4 Simple Yet Proven Ways to Get More Views on YouTube

Marketing on YouTube is quite different than marketing on other social platforms. While the obvious factor to succeeding on YouTube is awesome video content, there’s actually a lot more to it than that.

Remember, if you want to get a good number of views on your videos, there are quite a few areas to work on as a video creator on YouTube other than your video content itself.

So let us walk you through some tried-and-tested tactics of getting more views on your YouTube videos.

Catchy Thumbnails – Using the Right Colors

Even YouTube itself states that the thumbnail is the first thing that your potential viewers see and it’s very important. Moreover, when it comes to 9 out of 10 most-viewed videos on YouTube, they all use a custom thumbnail.

That speaks volumes about the importance of using a custom thumbnail that attracts your potential audience and stands out among your competition.

However, you need to get a little creative when designing custom thumbnails for your videos. You need to make sure that they stand out, and the best way to do that is to make them easily noticeable.

Now, YouTube is heavily focused around three colors: red, black and white. So you would want to avoid using any of these three as the main color of your video’s thumbnail.

Because if you do, your thumbnails would become easy to ignore among the same colors around them. So what colors should you use?

Well, green and orange may turn out to be your best bet as they would not only look contrasting to YouTube’s “main” colors, but they are also pretty unique in themselves and help your thumbnails stand out. That said, blue and yellow are not too bad choices either.

Your thumbnails can have YouTube’s colors in some proportion as well, they just shouldn’t be the main color.

Algorithm-Based Description

A lot of YouTubers overlook the importance of a well-optimized description. In fact, very few even write a detailed description.

However, a description written with the YouTube algorithm’s requirements in mind is crucial to your video’s rankings and getting more targeted views on your video.

So, how to write a description that will tick all the boxes for YouTube’s algorithm? Well, first things first, you need to have an introduction that’s 2 to 3 sentences long. Make sure you mention your important keyword or the main topic of your video in these 2 to 3 sentences.

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Then write a detailed description of what your video is about. Now, there’s nothing set in stone about how long it needs to be, but it’s good to have at least around 150 words.

Finally, include some links to your social profiles or website if possible. This adds a sense of authenticity to your video and makes YouTube consider more worthy of better exposure.

Encourage Your Viewers to Share Your Video

It might sound obvious that your video being shared on social media by your viewers would bring you more views, there’s actually more to it than just that.

As your viewers share your video on their social media handles, YouTube’s algorithm also considers it a positive factor for your video’s content. This eventually results in your video getting more exposure on YouTube itself as well.

However, getting your viewers to share your video isn’t easy. You can ask them to do it, sure, but very few are actually going to do it. Moreover, if you already don’t have enough viewers, there’s not much possibility of your video being shared enough on social media by users.

Aim for a Higher CTR

CTR refers to the Click-Through Rate. It basically measures the number of clicks your video gets as compared to the number of impression it gets.

So for instance, if your video appears in the search results or elsewhere on YouTube and is viewed as a result by 100 users, and if 20 of them actually click on it to watch the video, then the CTR would be 20%.

Aiming for a higher CTR is an assured way of getting more views to your videos. In fact, videos that get a higher CTR in the search results are automatically promoted by YouTube in its search rankings, making them appear higher in the results and giving them more impressions from users, which obviously results in more users clicking on it.

But how do you achieve a higher CTR for your videos? Well, the most important thing that will help you get a higher CTR is your video’s title. The other is thumbnails which we have already discussed above.

A lot of video content creators don’t put much thought into their video’s title. This is a big mistake. Your video’s title can make or break its success on YouTube.

But how do you write a title that stands out and helps you get a higher CTR? There are a couple of important elements that you must include in your video’s title, and you will be good to go.

First, include brackets in your titles. A particular study revealed that including brackets in titles increases clicks by around 33%. While this study was for blog post titles, there’s no reason it shouldn’t work for YouTube videos too.

The second element is to simply include numbers in your video’s title. So for example, if your video’s title was “how to get more views on YouTube?” you can change it to “5 ways of getting more views on YouTube.”

Finally, make sure your titles are not too long. Another study found that titles that have less than 50 characters ranked the best on YouTube, which helped them get much more views than they probably otherwise would.