successful YouTuber in history.
But…
PewDiePie’s immense success allows him something of a free pass when it comes to how he runs his channel. We’re not saying he doesn’t have to work at his content, but he could probably upload twenty minutes of a blank screen with no audio and still get millions of views.
This translates to his channel banner as well. Other than a slight nod to the black and red wavey lines that are associated with PewDiePie, there is nothing in his banner that tells new viewers anything about the channel or type of content you would find on there.
However, this can work for PewDiePie because, at this point, the chances of someone being on YouTube and not knowing who he is are pretty slim. But you shouldn’t do this when you’re just starting out.
Getting more views on YouTube is the ultimate aim for all YouTubers.
More views equal more money from the YouTube partner program. So you should seek out ways to get an edge over your competition and get more views for your content.
One way to get more views for your channel is to get the YouTube algorithm to recommend your videos. YouTube attempts to keep viewers on its platform by suggesting another video on the same topic to keep the user watching.
One way to assist YouTube in understanding your channel content topic is by adding keywords (tags) to your YouTube channel.
This article explains what YouTube channel keywords are, how you can choose the best ones for your channel, how you add them in YouTube Studio.
YouTube Keywords – Video vs Channel.
You probably already know that when you upload a video to your YouTube channel, it’s good practice to add some tags or keywords. YouTube uses these keywords to help it understand the topic of the video content.
For example, I made a video all about adding tags to YouTube videos. I made sure to use the keywords ‘YouTube video tags for search’ and ‘how I tag my YouTube videos’. These are potential keyphrases people might type in the YouTube search bar.
As for the tags, I took those keyword phrases and mixed them up to use as a start point for my video. Here they are:
As you can see, video tags get very specific about the content of the video. And I make my videos with a singular focus on purpose, so that they provide educational information on a narrow, niche, subject.
It helps viewers to find my videos and get the exact information they need.
So, What Are YouTube Channel Keywords?
For YouTube channel keywords (tags), you need to be painting with a much broader brush. If you make videos about cooking pasta dishes, then your video tags may contain words like ‘penne’, ‘farfalle’, and ‘linguini’, depending on the recipe you are cooking.
But your channel keywords need to communicate the overall topic of cooking pasta dishes. So you should use broader keywords like ‘cooking pasta’, ‘Italian food’, and ‘Italian cuisine’.
This also highlights the importance to you of focusing your YouTube channel on one general topic. There is no point on uploading a video on cooking pasta one day and one on growing tomatoes the next day. Those are two separate topics.
Uploading content for a number of topics to your channel will confuse YouTube. It works against how the algorithm operates when it suggests videos to viewers to watch next.
If you want to create videos on a different topic, create another channel. You can easily set up a second channel under the same Google account.
How to Choose YouTube Channel Keywords
OK, so now you understand that your channel keywords should be broad–how do you find YouTube channel keywords?
If you have access to a keyword tool, then you can perform a search to come up with ideas for keywords to use. But, you don’t need to over analyse selecting your keywords. You’re telling YouTube what your channel is about, not trying to rank a page in the search engines.
Browse similar channels to yours and pick up broad keywords, create a list, then add in others that you can think of.
Next circle the ones that best describe the overall topic of your videos.
Seriously, don’t overthink this.
How Many YouTube Channel Keywords Should You Use?
Don’t go overboard on the number of keyword tags you use for your channel either. Choose 5-7 keywords that are most appropriate for describing the overall topic of your channel.
It has been suggested that the more keywords you choose the more this dilutes the effectiveness of each individual one. In the example below, the channel owner has used too many diverse keywords to describe their channel.
Is the channel about music, massage, yoga, or even fresh air!? Keep your keywords on message, so they communicate the central topic of your channel.
So now you know what to put in YouTube channel keywords, next we’ll look at how to add them to your channel.
How to Add YouTube Channel Keywords
Make sure you have logged into YouTube with your Google account and select the icon in the top right-hand corner of the screen.
From the drop-down menu, select ‘YouTube Studio’.
When the YouTube Studio screen loads, select ‘Settings’ at the bottom of the menu on the left.
In the window that pops-up select ‘Channel’.
In the next screen, you will find the box to add your keywords. Add your 5 – 7 chosen keyphrases by typing them in and hitting enter after each one.
Once you have entered them all, hit save, and you’re all set.
If you want to check on, or change, your YouTube channel’s keywords, simply navigate back to the above screen to repeat the process.
YouTube Channel Keywords Tips Conclusion
Entering some YouTube Channel tags, or keywords is best practice. The tags help YouTube understand your channel topic, which should make it easier for them to suggest your videos to viewers.
Most of the videos watched on YouTube are as a result of the YouTube suggestions. So if you want more views, and more Partner Program earnings, set your channel tags today.
Here is a handy summary of what you have just learned.
Keep your channel tags/keywords broad and on topic.
Only use 5-7 keyphrases so as not to confuse YouTube or dilute effectiveness.
You can use a YouTube keyword generator, but it is not necessary.
