Ways to Grow Your YouTube Audience

Here are some crazy statistics about YouTube: over 800 million people visit YouTube once a month, 72 hours worth of videos are uploaded every day, and, in 2011, YouTube had 1 trillion views.

But the really crazy thing is that those numbers are about to get bigger. A recent eMarketer studysaid that online videos will grow as much as 55% in 2012.

This is a huge opportunity for content marketers to tap into. But just setting up a YouTube account, recording some videos and uploading them isn’t enough to get people to subscribe and follow you on YouTube.

Buy youtube comments and views, You need some hard-hitting strategies that will draw people in and convince them that you are somebody to watch and follow. Let me show you 7 strategies that will help you boost your YouTube subscriber count today.

Monitor “attention score” to measure good storytelling

YouTube executive Bing Chen says, “Another thing that cannot be replaced is good storytelling. We really recommend you go into your dashboard and look at your attention score.”

What exactly is your attention score? This shows you the level of attention and the length of time people spend watching your videos.

If your score is a solid red, then you are doing pretty well. But if it is falling off at a particular area, you might want to change that.

There are two types of YouTube content: entertainment and information.

Buy youtube comments and views, Entertainment videos pull people in with good headlines or enticing thumbnails, so the attention level is high at the beginning but drops off towards the end.

Here’s what makes a great entertaining video:

  • Five-second rule – A great entertaining video must grab people in the first five seconds. You can use questions or put yourself into an unusual situation. And don’t forget the conflict. People have to get a feeling of suspense immediately.
  • Storytelling – Bing Chen says this is essential. Learn the tricks of weaving a good story so that people will hang with you through the duration of the video. You can use gimmick or conflict to achieve that.
  • Short – Entertaining videos can’t be too long. Between one and three minutes is ideal. This is where looking at your attention score is critical. Where are people dropping off? Is that the upper reaches of attention span?

The other type of video is the informative video. This is your tutorials and how-to and do-it-yourself clips. The thing about these types of videos is that their attention scores will be just the opposite of an entertaining video.

  • Early attention score is low – Most of the traffic drops off early. People decide quickly whether they will learn what they want to learn from a video.
  • Late attention score is high – Those who stay past the two or three minute mark will typically stay for the entire video.
  • Steps – Great informative videos pull people along by giving them systematic steps to accomplish a particular task. In fact, people may tend to pause the video and write notes or actually perform the task. Think about how you would learn to fold a paper airplane or fix a sink.
  • Length – It doesn’t matter how long your informative video is as long as you are giving people the answers they need.

Use annotations

YouTube annotations are the notes on your videos. You can use them to help you increase your audience by following these techniques:

  • Call to action – Create a sticky note suggesting people subscribe to your channel.
  • Spotlight annotation – This will allow you to create a clickable annotation on the video itself. Drive people to a landing or product page.
  • Link to other videos – Annotations will also allow you to link to related videos (whether they are yours or not).

You control where the annotations appear on the video. You also control when they appear and disappear.

These are shown on your video any time someone plays it, but the viewer can go into the video player menu screen and turn them off.

Five steps to planning a good video

There is a lot of planning behind a good video. Let’s look at five elements of good video planning:

  1. Keyword research – You won’t get traffic, let alone high-quality traffic, if you don’t do your research with keywords. Google’s keyword tool will show you what’s hot and has the highest volume. Avoid the long-tail keywords.
  2. Transcript – After you’ve recorded the video, grab the transcript and upload it to YouTube. This will give Google more context to help index it and give you an additional number of words to help people searching.
  3. Bookmarking sites – Share your video across social bookmarking sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon, but don’t forget to use social media engines like OnlyWire. In addition, you should also manually build links to your videos.
  4. Social Media Engagement – Work your social networks. Share the video two or three times a week on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ each. The more shares you can get, the more your video will rise in the rankings.
  5. Your Blog – After about a week, embed the video on your site. Then you can go through the process of sharing it again.

So, those are the basics of creating and sharing a good video. Let’s look at some other ways to share it.