10 Tips to Help You Promote on YouTube

Compare these two pages: the first one is for new visitors, while the second one is for subscribers.

As you can see, the first one has an introductory trailer. The trailer is a video that your new visitors will see on your main youtube page. Imagine that your channel is an upcoming movie and you want your new visitors to buy the ticket to the cinema (subscribe to your vlog). Take into account that the viewer has never heard about you, thus you need to show your best qualities so that he or she decides to subscribe after watching this trailer. Key points you should remember while creating this piece of content:

• Be brief, 30-second video is quite enough;
  
  
• Put call to action (ask viewers to subscribe and add annotations)
  
  
• Be bright and catchy
  

This description will be shown at the main page of your channel on the right of the trailer. It's something like a movie description, that you read while choosing the movie, so it's not less important that the trailer. Moreover, search engines don't understand the video format thus they use this info to help people find your channel.

Here are some tips on writing the channel description:

• it should be informative and catchy;
  
• put the most important info at the beginning;
  
• add call to action (subscribe to your channel here);
  
• Include links to your social media/website.
  

Tags are essential, as it was mentioned before Youtube cannot understand your video content thus you need to associate it with the text, tags is one of the ways to do it.

• Put the most important at the beginning, it's considered that Youtube values the first ones the most;

• Write clear and easy tags. Imagine that you're searching for this video and try to write those keywords that come into your mind;
  
  
• Add relevant tags.Youtube values "watch time" metric much more than the number of views, so that if you put some popular, but irrelevant tag and thus receive lots of views, your video won't become top one anyway. People will close it in several seconds.

Playlists help you make your channel well-structured. Moreover, you encourage the viewers to watch other videos from this playlist. Divide your videos into several main topics and create the playlists.

Make sure that your videos are included to the playlists. When the video finishes, Youtube automatically launches the next one from the playlist. So that your visitors won't switch to another channel and will stay with you.

Video thumbnail is an image that serves as a video cover. Youtube automatically offers 3 options after the video is launched but you can also to upload a custom video thumbnail. This option is available only for the users whose account is verified. Choose the most catchy snapshot to make users click on your video. YouTube Help suggests to upload a thumbnail with a resolution of 1280x720 and remain under 2 MB.

Despite the widespread opinion, it doesn't matter how your video is named on the PC. What's important is what title you will choose after its upload. If somebody decides to download your video, the file's name will be taken from YouTube, so don't waste your time on this.

Video description is a free place to promote your social networks/ website. Create a permanent caption that will be automatically added to all uploaded videos.To do this go to the creator studio, then click on Upload defaults, and there you'll see "description" bar.

Include the links to your:

• website's main page;
• blog;
• social networks;
• important and useful website's pages;

Talking about YouTube there are several actions we want our viewers to perform: subscribe, leave a comment, watch the next video. There two main types of calling to action.

Direct mentions. The speaker can ask his viewers to do some action and show the position of the button he/she wants you to click on.

Annotations. Annotations are special elements that allow you to layer text, links, and hotspots over your video. They help you enrich the video experience by adding information, interactivity, and engagement. Don't add too many annotations, make some of them temporary and choose different "start and end time" so that no more than 2 annotations are displayed at ерк same time. At the screenshot below you can see 3 different annotations:

• subscribe button, which pops up when our speaker asks for subscription;
  
  
• and our logo that leads to our YouTube main page. This annotation is permanent.

Features video is the video that you recommend your users to watch next. To add the featured video box go to Creator studio then click on Channel and choose featured content.

There you can choose what video you want to offer: the last one or the custom one. You can also choose its display time: end of the video (pops up in 10 seconds before the end of the video) or custom start time. It appears at the lower-left corner. Remember that featured video box is perceived as annotation so that consider it as one of 3 allowable annotations.

If you know other useful tips, don't hesitate to share them with us.