There are over five billion videos on YouTube. So, if you’ve been creating videos with clickbait titles in the hope of going viral, you may as well buy a lottery ticket – it’s no plan for channel growth.
Growing a YouTube channel is a long-term venture. Best achieved by regularly uploading quality videos that give your audience more of what they are looking for.
When you are trying to grow, it’s natural to want to compare yourself to other channels, but resist the temptation! YouTube channels exist in viewer bubbles – it’s your unique combination of content, presentation and production values that keeps your viewers watching.
But you don’t nail it every time. So how do you figure out what it is your audience likes most about your channel? Sure you can keep an eye on your likes, dislikes, and comments, but these don’t give you the full picture.
Fortunately, YouTube provides you with a sharper view, with lots of in-depth analytics about your channel.
This post looks at how you can use your analytics to better understand your audience and how you then use that knowledge to grow your channel. First, though, it’s crucial to know how YouTube ranks videos and why clickbait doesn’t work.
How YouTube Ranks Videos
Before 2012, YouTube ranked videos based solely on view count. It didn’t matter if a viewer watched one second or five minutes, both counted as a view.
This led to an increase in YouTubers using clickbait titles to try and game the system. YouTube had to do something – video content frequently wasn’t delivering on the promise of the title.
So after 2012, Youtube added in watch time and session duration to its ranking algorithm, resulting in an improvement of content quality. Today, YouTube also puts ranking weight on how engaged viewers are with content. Relying on things like watch time, likes and dislikes, and subscribes, amongst other factors.
YouTube wants to keep users on the platform, consuming content and viewing paid advertisements.
And did you know that 70% of all videos viewed on YouTube are those suggested by the YouTube ranking algorithm? If you want to grow your channel and appear more in the YouTube recommended video lists, then you need to find out what parts of your content users like most, and plan more of it.
But, before you use your analytics to make content decisions, make sure you have uploaded a minimum of 20-30 videos. Data on only five or six videos will not be helpful enough to draw conclusions from. So if you have only uploaded a few videos so far, first work on recording and uploading more videos.
Where to Find YouTube Analytics
To access your analytics, first, log in to your YouTube account. Next in the top right of the screen, click on the small circle showing your profile picture or first initial. Then, from the drop-down menu, select ‘YouTube Studio’.
When the channel dashboard loads, on the left-hand menu, select ‘Analytics’.
The main Analytics screen then loads.
How to Use YouTube Video Views Analytics.
You may think you know what your audience wants. But, until you see how viewers actually interact with your channel, you can’t be totally sure. To start the process on the main analytics screen, make sure you have the ‘Views’ tab selected and click ‘see more’.
This loads up a more detailed list of your videos and some headline analytics. First, make sure that you have all the ‘lifetime’ data of your channel showing by selecting the data function in the top right corner of the screen.
Then from the drop-down list, select the ‘Lifetime’ option, which will show all the analytics data from the time your channel started.
Next sort your videos in descending order of views so that your most-watched videos are at the top.
Use this list to gauge what your audience likes about your channel. Figure out why your popular videos are doing better than ones that fell flat. See if there’s a pattern. Are your most popular videos a hot topic? Maybe useful tutorials or when you live streams.
Whatever the reason, the content of those videos is the kind that your channel viewers find most compelling. Look for these trends then aim to make more videos like them.
YouTube Impressions and Click-Through Rates Explained.
In the same analytics section as Video Views, further along there are two other columns titled ‘impressions’ and ‘impressions click-through rates’.
These data in those columns indicate:
Impressions. The number of times a video thumbnail has been seen, either from a search or by YouTube suggestion.
Impressions click-through rate. The percentage of times a viewer saw your thumbnail and clicked on it to watch your video.
Now, say that your click-through rate is 2%, if you can get that up to 4% then you will double your video viewers. So the impressions and impressions click-throughs measure how good your thumbnail and titles are.
Re-order your click-through rate column, again by descending order, and take a look at your best performing titles and thumbnails. What makes the top ones stand out from other titles and thumbnails? Perhaps a thumbnail was well composed, or it could be the title was snappy.
Use this feedback to improve your existing thumbnails and titles, then use what you’ve learned when you create them for your new content too.
If you need help getting started with Thumbnails, why not check out my Thumbnail Pack where I give you 75+ easy to edit psd template files to help you level up your thumbnail game and get more views!
Use Your YouTube Subscribers Analytics to Plan Content
Now let’s take a look at subscriber analytics and how you can use them to grow your channel. In the same ‘see more’ section you used for the video view count locate the column headed ‘Subscribers’.
Make sure the time period is showing the lifetime data again and order the data in descending order.
Follow the same process as before and examine the top videos to see what the common factors were. Did they have a certain length, content topic, or presenting style? Maybe you made a request or showed an extended caption asking viewers to subscribe in a different way to your other videos.
Whatever the factor, plan new content that replicates it. Whether it’s similar, updated, or complimentary, the analytics are telling you that certain content you make turns a section of your viewers into subscribers. Do it again.
