Ask any YouTuber and they will tell you that generating significant views and subscribers isn't easy. But with the right strategy and tools, any video creator can build an engaged subscriber base when they understand what those subscribers want to watch.

Appealing to an audience to watch content you are passionate about making is just the first step, you need to know how to reach them and get your videos discovered. Our guides to how to guide more views on YouTube will give you the best tips to succeed on the platform.

How To Get More Views on YouTube

Do you want to make money on YouTube? Millions of creators are earning a very good living from the platform by uploading content that drives huge views and engagements. Whether that income is from advertising revenue, merch sales, or brand deals, we keep you updated with best practises and ideas.

How To Make Money on YouTube

Do you know how to do keyword research so you understand what videos people are actually searching for on YouTube? Do you know how to create a custom YouTube thumbnail? Do you know how to create a Playlist on YouTube?

vidIQ has a ton of tips that will help every creator maximise their video content. We publish content every week to keep you up to date with all the best practices.

YouTube Tips & Tricks

If you’ve put off creating your own YouTube channel because you’re overwhelmed with the choices you need to make or are panicking because you feel you lack the right skills to succeed, worry no more and welcome to the only resource you’ll need to fulfill your video creator dreams.

If this is your first time here, we have a 

 that aims to educate you on your YouTube journey. And if it is your plan to grow your channel, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, and click on our notification bell so you don't miss any of our latest tips, tricks, advice, and news.

How to Start Your YouTube Channel: 10 Top Tips

We promised 20 tips to kickstart your YouTube channel, so let's start delivering on that promise with 10 tips in this post and 10 tips in the 

. All the tips are covered in this video too:

So amazingly, there are still some people out there who are thinking of starting a YouTube channel and have been for months, possibly even years. My advice to you is, ready or not, start now. And I'm not telling you this as a New Year's resolution. Every moment you hesitate or procrastinate, there are thousands of video creators starting their YouTube channel today, and gobbling up all your potential audience. You don't want that.

Feel the fear, do it anyway. Start, press record. Record whatever you want today. It doesn't matter if it doesn't end up on YouTube. You need to gain experience in getting in front of the camera, getting behind the camera, using your editing program. You need to start creating content to find out whether or not you enjoy making videos before you know whether or not you enjoy being a YouTuber.

Tip #2 Learn How YouTube Works, No Seriously:

The chances are, that the first video you make is going to absolutely suck. Fantastic, you've made a video. You've made the first step, and in six months’ time, you'll look back at that first video and think yeah, that really was terrible, but you've gotta start the journey somewhere. And with that, you've gotta start your YouTube channel somewhere as well, even if you're not ready. Create a YouTube account, upload a video to YouTube. You don't have to publish it, that's the important thing.

You need to gain experience going through the workflow of uploading videos. The last thing you want is having a brilliant video ready to upload, but you don't know how the YouTube system works. Again, experience is going to trump any advice any of us can give you, so record a video, upload it to YouTube. You don't have to publish it.

Tip #3 Develop a Strategy you Will Actually Follow:

While getting some practical experience behind you is obviously a good thing, you also want some form of strategy. So, answer these questions:

What do you want your channel to achieve on YouTube

, and when you're answering this, try and answer it from a viewer's perspective, not your perspective. So I don't want to hear about hitting 10,000 subscribers, a million views, or whatever. If your viewers know that you're in it for your own self-gain, they will see through it and immediately switch off. Viewers want to know what they can gain from the content, and you want to sell that as much as possible in your videos.

 Again, try and be as specific as possible. What age range? What gender, if you are going to a particular gender? What type of demographic? What are they interested in? You need to know who's going to watch your content.

 There are millions of gaming channels out there, hundreds of thousands of Fortnite channels out there. How are you going to distinguish your content from everybody else who's already on YouTube making content? You need to disrupt the status quo, not join it, because you'll never be seen.

how are you going to deliver this content?

 Is it going to be every day, once a week, at a particular time of the day? Think about when your audience is most likely to watch YouTube, and how much YouTube they can watch per week, and then tailor your content to those watching habits, and think about whether you're going to do video on demand, live streams, what's going to be best for you and your audience?

