Ultimate Guide to YouTube

21 Ways to Dominate YouTube: The Ultimate Guide

With 4 billion video views per day, YouTube isn’t just the third most popular site in the world. It has also quietly become one of the world’s biggest search engines. Meanwhile, Google has shifted it algorithms to favor videos, often putting YouTube videos near the top of its results.

Some have taken advantage of YouTube’s incredible power to expand their influence and make money online.

One of the biggest problems plaguing YouTube videos is poor lighting. Even the finest video camera can’t capture vivid detail when the real-world lighting is poor.

If you want thousands of people to be watching your videos, you owe it to them to trim the fat and move things along. Editing together the best parts and cutting out pauses will quicken the video’s pace and remove the pressure on you to deliver a flawless performance.

Choosing keywords for your video is essential for ranking well. Just like with standard SEO, a little bit of research goes a long way. I recommend that you consult YouTube’s keyword tool before you decide which words and phrases you’ll be targeting.

The best way to drive traffic to an outside website is through the description box. Make sure to start with http:// or it won’t be recognized as a link. You’ll also want to put the link in right away, because after 27 characters, the description is hidden unless the ‘show more’ button is clicked.

But ranking well doesn’t matter if nobody clicks on your video. That’s why it’s also important that your video title be something that induces curiosity, promises a benefit to the viewer, or otherwise explains why someone should watch the video right away.

YouTube will give you three choices for your video thumbnail: one at the 1/4 mark, the ½ mark, and the ¾ mark. Just like with the headline, it’s important to pick an image that’s going to make people want to click on.

If your videos benefit from being watched in a particular order (e.g. a series of videos about building a website), then creating a playlist that reflects that will help your viewer get more out of your videos. Of course, it will also help ramp up your views across the channel.

Some YouTubers put annotations in the top-left and top-right corners of each of their videos. The annotation in the top-left links to the previous video and the annotation in the top right links to the next video.

YouTube can be an amazing community. Your viewers can respond to your questions in the comment section, send you material for future videos, and make video responses to your videos. But you have to encourage this type of behavior if you want to see it happen.