How To Grow Your YouTube Channel Immediately

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. The first one after Google.

SimilarWeb data says that every month more than 22.3 billion visitors visit YouTube. Enormous number.

That’s a great opportunity for increasing brand awareness!

All these numbers suggest that every business owner should create a YouTube channel. When we say grow a YouTube channel we think either:

• Increasing the number of views or
• Increasing the number of subscribers

Here, I’ll show you both.

There’s a strong correlation between views and subscribers - when you increase the number of views, you’ll increase the number of subscribers as well.

Get Your Videos In Google SERP

Here are some types of videos that will naturally be embedded in Google SERP:

• How-to videos
• Review videos
• Tutorial videos

For example, if you enter how to make an american pie query on Google, you’ll definitely see YouTube videos.

Here’s how it looks.

The main reason why YouTube is awesome is its Domain Authority.

High DA guarantees that the domain will rank high in Google SERP.

I don’t need to mention how YouTube is a subsidiary of Google. In fact, YouTube paid lots of penalties in the Europe because of preferring YouTube in Google SERP.

You only have to find queries that will be displayed in Google SERP. You can use Keyword Planner to find keywords that have a solid search volume.

For example, how to make pizza crust has a solid search volume and YouTube videos appear for the term in SERP.

However, it’s not so easy to appear in Google SERP because you need to apply some SEO tricks as well.

YouTube SEO Tricks

When we say SEO we usually think about Google, but we should think about YouTube as well.

The following SEO tricks will help you both in appearing high in YouTube search results and Google search results.

File Name

The most simple trick is to put a targeted keyword or phrase in the title.

That’s obvious of course, but you should also enter the keyword in the file name as well.

This doesn’t cost you anything but it might help a lot.

Video Description

Next, you have to use the phrase in the video description.

Take a look at the following screenshot which explains how whats cooking (YouTube channel) uses their targeted keyword both in title and description.

As for the video description, it’s preferable that you put the targeted keyword at the descriptions beginning.

Furthermore, you should insert a CTA in the description text - CTA like calling users to subscribe to the channel. Also, you can enter an URL to the free content such as eBook or webinar.

That way, you will be able to capture new email subscribers, and maybe call them to subscribe to your YouTube channel through the newsletter.

Keep in mind that you can’t ask too much information from your customers when users come to the landing page (webinar registration, eBook download). If you ask too much information, your conversions will be lower.

On the other side, if you don’t ask information about your visitors, then precise email marketing segmentation and targeting will be harder.

There’s a research from VWO which shows a study where removing three fields has increased the conversion rate by 11%.

A/B tests are always great, but they’re useless when there’s no traffic because decisions must be based on statistically significant data.

There are lots of tools that help you to check if the data is statistically significant or not. For example, you can use this Google Sheet to check it.

Simply said, enter how many conversions each version (A and B) has and you’ll see if the data is statistically significant or not.

Embed Videos

Page Authority (PA) is a metric invented by Moz that predicts how well a specific page will rank on SERP.

Your videos should have a higher PA as many as possible because that way you increase the chances of getting listed in Google SERP. Here’s how to check a PA of some YouTube video.

Firstly, visit Open Site Explorer and copy the video URL you’re interested in analyzing.

Next, click on Search and you should be able to see something like this.

On the other hand, if you have just uploaded a video, your PA will be very low (zero). Here’s what you have to do if you want to increase it.

Firstly, embed a video on your site. You can do it by clicking on Share - Embed and then copying the HTML code on your site.

If you’re not sure or if you’re worried that you could make something wrong, just copy the code and send it to your developer.

Furthermore, you can directly link your videos in blog posts that you regularly write.

Set Channel Default Video

On your YouTube channel, you’re allowed to set a default video that every user who visits the channel see. Here’s how Allrecipes does.

Their default channel is actually a CTA - Subscribe to the Allrecipes YouTube Channel today! This is amazing and this is exactly what you have to do.

Add Annotations

Annotations are great for displaying CTA messages. FoodFood calls its visitors to subscribe for more simple and easy recipes.

In fact, there’s a report which provides information on the performance of video annotations and gives the next engagement information:

• Impressions
• Clickable impressions
• Closable impressions
• CTR
• Close rate (the percentage of people who ignored annotation)
• Clicks

Now let’s see other annotations you might create.

Suggest Other Videos

Jamie Oliver also uses annotations. He uses it to promote Gennaro Contaldo, an Italian chef and restaurateur, who is actually Jamie’s mentor.