Tip #4 Find Your Niche and Build the Hell Out of It:

live streams, you'll know this one off by heart. Niche down. Let me give you a quick example. What's your channel about? If you're giving an answer such as, "My channel's about beauty, and it's about travel, "and it's about vlogging," then it's about too many things. 

. It should be about one specific topic, when you start your channel, because you need to appeal to a very specific audience.

Once you've grown your channel, and you've got millions of subscribers who fall in love with you, you can take them on a journey wherever you want, but to begin with, the audience is only interested in the content. They have no investment in you. Try and remember that. It's a cruel lesson to understand, but it will help you when you first start out on YouTube.

Once you've thought about and answered all of these questions, I want you to wrap it all up in a nice little present, called your value proposition. This is your elevator pitch. Try and tell your audience who you are, and why they should watch you, in around about six words.

. It tells you the who, YouTubers, video creators, and why they should watch, because they will learn how to grow their channels. But we've managed to do that in four words. Now it's your turn.

Tip #6 Invest in the Right Audio Equipment:

If you've just started out on YouTube, and you're wondering what your first tech upgrade should be, it is 100% audio, and here's why. Bad audio is so much more distracting than bad video, and everybody hates onboard microphones. 

So if you can, get yourself a dedicated microphone for your camera,

 and if you're recording from a computer, you can't go far wrong with a Blue Yeti.

Tip #7 Create a Formula with Template Videos:

Videos need structure, so when you make your next video, try to think of how you will develop a show formula, that you can use as a template for your future videos. Remember at the beginning of this video, I literally gave you a hook. An introduction, a teaser to what's going to be going on for the rest of this video. Then we have the branded intro, followed by an introduction to who we are for new viewers, a call to action to subscribe to our channel, and then we jumped into the meat of the content where we are right now, and at the end of this video, you'll see how we round this all up.

Your show formula will take time to structure, and it will evolve over the course of your YouTube journey. Try and keep an eye out for this when you watch your favorite YouTubers. As rough and as random as they might appear, there is always structure and story behind each video, and that's why you watch them.

Some people love analytics, others hate them, but there are a couple that are crucial to keep an eye on, whether or not you want to look at that analytics. The first is 

This represents how enticing your titles are, and how clickable your thumbnails are. Check the click-through rate for your channel as a whole, and on individual videos as you test. I'm not going to give you all of the same target to reach. Check what your current click-through rate is, and whether it's two, four, six, or eight percent. I want you to try and improve that by two to three percent this year. It will bring in so many more views.

The other metric, as it always has been, is 

. Generally speaking, the more watch time you get, the more YouTube is going to promote your content. But if you make shorter videos, that doesn't necessarily mean you must make longer videos, because your audience might not react very well to those longer videos.

What I will say is maximize the value of your watch time in the videos that you have. That's by looking at relative audience retention. How does your video stack up to similar videos, in terms of whether people are still watching or not, and try and improve the relative audience retention. Having said that, if your average view duration is 60, 70, 80%, you're doing really well, and it gives you a license to try testing longer videos.

Verify your YouTube account. That will give you access to the most important tool on YouTube, which is custom thumbnails. We've got a video here on how to do it.

Tip #10 Create an Engaging, Interesting Channel Banner:

If I see another generic cityscape, or rolling hills in the channel banner when we do channel audits, I'm going to rip out my hair.

10 more tips or creating and growing your YouTube channel

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level and 

 then make sure to download vidIQ. Join over 1 million other users and use vidIQ to help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

Members of the vidIQ family that have upgraded to our Boost and Pro packages get immediate access to the Academy 

 so you can kickstart your YouTube success today! Access to the exclusive vidIQ academy will give you a huge advantage over your competitors from the get-go. 

Kick off your YouTube dreams with the tools you need to launch YOUR channel. We've got the top tips just for you!

How to Start a YouTube Channel: 10 Brilliant Tips

The e-mail scam is nothing new, but it's just as easy to click the wrong link or disclose the wrong information, and just like that, all of your data falls into somebody else's hands. The most recent is this spoof email, masquerading as coming from YouTube telling you that viewers were complaining about your spammy videos. But never fear, because YouTube will review your channel if you pass over all of this information in an email.

