Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you today?
Me?
I'm doing just great.
Thank you so much for asking and welcome to the latest installment of Growing your YouTube
channel to 100,000 Subscribers.
We are in a mission here to crack the YouTube code and figure out what it takes to be a
successful content creator on YouTube and success for us is of course identified by
our channel being vibrant and developing a good audience.
Today, I want to talk about some really practical tools, one of the most practical tools we
have on YouTube actually, and it's playlists.
When you first start your channel, you probably aren't going to pay that close attention to
playlists but as you start to refine your channel playlists become increasingly important.
For me, the importance of playlists first kind of rose to the top when I started to
create a little more diverse content on my channel.
At the beginning, the channel basically just contained how-to videos, my old stock and
trade, my kind of tutorial type videos so I just kind of had one theme happening on
the channel.
But then when I decided to start creating this vlog, the one that you're watching right
now on Growing Your YouTube channel, I had a whole now body of content that was quite
a bit different than the rest of the content on the channel.
Now I thought and I actually, as I started to kind of strategize it, I planned on starting
a new YouTube channel just for this content and just for this vertical.
But then I thought I'll be losing all of my subscribers and I'll be losing that audience
that's already there.
Granted some of them might not be as interested in this topic as they are in the productivity
stuff but I think a lot of people just like to follow what I'm interested in.
So I would lose those people and I'd have to rebuild them and I didn't like the idea
of having to manage multiple channels.
I wanted to kind of leverage all of my effort and maximize my effort on a single channel.
So instead of creating a new channel, what I did was I created a playlist.
I made this a playlist so I look at it as a series.
Now my channel instead of being—let's just actually go to my channel here while I'm talking—just
relating to productivity tools and how-to videos, now I've got different shows, as it
were, that are focused on different topics.
So I'm more of a network now rather than a single purpose YouTube channel.
Each of these things here, Uploads, Google Apps, Getting to 100,000 Subscribers, Evernote
videos, each of those are playlists that I've created.
This is one of the times where we can actually go in and we can edit our playlists right
from the YouTube watch page, right from our homepage, your channel page.
If you click here on the little icon here, you can go in and you can modify the content
somewhat within this playlist here.
You can adjust how you see it.
You can adjust the layout.
You can make it a vertical list or a horizontal list.
You can do some editing right here.
I don't do much in this window though.
For the most part when I'm managing my playlists, I do it within my video manager itself.
Now YouTube has added some controls for us here in the video manager.
They've made this new menu item, fairly new I think, Playlists and this is where you're
probably going to spend most of your time setting up your playlists and looking at the
different options.
While I'm using them to differentiate my content, you can use playlists in a variety of different
ways and how you set them up is going to be personal to you.
But you should understand kind of the nuances of the playlists.
So let's look at this list here that we're working on right now, Getting to 100,000 Subscribers.
When we go in and actually edit the settings for the list, we go in and here is where we
basically can set the different parameters for how the list displays and what's included
in the list.
So the first thing I want to do is just go into Playlist Settings and there we can see
that the list is set for Public, meaning everybody can see it.
You can set lists to private and you can actually share the playlist itself, all of the videos
in the list instead of a single video as you go to share things.
This is one that you should pay attention to which is—what do they call it here?—ordering.
The default way that they order the videos as you add videos to the playlist is chronological,
from the oldest to the newest.
If we cancel this and we go back to my videos here and we go back to my channel, the way
that it's set up, my oldest, the very first video I produced would be the one we would
see here and we'd have to scroll to the right to see the latest video, the newest one.
I think that that's not the way that I want mine set up because I want people to see my
newest videos and then they have to go back to find my older ones.
That's how I want to have it set up.
I think you probably will want the same thing.
In order to do that we go in and we set within our Playlist Settings, you want to set the
newest to oldest so the newest ones is going to rise to the top of the list all of the
time and be to the farthest left when we look at it in the screen.
Does that make sense?
That's kind of number one as far as the things that we do.
This next thing is a brilliant tip, I think, "Set as official series for this playlist."
Now what this does is it limits the number of playlists that a video can go in.
Once you set this check mark, a video can only live in one playlist, at least that's
what I'm led to believe when I read this description; I've never tested it.
But when I set it as an official playlist, a very cool thing happens.
Anytime anybody is watching any of the videos in this series because now they are theoretically
going to be interested in growing their YouTube channel so they're going to be interested
in this content, anytime they watch any of the videos in this series, the suggested videos
that are going to be appearing in the sidebar are all going to be the other videos in this
series.
So even if they stumble across this through search and they don't recognize that you have
a whole series of videos in this area, they're going to see all the related videos being
displayed to them, which I think is a great way to go when you have a family of videos
like I have for the 100K Subscriber series.
That's a setting that I would encourage you to learn about, figure out how you want to
work strategically with and then use it.
The other thing about playlists that you should consider is they don't have to just contain
your content.
Some people are great YouTube publishers, the way they publish some of their content,
but they curate other people's good content and they add it into the videos.
In that particular case, I haven't done it and I'm not sure I'm going to do it because
I'm so prolific.
I publish so much content.
But if I was just say publishing once a month on Growing Your YouTube Channel to 100,000
Subscribers and I was finding other really good videos out there that were relating to
this, I could then be adding those other videos just by clicking on add video.
I don't have to just add my videos.
I can add videos from any other content creator that's giving permission to it.
I can add those videos.
What a lot of people did, especially in the early days—we don't see it as much—they
would actually do short little intro videos where they say hey, I saw this video from
Steve Dotto and it was really interesting because of this point here, this point here
and this point here.
You can actually set when you enter the video and exit the video as well but you can curate
the content that way to create more value for your audience.
It's a really creative way of managing your own playlists.
When the YouTube guys came through, YouTube did a road show coming through Vancouver a
couple years ago, they said this was one of the strategies a lot of content creators did
early on in the development of their channel that really helped create more engagement
because you became a trusted advisor.
You became a person that was out there researching, finding good content and bringing it back
to your tribe.
So that's another thing that you should consider.
So those are all things that I want you to take a look at.
I know there are more things around playlists and we will return to this topic, I'm sure,
at some point in the future but that's enough to get you kind of started thinking about
playlists.
So take some time, think about and take a look at how you structure playlists within
your site and if you haven't structured them within your channel, get some structure to
them, start adding videos to the playlist and start discovering just what sort of structure
and what sort of leverage you can create by using playlists to help amplify the reach
of each of your videos and have them support each other as I'm doing here by creating an
official playlist where all of the videos are going to be supported.
Every time one is played they're going to see the other ones that are related to that
video . That's it.
I hope you find this video today to be useful.
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that oh so much.
I appreciate you just being here actually, just watching so thanks for that.
I appreciate you spending the time with me today.
With that, I am finished for this day.
I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!