If you make a successful video about knitting a jumper, make one for knitting a hoodie. If you made one showing how to find a weapon in a game, make one for how to use it.
YouTube Watch Time – The Most Important Metric?
Of course, views and subscribers are essential to understand. But an arguably more important metric for YouTube is watch time. Watch time is an estimation of total hours spent by viewers watching your videos.
On the main analytics screen, select the tab showing ‘Watch time (hours) then select ‘see more’ at the bottom.
As I mentioned earlier, YouTube ranks videos, in part, by how long viewers watch videos. Why do they do this? Because it demonstrates how engaging and useful your videos are to your viewers.
It makes sense when you understand that YouTube’s entire business model is to keep people viewing content and adverts on their platform. It follows then, that channels which get good overall watch time are more likely to show up for searches, or in a selection of videos that YouTube recommends.
So, if you are getting click-throughs and good view counts, but people aren’t watching many hours of your videos then (there is no way to sugar coat this) you need to make better videos.
Fortunately, YouTube offers data you can use to see precisely when viewers stopped watching your video; audience retention.
YouTube Audience Retention Metric Explained
The audience retention metric is shown as a percentage figure. If you upload a ten-minute video and your audience, on average, watches five minutes, then you’ll have an audience retention measure of 50%.
Select one of your videos to view the analytics screen shown below, then click ‘see more’ in the audience retention section.
As you can see, in the graph below, audience retention starts at 100% and over time gradually drops off as viewers stop watching the video. In the example below the overall retention rate is 30.4%
You can play your video and watch as it tracks along the graph so you can see what you were doing at the time when viewers stopped watching.
Did you lose a lot of viewers when your content got a bit dry or technical? Maybe you had a section you felt was amusing but turned your viewers off?
This is a powerful tool. It gives you feedback on what works and doesn’t work. You can use it to help you plan future content and give your audience more of what they want.
Also, did you notice the bump in the graph?
How can audience retention go up if viewers have gone away? This bump tells you that viewers are coming back to rewatch a portion of your video. Whatever you were doing at that part of the video is clearly of value to your audience, so it’s a good idea to do more similar content.
Conclusion
Getting to grips with your analytics shouldn’t be as scary as it sounds. Once you understand what they represent and how you can use them to understand your viewers, you’ll probably find yourself hooked on them.
And we’ve only scratched the surface here. There are lots of other metrics in your analytics that help you make better videos. There are also analytics for things like audience demographics and YouTube features like cards.
Explore the entire analytics section to see what other metrics you can use to fuel YouTube channel growth.
If you have been creating YouTube videos but not promoting it across other social media channels, you are missing a real trick.
First thing you need to do is go and read about the best places to share your YouTube videos for all of the ideas, and then come back here and we can run through just how important Facebook is to catapulting your YouTube views and traffic.
Why Share YouTube Videos on Facebook?
Why should you be promoting your YouTube videos on Facebook?
Well I think you should be sharing your videos on every social media platform you have! But Facebook is particularly important for several reasons:
6 Billion monthly active users
Leading non video social platform reaching over 60% of internet users
Over £17 Billion earned in ad revenue in Q1 of 2020
With those huge ad numbers and high active users you really can’t afford to miss out Facebook in your YouTube promotions, plus the platforms work together in a really effective way making it super easy for you to promote your new content
Native Videos or Embedded Videos
When deciding to share your YouTube video on other social media platforms you need to decide whether you want this to be native or embedded.
Native videos are hosted on that particular platform, for example you would download your video on YouTube and then reupload it to Facebook, so the video is then also hosted on Facebook. This is good for sharing a related video or a shorter promo clip.
Native video uploads will not increase your YouTube views directly but can help you direct traffic to the full video
Embedded Videos are where you are effectively sharing your existing YouTube video to another platform using YouTube share functions. It is still hosted on YouTube so the views you receive from other platforms will increase your YouTube video views
How to embed your YouTube video on Facebook
Embedding your YouTube video on Facebook is really simple here is a quick step by step guide to help you embed your video
Find the YouTube video you want to share and click into the thumbnail, this makes sure you are on YouTube’s distinct URL for that video
Scroll down to directly underneath the video, you will see the thumbs up / down buttons and a share button, click the share button
You should now have a list of social platforms you can share your video to, click the Facebook button
Add any text or captions you want sharing along with your video, this is a good place to explain what the video content is as embedded videos do not auto play so will require someone to click.
Click the blue post to Facebook button and that is it! Your video should now have shared across to Facebook
How to upload a native video to Facebook
Uploading a native video to Facebook is slightly more complicated but it does have it’s pro points too, first of all it’s important to note that it goes against YouTube’s terms of service to use a 3rd party app to download YouTube videos they want you to stream directly from their own servers.
But as you are creating content you will not need to use a 3rd party app because you should already have the video created and saved before you originally uploaded it to YouTube. Here is a quick guide to uploading a native video:
Locate your video file on your computer and check the files format, you want this to be an MP4, if it isn’t already then you can quickly Convert to MP4
Open the Facebook URL or app and find the standard ‘What’s on your mind’ for sharing new content. Directly underneath the text should be a button that says Photo/Video
Click Photo/Video and find the video you want to upload in your files and click open
Add text or a caption to your post, again this is always important it is a way of selling your video to stop the scroll
Finally click the blue post button and voila! You have now uploaded your video directly to Facebook.
