How to promote your YouTube channel

High-quality Videos

High-quality videos are super important if you want your audience to stick around. It is 2019, the year where everybody and their kids have smartphones. There are no excuses for having poor video quality. Nowadays it is quite common for somebody to leave your video because of poor quality. It isn’t exactly pleasant to look at.

As content creators, the audience has to be at the forefront of our content. With social media around, it makes it a lot easier for people to voice their opinions and experiences. We are living in a customer-centric world, and if you’re not thinking about your audience, then the sad reality is that you will burn out.

Cross-Platform Promotion

Promoting your videos can be either really easy or really difficult. Cross-platform promotion is a great way to get started, and there are so many ways to do it. A very vague definition of Cross-platform promotion would be to promote your YouTube video outside of YouTube (This definition is specific to this blog). So what does this mean? It means that you promote your videos on other platforms, let us use Instagram as an example.

EXAMPLE: You’ve just uploaded your first video to YouTube and can’t wait to start promoting it. You have an Instagram account with around 1000 followers. In order to promote your video, you make a short 1-minute snippet of your video and post it to Instagram. In the caption, you post a call to action to view the full video on YouTube.

The above example shows that you can cut your content down and post it to other social platforms to drive traffic to your YouTube channel.

Be Apart of the Community

Being active in the community can make you stand out amongst your virtual peers. You can make your name recognisable and possibly collaborate with other channels (more on this soon).

By directly replying to your comments, or commenting on other videos within your sector can help you reach people through word of mouth. This doesn’t mean you should go onto other YouTube videos and comment “Check out my channel”. This says that you should watch other channels that post similar videos to you, offer feedback and get involved with the discussion, reply to other people’s comments etc. The simple stuff like this usually gets skipped past by marketers, yet is a very useful (and free) way of getting your name out there.

Collaboration Videos

As I previously mentioned, being active in the community could lead to video collaboration opportunities. If you’re starting out with making YouTube videos, then I highly recommend doing collaboration videos because then you’re reaching a whole new audience. It’s a great way to grow your channel.

Collaboration videos can also inspire you on what content to create next and also with how to distribute your content.

Make your Channel Easy to Navigate

If your channel isn’t very well organised, then it could leave your audience a bit confused. A good layout is a must for any YouTube channel. Fortunately, YouTube makes it very easy for us to customise our channel.

Begin by going to your channel and clicking the big, blue “customise channel” button. This will take you to the “backend” of your YouTube channel.

Within the “backend” of your channel, you can add a channel trailer (You can have a different video for new visitors and returning subscribers), edit the links displayed in your header and add sections.

Sections appear underneath your channel trailer on your homepage. Sections are a selection of videos of your choosing. They can be anything from your popular uploads, selected playlists or past live streams.

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