This way, Jamie increases the number of viewers at his mentor’s YouTube channel. It’s important to recommend similar products or services.

For example, if you’re presenting a pizza recipe, then it’s good to recommend a food that goes well with pizza such as desert of course.

Add CTA

The largest British online retailer - ASOS - increases sales by adding CTA annotations in their YouTube videos.

29,848 views maybe don't look so much, but when you create 300 similar videos that’s 8,954,700 views. I know, producing 300 videos is not expensive, but you can measure:

• How much does producing each video cost
• How much do videos bring in revenues

You’re fine as long as videos make more money than you spend on producing.

Recommend eBooks

Recommending eBooks is also great to grow your YouTube channel.

You might be wondering how because with eBooks you’ll drive visitors to a landing page, not to a YouTube channel.

That’s the way how you can build an email marketing list.

As you probably know, email marketing is still the most efficient marketing channel and having such a visited videos will skyrocket your list.

Although Jamie’s The Pasta Book isn’t a free eBook and a landing page where he collects emails, it’s still a great example of annotation usage.

Use Google AdWords

YouTube advertising rocks because it’s very cheap - you only pay when someone watches over 30 seconds (in most cases).

The following photo shows how Amazon spends about $55.2M each year on ads.

After that, we have eBay and Macy’s.

Google Ads definitely helps in growing a YouTube channel, but before advertising, you should understand different types of YouTube video formats.

Google Ads offers you two types of video formats - TrueView ads and Bumper ads.

TrueView Ads

There are true types of TrueView Ads:

• In-Stream ads
• Video discovery ads

In-Stream Ads appears before, during, or after videos on YouTube.

The beautiful part is that they give visitors the option to skip the ad after 5 seconds. Here’s a HostGator example.

Video discover ads appear in search results, related videos, YouTube home page, and partners site.

For example, if you search for web hosting, you’ll see videos on top results.

What I really like about TrueView ads is that YouTube charges you only when visitor watches 30 seconds of your video or less if the video is shorter than 30 seconds. In other words, you only pay when someone interacts with your ad.

Bumper Ads

Bumper ads are short videos of 6 seconds that advertisers use when they want to reach viewers with a short, memorable message.

The difference with Bumper ads and TrueView ads (In-Stream) is that here users don’t have Skip button which means you always have to pay. Bumper Ads use CPM bidding, so you’ll pay per 1,000 impressions.

According to ThinkWithGoogle, Libertarianism.org and Cato Institute wanted to create greater public interest in libertarianism while spreading the word about their website.

They had two goals:

• Boost ad recall
• Boost brand awareness

Here’s the video they created.

The results were amazing. They found the campaign boosted ad recall by more than 357% and brand awareness by more than 125%. What’s more, the ads increased their traffic website by 14%.

Social Networks

Facebook is the most used social networks by Americans. An average American spends about 40 minutes each day on Facebook.

Tumblr and Instagram are the next most used social networks with 31 minutes and 21 minutes, respectively.

Which social network you’ll use to promote a YouTube channel depends on the business. For example, B2C companies should definitely promote their businesses on Facebook and Instagram.

As for B2B, LinkedIn and Twitter are definitely the best social network. Almost half of the U.S. population is registered on LinkedIn.

43% businesses spend 6 or more hours on managing their social media profiles.

That means it will cost them at least $104.04 per week, according to PayScale.

However, some businesses spend more than 11 hours a week, and some even more than 21 hours.

Why does that happen?

Managing social media profiles is not publishing sharing your videos only. Generally, here’s how the wheel of social media strategy goes:

• Plan
• Implement
• Measure

The measure is a key of everything in digital marketing.

Simply said, you must know what brings the best results and what doesn’t.

Conclusion

Growing a YouTube channel definitely takes lots of time and efforts, but it’s worth it. Again, YouTube is a second search engine in the world and definitely a great source of traffic.

The truth is that lots of marketers don’t even think about YouTube when talking about content marketing. What really matters is to avoid uploading videos on random topics.

You have to research and see which videos should appear in Google and which queries don’t have a high competition. Be aggressive. Promote your video everywhere - newsletters, social media networks, blogs, Google Ads, etc.

Finally, don’t be impatient. You won’t see great success after you upload a few videos. But, after you upload 100 or 200 videos - views will come. Don’t forget to measure a video impact. Good luck!