Which should I use?
This is a trickier question and entirely depends on what your marketing goals, traffic goals etc might be. There are pros and cons to both video options and direct comparisons too which can help you decide which is right for you
Embedded video links tend to show as a smaller thumbnail whereas a native video will show at the width of the news feed making it more eye catching and noticeable when scrolling through
Auto play only works on native videos, with an embedded video the audience will need to click to get the video to play
Native videos tend to keep users on Facebook, understandably it’s a competitive field in the social media game, so where they can Facebook will keep it’s audience on it’s own platform, this isn’t good for you if you’re trying to increase your views specifically on YouTube in order to hit goals to monetize your channel.
Whether it’s natively uploaded or embedded Facebook posts are not usually crawled by search engines so it’s unlikely to increase organic search traffic, but it obviously does open up your video content to a whole different audience than the YouTube audience
There are pros and cons to both methods of sharing your YouTube videos to Facebook so it’s important you experiment with both methods to get a good feel for your Facebook audience, determine which they prefer and monitor which type of video gains you more views / click throughs.
A good way of getting the benefits of a native video but the YouTube traffic and increased channel views is to utilise both methods. Try full videos for both, but a common method for gaining traction is to create specific promo videos or a sneak peak video for Facebook.
This allows you to share a short video clip natively that will pique interest and make your Facebook audience want to click through and watch the full video on YouTube
When creating a promo video use a tool such as Adobe Spark, this allows you to cut video clips and add shorter clips while also adding slides and overlay text to your video.
This promo video can then be shared across your various social media channels with a link through to your YouTube video therefore gaining strong click throughs and increasing your YouTube views and subscriptions.
Promo videos are an excellent way of gaining the right audience, and an audience that will stick around. If they are interested enough to click through to the full YouTube video the likelihood is that the content resonates with them and they are going to watch the full video
How are you sharing your videos?
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.
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.
You just set your camera up and go. But what about gaining the traffic to your video? From a search engine perspective, the title and description of your YouTube video is equally as important as the actual video content.
A professionally written title can be the decision as to whether someone clicks to watch or keeps on scrolling
YouTube categorizes it’s video like any other web page on the internet, each video has its own unique URL and meta tags are created to help search engines like Google categorize your video and make them searchable.
The title of your YouTube video becomes the title tag for search engines. A bad title will mean you will not show up in search engine results and therefore traffic will not find you. A good title will hugely improve your click through rate and traffic.
So how do you write a good YouTube title?
Title Length is crucial
Before you begin creating your title you need to consider that Google truncates titles around the 60-character mark simply due to the pixel width limit. They attempt to truncate at the nearest word break to 60 characters.
What you need to remember in regards to YouTube is that every video that appears in search also contains the phrase “YouTube – “ which uses up roughly 10 characters leaving you 50 characters to play with to create a compelling clickable title
Do your keyword research
Creating your YouTube title will require a small amount of research to make it as successful as possible. To begin this, have a good idea of what keywords you want to include, what words you want your video to appear for on google search.
For example let’s say you’ve created a cookie recipe video you probably want to rank for the words “cookie recipe” plugging that into Google’s Keyword Planner shows that there are roughly 100k – 1M searches a month and a whopping 2642 related keyword searches.
Utilise this to find keywords with low competition, ideally a search between 1k and 10k to begin with as this will be easier to rank for. Use various keyword tools such as Google Trends and Keyword Sh*tter to help you define a title with a distinct identity that you think will rank
A little tip if you do have extra characters remaining is to include the word ‘video’ – this really helps search engines distinguish that your content will contain a video, and in certain niches such as cooking, baking, how to guides many people will search specifically for a video so it can help you rank higher and get high quality click throughs from people intending to watch a video.
Boost your click through rate (CTR) on your YouTube Title
You have a solid idea of the keywords and phrases you want to use in your title, you know how long your title needs to be and you know to add the word video if you have the character space.
Now you need to create the full title that will increase the chances of people clicking into your content.
Include your keyword as close to the beginning of your title as possible, YouTube places more weight on this and therefore your video will appear higher in searches for that phrase and increase the likelihood that searchers are actually looking for the content you’ve created.
For the remaining characters in your title there are other tools such as including a number in your title – this has been proven to increase CTR.
Using emotive language and descriptive adjectives will compliment your keywords and increase the likelihood that your audience will want to click into the video.
One thing you need to avoid is clickbait titles, YouTube has cracked down on this in a huge way if you get a high number of clicks and then drop offs YouTube will assume your title is misleading and viewers are not actually finding what they expected.
It is highly likely YouTube will then bury this video and think twice about recommending your videos to new viewers in the future so play by the rules and keep on the right side of emotive when creating your title.
