You’ll need to use tools both on and off the platform to promote your YouTube channel. YouTube allows you to create playlists and trailers, and it also provides creators with analytics to see how their content is doing. And don’t forget the power of other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to promote your YouTube channel by driving traffic and subscribers to your page.
Once you’ve created your channel and carved out your niche, there are several different ways to promote your YouTube videos:
- Create a trailer that plays automatically for people who don’t already subscribe to your channel. Trailers work best if they are “short, engaging, and end with a call to action to subscribe.”
- Think about titles in terms of what people will actually type into YouTube to search for content. Pro tip: only the first 45 characters of your title are viewable during searches.
- Thumbnails are also an important promotion tool. They serve as a “mini movie poster for your content.” She recommends using “bright, eye-catching, high-resolution thumbnails overlaid with your video title” to make your video stand out from the crowd.
- Use YouTube’s audience retention graphs in YouTube Analytics to understand your viewers’ habits. People can skip around in your video at different times. Maybe your intro is too long, or maybe your video is too long and many people are leaving after five minutes.
- Create a branded watermark for your YouTube videos that allows viewers to subscribe with one click.
- Add a subscription link, an automatic pop-up that will allow viewers to subscribe, which is called the “secret sauce to increasing subscribers” on YouTube.