How to Get More YouTube Views: 8 Steps with Examples
Marketers who use YouTube are usually keen to reach the widest audience possible. After all, the more YouTube views you get, the more exposure.
While they’re not the only metric that determines the success of your YouTube marketing, generating a decent number of views for your videos is something that you should definitely try to achieve. After all, there’s no point uploading a video if nobody is going to watch it, especially your target audience, right?
Perhaps you’ve got doubts about YouTube, and I understand that. I mean, who wants another platform to master creating content for? However, it makes absolute sense for your business to get on YouTube if you haven’t already.
YouTube attracts 2.6 billion global monthly users. Now, I can’t guarantee your success, but with such a vast audience from all walks of life, it’s likely that some of your target market will visit the platform. You might as well meet them there.
If you need some more convincing, what about this research? Google found that 40 percent of consumers bought a product they found on YouTube.
However, just posting content isn’t enough; if you’re not getting YouTube views, you’re wasting your time. Without views, you’re missing fresh opportunities to engage with your audience (incidentally, this article has some tips if you want some quick wins to increase engagement).
In this post, we’re going to take a look at tactics that you can use to get more views on YouTube.
We’ll cover some of the fundamentals to help you over the long term and some unique tactics that you can implement to generate quicker results with your target audience.
By the end of this post, you’ll have a high level of confidence in knowing what needs to be done to generate more YouTube views.
What Counts as YouTube Views?
Before moving on, there’s something I must clarify: what counts as a YouTube view?
Here’s what you need to know: YouTube views depend on someone watching a video for at least 30 seconds.
Another key note is that the viewer needs to have intentionally initiated the video viewing. For example, they’ve clicked through to it.
Rewatching a video also counts towards YouTube views, provided the video is watched for 30 seconds.
Now that you’re clear on that, let’s move on to some tips to start attracting viewers.
Great Video Content Gets More YouTube Views
It’s the golden rule on any platform, and applies here too. If you want more YouTube views, then you must publish great content.
Sure, you could just upload a video that doesn’t offer any major takeaways and press ‘publish’. That would get your content out there, but it wouldn’t be share-worthy, so why bother?
What makes excellent content?
- First, you need engaging and exciting visuals, like high-quality footage or creative animations. Whatever you choose, make sure it’s eye-catching and holds viewers’ attention. For help with creating professional-looking videos, there are plenty of tools available, like InVideo.
- Second, consider your audio quality. No one wants to listen to a video with muffled or distorted sound. Make sure your voice is clear and easy to understand and that any background noise is kept to a minimum.
- Finally, think about the overall story you’re trying to tell with your video. Is it informative? Entertaining? Inspiring? What do you want to convey? Whatever it is, make sure your video is well-organized and flows smoothly from beginning to end.
If you can do that, generating more views for your videos becomes a heck of a lot easier. For one thing, the better your videos are, the more likely people are to share your videos on social media.
Since I don’t know your business or your audience, I can’t tell you precisely what you should be doing to create amazing videos, and I can’t promise you thousands of YouTube views.
I can tell you this: awesome content provides exceptional levels of value.
It’s important that you don’t get caught up in the wrong things when looking to create great content to get more YouTube views.
People often worry about content length and production quality.
Sure, the content length might matter to a certain extent. However, are you really going to stop watching a 1-hour video if it’s providing immense value? Probably not.
In fact, it’s worth remembering that the average length of a YouTube session of 29 minutes and 37 seconds.
Value trumps everything for search results, especially high production quality, and if you offer quality, people keep watching. Here’s an example:
The video below ranks near the top in YouTube search results for ‘how to build a website,’ runs for over two hours and has attracted 2.5 million views and counting.
So remember, content length isn’t something that you should obsess over on this social network.
Step 1: YouTube Views Don’t Depend on Video Production
An increasing number of companies are investing in YouTube. Often, these businesses create highly produced, glossy videos, but you don’t necessarily have to take the approach.
You see, if you’re publishing quality content, YouTube is generally pretty forgiving: your videos don’t need to be perfect. When your videos start to get some traction, that’s the time to think about investing in fancy production and camera equipment to help you get more YouTube views.
However, to begin with, just make sure that you cover the basics. For example, if you’re creating a:
- ‘talking head’ video, ensure everything is well-lit and the audio is clear.
- screen capture video, ensure that the resolution is high and the audio is easy to hear.
- slideshow, create something simple and visually engaging. Use strong images and minimal text on your slides. You can use a tool, like Haiku Deck, for this. A custom thumbnail also helps people remember your brand.