If you need help with mastering the right keywords, descriptions and tags to help you rank your videos higher on YouTube why not try TubeBuddy and VidIQ – Since I added them to my tool kit I have tripled my channel growth.
Learn from others in your niche
If you are struggling with your YouTube title why not look around your niche?
Plug into YouTube what you think you would search to return your video and take a look at the competition, are the views what you would like on your own video? What about videos that have not performed as well is there something you can learn from their mistakes?
Do not ever directly copy your competitors but I recommend doing this for each video you upload, it’s a good learning exercise on what titles and keywords are working in your niche and what are not
Analyse your YouTube Title
By this point you should have a fully optimized YouTube title of approximately 50 characters, this should contain the keywords you want to rank for and descriptive emotive language around this keyword. Ready to publish? Wait right there. Before you hit publish why not use a Headline Analyser to check over your YouTube Title.
The CoSchedule Headline Analyser is a free tool which is perfect for helping you craft the best YouTube title possible.
The Headline Analyser gives you a whole heap of data to work through, it gives your current headline a score and helps you improve it by explaining which type of words you’re missing with categories of common, uncommon, emotional and power. It also demonstrates a preview for both Google search and Email results to help you craft the best Title.
As you continue creating and crafting YouTube Titles the keywords research should become easier and you’ll start getting analytics results to understand which words and phrases are working well for you and which words you should continue using.
Each niche is different, so it is important for your first few videos you follow the above steps and then combine the advice with your analytics to reach your perfect audience every time
If you need more help with your channel why not check out my resources page where I list all my secret tools and websites I use to super charge my channel growth.
YouTube is the second largest search engine on the internet, after Google. Over 3 billion searches are processed by YouTube in a month, with up to 500 hours of videos being uploaded every minute.
This means that if you have a YouTube channel and you want to get viewers, you have to work really hard to make sure your video appears at the top, or near the top, of search results.
You may have better content than your competitors but success is not just about working hard. It’s about working smart. In addition to producing quality content, you also have to make sure your channel is visible. With so many people uploading content all the time, this can prove daunting. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in.
So do YouTube Tags Matter? – YouTube Tags are a throw back to the old days of Website SEO. Tags used to be used to summarize a web page’s content. YouTube tags are not as important as they used to be BUT can be valuable meta data for smaller channels to help categorize content when they first upload videos.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your content such that the search engine, in this case, YouTube, ranks it as one of the top results in search results.
This makes your video visible and increases the quantity of traffic to your site.
Why is it Important?
According to a State of Inbound report in 2018, 45% of marketers invested more in YouTube that year than in any other channel. This means that for you to attract marketers, you have to attract many users who will actually spend time looking at your content because they are interested in it, and are not just passing through.
This is why SEO for YouTube is important. Different search engines have different optimization techniques and YouTube is no different.
We are interested in YouTube tags here but some other techniques are also worth mentioning because they are related to tags.
Finding Relevant Video Keywords
For you to create content that will attract viewers to your site, you need to know what your audience is interested in and how they talk about it. You can do this by simply typing a keyword in the YouTube search box. As you do so, the autocomplete feature will suggest popular searches related to what you’ve just typed in.
You can also use different tools for this like TubeBuddy and Ubersuggest – Tubebuddy can help you deep dive into keywords and maximize your titles for better breakthroughs – you can download the plugin on their website.
You can also compare how frequently different keywords are used so you can know which keyword is most likely to appear at the top of search results.
A free, accessible tool you can use for this is Google Trends, which has a YouTube search option for specific keywords for YouTube. Once you know what your target audience is interested in, you can then create your content to suit their needs.
Choosing the Title
While your title should communicate what your video is about, it should also grab attention. Use concise, catchy phrases that resonate immediately with your audience.
Remember to incorporate keywords as naturally as possible into your title without deceiving your viewers.
Like the title, it should be concise and attractive. Keep in mind that while Google allows up to 1000 words in the description, only the first about 100 words will appear above the “show more” link, so you have to make the first part of your description compelling and convince the viewer to look at the rest of your description.
Include relevant keywords here as well.
Using Thumbnails
This is the image that appears with your video. A great video could lose potential views if it has an unappealing thumbnail. A thumbnail is just as important as a title in grabbing and holding attention.
YouTube has auto-generated thumbnail options that you can use, but for better results, a custom thumbnail would be more effective. 90% of the best performing YouTube videos have custom thumbnails.
Note that for you to use a custom thumbnail your channel has to be verified by YouTube.
Putting Your Video in a Category
You can link your video to others with similar content by adding a category to your video in the Advanced Settings.
This increases its chances of winding up in different YouTube playlists and will in turn increase your channel’s visibility. Do some research to see who else is in the category you’ve picked. In addition, check whether your target audience also follows those creators.
Finally, check how the creators in that category make their videos to know whether your content is a good, or better than theirs. The Creators Academy at YouTube takes users through a comprehensive process to help them determine what best category to put their video in.
Renaming Your Video File Using A Target Keyword
Before you upload your video, you can incorporate your top keyword in the video file. Because YouTube won’t actually watch your video to know its content, it will use your keywords, so you want to put them in places they can be detected by YouTube.