Yeah, rule 101 of scams: if an email makes you go, "Hmm," chances are it's a scam. In terms of scam emails, this is one of the better attempts at deception. The contact name suggests it's from YouTube Support, the images are on point, and much to my surprise, there are no glaring spelling or grammar mistakes. However, YouTube would never threaten to close your channel without referencing its comprehensive guidelines and policies, and like every single well-respected, trustworthy company in the world, they would not ask for details about your channel, or, indeed, your password.

Scam emails always encourage you to compromise the security of your data. And in another one of these dodgy emails that was supposedly from YouTube, they even tried to convince the recipient that they would need to disable two-step phone verification on their YouTube account. Seems legit…...

With all this in mind, we have two simple pieces of advice: Never send sensitive information over email, and if you receive an unexpected email, don't do anything directly from the email. For example, if you reset your password on any account on the internet, you may receive an email asking you to click on a link. And that should be okay, because it's an action you started, and you're aware of our email.

But if, for example, you receive an email out of the blue telling you that one of your videos has received a copyright claim, don't click on the link within the email, go directly to your YouTube channel and investigate the issue yourself. Because, as convincing as this email looks, who knows what this button actually does. If in doubt, dismiss the email, and always go to the source, which will tell you exactly what's going on.

We asked YouTube what information we should expect from an email, and they said that while they may provide analytics about your channel in emails, they would never ask for personal information, pin codes, or passwords. You should also check the authenticity of the email sender. Obviously, genuine emails from YouTube will be authenticated, and you can find more information via the help page on screen now, which you can read from the link in the video description.

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level then make sure to download vidIQ. It will help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

Creators, you've all worked really hard to build up your YouTube channels. Don't lose it to a scam!!

Don’t Fall for YouTube Email Phishing Scams!

YouTube can be frustrating. You think you're doing everything right, but perhaps you’re actually making one of the five fundamental mistakes that are derailing your channel. In this week's TubeTalk podcast we'll unpack those five common mistakes YouTuber's are making - 

Tube Talk, the YouTuber's podcast, is dedicated to helping you become a better video creator so you can get more YouTube views, and subscribers. This week we’re very lucky to be joined by the one and only Benji Travis.

Benji is a YouTube mastermind. He's behind the 

 channel which has over 1.6 million subscribers, as well as his own cooking channel, 

, which has over 367,000 subscribers. He is one half of the team at 

, and he's the co-author of YouTube Secrets, one of my favorite books. Through his multiple social media based businesses he earns a seven-figure income.

Click on the above link to play this week's TubeTalk podcast to find out the top 5 mistakes YouTubers are making. In this post we take a look at one - a lack of clear direction and goals.

There are a lot of YouTube creators doing things right, but there are many more that aren’t doing the basics. Benji confirms that because YouTube is so big it can get very confusing so it's important to have some guidance when you first start. There are so many resources (including TubeTalk) available to teach you how to navigate this new frontier we call YouTube.

But at the end of the day, it's still a content platform, and there's still some basic stuff that creators are not getting. We’ll be taking a 

deep dive into all of these basics during the podcast

 but let’s discuss one here: how many creators lack clarity or a clear goal of what they want to accomplish on the platform.

And that can be different for everybody, but focus is important because If you don't have some kind of clarity for yourself in terms of who you're trying to reach, what type of content you're going to stand for, what people will know you for, what your channel's going to look like, what your videos are going to be, you're going to be just all over the place.

Starting with clarity in mind, your YouTube goals become a kind of mission statement. Define what kind of content you’re passionate about and you want to share with people. Then, have a personal goal for exactly what you want to get out of being on YouTube. A lot of people just jump into it, especially young people. They just want to be famous. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's an uphill battle because what does that even mean?

People think they can start uploading content to YouTube, and then they'll be famous. Well that really isn't going to help you. But by being clear, defining what kind of content you want to create for what audience, is a goal to get you going. It's well worth determining your goal and investing time in it. It's going to save you a lot time rather than just filming random stuff online that doesn't really apply to you.

