Hey, it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose farm, and normally I make gardening videos
But today I'm straying from that a little bit to talk to other small youtubers like me about how you can have some success in
YouTube getting your videos noticed against all of the noise. There's so many videos out there
How can you succeed? I titled this video "for the rest of us" because let's face it if you're super
Attractive super funny super talented or naturally attract attention in other ways
Then you probably don't need my advice to get noticed on YouTube. But what about us the small
Hobbyists the small youtubers who just want to share
Their passion for their hobby with the world and be a part of that conversation
How do you get your videos noticed? I've had some success in that regard
So recently, I've had a number of my videos below up past 100,000 views
I'm picking up over a thousand subscribers a month now in my slow season, so I'm starting to have some traction
so I want to share with you some of the tips that I've
that I've put together some of the things that I've learned over my first couple of years as a
Youtuber that might help you to get your videos noticed
I'm going to put those up right now on a
Graphic on the screen just to let you preview what I'm going to talk about
I'm also going to link those below the video in the first pinned comment
Indexed by time so that you don't have to waste your time on the topic that you're not interested in
For those of you who normally tune in to my channel to hear me talking about roses or gardening. Don't worry
My hands will be back in the dirt by next week. So this is just a temporary thing something
I felt I had to share with other small youtubers and let's go my first tip and it may surprise you where I start is
Fix your audio and I'm going to state the obvious here, but these are moving pictures
with sound and so you're making a topic video and the value you're adding to your
Viewer is that you're going to give them lots of information if they can't hear what you're saying?
They will click off no doubt about it
I had a tip early on in one of my videos from
another youtuber named Morgan Brown and props go out to him for at least being straight with me that my audio kind of sucked and
I looked back on the footage and I realized yeah
Nobody was watching to the end of the video because it went in and out of audio just on my camera
Microphone. So if you can get away from using just the internal mic on your cell phone or the internal mic on your
Camera and go over to something like a shotgun mic now
I'm inserting a picture of my shotgun mic here and you'll see it has this big fuzzy they call it a "dead cat" on
the top of the shotgun mic
That's to reduce wind sound or wind noise because I shoot an awful lot of my videos outdoors
Whatever your circumstances are, though
you want to make sure you're close enough to your microphone that you get good audio and you don't have static or hiss or
Widely, varying levels in your audio. So check that in editing
It will improve your watch through on your videos and watch time is what gets YouTube to recommend your videos
My second tip today is to get yourself out in front of the camera and it can be comforting
I admit to just get behind the camera and start taking shots of your subject. Maybe narrate from the background the problem
Is that there are so many other videos out there so much garbage being uploaded to YouTube every day
auto-generated stuff with robotic voices
There's nothing that is going to give you credibility to your audience quicker than seeing your real face
hearing your real voice and
In a fashion then being able to look you in the eye and tell how credible you are on your topic
So you have to get out in front of the camera and I admit it is really uncomfortable
Hey, I'm really uncomfortable right now. But the more practice you get in front of the camera
The easier will become and I promise you it will show up in your results in how much people watch your videos tip number three
give your audience something else to look at and
You'll notice already that I've changed scenes a couple of times in this video every time I bring a new tip
I've got a new background. It's completely unnecessary. I'm not nothing that's behind me is helping me to make a point about this video
It's simply because if you change your angle you change your scene
You reset the attention of your viewer and they will watch longer another great tip to make this work for you is to add
B-roll to your scenes "B-roll" is a picture
or a video that you've shot separately that you can either insert somewhere else on the screen or
You can have it overlaid in front of the background audio entirely and what it does again
Is it breaks up the monotony of having the camera just in front of you for 12 minutes or so ten minutes eight minutes
Whatever the length of your video
You will retain more of your viewers for more length of time if you change scenes
every now and again and you also add b-roll to your videos tip number four is to get your ego out of the way and
Frankly, it's number one in terms of its importance as a youtuber and it's probably number one in terms of its difficulty as well
I just didn't want to place it at the front of the video because I didn't want to scare you off
So what do I mean by get your ego out of the way? Well when you post something on a social platform like YouTube
You are bound to feel judged by the results of your video. So I'll give you an example here
I made a video on how to try to fix stretched seedlings
Early in the season and I spent two weeks on it
I think it's the best thing out there on the topic and it didn't do so
Well, it sort of stalled out at 2,500 views and went nowhere after that. And so that hurt my feelings
Meanwhile, I made a quick video on how to propagate roses from cuttings from a bouquet
Took me 10 minutes put very little effort into it just hammered on and it has done outstandingly
So with those two pieces of information
it's very easy for me to look at that and say I need to make less videos like this and
more videos like this
But that's not necessarily what it means the yuca tube algorithm and the way people receive your videos is a little bit arbitrary at times
So you can feel like they stomped you down or judged you harshly
When it's just a foible of the timing or the pacing or the length of your video or some other factor?