This way, the YouTube algorithm will read your keyword in your video’s file name along with the code.
Encouraging Subscription
Make it as easy as possible for your viewers to subscribe to your channel, or to watch similar videos by you by having the option very clearly displayed in the video.
Using Video Tags
Finally, we come to YouTube, or video tags. These are words or phrases which you can use to give more context about your video and let YouTube and your viewers know what your video is about.
Using video tags helps to rank your videos higher in search results. They are thus an important search SEO tool.
Although some studies have shown that tags play a small role in ranking a video, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t spend some time on them. For famous celebrities who have constant streams of visitors to their pages, tags may not be necessary.
However, for creators with a niche audience, or who are just starting out on YouTube, tags can effectively boost the ranking of the video, leading to more visitors, which in turn raises the ranking of the video further.
Tags are also important if your name as a creator, or your subject content, constantly gets miss-spelled.
Finally, tags teach YouTube that you belong to a certain category.
This will remove you from the large number of anonymous creators constantly uploading content and place you in a smaller niche which will increase your chances of visibility as there will be less competition in your category.
How to Add Tags to YouTube Videos
Beginning in the channel dashboard, where things like your subscribers and revenue appear. On the left-hand side of the screen, click on settings.
Click on channel below settings. This where your tags are. To add a new tag, click on the white empty space, type something and click enter to make it a new tag.
Now we’ll look at some tips on how you can tag your videos for better visibility on YouTube.
Make Your Primary Keyword Your First Tag
The tags you use have to actually relate to your video, otherwise you’ll be deceiving your viewers.
Therefore, since YouTube pays a lot of attention to your first tag, try as much as possible to have it as your primary keyword.
Use Common Keywords from High Ranking Videos
If you want to know how your keyword ranks online, you can search for your keyword on YouTube. Open the top 3-5 videos that are most closely related to your content.
The videos you pick don’t have to rank at the very top, but they have to be relevant. Check the tags on these videos and pick the ones that most relate to your content.
Having tags similar to top ranking videos will increase your chances of visibility.
If you find it difficult to think of keywords, you can use different online tools to generate keywords. Here are some examples.
Keyword Keg
This tool gives different statistics like search volume, competition, SEO difficulty, trends, keyword power, suggested keywords, off-page, and on-page difficulty.
Once you enter the target keyword these different parameters come up. It also has the option of filtering results according to country and language.
VidIQ
This tool shows keywords related to your target keyword, the related score, the search score, search volume, and overall score, which is a combination of all these.
A powerful plugin that combines productivity tools with deep dive stats to super charge your rankings and views.
VidIQ is creator focused and continues to add and improve its tools including recent add-ons like fast title and description translations to help you rank in foreign languages. You can get their free plugin by going to their website.
Keyword.io
This tool gives you other related keywords once you’ve typed in your target keyword.
In addition to these, it also provides their search volume, trends over the past 12 months, and suggested hashtags and prepositions you can use with your keyword.
Use Keywords with a High Search Volume
Some keywords are more commonly used in search for particular content. Using commonly used keywords for your tags can serve to amplify your visibility to YouTube. Of course, they have to be relevant to what you’re creating.
You can use Ahref’s Keywords Explorer for this. Simply set the search Engine to YouTube and type in some keywords.
The estimated search volume for the month for each keyword will be displayed in percentages in descending order. From the list, you can pick out relevant keywords with substantial search volume.
Use Specific Categories of Tags.
I tackled this is a video before – You can can categorize your tags to get the most out of them.
Video Specific Tags – Your first tag should be very specific and should have the aim of describing exactly what the video is about.
This will directly place you in the niche your target audience are interested in.
Video Category Tags – Your next tag can be slightly broader and describe the category your video falls under. This will relate it to videos that talk about the same thing and will widen the base of your audience.
Your video can then be recommended along with other videos in a similar category, hence increasing your chances of being seen by more people.
Channel Level Tags – Lastly, you should have a tag that directly mentions your name or the name of your channel. This will link your video to other videos you’ve done that may not be related to your current video but will still be of interest to your viewers.
It will introduce your viewers to other work you’ve done.
Use Phrases Instead of Words
Keywords by themselves are important but sometimes they may be so general that they still hide your video in a long list of other related videos. Using a phrase that is more specific to your content together with the keyword increases your chances of standing out.
This is because your video will now be in a less competitive category. For example, instead of just using the word “make-up” for your video, you can use “how to do make-up” instead.
Don’t be too wordy
Although the maximum characters you can use for tags is 500, you don’t have to use all of them.
You don’t want to look spammy. The optimum number of characters, according to Briggsby, is about 200-300.
Be Relevant
The fact that a keyword has a high search volume doesn’t mean it should be used indiscriminately. Use tags that are relevant to your content.
Don’t Be Deceptive
Avoid using unrelated keywords to trick users to view your content. This could actually get your content removed by YouTube. For example, don’t use the names of famous celebrities or brands just to get people to watch your video.