You can find out the four other major mistakes that YouTubers make by listening to the podcast! 

 for his insights. You can follow him on 

Subscribe to TubeTalk: The Video Marketing Podcast

TubeTalk has been informing video creators amd marketers since 2014, and is one of the most respected and listened to podcasts in the online video industry. Subscribe today so you never miss an episode! You can find vidIQ's TubeTalk at:

Don't forget to leave us a review if you love the show!

Are you a YouTube creator making one of these 5 huge mistakes? Take a listen to this week's TubeTalk podcast and find out where you may be going wrong.

The Five Big Mistakes YouTubers Make: TubeTalk Episode 164

The 4th of July is one of the top tentpole events in the US, and like Thanksgiving and Christmas, there are huge opportunities to create content around this national holiday that will appeal to YouTube viewers. But what keywords and terms are YouTube users searching for around this event? Let's take a look.

Top 15 4th of July 2019 Keywords on YouTube

If you plan on creating a 4th of July video then start by understanding what keywords viewers are searching for, and also when they are searching for the content. Knowledge of both will give you a heads up on what and when to publish.

, we can confirm that the following are the most searched for 4th of July keywords and phrases on YouTube right now:

We also took a look at whether there was a significant difference in the average number of people who searched for either 'Fourth of July' or '4th of July' on YouTube each month. Interestingly, there wasn't a lot in it, so you're safe to use either (or both) in your YouTube titles and descriptions:

 - 26.8K searches average monthly searches

When are Viewers Searching for 4th of July Content on YouTube?

Just as important for any YouTuber creating videos around a tent-pole (and potentially evergreen) event is to know just when viewer interest is peaking. 

 data for the last 5 years confirms that the holiday trends between 29th June - 5th July so publishing videos this week would give you the best chance of being seen so you can attract those views and subscibers.

Finding Opportunities to Create 4th of July Content on YouTube

Alongside the main keywords being searched for, we took a deeper dive into the food and DIY categories, both of which land themselves very well to content ideas. When it comes to food for the celebration, it's no surprise that snacks, and party food top the list:

Top 10 4th of July Food Keywords: YouTube

If you want an idea of the type of 4th of July recipe ideas that YouTube viewers love, take a look at this upload, published by Twisted on July 2nd 2018. To date, it has generated 1.3M views, and still attracts around 150 views per hour:

4th of July and DIY is also a very popular content theme with 'Dollar Tree' topping the list of keywords associated on YouTube with this tentpole event.

An excellent example of a channel that uploaded content that took advantage of the viewer's interest in 4th of July plus DIY'ing the celebrations using Dollar Tree is 'My DIY Home'. It uploaded a video on May 27th 2019 which has already generated a healthy 28.5K views:

4th of July videos are hugely popular on YouTube - here are the top most searched keywords around this major U.S. tentpole event.

How to Win on YouTube with 4th of July Content

 will know Rob Wilson. He's one of the very public faces of the company, and the man behind the Channel Audits & Q&A livestreams as well as hundreds of how-to videos on a range of YouTube topics. Oh, and you can ask him 

 as he's a world class expert on that topic by now.

Rob has helped build the vidIQ channel to 362K subscribers and 16.8M views with his passion as a creator. His dedication to the YouTube community is unrivaled as he strives to inform creators across the globe every week about tips, tricks, and best practices. You can take a deeper dive into Rob's story about how to go full time on YouTube 

vidIQ's Rob Wilson: How to Go Full Time as a YouTuber

For many years, just like many of you, I made videos on YouTube in my spare time. Desperately trying to find a niche in the highly competitive tech sector. Well let's face it, every sector on YouTube is highly competitive.

. It sounds pretty mundane I know but nobody else was doing it and YouTube decided I was the authority on the subject. And my channel quadrupled in size. But in between all of this, I did one tiny tutorial on a vidIQ tool. Tweeted it out to my audience and thought nothing more of it.

Within 24 hours, the real boss of vidIQ had contacted me, loved my work, and wanted me to do more. 12 months, 50 videos and one work visa later vidIQ offered me the chance of a lifetime. To transfer my hobby, my passion, my extra money on the side into a full-time career. I thought about it for all of 2 seconds and said yes.

