Before starting, it's important to note that these tips are not a guarantee that your channel will grow exponentially, but they have been proven to work for many creators. If you don't know where to start optimizing your channel, these tips can help you focus in some areas.
Use Google friendly keywords
The keywords that you use are very important, as they are used by Google/YouTube to recommend your videos. To learn more about this, you will need to learn more about SEO. We recommend you do some searches regarding SEO (Search Engine Optimization), even reading more about it on Google's own SEO starter guide will help you better understand what this is about.
On this topic, you can follow these best practices:
In your video title, place the most important keywords first to make it clear for the viewer and YouTube what your video is about.
For the video description, use relevant keywords to improve your chances of being recommended higher.
Add relevant tags to your videos.
Use concise and descriptive titles
Create custom thumbnails
Creating custom thumbnails will give you the chance to use more compelling images while building your brand and visual identity. This will help your videos stand out from the crowd in the search results.
Optimize your descriptions
Make it relevant to your content and try to keep the most important information at the top, so that more people can see it, even if they don't click the "show more" button in the description. Keep in mind that you should not overuse keywords. Remember there is a tags section in your videos.
Use the metadata correctly
Metadata is key to get your channel being noticed. Make sure that the video title, description, tags and thumbnail are all relevant to the content of your video. The more relevant they are, the best results you will have. YouTube uses the metadata do match the right audience to the right content. Adding information in your metadata that is not relevant to your content, can get the opposite effect you are looking for, as viewers will leave your video early, and your watch time, a very important metric for YouTube, will go down. Also, if your metadata is not relevant, YouTube may consider that you are doing that to get around their algorithm for your personal benefit, and may decide that you are violating their spam policy.
Interact with your fans
This is a key step for building your audience, and most importantly, grow ther number of fans. The reason why there is a distinction between audience and fans, is because your fans are the ones who actually care about your and your content and that's why they subscribe to your channel. They are the ones that are most likely to watch all your videos, and watch them for longer periods of time. You can use the comment section of your videos or the community tab of your channel to interact with them, but you can also ask them questions directly in your video so they can reply in the comments and you can follow up with another video. Make them feel important by talking to them directly and building a relationship with your community.
Run contests
Give back to your fans by doing contests, they will appreciate your gesture and may even share it with others. Just make sure you read YouTube's contest policy guidelines before you do that.
Respect the Community Guidelines
All the results and achievements you have gained through long hours of work and effort with your channel can be taken away by YouTube at any time if you don't respect their Community Guidelines. Make sure that your content always adhere to them to avoid having your channel demonetized, suspendend, or even terminated.
Create playlists
Help your audience find what they are looking for by creating playlists with similar types of videos. When someone watches a video in a playlist, you increase your chances of that viewer watching more of your videos, instead of leaving your channel.
Make calls to action
Remind your audience to comment, watch your videos or subscribe to your channel if they haven't yet done so. This will keep the interaction going, and turn a viewer into a subscriber that can receive the notifications when new videos are uploaded to your channel.
Find what works for you and do more of it
Look at your content and your YouTube Analytics and find what type of content your audience likes the most. Follow the trend and create more of the content your audience likes to watch and give them more of it. In return they will give your more views and longer watch time.
Share your videos in social media
Different platforms have different audiences, but if you are present in other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and others, you can expand the reach of your brand by posting your content in there as well, and you may even be able to bring some of that audience back to your channel on YouTube.
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