Don’t Place Your Tags in the Video Description
This is another violation of YouTube policy that could get you in trouble as it can be considered as an intention to mislead users.
Tracking Your Progress
Finally, did you know that you can track your ranking in search results?
You can use different tools for this, and you can track your progress and see how the different SEO techniques are working for your channel. This is an important step to see which of your efforts are actually bringing positive results.
In conclusion, tags alone may play a small role in substantially increasing your views, but, when used together with other SEO techniques, can boost your channel’s visibility.
Upload content consistently and see your rankings rise. After all, even famous celebrities started small before they blew up.
Translate Add Foreign Language Subtitles to YouTube Videos (EASY WAY) – Adding subtitles to videos can help people understand you better, what your videos for longer, increase engagement and boost video rankings. Today I am going to show you how I add foreign subtitles to my videos using REV – 🔊 SUBTITLES – $10 FREE + QUICK, EASY CAPTIONING FROM REV – https://www.alanspicer.com/rev
Captioning your videos can have a big effect on how successful they are. This is true for movies, TV shows, social media videos, training content, and any other kind of video you might record and share.
1. Not Everyone Can Hear Your Audio
Over 28 million American adults are deaf or hard of hearing—and if you don’t have subtitles on your videos, that’s a huge audience you won’t reach.
No matter what your content is, you don’t want to exclude millions of people from watching it. Your target market includes people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and not subtitling your videos excludes them.
That’s just bad business. Think inclusively and add subtitles to your videos.
As you’ll see, though, it’s not just people with hearing difficulties that appreciate subtitles.
2. Many People Don’t or Can’t Turn on Audio
You’ve probably heard that 85% of Facebook videos are watched on mute. Of course, that’s just for a single social network. Snapchat, for example, says that two-thirds of its videos are played with sound.
No matter what the statistics say, many people silence audio on their phones or computers because they don’t want or need to. Maybe they’re listening to their favorite song and don’t want to pause it. Or they’re in a public place and can’t be disruptive.
Even if your videos target an audience that’s likely to turn video sound on, there are going to be some people who won’t. And those people will miss out on your video if it’s not subtitled.
3. Subtitles Improve Comprehension
People learn in different ways. Some learn best through doing. Others through watching. Still others through listening. And if your viewers aren’t visual learners, they’re not going to get as much out of your video.
That’s where subtitles come in. People who learn best via reading will get more out of your videos if they have captions. The combination of video and text is strong, and appeals to more people than just video.
In fact, many people prefer watching videos with subtitles even if they don’t have to. A quick search reveals many people turn captions on when they’re watching TV shows or movies, even if they’re native speakers of the original language. They just understand it better.
Even if those people could watch without subtitles, they’ll appreciate that you made your video better for them.
4. Not Everyone Speaks Your Language
Great content transcends language boundaries . . . but only if it’s translated. You might want people from all over the world to watch your videos, but if they can’t understand them, it’s going to be hard.
English is the most commonly used language on the wider internet, but Mandarin Chinese isn’t far behind. Some parts of the world use the internet mostly in Arabic. Or Spanish. Take your target audience’s language into account when you’re making your videos.
And when you can, offer subtitles in multiple languages.
5. Viewers Are More Engaged
In 2009, PLYMedia found that 80% more people watched a video to completion when subtitles were included. Videos without subtitles were watched to 66% to completion, compared to 91% with subtitles on average.
Of course, these are correlations, and the cause is open to interpretation. But 80% is a figure you can’t ignore. If there’s a chance that subtitle help videos get more views, you should invest the time and money it takes to caption it.
Keep that in mind as you read this next fact.
6. Subtitles Increase Video Social Reach
Instapage found that captioned videos on Facebook had 16% higher reach than those without. They had 15% more shares, 17% better reactions, and 26% more call-to-action clickthroughs.
In short, they performed better on every measure that matters. Combine that with the fact that more videos get watched if they have subtitles, and the take-away becomes clear.
Subtitles make a big difference in how people see, react to, and engage with your videos.
7. Captions improve SEO
While the quality of your content should be your main concern, we know you’re thinking about SEO, too. And video subtitles can give you a boost in the search rankings.
Many of the benefits above also have an effect on SEO. If people spend more time watching your videos, you’ll have increased dwell time, which has a positive effect on your rankings. Social shares can play a role, too. And appealing to more people helps boost visits and reduce bounce rates.
But the subtitles themselves can also help, because Google indexes captions that you’ve added to videos (they don’t index automatically generated captions, like those YouTube can add for you).
That can make a big difference in how many people find your website, watch your video, and engage with your content.
Is It Hard to Add Subtitles?
While it does take some time, it’s actually quite simple. And you can do it for free.
When you get started, adding subtitles to videos can take a while. 3Play Media suggests budgeting five to ten times the length of the video for subtitling. Of course, this depends on your experience level with the software, the type of dialogue you’re adding, and a number of other factors.
If you’re subtitling a short video to share on Facebook or YouTube, that’s not very long. But if you’re doing an entire TV show or movie, you could be looking at a lot of time. And it’s easy to wonder if it’s worth the effort. Just remember all the benefits above.