18 months, 250 videos, 7 conferences, 10 million views, and 300,000 subscribers later, you know what? I think I made the right choice.

Rob Wilson helped build the vidIQ YouTube channel to 362K subscribers. Read his story about going full-time as a professional YouTuber.

How to Go Full Time on YouTube - Rob Wilson's vidIQ Creator Journey

For years, many have considered YouTube notifications both a blessing and a curse. For viewers, notifications help inform them when content comes out from their favorite creators. But for many creators who rely on this notification system, it’s been a little shaky for the past couple of years. YouTube have finally acknowledged this and are doing something to improve it.

A quick reminder of how notifications work. When a viewer subscribes to channel, a bell icon appears that gives that new subscriber the chance to personalize their notifications from that channel. Yes, I know it still seems a little daft to subscribe to a channel and then have to tap the ‘All’ option to make sure you get notifications, but that's the YouTube world we live in. That is why you will see many creators asking their viewers to not only subscribe to their channel but click on the notification bell as well.

Once you've helped your viewers jump through all of these hoops to get their notifications, is there any way that you, as a video creator, can help YouTube in distributing those notifications to those viewers? Yes!

YouTube have recently released two videos on the subject . The first video gives you a YouTube viewers perspective, explaining how to make sure your account and devices are set up so that you should receive those YouTube notifications. You can watch that video 

The second video from the Creator Insider channel talks a little more about the process of sending notifications, and this is the golden piece of information. And this sounds so simple, and it makes me wonder why I didn't think of this before!

One Simple Trick to Get More YouTube Views from Subscribers!

There are millions of video creators publishing tens of millions of videos on YouTube every single day which results in billions of notifications. And when do you think most of those videos are published? On the hour. In the video, they only showed this graph for a snippet of a second, but it illustrates when notifications are sent out by YouTube, and as you can see, there are massive spikes on the hour and presumably many spikes on the half hour.

It's also interesting to note how the overall volume shrinks to almost nothing during what I assume are the early hours of the morning. Now, of course, I am not suggesting that you publish your videos at 3:00 a.m. in the morning because everybody's asleep. But, what I am suggesting is that you test publishing videos at slightly unusual times. For example, if you usually publish your videos at 7:00 a.m. in the morning, try publishing them at say, 6:53am.

First of all, if we use YouTube’s graph as evidence, the notification of a published video has a much better chance of reaching subscribers instantly rather than getting stuck in a huge notifications spike on the system.

Secondly, let's say that a subscriber gets lots of notifications on the hour, wouldn't you prefer to have yours at six or seven minutes earlier to ensure you’re top of the list?

And finally, don't forget that YouTube allows creators to schedule videos at 15 minute intervals, so if you publish your video at a time such as 22 minutes or 53 minutes past the hour, you're slotting your video's go live time into a pocket of quieter notification traffic.

A video's initial view velocity can be crucial to the long-term success of that content. If you get a wave of subscribers flooding your video in the first couple of hours with views and watch time, that will send positive signals to YouTube who should then, in turn, share your content more broadly.

So now you know not to post videos on the hour, but what hour of the day should you be posting your videos? Well it just so happens that vidIQ has the perfect tool to help you. It analyzes your subscribers activities and suggests when is the best time to post your content on YouTube along with a dozen other tools that will help you reach research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own YouTube channel, and take actual steps that will help grow your channel.

Did you know there's one very simple (and kind of obvious trick) that could get you more YouTube views from your subscribers?

How to Get More Views on YouTube From Your Subscribers

Life as YouTube's largest solo video creator has been a rollercoaster for PewDiePie. Overall interest in his channel has waned, with the exception of occasional controversies, but we all know why this apparent decline has happened. It's because the passion shown towards his race to be the 

most subscribed to channel on YouTube against T-Series

 has dwarfed all the other things PewDiePie's done in the past.

We all knew this story would come to an end and it abruptly did when PewDiePie asked his audience to stop the 'Subscribe to PewDiePie' meme. But what effect did that have for PewDiePie? Yup, interest fell through the floor. T-Series became the subscriber king and we all moved on.

