Methods to Drive Traffic

With all of that in place, you should now be building momentum for your channel and seeing your views, subscribers, comments etc. grow. Keep putting out more content and keep being active in the comments and this will only gain more momentum with time.

But you can also inject a little more fuel to the fire by driving traffic in other ways. Here are some of the top methods used by businesses and YouTubers: 

SEO for YouTube

Remember when we said that YouTube was the second biggest search engine after Google? This is a fair comparison because in many ways, YouTube works exactly like a search engine by allowing users to search for content and find videos that are relevant to them.

For instance, if you want to know how to use PhotoShop, then you’ll probably head to the search bar and type in ‘beginners’ guide to PhotoShop’ or something similar. You’ll then look at the thumbnails of the videos and select the ones that look the most relevant along with the titles. Again, just like Google!

Businesses trying to get to the top of Google search results will do so using something called SEO – Search Engine Optimization. And this is exactly what you’ll use on YouTube as well, only the methods you use will be slightly different due to the different platform.

Basically, you’re trying to think of what people are going to search for when they’re looking for content like yours. From there, you’ll then take that term and try to use it in your video title as well as the description. Writing lots for your descriptions is often considered a good idea.

And when picking search terms, try to think not only of what’s popular and what people are looking for but also what’s not overcrowded. Look for niches and unmet needs and with a bit of luck, lots of people will start finding you.

Also good for YouTube SEO is to fill out the details on your channel page, to link to your website and to link to other related channels.

Sharing and Linking

Obviously you should also try to post links to your videos where possible and to embed them online.

We’re going to talk more about posting to social media in a future chapter but this is one of the easiest ways to get your videos seen by more people. You can also share to communities like Reddit, as mentioned before.

Reddit (www.reddit.com) has lots of sub-forums where people discuss a myriad of topics, share links and vote on what should gain the most visibility. You can post here and if your videos are high quality, it can gain you a huge amount of exposure. The same is true of Google+ which has lots of smaller community pages and of course you can also use forums.

All this works best though if you can match the content of your video with the topic of the group/page. Try to offer something that is directly relevant to that group but yet they haven’t seen countless times before.

If you have your own website, then another neat trick is simply to embed your videos there. This way, you’ll get lots of views simply from people visiting your site.

The WordPress plugin ‘YouTube Channel’ makes this particularly easy and can allow you to show the most recent video at all times in your sidebar – or even a random video each time someone reloads your page. The latter is a great way to get some more exposure from legacy videos!

And this is a good point in general: posting links to your older videos is a brilliant way to give them a new lease of life and to help your channel grow. This way you get more value from all your content and this leads to improved ROI.

Of course one of the very best things that can happen is for your video to end up embedded on a hugely popular website and blog. If this happens, then you can gain thousands – if not millions – of views overnight. The only problem? It’s a million to one shot. Once again then, the solution is to make your own luck. Record videos that are news worthy, exciting, funny and worth sharing and then send them to the editors and the bloggers that you think might want to show them!