How to Add Subtitles to Your Videos
Now that you’ve seen why it’s crucial to subtitle your videos, it’s time to start. The premise behind adding subtitles to your videos is simple. All you need to do is identify the times you’d like a particular subtitle displayed, then add the text.
Fortunately, subtitling apps will help you out with this. Rev.com will help write them for you and import them to YouTube.
Once you’ve created your subtitles, you can either store them in a separate file (so your video can be played with or without them) or encode them directly into the video (so they’re always displayed). In general, it’s better to give viewers the option to view them or not.
Captioning Your Videos Is Worth Your Time
Adding subtitles to your video isn’t especially hard—it just takes time and practice. And it might not seem like it’s worth it when you just want to share your videos.
But we’ve seen that adding subtitles increases accessibility, encourages better engagement, and even improves your search engine optimization.
There’s really nothing you have to lose (except the potential for more viewers). It’s time to start subtitling!
Learning How to Tag YouTube Videos can be hard but I have a little technique to Tag youtube videos for search and more videos. In this video I am going to teach you how I tag my youtube videos and how you can use google, youtube search and tubebuddy to tag yours.
Tags help users find your video when they search the site. When users type keywords related to your tags your video will appear in their search results.
YouTube does consider user engagement as well (like number of views, views in common and user “retention”) but tagging is the *first* step to ranking your video in YouTube search results (and thus getting a good chance to get ranked in Universal Results as well).
How To Tag YouTube Videos
A most scientific (but still useful to start brainstorming) approach to classifying YouTube tags (pdf) groups all the tags as follows:
Generic relationship between tag and video content:
Tag identifies what the video is of at its most primary and objective level – no subject specific knowledge is needed to make this distinction (e.g. a video of a cat, tagged as ‘cat’ or ‘animal’)
General YouTube defined Category or Genre (e.g. Comedy, Entertainment, Music)
Specific relationship between tag and video content:
Tag identifies what video is of. Familiarity or some existing knowledge is needed to make this connection (this may be about names, locations, venues, etc).
Tag only useful to a minority of users, specific individual or group
Refining tag (Tag which cannot stand alone – only useful when looked at as part of the larger tag set (e.g., episodes of a series of videos specified by a number)
Self-reference tagging (e.g. “my dog”),
Irrelevant/Non Useful Tags (those may vary from attention-grabbing and misspelled tags to conjunctions and prepositions).
Obviously, the top three classes of tags should all be considered for ranking for various types of search queries (navigational search queries, generic search, category search, etc).
How To Add Subtitles on YouTube EASY – Add Closed Captions Fast YouTube Subtitles // Adding subtitles to YouTube videos opens up the audience who could see and understand your content. Subtitles (closed captions) help people read along when they might not be able to listen, might be learning the language or may not even speak the native language of the video.
How To Add Subtitles to YouTube Videos 2019 – 2020 – Why add subtitles? – Subtitles make your YouTube videos text searchable and thus search engine friendly. You benefit because your video is ranked higher by Google. End result, you get more views, hits and traffic to your website. Captioning your YouTube videos is a killer SEO secret that your competitors probably don’t know about. That’s what sets you apart.
350 million people speak English as their first language worldwide. 1.4 billion people speak English as their second, third, and fourth language. Do the math. Captioning your YouTube videos improves comprehension and retention of your message for all of your viewers.
How To Turn On / Off Restricted Mode in NEW YouTube Studio 2019 // Restrict non kid friendly content or see what videos have been hidden form your back catalogue. The YouTube Restricted Mode is a tool that many people overlook but could be harming or helping your audience find you.
Turn On YouTube Restricted Mode – This will safeguard your children from potentially harmful or sensitive content. However this can also block some content you never intended to hide such as LGBTQ YouTubers or news channels.
Turn Off YouTube Restricted Mode – Sometime the YouTube filters can be a little harsh and content maybe hidden by mistake. Turning off the YouTube Restricted Mode will open up all content, whether age-gated or not.
Perfection Is YOUR Enemy — YouTube Productivity #RANT // Churchill once said — Perfection is the Enemy of Progress! Quality vs Quality is an argument we all have with ourselves but the search for perfection maybe slowing you down and harming the growth of your channel. If you don’t get out there and #StartCreating then you will always be stuck tweaking and waiting for perfection. Just get it uploaded and you can remake it in a few months time if you feel you can do better.
“When I get this content perfect, then I’ll share it with people.” “When I retire, then I’ll get to (do all the things I’ve been putting off for the last 35 years).”
Perfection(ism) — as Winston best put it, is the enemy of progress. When we decide we want to try something new, the opportunity and fear of failure and rejection come knocking. Should we let them in? Heck yes. Should we let them stop us. Heck no. And that’s where great things happen. At the end of fear.
“The person who fails the most, wins.” -Seth Godin.
You know whats really cool about fear? It’s in our control. You get to decide whether you take advantage of this control or let that fear control you. This is what defines your path.
