- YouTube descriptions, what have they
ever done for your video?
Well, they could be doing a lot more,
if you actually wrote something in them.
- [Presenter 1] vidIQ.
- [Presenter 2] vidIQ.
- [Presenter 3] vidIQ.com
Hello, I'm Rob, welcome back to vidIQ, educating you
on your YouTube journey, and today's education
is all about YouTube video descriptions,
which means we have to kick this off with a question.
What I want you to do right now is pause this video,
which will probably ruin our watch time,
go to your last video, look at the video description,
just tell me roughly how big is it.
You can either answer by clicking on the voting card
up here, or answer in the comments below.
The truth is, for the majority of you, you're probably
not writing enough, so here are a couple of tips and tricks
to help you write better YouTube video descriptions.
So let's go through the hierarchy of importance.
The most important hook you have, to pull in the viewer,
is the thumbnail.
That's going to stop them from swiping or scrolling
through the videos that are suggested to them.
Then you have a title, which provides some clarity
for the video, and then the description,
tags are at the bottom now, these days.
Why, do you ask that.
Well, we've done a recent case study
to find out just how important tags are,
and you can watch it over here.
So, yeah, when it comes to marketing your video, make sure
you put most of your time, energy and resources
into the thumbnail and the title.
But the description does have its uses, and we'll start
with the beginning of your description.
There are two reasons why the beginning
of your description is important.
First of all, YouTube scrapes those descriptions
for keywords, and it may help your video appear in Search,
the higher those keywords are in the description,
the more likely they are to be found by YouTube.
Second of all, when people are searching through video
content, they will see a snippet of your description,
roughly the first 140 characters,
so think of your description as a Tweet
when you first start to write it.
If you're not sure how to start your description,
a good idea is to more or less repeat your title.
You've no doubt put in a lot of effort into your title,
and included as many keywords in there as possible,
so if you put that in your description, and then maybe
riff on the title a little bit, add a question in there,
or a few more keywords, that's a good starting point
for your video description.
The next thing you want to do is to include a subscribe link
to your channel somewhere near the top of the description.
Think of it as a point of sale.
Your viewer could be on the edge of subscribing
to your channel, and they just need a little bit
of encouragement, and seeing a subscribe link
in your video description may persuade them to do just that.
And you can make it even easier for them
with this little subscriber hack.
Simply copy and paste your channel home page,
and then add this bit of code to the end of it,
and when people click on it, it will give them
an automatic pop-up to subscribe to your channel.
This does only work on desktop computers,
but on a mobile it will still tune in to your channel page,
where your viewer may subscribe to you.
Next comes a paragraph where you can go into more detail
about your video content.
Again, this is where you want to be using as many keywords
as possible, so that YouTube can identify your content
with as many associated terms as possible,
which helps you in Search.
This doesn't mean keyword stuffing, where you're simply
adding tags to your video description,
that's against Terms of Service.
But it may mean you're writing natural sentences,
with a bit of repetition of those keywords.
If you want a good example of this, check out
the video description of this video.
The next thing you can do which can be really helpful
to viewers, especially on longer videos,
is to use time stamps.
Time stamps are very easy to create and work
on both YouTube descriptions and YouTube comments.
All you need to do is create a time with a colon,
for example, if you put in 1:53, that creates a link
that when you click or tap on it, it takes you
to one minute 53 in the video.
Now, as I say, if you've got longer videos,
then this can be a great way to break up the video,
and it gives you another opportunity
to include keywords in your video description.
And, once again, if you look in the video description,
you'll see some examples of this.
Next, there's nothing wrong with earning a little bit
of extra cash from your YouTube videos, from non-YouTube
tools, and that includes affiliate links
in your video description.
As long as you follow the rules.
To quickly explain affiliate links, these are links
to products and services that you create, that if the viewer
clicks on them and buys something from those sites,
you will earn a little bit of commission.
A simple example of this might be including
a affiliate's gear guide so you're telling
all of your viewers the type of camera, lighting,
and other things that you use in your videos,
and it gives them the opportunity to buy exactly
what you use, and you earn a little bit from that.
But as a disclaimer, let me stress this.
Make sure you check out all of the YouTube Community
Guidelines on how to use affiliate links and sell
products and services on your videos,
because you don't want to get in trouble,
and have a strike put against your channel.
Now it is likely that you'll want to include
these affiliate links among many other things
in all of your videos, and so that's where you can
start to use upload defaults.
You'll find this under Settings in the new Creator
Studio, and there is a section called Upload defaults.
Essentially, Upload defaults is all of the stuff
that you want to include in every single video,
so it will appear below everything else
that we've already talked about.
As a good example, if you go to the bottom of our video
description and work your way up, you will see
lots of things that come from our upload defaults.
For us, it's a case of answering commonly-asked questions,
such as who vidIQ are, whether we support
multiple languages, how can we download vidIQ,
and videos that may help you understand
how to use our tools.
We also include social media links in there, so that we can
communicate with our audience, whether they're on YouTube,
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and tell them when we have
new content on any of those platforms.
Upload defaults is something that you can do now,
so again, if you wanna pause this video, and ruin our watch
time once again, head on over to Upload defaults
and start to amend yours.
Once you've done that, it may take you half an hour
to an hour, then that applies to every single video
that you publish in the future.
Now I do have a couple more video description tips
and tricks up my sleeve, but just before I tell you
about them, if you're finding this video useful,
then there's no doubt that you'll find vidIQ useful.
It is a Chrome extension that allows you to research
YouTube, analyze any video on the platform,
audit your own channel and take actual steps
that will help grow your YouTube channel.
It is free to download, there is a link
in the video description, of course.
Oh, and something that I want to stress
at this point, as well.
If you see huge channels not paying any attention
to video descriptions and not writing anything in them,
that doesn't mean that you should do
exactly the same thing.
Those super-channels have already made it on YouTube,
and they can do whatever they like.
But when you're a smaller channel, trying to grow,
making a good description is one of those marginal gains
that gives you one or two percent more reasons
to click on your video, as opposed to another,
similar video of a channel of a similar size.
All right, time for a couple of extra tips and tricks here.
Go to your YouTube channel on a desktop computer,
click on the videos tab, and then grab that URL
and then you can use that as a link
to your most recent videos.
And also don't forget that if you want to include hashtags,
in your video above your title, you would add those
hashtags to your video description, you can use
a maximum of three, and they will appear as blue words
above your videos.
Whether you should use hashtags is an entirely different
question which we kind of answer over here.
Something else to remember about video descriptions.
If you change one of your video descriptions, it's not going
to transform your channel overnight.
This is a long-term game plan, you're trying to stack
the deck in your favor.
Constantly reinforcing the keywords that you use,
including links to other videos in your description,
and other playlists that send your viewers
on a feedback loop throughout all of your content.
You want to make it as easy as possible for your viewers
to find your content, and then stay in your own
little corner of YouTube, and that's helped through
not only video descriptions, but cards that you've seen
as well, and endscreens that you're about to see,
right now.
If you want more YouTube tips and tricks that will help
grow your channel, just like this one,
head on over to this video over here.
If you want to learn more about vidIQ, we've got a tutorial
video down there.
Thank you very much for watching,
enjoy the rest of your video-making day.