, he did go into a tiny bit of detail about his analytics but we thought we'd take a closer look because, in reality, is PewDiePie better off today than he was a year ago?

Let's start off with this golden nugget of data. PewDiePie's video about his analytics, is, after seven days with seven million views, already performing better than his average video, which is expected to get six and a half million views after 28 days.

Oh, how did he get that data, Rob, I hear you ask? And what on earth is this tool? I want it. I'm glad you asked because it's now time for the VidIQ shameless plug claxon. In the new YouTube Creator Studio, if you view one of your videos, YouTube will display the expected high and low end of views your average video is expected to get. It's good for seeing if a particular video's done well for your channel. But we decided to take that concept a monumental leap forward with our 

 which tracks the performance of any video on YouTube during its first 28 days and compares it to the video's channel average, your channel average, or any channel on YouTube's average.

With this tool, we can see how an average video performs on PewDiePie's channel. And since he posts every single day, we've got plenty of videos to look at. What you will find is that PewDiePie is remarkably consistent with one or two exceptions, every video gets between five and 10 million views.

Occasionally, a video may over perform its average, but very, very rarely will you find a dud on the channel. But obviously, it leads to a question that all video creators get asked. PewDiePie has nearly 97 million subscribers and yet, each video only gets between five and six and a half million views. That's less than 10% of his potential subscribers watching his content and not all of those views would be subscribers.

What would help, at this point, is if we could compare PewDiePie's video view velocity against another channel's stats. Let’s pick T series! That channel seems to have much more unpredictable results with views after 28 days, averaging between 475,000 and 900,000 views. T-Series may be the most subscribed to independent channel on YouTube (and by independent, I mean independent from YouTube, so not YouTube Music).

But, on average, less than 1% of T Series’ channel subscribers will watch each video. Now of course, this is offset by the fact that T-Series publish several videos a day and some of their videos get hundreds of millions of views, which helps boost the numbers. But what you can argue here is that PewDiePie has a loyal, consistent audience because they know what to expect from every single video. In contrast, T-Series, by nature of its eclectic music and movie content, is very much a pick and choose what you fancy type of channel.

Now I'm not going to argue about which is the better type of channel to have, it just represents different generations of the YouTube platform. On the one hand, you have the individual video content creator, the personality versus the big movie label, big content, lots to see brand channel.

Mr Beast: Twice as Many Average Video Views than T Series or PewDiePie

But what about the channel that achieves both? Lots of subscribers and an amazing number of views for the size of a channel - we've got just the example. Each video on Mr Beast’s YouTube channel averages, and let me just say that again, averages 13 to 16 and a half million views. But the incredible thing is that this channel is just, and I'll say this again in relative terms, just 21 million subscribers. It has a quarter of the subscribers of either PewDiePie or T-Series, yet averages at least twice as many views per video.

If we dive into a bit of a detail. Each video on Mr. Beast's channel seems to actually increase in velocity after 24 hours, almost as if millions of subscribers get notifications, flood the video with views, which sends positive signals to YouTube, who, in turn, share the video out to an even wider audience.

In contrast, PewDiePie's videos follow the much more traditional route of sharp initial velocity before tailing off after three and seven days. And when you look at the channels side by side, look at how even after seven days, Mr. Beast videos still have upward velocity and momentum, whereas PewDiePie and T-Series average videos completely flatten out, like many videos do on YouTube. That's a sign of YouTube continuing to push all of Mr. Beast's videos on browse pages and suggested videos, long after the videos have gone live.

So, is PewDiePie any worse off today than he was a year ago? Well, the stats do speak for themselves. In May 2018, PewDiePie's channel got 218 million views. In May 2019, PewDiePie's channel got 334 million views, an increase of 53%. PewDiePie, I think you're doing just fine. As are T-Series, who are getting along just fine, but you know what? Mr. Beast might be doing just a little bit better.

PewDiePie thinks his YouTube channel might be dying. Let's investigate by comparing his average video view count against T Series and Mr Beast.

