How come my videos get no views?
Why aren't people watching my videos?
My channel is too small to compete against those big channels.
Does YouTube hate me?
Does any of this sound familiar?
You're a small channel and no matter what you try to do
You just can't seem to get views on your videos
My name is Daniel and I'm here to help
I'm gonna give you a simple four-step strategy
that can get traffic flowing to your channel
And today we're gonna start with step 1
Titles.
Wait... before you even start
I know you think you've probably got titles figured out
But I'm here to tell you if your videos aren't getting any views
Your title suck
I know that sounds harsh
But I'm telling you that because my title sucked too
and the reason they sucked is like just didn't know how to do them properly
But I can show you how to fix that
Titles are the single most important part of your video
They're more important than your thumbnails.
They're more important than your content
And this is from a guy whose channel is devoted to making better content
But listen, there's a reason I say that
Because no matter how good your thumbnails are and no matter how great your content is
If nobody sees it
It's useless
So today we're gonna fix your titles.
And the first thing you need to master in order to do that is keyword research
First of all, you need to understand how YouTube works
YouTube doesn't just put your videos out there randomly
And wait to see who views it
and YouTube certainly doesn't play favorites if that's what you're thinking either
It looks at the information it has
and decides what to do with your video.
And the information that YouTube considers the most important
By far is audience behavior.
What are the viewers doing?
How are they reacting to your video.
Larger channels already have a built in audience.
They have subscribers that will watch that video when it's uploaded
and YouTube can figure out what those viewers think of the new video
They can look at the YouTube history of those viewers
and then suggest that video out to people
who have similar tastes and viewing habits
But when small channels just like mine upload a video
YouTube doesn't have a lot of traffic data to make those decisions
So it relies on what the Creator is telling it about the video
The metadata.
The single most important piece of metadata by far
is your title.
YouTube will take it and try to match it
with things that people are searching for to see how it performs
And then it can gather traffic data
but it does that in a very specific way
If the title you choose for your video
has a lot of competition
If it's something that a lot of people search for and a lot of videos have been made about
It'll stick it in line behind a bunch of other better performing videos
that have titles like yours
It's like being at the grocery store on a really busy day
and you get stuck in line at the register
behind 20 other shoppers with full shopping carts
What you need to do is look for an open register.
One that you can race over and get in line
Before anyone else tries to take advantage of it.
The key to those open lanes
is you need to find exact search term and phrases
That people are looking for
And
that research shows you you could potentially rank for.
This is where 90% of small channels blow it
Either they use titles that people do search for
but they have no chance of ranking for
or they come up with titles that nobody is searching for.
Let's use gaming channels for instance
Fortnite is one of the biggest games out there
and trying to make a video about Fortnite
that a small channel has a chance to rank for
is next to impossible
But not impossible.
"Fortnite Battle Royale" may be the game that you're playing
but if you use those words to start your title
*Buzzer sounds*
Because that's who's ahead of you in line
But if you spend a little time to rethink your title and try to find an open lane
Maybe you'll find that a lot of people like to watch
Fortnite videos where the creator isn't swearing
and using cuss words throughout the video.
So they search for
"Fortnite with no bad words"
Gamers out there
that is a 94 out of a possible 100 search ranking.
and a wide open lane.
But the trick here is you have to use those exact words in that exact order
There are several creators that I coach
And the most common mistake that I see them make
is they veer off course from their target
They see "Fortnite with no bad words"
and they decide they like the title
"Fortnite Battle Royale without swearing" better
*Buzzer sounds*
Let me be perfectly clear
Search is semantic.
Meaning, the search engine tries to match the results
with what it thinks the viewer is trying to search for.
So YouTube has a lot of traffic information about your video
and who's been watching it,
It may end up in Discovery for slightly different titles
But only because YouTube has that traffic data to work with
In your case... you don't have that
You're a tiny Channel. Your videos are unproven.
You don't have all of those views in traffic to tell YouTube
what the best place for your video is.
So listen to me very carefully...
Use the exact words in the exact order to create your title
Now you can add stuff to the end of the title to make it more compelling
You could take a title like 'Fortnite with no bad words'
And add 'Battle Royale Tips & Tricks' to the end of it
If you think that's more specific to your video
And it could actually help with where your video could be suggested in the future
Once it starts to gain some traffic
Let me show you some of my own successes.
On my other channel, Extreme Food Reviews
I wanted to make a video about 'How to make beef jerky'
But the research showed me, although that was a very popular search term
I had no shot at ranking for that
and I would have been lost in the back pages of YouTube
So I did a little more research and I was able to find that people search for the term
Air Fryer beef jerky
And that term was much easier to rank for.
It had hundreds of searches on both Google and YouTube
But nobody seemed to be optimized for the words in that specific order.
So, long story short guess who owns the #1 spot on YouTube
AND Google for "Air fryer beef jerky"?
*Clapping and cheering*
And that video continues to climb in views
And as it grows,
it gets suggested out next to other videos
with similar titles based on its performance.
And that creates a traffic snowball effect.
I just had to get that snowball rolling downhill to begin with
In fact, I have several videos on that channel that drive thousands of views every month
because of this keyword title strategy.
And keep in mind, that channel is only eight months old
and has less than 1,000 subscribers
So that is step one of this four-step strategy
I use several tools to do my research
Some of them free, some of them paid and I'll put links to all of them down in the description
And if you have any questions, drop them in the comments section below and we'll dig deeper
But if you've learned anything here today
Do me a favor
Hit the subscribe button and the notification bell
So you won't miss the rest of this conversation
Peace.