Come on folks, it's 2018 and you're still
not sure how to upload videos to YouTube.
Once more from the top.
Alright folks let's kick
this video off with a question and a
challenge for you: do you have a YouTube
video upload checklist? If the answer is
yes I want you to list it in the
comments below. All of the different
facets you go through when you're
uploading a video to YouTube; one of the
most crucial elements of the video
creation process. If you don't have a
checklist or you think it's undercooked
that's why we're here right now. Hello
everyone, my name is Rob welcome to
vidIQ. If this is your first time here,
we are the YouTube tool and channel that
aim to help you get more views and
save time. Any of the tools you see
throughout this video are from the vidIQ
Chrome extension. There is a link in the
description download it for free right
now. Otherwise let's get on with these
awesome upload tips and tricks. Now
before you even push the video onto
YouTube, I look like a cat here, there
should be one burning question in your
head: when is the best time to publish my
video to YouTube? If you don't have a
posting schedule that your audience
knows about, you just use your common
sense, or you post
videos whenever you feel
like it - you're doing it all wrong. Here's
a couple of simple tips to consider.
Go to your real-time analytics and as
long as you haven't posted a video in
the last 48 hours, you will see the natural
rhythms and cadence of your audience. The
peaks and troughs over the 48 hour
period. What you want to do is look at
when it starts to rise and post
videos probably an hour or two before
that rise. That's when your audience is
coming online to watch content all over
YouTube including yours. If you want to
upgrade your ability to find out when is
the best time to post then you want to
get the vidIQ best time to post
tool that's available to pro users. It
analyzes specifically your subscribers
activity and suggests a best time to
post. From there the next burning
question on your mind should be when
do I start uploading my videos to
YouTube. If you're going to publish
something at 9 a.m. and you start
uploading at 8:50 am, guess what: you're
doing it all wrong. You should be giving
yourself at least a 2 or 3 hour lead
if for nothing more than to allow your video
to process, especially if it's a 4k video
of a considerable length of time. But
you've got all sorts of other things to
consider which we're going to be going
through throughout the rest of this
video. So if you're aiming to publish at
9 am maybe you want to start at 6 am,
or more sensibly do it the previous day.
Now as your video is uploading to
YouTube you've got three boxes you can
be filling in: those are tags, titles
and descriptions, and if you haven't
given considerable thought to how you're
gonna fill out all of those boxes: you're
doing it all wr... Let's start with titles
first. You know we could do an entire
live stream on this - and we have! To
summarize what we said there ,you should
really watch that video, titles need to
have search intent. YouTube is the second
biggest search engine on the Internet,
make sure your titles are searchable and
people are looking for answers to the
content that you are producing. The title
also needs to act as more than just a
functional file name, and while we're on
the question of file name: does the file
name of the video you upload influence
the metadata?
YouTube says no *cough* excuse me. The title
needs pizzazz. Give your audience a
reason to click on your title. So instead
of 15 upload tips and tricks how about,
15 awesome upload tips and tricks for
2018. Or oh my god, I'm pregnant. Yeah now
that's not particularly true for me but
sensationalists title, if the content is
true, it's certainly worth doing. Or how
about something along the lines of: when
my worst day ever
turned into my best day ever. You're
pulling on the emotional strings there
so make sure your title has gravitas... I
love that word. Title length is something
you want to think about, too. You have a
hundred characters to play with but bear
in mind that on previews you get cut off
at around about sixty characters and
generally speaking you want your titles
to be a short and as powerful as possible
for your subscribers and a little bit
longer for search intent. Bear that in
mind. When it comes to your description
you have a five thousand characters to
play with so you could write an entire
essay if you want to and have time but
in the real world that's probably not
likely. If you do write a script or have
captions on your videos you have a
little bit of an advantage. You can take
a stripped down version of that, so your
core elements from the script or the
captions
and that can act as your description. The
most important thing to consider with
descriptions is that if you share your
content to other social media platforms
or when people are searching for your
content on YouTube, they can see the
first around about 150 characters of
your description. So really front load
the most important information in those
first two or three lines. Whether it be
keywords or again a really powerful
message that draws the potential
audience into your videos. The first part
of your description is vitally important.
Now let's move on to the somewhat
delicate topic of tags in 2018. Just how
important are they? YouTube would have
you believe that they're not important
at all anymore,
kind of ironic when on the video where
they post this information it has tags
but I'm just being a bit playful there. On
the other hand if you look at videos
from the past decade which rank very
highly, particularly in search heavy
content, you'll find that they're very
heavily optimized with tags. Here's what
we can say: tags is still a great way to
build out your titles and descriptions
and other similarly linked content to the
video that you're actually publishing
today. And if there is any marginal
metadata gain to still be had from
tags, then you're always going to be
better off than the person who doesn't
use tags at all. Any assistance you can
give to YouTube to help target the right
audience for your content is worth doing.
This is why we have the vidIQ
boost tool. It takes out all of the
legwork and allows you to add tags very
quickly to the tag box, or use the
autocomplete from vidIQ. Simply start
typing in something in the tag area and it
will give you suggestions to what you
can add to your tags. Next we have
arguably the most important part of the
upload process beyond the video itself
and that is thumbnails. If you're just
picking one of the auto-generated frames that
YouTube suggests, as long as YouTube's
not forcing you to choose that, or you're
spending very little time on your
thumbnails then I'm afraid you're doing
it absolutely wrong. Thumbnails are
another thing we could do an entire livestream
on, and we have, but we've also done
some other videos as well so check out
the entire playlist. I don't think
there's a better way to describe the
evolution of a thumbnail than to look at
the vidIQ Channel itself.