PewDiePie's YouTube Analytics (Featuring T Series and Mr Beast)

Welcome to another episode in our exciting new series that focuses in on some of the most successful Youtube creators around today. We're taking a look at their creator journey, and the often surprising story behind their success on YouTube.

, a family vlogging channel which has to date generated 2.6 million subscribers, and 680 million views. You can read the full transcript of The Ohana Adventure's story below:

The Ohana Adventure: Journey to 680 Million YouTube Views

Hello, my name is Jase. But you may know me better as the dad from my family's YouTube channel of the Ohana Adventure. Ohana means family and our family is always an adventure. Together with my wife Rachel and our six children, Klailea, Rykel, Shae, Wyatt, Evie and Cora, we get to share our lives through our daily vlog channel that now has almost half a billion views. But how did we get here? Well this is our creator's journey.

Before creating the Ohana Adventure, I owned a skate company. I was making skateboard videos to gain awareness and to use as a promotion for my entrepreneurial company. Through those videos I learned how to shoot, painstakingly edit and tell a story. These were useful skills that would help with creating our own family channel in the future.

But during the skate video days, I didn't know that there was an algorithm controlling the visibility of our videos. But I strived to test and better understand the inner workings of YouTube with every video. I wanted to create positive controversy in my videos to get conversations going. So I decided to film the thing that does not go together in my industry which was skateboarding underwater. The video went viral and got millions of views in just a short period of time. The video now has 20 million plus views but that all happened from my thoughts which was from the comments section which added up so quickly due to the conversation going on the validity of actually being able to skateboard underwater.

I then created videos of cars running over my boards, and those took off as well. After the 20 million mark and the success of the others videos in 2016, my wife and I sat down and decided to use what we learned to start a family vlog. We decided to post daily and we haven't missed a day in over two years.

Now getting the kids on board was very interesting. They loved YouTube, they watched YouTube, and they wanted to be a part of it, but then figuring out the dynamic of a family of eight being on camera was hilarious. Now creating those videos were a little bit daunting at first and it was harder than I had expected to gain traction, but we focused on making more original and shareable content and so our first Ohana Adventure video to really take off was how to family videos.

We decided lots of families wondered about having kids, there was always new moms, families wanting to wonder about having lots of kids and what to do about it, and so we started these how to videos, the first one that actually took off was 

And then we ran with that style of content for another year, videos based on those moments that were happening in our family life, like Klailea’s broken wrist and videos sharing advice with other families, like how to travel with six kids and a bunch of other how to videos, how to pack bug out bags, how to pack a car for a road trip, lots of stuff like that that really started to take off for us.

Then I've had a background in music and writing music since I was a teenager, and I really wanted to try that. So we tried something new. I was watching and waiting for the new music videos coming up from the top pop artists and Taylor Swift came out with, I don't even remember the title of her's now. You'll have to cut this part out! Taylor Swift then came out with Look What You Made Me Do, and my daughter at the same time was talking about this crush that she had at school. So I decided to create a parody called My Teen Crush Is At School. But our channel was doing so well on teen crush for keywords that we just called the video Teen Crush. And it crushed it. A million views overnight, 30 million views within the month and it kept going. To date it has over 83 million views.

We then filmed about ten other parody videos using that same algorithm and that same style for our family that worked with our family, we wanted to film and they crushed it. In early 2018 we added family challenge videos because we do that anyways. I run away from the children in grocery stores all the time just for fun. Then we started mystery door challenges and blindfold hide and seek challenges that we still play to this day.

The family games and challenges were so fun and something we did naturally as a family, these were videos we could bulk film and then wrap them in a vlog. That's very helpful for marketing content every day. I mean, every day is an adventure but some days you're just exhausted or things go wrong, or they're a little less adventurous than other days. With the challenges, we can make new and ambitious content that seamlessly adds to the vlogs and propelled our channel forward.

As creators, we're much more focused and specific when filming and editing our videos than we were at the start. But we still film our family having fun and being adventurous. As a family, we're so blessed by all of our success. Our family has always loved traveling and playing together. Now we're able to do that full-time. It's so inspiring when fans send us their stories and tell us how our content helps them in their family situations. It's that kind of love that keeps us making videos.

