You’ve got a YouTube channel, and you’re ready to start posting videos.
But how do you get people to watch? How do you make sure they love your content? How do you ensure that they’ll keep coming back for more?
The short answer: optimize your videos.
These days, YouTube is the second most popular search engine online, so it’s important to optimize your videos to make them easier to find. Optimizing your YouTube videos is a multi-step process that can help you increase engagement, reach more viewers, and rank higher in search results.
You can’t just post a video and expect the world to come knocking; it takes planning and execution to attract viewers, build an audience, and keep them engaged with your channel. When done right, this process will help you increase traffic and engagement on your videos.
In this post, we’ll break down the steps to optimize your videos so that you can achieve those goals.
Step 1: Optimize Video Titles, Description and Thumbnails
A video title is an opportunity to tell a story and capture your audience’s attention. The first thing people see when they search for something on YouTube, so make sure it’s accurate, engaging and persuasive and include your main keywords. Your goal is to get people to watch the whole video by telling them what they can expect from it in the title.
The description should be clear and concise with no long-winded sentences or rambling paragraphs that make it difficult for viewers to read through everything you have written. It’s also important to include a link back to your website so that viewers can learn more about whatever you are talking about in the video if they want more information after watching it – this helps increase traffic back into your site from YouTube!
Make sure you have a great cover image for every video you publish.
Step 2: Pick Up An Intriguing Hook
One of the best ways to get people to watch your videos is by using a hook. A hook is anything that gets your audience curious and keeps them engaged until the end. So what makes a good hook?
The first 5 seconds of your video are critical because it is at this point that viewers decide whether or not they will stay till the end or click away from it.
Hooks are one of the best ways to get people to watch your video, but they’re also a powerful way to engage your audience.
For this step, let’s think about what makes an engaging topic for each of us as individuals. What do you want your viewers to know? What are some things that make your life interesting? Think about how you could write it down and make it so that people would want to watch it.
If you want more engagement for your videos, consider including a strong opening line that makes people want more information about what you’re talking about. For example: “Do you want to learn how to make money blogging? I’ll show you how!”
This type of opening line has been proven time and time again as one of the most effective ways for beginning conversations with potential customers on social media or video platforms like YouTube/
Step 3. Provide Value
Think about how you can provide value to the people who are watching your video by providing information or entertainment. You can be helpful, different, educational, entertaining and relatable all at the same time—and if done correctly—your audience won’t even realize that they are being taught something or persuaded to do something!
Talk about why a problem is important and how it affects them. It’s easy for people to get lost in the details of what we’re saying when we talk about problems without explaining why those problems matter. If someone doesn’t understand why their lives would be better after solving this issue, then they won’t want to listen further or try your solution out for themselves!
Discuss the solutions that you found that worked for you and explain why they worked for you. Finally, talk about who else has tried this solution before and share any success stories from others who have used your solution (with their permission).
Step 4. Create a Channel Trailer & Use Playlists to Increase Watch Time and Retention
A trailer is a short video that introduces your channel to new viewers. It’s a great way to get viewers to subscribe to your channel, and it will also help you attract people who haven’t seen what you do before. You can use this opportunity to promote videos on your channel, as well as give them an idea of what kinds of content they’ll be seeing if they subscribe.
When creating a trailer, it’s important to keep in mind that it should be between 30 and 60 seconds long and contain high-quality images as well as text overlays (this will allow you to upload more information about yourself and your brand.)
As a rule of thumb: If you’re not sure if a video should be in a playlist or on its own page, put it in the playlist. If you want to send people straight from the video player (or Google search) directly back again without having to look through any other pages on your site then put that one alone.
Step 5. Promote Your Video Content
Once your video is live, you can start promoting it. This is a crucial step in the process that will allow you to get more views and engagement on YouTube.
Here are some tips for marketing your video content:
Use social media. You should have already created an account on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and/or TikTok. Now it’s time to use these networks to get the word out about your new video! Your friends and family are probably the best people to share it with initially because they care about what you do as well as being much more likely than strangers or acquaintances to watch and engage with your video on social media platforms by commenting or liking it for example.
Use content marketing strategies such as writing blog posts about topics related to your videos so that when Google crawls these websites they will see them ranked highly in search results which will drive traffic back towards viewing one of your videos!
Use social media. It’s not just a place to share your videos, but it can also be used to promote them. When you upload a video on YouTube, there are options to share that video on other social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. When you post one of your videos on any of these platforms, make sure that you have links back to the original video (the direct link). The more people who view your video through this channel means more views for you which leads us into our next point…
Infographic: 10 Insanely Important Steps For Crafting Engaging & Polished Videos That Wow Your Audience
Check out this infographic for more tips on how to optimize your videos for engagement and traffic.
By following these steps, you can create videos that grab attention, evoke emotion, and generate action.
Once you get the hang of it and start seeing results, the whole process becomes much more enjoyable.
We’ve found that by following these six steps outlined above, we’re able to make our videos more engaging for viewers while also increasing their time on site (and therefore chances of staying longer).
If you want to get more viewers and subscribers on YouTube, use the AmpiFire content marketing campaigns.
Learn more by booking a free call with our team.