right
and also if you become a sudden youtube star and you start chasing that by making more and more videos of
exactly that same type that
Can be negative on your creative process as well. So what I'd suggest you do
I mean, you can't ignore the success or failure of your videos
but you definitely have to take it with an
Objective mind sort of set aside how you feel about it and just look at the factors
just look at what went into the video what the timing was what the
Length of the video was try to isolate the factors that made you successful or not successful
In those videos and try to take your personal feelings out of it hard to do tip number five is to add
captions to your video and first I'll talk about why and then I'll do some screen captures to show you how
so a lot of people are watching your videos on their mobile phones and not in every situation on a mobile phone can people be
listening to the audio so they can put it on to
subtitle motors or closed captioning mode and a lot in in my experience about
10% of my audience is watching in this manner
But that's not the only reason why you want to add captioning is to capture an extra bit of audience
the second reason is that YouTube Google can use the transcript that you approve from your
Captioning to create search terms for that video
So if you're talking constantly in my case about roses or propagating roses
Then that is going to make your video come up higher in the search results
so in order to make the captioning what you do is you go on to the
YouTube studio now in this case. You have to go back to YouTube studio classic. It's not a feature yet of the new
Studio beta you go into the video manager
And from the choose your video and from the Edit drop-down menu click
subtitles
CC add or click the add new?
Subtitles and usually within about 30 minutes of you uploading your video. Google will have made an automatic
translation or an automatic captioning of your video
So if you go ahead and click create new subtitles in the next menu, it will auto populate
Your video with timings with those subtitles that Google has created now if you just hit
Great
Publish then you'll get what Google has automatically published for you, but that's not good enough
You have to actually go through it line by line. The reason is because about half the time
It calls my the name of my business wrong about half the time that also
represents Rose r-o-s-e as
Rose R-o-w-s so it does an awful lot of little errors that can make
Problems for you in the way that your audience sees the words and also in the way that it shows up in the search results
So definitely go through it one time to make sure it's all correct hit publish and then your video will show up with the closed
Captioning symbol beside it, which will also make it show up higher in the search results
One more unnecessary change of background and I'm going to give you tip number six
Which is the one that I'm not following right now the tip is to stay within your zone of expertise
There's something that Google calculates. I don't know how they do it
I don't think it's a number you can look up but it's basically called
Channel authority and it relates to the topics that you talked about
so for instance if I make a video right now about
Roses it gets a lot of hits. A lot of my viewers are used to looking at content like that from me
And so Google knows with confidence. It can recommend that around that group and I will always get a number of hits
but if I go straight outside of my zone of expertise and suddenly I'm talking about butterflies or spiders or
Windsurfing. It isn't going to have that same confidence that can go around to the people who it's recommended my videos to before and
Get the same results
So it does react to you building
Areas of expertise within your channel. I've built around roses. I've built around propagation
I've been talking a little bit about how to run your own backyard nursery those things
I can have pretty good success with I
Suspect that this video here. The one I'm making on how to succeed on YouTube will not get recommended as strongly. That's fine
I'm making this mostly for myself and maybe for some other small youtubers
But for you if you see this make sure you navigate within your zone of expertise. You can expand it
You can take some things outside of it do some experimenting
but you do want to find a way to relate that back to the theme of your
channel so that you'll have your best level of success now back inside now for tips number seven and eight the first one of which
Is to customize your thumbnails?
So if you just upload a raw piece of footage to YouTube just something that you've shot
About your hobby what it will do to make the thumbnail is it will offer you and a selection of two or three different?
screen captures from your video from moments that it chooses itself and
Those are not great thumbnails
so your goal is that if people if your viewers
See that thumbnail either in the search results or on their home page or on the next?
Suggested videos that they're going to see it and they're going to want to click on it and those screen captures
Just don't do the job. So you have to find a way through an editor. I use
LibreOffice draw just to make something that's in that sixteen by nine format up to about two megabytes in size
That better epitomizes what your video is about and at least look
semi-professional in my case
I'm by no means a master of this but at least I put a couple of pictures of plants in my thumbnails
I have a
Readable piece of font that's pretty consistent between the videos and so people can recognize my videos if it comes up in their suggestions
There is a great school of thought now that talks about getting way better results by putting your face into the thumbnail
So especially if you can make it traumatic you do a little like like a reaction like ah, you know
Something like that that will tell a story it will make people curious and then they will click on your video first
So think about that. I'm not the best guy to give you advice on it, but certainly don't settle for the stock thumb
They also come out of your footage
And the last one here I'm going to talk about is to make your videos searchable and this is a general topic called
SEO or search engine optimization again. I'm not an expert on it
But basically what you want to be able to do is have a title that people would search for
especially for a smaller youtuber if you're a youtuber that has
500,000 subscribers and you just put down something generic
Like I can't believe my mom just did that then people don't have to search for it
They'll just click on you because they know you but if you're a small
Youtuber trying to make something on machine tools. It might make sense for you to have machine tools
in some searchable term in your title also in
the search terms that are below it so you get tags that you can put onto your video and add tags that both generally and
Specifically talk about your video
Also, even though this sounds repetitive you want to put those same terms and the same tags into your description into full sentences
and if you've CC door subtitle to your video when it reads that transcript it will
emphasize the same thing the the total effect of having
the title the tags the
Description and your transcript of the video all saying roughly the same thing about what your going to deliver to the customer
Or the viewer is that when they search something specific you have a better chance of showing up in the results
Okay, that is the end of my video. I think this is the point where most youtubers would say consider subscribing to my channel
But if you're not into gardening you would get very little value here
So I'm just gonna say thank you for watching and I wish you the best of success with your small youtube channel
I hope it works out for you
And if it does hey, share some tips below the video see if you can help anybody else along the way