Asking for Tips on Growing a Channel

So I've got a personal channel, only a handful of videos on it at the moment. It's more of a hobby type thing than a business venture. I'm not trying to buy views and like/dislike ratio stuff. Trying to stay out of the blackhat area.

I've got a big project I'm working on and plan to use YouTube ads to promote it after it launches. Basically create a small trailer for it and see where it goes. But I was wondering if there was anything else I should look into on the promotion side.

And yes, I've already done all of the backend work for metadata stuff. Keyword targeting in the title, tags, description, all that jazz. I'm just looking for ways to help increase my reach.

If you guys have any tips that'd be great, thanks!

If you did a backend works right as you say,
than just target your audience with google and
facebook ads. And according to your niche you
can find other forums or networks that can be
usefull for your niche. Influencers may also help
you in promotion just highly target your campaigns.

hakann said:

If you did a backend works right as you say,
than just target your audience with google and
facebook ads. And according to your niche you
can find other forums or networks that can be
usefull for your niche. Influencers may also help
you in promotion just highly target your campaigns.

Click to expand...

Yep, I actually already have list of "competitors" to target as well as specific keywords that have a few hundred searches, are well targeted, and relatively cheap.
The only issue I have with analytics for my stuff is that I'm only averaging a hundred views or so per video, so it's tough to really narrow down how people are finding me. Most of it is organic searches, but no real specific keywords that would be worth targeting.

Ateriese said:

Yep, I actually already have list of "competitors" to target as well as specific keywords that have a few hundred searches, are well targeted, and relatively cheap.
The only issue I have with analytics for my stuff is that I'm only averaging a hundred views or so per video, so it's tough to really narrow down how people are finding me. Most of it is organic searches, but no real specific keywords that would be worth targeting.

Click to expand...

Take a look at your competitors keywords and see
for what words they are ranked, than use those keywords
for your videos. Sometimes its enough to get more views,
but sometimes its not that worth if keywords are not searched
much by itself.

Secondly find all pages that your competitors are using
to drive traffic, eg external sites that point to that video or
embeds it. Than follow same path as they did and put
your vids to those sites.

Overall try to find out how your competitors are driving
traffic and do the same. That will drive part of their future
traffic to your video, and that traffic is highly targeted and
likely to subscribe or buy your product or participate in
any activity you are promoting.

hakann said:

Take a look at your competitors keywords and see
for what words they are ranked, than use those keywords
for your videos. Sometimes its enough to get more views,
but sometimes its not that worth if keywords are not searched
much by itself.

Secondly find all pages that your competitors are using
to drive traffic, eg external sites that point to that video or
embeds it. Than follow same path as they did and put
your vids to those sites.

Overall try to find out how your competitors are driving
traffic and do the same. That will drive part of their future
traffic to your video, and that traffic is highly targeted and
likely to subscribe or buy your product or participate in
any activity you are promoting.

Click to expand...

Do you have any recommended thing you use to find their stuff out? I had Ahrefs for the trial but didn't find much in terms of keywords they were targeting unless I went video by video. And even then it was questionable.

Ateriese said:

Do you have any recommended thing you use to find their stuff out? I had Ahrefs for the trial but didn't find much in terms of keywords they were targeting unless I went video by video. And even then it was questionable.

Click to expand...

vidiq can give you list of keywords and rankings for
specific video. You can also see how many external
links points to particular video, and earlier you could
get a list of external links in vidiq, but not sure if its
still present in the program. Anyhow you can find it
on google search engine with special search commands.

You can also use some program to determine what
other competitors are using. Cant remember name
of program, but it works like this:
You enter your target keyword and softwer finds 10
or 100 best rated videos for that keywords and extracts
best simmilar keywords used by top searched videos.
That kind of optimization gives you starting advantage
and you show up high in search YT results at start/publish
of video, and maintain that position if you get views,
or degrades in case video is inactive.

All in all at start try to rank for lower competing words
and as your channel grows try to rank with higher
competing words. Its slow proccess and you need
to be persistant in order to succeed.

Ateriese said:

Do you have any recommended thing you use to find their stuff out? I had Ahrefs for the trial but didn't find much in terms of keywords they were targeting unless I went video by video. And even then it was questionable.

Click to expand...

There are paid tools for this purpose like vidiq.