Author: Oriol Salvador

YouTube playlists are essential to position your video, but they are often treated as a secondary feature that goes unnoticed when you are managing a channel.

A fully optimised YouTube playlist can make your content more discoverable on the platform, increase your views and, by keeping your audience engaged, grow the total amount of watch time on your channel.

Using a playlist you can organize the content from your channel, help users find specific types of content or one of your series and facilitate they stay on the platform binge-watching similar content, ideally remaining on your channel.

Even more important, a good YouTube playlist influences the algorithm that selects recommended videos or what video is played next automatically. Continue reading “Grow your audience on YouTube with optimised video playlists”

When YouTube users make the decision to watch a video, even before they read the video title or identify the uploader, the first thing they see very often is a little window with an image as a preview of the video. If that’s the first thing viewers will associate with your video, you should put some extra effort into making it, don’t you think?

In the process of uploading a video, you can choose one of the three still images automatically taken from somewhere around the introduction, middle and end of your video. However, using one of this three would be a lazy decision that could impact your channel negatively.

Do better: upload a custom YouTube thumbnail that includes an attractive image with additional information to, ultimately, get more clicks and, consequently, more views, watch time and a better engagement indicator for your video and for the channel, overall. Thumbnails are also a great way to keep a consistent branding and visual identity across your channel, to make all your videos easily identifiable on search results, suggested videos, etc.

This is all you need to know to create eye-catching YouTube thumbnails that will turn all the eyes towards your videos, from the image size to other best practices and special tricks.  Continue reading “How to create eye-catching YouTube thumbnails?”

You can have a beautifully shot video that is informative, entertaining or educational but — unless you are considering the specific requirements of YouTube, making the most of all the available features and looking at the analytics regularly to get some data-based feedback on your channel performance — it will be really hard for you to become a successful youtuber and make your channel a sustainable long-term business, no matter what kind of content you are producing or who is your target audience.

Use the following best practices to manage and optimize your YouTube channel: learn how to make a video that works specifically for YouTube, optimize all the necessary metadata and use of all the metrics available on YouTube Analytics to improve your strategy. Continue reading “The keys to a successful YouTube channel”

YouTube is king (or queen) of the Internet when it comes to watching videos online. The video hosting service, founded in 2005, grew to become the second largest search engine after Google, its parent company since 2006. Therefore, YouTube is the essential platform to promote your brand, products and services through video.

In just a single minute, 400 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube, according to a keynote by YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki at VidCon 2015. With so much competition, how can your content stand out?

Actually, nobody has the answer (sorry!). YouTube’s algorithm is a mystery, but tests have proven that overall watch time, video title, description and even the Likes/Dislikes ratio will affect the position of your videos on search results, related videos, recommendations… On top of that, the algorithm also considers each user’s watch history, preferences and more. Not easy, right?

My message here is that your video content itself is as important as optimizing it for YouTube through metadata, playlists and more.

If you are struggling with it, fear not! Get in touch and I can help.

Barring that, here are five common YouTube mistakes that you shouldn’t make as the person responsible for managing a YouTube channel.

Continue reading “5 mistakes to avoid as a YouTube Channel Manager”