Step 2: For More YouTube Views, Focus on Value Above All Else
Remember, providing value should be your guiding principle when it comes to getting YouTube views.
If you want to learn how to provide value, you have to learn more about your audience and, more specifically, what they like. You may be wondering how you find the type of content that appeals to your target market. It’s simple: Just look at content in your niche.
There are a few approaches you can take.
The first is to take a look at blog posts that have done well in your niche. Then, create incredibly informative videos based on those blog post topics.
You can find such blog posts using Buzzsumo. Just enter your keyword, press search, and you’ll get a wealth of ideas.
Alternatively, you can look at other YouTube videos that have done well in your niche and create better videos. If your competitors have a YouTube channel, look at the type and frequency of content they are putting out.
If you’re an expert in your niche, then it shouldn’t be hard to create high-quality videos when using other videos as inspiration.
However, if you find yourself struggling, take a moment to assess what could have been done to improve the other video. For example:
- Did it ignore something that was actually important?
- Did the video fail to explain certain sections fully?
- Did the video fail to provide actual results/case study information?
- Was the pace too slow or too fast?
- Was there too much information on the screen, or not enough?
- Could diagrams have been used to illustrate a point better?
- Maybe you could’ve included some data?
Check out the comments section, too. Other viewers’ opinions are often extremely revealing, and they’ll say if they felt the video was lacking something and could have been better in some way.
Finally, why not use the YouTube Search engine to help you come up with content ideas?
Say I’m in the business of teaching people ‘how to build a pond’ or building it for them, and I’m looking to do some content marketing.
I can just type ‘how to build a pond’ into the ‘YouTube Search box,’ and let the YouTube algorithm and Autosuggest do the rest.
Not all of the ideas are relevant, so I might select the first option and see what else comes up as a result of ‘Autosuggest.’
If I go with the option of ‘how to build a pond in your backyard,’ I’m presented with some helpful ideas.
I can then repeat that process, using other keywords, if I want to come up with even more video ideas.
It might also be a good idea to cycle through the alphabet after having chosen a ‘base’ keyword.
This time, I type in ‘how to build a pond a’
As you can see, plenty of video ideas here look relevant. I can use those to create super niche video content that resonates with a certain demographic in the social media platform.
If you have an existing audience on YouTube, consider asking your audience what they’d like you to cover next.
More often than not, your audience provides you with ideas that you can use.
The great thing about these video ideas is that by acting on them, you can be sure that there is an audience for them.
If you have done a good job of creating great content that meets people’s needs, you’ll find that organic views will be easier to come by. This is because a recent change to YouTube’s algorithm means authoritative content, viewer satisfaction, personalization, and the video’s performance are all important ranking signals.
Therefore if your videos produce a great user experience, there’s a good chance that they perform better in the rankings, too.
Step 3: Optimize Your Videos to Get More YouTube Views
Optimizing your video can help ensure it appears when and where it should; this includes the search listings and the ‘related video’ suggestions.
If you want to optimize your video, there are four things that you must take care of.
- Title
- Tags
- Description
- Thumbnail
It’s easy to over-complicate this and over-analyze everything, but keep it simple and focus on the four areas above.
Step 4: Write Better YouTube Titles
For the title, it’s essential that you don’t use clickbait-style headings. Inevitably, if the content of the video doesn’t reflect the title, you’ll get a ton of disappointed viewers.
If you’ve created your video around a keyword, ensure that your title clearly explains that your video covers the subject in question.
For example, if I created a video based on the key phrase ‘how to bake a chocolate cake for beginners,’ my title might be…
How to Bake a Chocolate Cake for Beginners – Spent $5 and 5 Minutes cleanup
Note: If you want to write great titles, you might want to work out what your audience doesn’t like or its fears about the topic.
In the example above, people might worry that it costs a lot to bake a cake and that cleaning up is a pain. The video becomes much more enticing if I address that in the title.
Step 5: Use YouTube Tags
For the tags, provide some keywords related to your video’s topic. If we continue with the ‘chocolate cake’ example above, our YouTube tags might look something like this:
Try not to use more than 10-12 tags per video. You’ll lose your target audience and dilute search results data.
Picking the right tags helps your video appear in the ‘suggested videos’ section when someone is watching a related video.
Now, let’s take a look at the description.
Conclusion
For many, getting more YouTube views sounds complex and obscure.
Hopefully, you now have a better sense of how to get more viewers to your videos.
There are many avenues that you can go down. The most important step is to create good quality content about topics important to your viewers.
If you can take care of that, everything else you do to get more YouTube views will be much more effective.
Do you have any tips when it comes to generating more YouTube views? Share what works for you in the comments section.