I've been making all of the thumbnails
here at vidIQ for a very long time and
you can see how I've worked really hard
to try and improve my thumbnails with
every new one I do. First of all it was
big bright graphics but it was
contrasting too much with me in the
foreground so it was important to make
the foreground and a background contrast
better. Then I tried to simplify the
objects, there were too many on screen, it
looks a little cluttered. Maybe a little
more focused on one particular thing. Next I
made a lot of changes to how I look.
Getting rid of the pasty white zombie
that you used to see and adding a lot
more color, definition and detail. As I
say for a lot more help on thumbnails do
check out our live stream there's a lot
of awesome stuff in there. Playlists, if
you're not adding every single video to
at least one playlist then I'm sorry,
you're just still doing it all wrong, and
I'm finding it difficult to cope right
now. There are several positives to
consider when you have playlists. If
people are watching videos in your
playlists, then when they finish one
video they move on to more of your
content. Playlists are also searchable on
YouTube so if you get really good
keywords and you get really good
playlists, again people are gonna be in
your YouTube ecosystem for a lot longer.
And when you create new playlists
YouTube treats that as new content. It's
like a new video to them so it's good
for consistency on your channel. Also
look at it from a content point of view.
If you have a video that you can't add
to any of your playlists because it's
not connected to any of them should it
really be on your channel because it's
probably not going to appeal to your
audience, unless you're
starting a brand new
series of videos on a particular piece
of content. Now there is a one more
metadata curveball we want to throw into
the mix and that's YouTube hashtags in
2018. Now don't worry you're not doing
anything wrong at this point because
it's a relatively new concept. If you add
hashtags to your video description, at
most three of those hashtags will appear
above your title on desktop and Android
videos, not currently on iOS but that will
probably change by the time you watch
this video. These have a very visually
powerful impact on what you see on
screen and they're also clickable and
searchable. Now we've done a video on
what we know about them so far and
guess what there's a link right here. Now
I'm going to keep pointing here because
this is another thing
you definitely want to be adding it to
your videos and that's cards. It's a
handoff to more of your content. Whether
the viewer is potentially losing a bit of
interest in what you're talking about or they
are really fascinated by something that
you covered in a small amount of detail,
like in this video, it's a great way to
keep viewers in your content so you get
more session watch time. Konichiwa,
willkommen, bienvenue. Why am I looking so
cheesy trying to say welcome in other
languages? Think about translations. Go to
your YouTube analytics and search for
your demographics and see if you can
better serve your audience from areas
where English isn't their native
language. You can go to the translation
tool and with vidIQ Pro you can
actually translate titles and
descriptions and tags into entirely new
languages. Again we've got a tutorial
right here if I haven't run out of cards
so check it out make sure that your
entire audience is well served with your
content. Another thing you may want to
consider when uploading your videos is
to caption everything. If you click on
the captions option right now
you should see perfect subtitles for
these videos and that's because I
manually transcribe every single video
that I do here at vidIQ. But there is a
way to speed up the process here if you
want to do it for free of course. When
you've uploaded your video, wait about 30
minutes and it should give you an auto
translated effort from YouTube. What you
can do then is download the SRT file and
then open it up with something such as
notepad plus plus and then you can go
through it and add all of the correct
punctuation, make sure that all of the
words said there are correct. For me it
takes around about half an hour for
every 10 minutes I translate. If
you really want to put the effort in and
make your videos with a very high
standard then captions is definitely
worth trying. Now yeah as a Video Creator
myself I feel your pain when it comes to
uploading. it's always small things that
I sometimes forget. This is where vidIQ
can help you out tremendously. In the
video editor/upload page we've got
the SEO checklist panel that's gonna
score your metadata, make sure that
you're giving yourself the best
opportunity to promote your content
through YouTube, but it's also has the 9
bullet point checklist to make sure you've
done things mentioned
in this video. If you go
to the video watch page of your content
it gives you a 15 bullet point checklist
which includes more things such as
replying to comments and pinning them so
make sure you visit that page as well
once the video has been uploaded. We're
not finished there. We've got some extra
bits and pieces as well. Start to check
the creator studio beta on YouTube as it
gets more and more comprehensive. You
can do changes to your videos there.
For example, in the Advanced tab you can
set the location there which I don't
think you can do on the old classic
version of YouTube anymore and they're
probably gonna add more features there
as well. I know they're starting to roll
out end screens and we haven't forgotten
about them so stay tuned for that. Also
consider what Sean McKnight calls the
breadcrumb strategy. That's teasing your
content before it's released. Whether
its mini clips, posting things in your
community tab, make your audience aware
of the content that's coming up and then
when you do release it, share extra bits
and pieces on Twitter, Facebook, wherever
you have a social media presence. And it
goes without saying. Once you've
published a video, you've still got
plenty of things you can be doing. That's
returning to the video to answer
comments within the first four hours,
really to try and drive up velocity and
engagement. And, long term, check the
analytics after 48 hours, 7 days an
entire month and see how the videos
performing and how it can influence the
content that you make in the future. And
here we are folks the final piece of the
upload jigsaw puzzle the end screen. But
this is not a place to say goodbye to
your audience, this is where the handoff
takes place. If you want to know more
about the YouTube secret formula in 2018,
click right here. And down here we've got
a channel audit tool from vidIQ which
will instantly give you a channel
health snapshots. Enjoy the rest of your
video making day and we'll see you on
those videos right now.