The First Few Months: Posting to external sites?

[Altairsfriend]

So my channel is in its infancy, and I could use some pointers. For instance, what do you guys do when you upload your video? Do you post it to Reddit or some other sites? I guess what I'm asking is what is your uploading process?

P.S. What about your tags? The more the merrier?

 

[KiddieToysReview]

Tags/Title/Description go hand in hand and should be keyword rich. I suggest using longer tailed kw 3-5 words in addition to the basic 1-2 words. The more words you use the less competition and the easier it is to rank.
The first 3 months we posted to many social media: FB/Tw/Instagram/Blog/Tumblr. Total traffic = perhaps 100-500 views. It's only when we stopped wasting time with social media and focused on optimizing for YT search/suggested that traffic picked up and the channel got active. I only share now to Tw/Fb/Blog right after upload by clicking that share button, nothing else (no more than 30 seconds per video time spent).
I have found (for us at least as a kids channel) that social media is useless. Our audience is on YT, that's the social network we need to focus 100% on. There is one kids channel, Ryan ToysReview, that has exploded to 3mill+ subs in the last year with no social media at all. They focus on what their YT audience wanted and where they were.
There are exceptions I guess. I read the Hydraulic Press Channel blew up on Reddit, but that's because they had really cool play-doh characters being squashed that looked good in 10 second clips. A lot of people here also recommend Reddit. I don't use Reddit because our target audience of 2-5 year olds doesn't go there.
Good luck!!

 

[Altairsfriend]

Tags/Title/Description go hand in hand and should be keyword rich. I suggest using longer tailed kw 3-5 words in addition to the basic 1-2 words. The more words you use the less competition and the easier it is to rank.
The first 3 months we posted to many social media: FB/Tw/Instagram/Blog/Tumblr. Total traffic = perhaps 100-500 views. It's only when we stopped wasting time with social media and focused on optimizing for YT search/suggested that traffic picked up and the channel got active. I only share now to Tw/Fb/Blog right after upload by clicking that share button, nothing else (no more than 30 seconds per video time spent).
I have found (for us at least as a kids channel) that social media is useless. Our audience is on YT, that's the social network we need to focus 100% on. There is one kids channel, Ryan ToysReview, that has exploded to 3mill+ subs in the last year with no social media at all. They focus on what their YT audience wanted and where they were.
There are exceptions I guess. I read the Hydraulic Press Channel blew up on Reddit, but that's because they had really cool play-doh characters being squashed that looked good in 10 second clips. A lot of people here also recommend Reddit. I don't use Reddit because our target audience of 2-5 year olds doesn't go there.
Good luck!!

Thanks for the tips. We will try to emulate this strategy. With out giving away your trade secrets, how did you go about optimizing?

 

[Commander Skull]

Self advertisement in the first few months can be of a big help. If you ask me the biggest quality of the channel is the quality of its content and how it is represented. The quality of the jokes, the videos, the thumbnails the art and etc...
Be self critical before uploading a new video and say to yourself "Will people want to watch this and if so will they stay, is it good enough?" then go on to post it after you have answered that question to yourself.
Try posting to fb,twitter and w/e other site there is that your videos fit in.

 

[KiddieToysReview]

Thanks for the tips. We will try to emulate this strategy. With out giving away your trade secrets, how did you go about optimizing?

There are really no secrets as such. Just lots of hard work and lots of analysis and testing.

Study the fellow youtubers in your niche, taking note of their tags and descriptions. Go one step further and ensure you encompass all their tags and variations in your description. this goes back tot he old days of google and trying to get your blog ranked on the first page of search.

For tags, type into the YT search bar your tag/keyword then scroll through the alphabet to ensure you capture all possible search terms. Ex: "keyword a" "keyword b" ... "keyword z". Use everything suggested by YT that's relevant to your video as that's the raw search terms that viewers are searching for. Incorporate everything into your description and pick the most pertinent (highest search low competition) for your title and first few lines of description (Tubebuddy helps here with tag rankings).

Other things about optimizing your videos and time spent is study your niche and what's on offer already, not only in metadata but as a whole picture. Look for what's popular. Looks for trends and ideas they are following. YT recommends in many courses in the Creator Academy to create videos along popular topics and take advantage of key note events. Try to get onto the trends and hot topics in your niche.

For kids/toys channels last year it was giant surprise eggs, and several channels blew up to half a million+ subs on the giant eggs. The last few months it's "superheroes in real life" and such. That's what the algorithm (viewers) is hungry for, if you feed it what it wants it'll spit out your videos into search and suggested.

But it's a long involved process to get a feel for what works. If you see something work on your channel grab hold of it and feed more of the same into the algorithm. If you study carefully the releases of some channels and cross-reference in social-blade you can see the paths to growth that other channels had taken.

That's all just a start. There's so much more stuff here and there along the way.

 

[G and E(GSE)]

The best way to promote is through reddit as trending subreddit could get you alot of views[DOUBLEPOST=1467624737,1467624690][/DOUBLEPOST]

Tags/Title/Description go hand in hand and should be keyword rich. I suggest using longer tailed kw 3-5 words in addition to the basic 1-2 words. The more words you use the less competition and the easier it is to rank.
The first 3 months we posted to many social media: FB/Tw/Instagram/Blog/Tumblr. Total traffic = perhaps 100-500 views. It's only when we stopped wasting time with social media and focused on optimizing for YT search/suggested that traffic picked up and the channel got active. I only share now to Tw/Fb/Blog right after upload by clicking that share button, nothing else (no more than 30 seconds per video time spent).
I have found (for us at least as a kids channel) that social media is useless. Our audience is on YT, that's the social network we need to focus 100% on. There is one kids channel, Ryan ToysReview, that has exploded to 3mill+ subs in the last year with no social media at all. They focus on what their YT audience wanted and where they were.
There are exceptions I guess. I read the Hydraulic Press Channel blew up on Reddit, but that's because they had really cool play-doh characters being squashed that looked good in 10 second clips. A lot of people here also recommend Reddit. I don't use Reddit because our target audience of 2-5 year olds doesn't go there.
Good luck!!

How do you optimize your tags???

Care to elaborate.

 

[Darkinno]

There is easy way to know when to upload videos and how to pick trending topics,tags and stuff like that.There is this app you probably heard of.Its called TubeBuddy.It has a lot of cool features like:
-tags to use
-best time to upload (day-hour)
-trending on youtube at the moment
-video topic planner and much more..
I really reccomend trying it

 

[PositivelyBrainwashed]

You just have to experiment. I tried all the social medias out there and for me reddit and twitter were my biggest traffic. So I focused even more time on learning each platform. For me Twitter is amazing, since I can automate it and it becomes a free working employee that promotes all my videos and stuff 24/7, and it automatically grows on its own.