By Ernest Thompson
Whether you’re a marketer looking to push a product, or you have YouTube celebrity aspirations, your goal on YouTube is to get more views. And how you’ll make those views happen is through hard work. Get more YouTube views with these six tactics:
1. Partner and collaborate with other YouTube channels.
Forging a partnership with another successful YouTube channel could be one of the best ways to achieve your video marketing goals. The goal behind this is to entice viewers from the other channel to come over and subscribe to your channel, or at least watch a few videos of yours.
Getting these already established and successful channels to partner with you is the real challenge. You may have to try a couple of these tactics before you succeed:
- Study the other channel and send them an idea that will play to the strengths of both your channels. Make sure you get across the fact that you know who they are and what sort of content they do well to let them know you’re serious. The more personal you are the better; no one wants to read a message that feels too cut/paste.
- Have a budget to pay them--cash rules everything. Some YouTube users are making surprisingly good money off AdSense, YouTube's ad revenue sharing program. If there’s no money in it for the them, or if you don’t show how working with you can make them more money, they may be too busy to help you.
- If you don’t have the money, send the next best thing: statistics! Show your subscriber growth, viewership numbers, click-throughs to your website, social shares, and anything else that will convince the other channel that they’ll gain something from you. Learn more about YouTube Analytics for this type of information.
- Create a video on your channel which mentions the other channel directly. Urge your viewers to go to the channel and comment that they should watch the video. Your goal in the video is to start working on building a relationship. The video below offers a perfect example of relationship building when Blendtec host Tom Dickson's authenticity is challenged by another YouTuber (a guy named Richard from the now defunct RatedRR channel). Tom stepped up and offered to arrange a meeting between him and Richard.
- Take advantage of YouTube’s own video collaboration page. This is a useful tool. You’ll still likely have to use a tip from above, but it’s a foot in the door.
Also, do not overlook even the smallest guest appearance opportunity. A link to your channel is a link to your channel any way you look at it. In the Blendtec example, think about how Blendtec is working to create a community, connect with another YouTube channel, and stir up a little bit of controversy. YouTube, like the rest of the online world, lives on controversy.
2. Build your own playlists for binge watching.
YouTube viewers have been creating playlists for years to watch their favorite clips with one click. I have one of my own called, quite accurately, "PARRRTY MIXXXXXX." When I want to party, I put it on the TV and commence partying.
To get more views on YouTube, build playlists of your content so one click is all your viewers need to watch multiple videos. All that you need to do is determine which videos go together.
Group your videos by product, by date, by video content, by color, or anything else that makes sense. You may not be starting a party, but you may be starting a binge watch.
Here’s how "How it Should Have Ended" organizes its playlists by topic:
Edit your playlists from the Creator Studio screen.
3. Link to other videos in your YouTube annotations.
Now we’re going to get a little bit techy. YouTube annotations, a tool provided by YouTube, are pop-up windows that appear during a video. For basic users, this allows you to link to other YouTube videos; for those who are YouTube partners, you can link to websites.
In your quest to get more YouTube views, you need to link to other videos you own. This can be pretty simple as all you need to do is enter the link and text into the annotation box when you edit your video.
For best results, choose a time in the video that would be best for your users to have another link handy--at the end is the obvious choice. It might also help to link to another video in the middle of your video to help viewers better understand what you’re talking about.
Watch how Philip DeFranco uses annotations in this video. At the beginning of the video he asks for Likes. (See top left corner of video.) This tactic is for SEO for more views as videos with more Likes rank better. At the end of the video, during his outro, two links to other Philip DeFranco videos pop up in the upper right hand corner.
Edit your annotations from the Creator Studio screen.
4. Examine the power of social proof.
To put it simply, social proof is a tool which smart social media marketers use to show their worth through numbers. For example, a successful Twitter account will want to show its worth through a high number of Twitter followers. A YouTube account that wants more views can get social proof through both its subscriber numbers and its view numbers.
There are a number of ways to highlight and leverage your social proof on YouTube:
- Create special videos when you achieve milestones. The video below from The Lonely Island was created when the channel hit 1 billion total views. This was HUGE for their legitimacy as a channel, and as creative people in the entertainment industry. The video itself, however, was really, really stupid.
- Use your social proof on other channels in a number of ways. The first way is to use your audiences to push people to watch your videos. The second is to mention videos with high viewer numbers and push them with that statistic. Getting people to watch a popular video is easy thanks to its social proof.
- Use a YouTube views service to boost low numbers. Remember this is a service you’re using for social proof, not to actually get views from. You can use a views service to boost your viewer numbers. This will build your social proof and is best used with any other tactic described in these bullet points.
- Create a playlist of your most viewed videos. This is the exact type of social proof that you want to focus on. It’s great for binge watching, it can be a great tweet/Facebook update, and it takes very little effort.
- Mention and link to your viral videos in other videos. You’re trying to build as many connections as you can that people want to click on. The social proof of an audio call to action like "Our viral video has xxx million views, watch it next!" accompanied by an annotation could keep that video viral for a long time.
5. Identify and use viral influencers.
Every industry has those few people who really have a voice amongst an audience on social media. Gaining the trust of these people and getting them to share your videos will be a key to growing your YouTube channel beyond your own audience.
Follow these steps to get started:
- Look for influencers in your industry who are actually sharing content. BuzzSumo is a useful tool if you have some money to spend; if you don’t have the money, you can search for free using Twitter Search. Enter terms related to your industry, and scan through those results to find users who are sharing relevant content to a large audience.
- Share the content of viral influencers. Use the @mention on Twitter and a Facebook tag on Zuckerberg’s platform. Your goal is to get influencers to know you. They may just be curious enough to start sharing your content on their own.
- Share your own content and tag viral influencers. This puts you one retweet/share away from the influencer's audience. You may not get them every time, it may take a few shares, but one shot may be all you need.
The mistake you don’t want to make is throwing your content at influencers right away. I’ve been on the receiving end of this too many times to count and it is not a good look. The mute and block buttons work very well.
In the world of epic food, there is no one more epic than Epic Meal Time’s Harley. Here's Taco Bell giving him a mention using his @HarleyPlays username for a retweet from the man himself:
6. Embed your videos EVERYWHERE.
YouTube, WordPress, and a number of video hosting websites, have made it easy to embed videos. This is good for you as your videos need to be in as many places as possible to catch viewers as not everyone wants to go to YouTube. Embedding videos on your website, blog, or in a newsletter is the perfect way to take your videos to where off-YouTube audiences are.
Not familiar with embedding videos? It all depends on your specific hosting framework, but for WordPress users it is dirt simple:
- Take the URL directly from the address bar of the video you want to embed.
- Paste the URL onto its own line and do not hyperlink it.
- YouTube and WordPress take care of the rest.
Others may have to get the embed code from YouTube. Click on the Share button below the video, click on Embed, copy the code. Now paste that code into the HTML editing screen on your website. It should work at this point; if it doesn’t, you have a more complex embedding issue to take up with your individual administrator.
YouTube Views: Building Connections
You’ve likely read before that YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. While that’s great for your video marketing efforts, you still need to make as many connections as possible to reach your maximum number of views:
- You need to connect with popular YouTube users.
- You need to connect your videos together in playlists.
- You need to connect videos with annotations.
- You need to connect your social proof with your marketing efforts.
- You need to connect with viral influencers on social media.
- You need to connect your videos with your other web properties via embedding.
The more connections you make, with people and web properties, the more chances you have of getting an avalanche of YouTube views.