In the future, we're planning on making lots and lots more of exactly this style content, because it's natural to us, it works with our channel, and we have so much fun doing it. When you're making your own videos it's okay to be specific and still have fun making your content. Whether you're a creator who's just getting started or a seasoned pro, remember to be consistent, keep filming, keep uploading and always have fun with it. That translates through your content.

Family vloggers The Ohana Adventure have generated 2.6M subscribers and over 680M views on YouTube. Take a deep dive into their creator journey with us

How to Get 2.6 Million YouTube Subscribers - The Ohana Adventure Story

When you are logged in to YouTube you should see your profile logo in the top right hand corner. Click this and then go to settings. From here, you need to click on the "view additional features" link which will then show you all of the YouTube features that are available and whether or not you have access to them.

As we can see, currently this test channel does not have access to features such as custom thumbnails. But fear not because there are no views, subscriber, or watchtime requirements to use this tool. All you need to do is verify your YouTube account. And, you can do that from this very screen.

Next to your profile logo and channel name at the top, you will find a blue "Verify" button. Click that to start the process. To verify your YouTube account, Google will send you a verification code to a phone number either through an automated voice or text message which you can choose on this screen. Do note that you can only verify two YouTube accounts per phone number per year.

Once you've put your phone number in, click "Submit" and you should see this screen that asks you for that verification code. Whichever solution you decide to use, you should almost instantly get a ping on your phone. In this example, I requested a text message which sent me the verification code. Now, all you need to do is go back to your computer, input the 6-digit verification code, click "Submit" and that will verify your account which instantly gives you access to YouTube tools such as adding custom thumbnails to your videos.

 are not the only feature you will unlock when you verify your YouTube account. You'll also be able to upload videos of longer than 15 minutes and on a desktop computer, live stream from your account. In order to do that on a mobile device, you will need 1,000 subscribers.

There are, of course, many more YouTube features you can unlock such as custom URLs, monetization, and merchandising. Click on the video below which will tell you everything you need to know. But, the features that you unlock when you verify your account are the bedrock of any successful channel, especially custom thumbnails. So, there's no reason not to do that right now.

If you've just started a new YouTube channel you'll need to get it verified so you can unlock some core features. We show you how.

How to Verify Your YouTube Channel & Unlock Basic Features

What matters the most to us, is what matters the most to the audience - the thumbnail and the title. So do video tags on YouTube matter anymore? We get asked this all the time, but why stop there? What metadata does count on YouTube?

What is a video tag? Well you have a title, you have a description. How else could you help categorize your content for maybe a piece of software, that wants to place it in a certain area, to help people search and find your content. That's where video tags come in. YouTube gives you 500 characters worth of space for each video to create these video tags. These could be single words, or small phrases, because there's more than one way to explain to a person, what soccer is, or what an iPhone is, or who Donald Trump is. And when you've spent time doing keyword research on a particular topic and then using all of those phrases in your tags and seeing the video rank for them getting thousands of views, you feel like you've accomplished something. And then YouTube tells you that tags mean absolutely nothing.

Descriptions, like titles, are a valuable piece of information. They help viewers decide if they want to watch a video, but they also let YouTube's algorithms know what your video's all about. YouTube has stated in the past that Instead of adding tags in the description, add them to the tags field when you upload a video. And while there are lots and lots of theories around tags and how to use them, they're actually quite simple. Just use the words that make the most sense for your video and YouTube's algorithms will use these, alongside your description and title and other information, to determine when to show your video to viewers.

YouTube is telling us that tags help YouTube's algorithm, to understand what our content is about? But they also say that “we do look at tags a little bit, but not as much as creators think we do.”

Testing the YouTube Algorithm with Keyword Tags

This is not the only source of information from YouTube either on this new stance on tags. In a recent Q & A session, on the Google support forums, a member of a YouTube search and discovery team, told all of his video creators, to focus on the thumbnail, title and description, and don't worry too much about the tags. But you know what, I think we spent enough time trying to work out what the YouTube team wants us to do with video tags. Let's ask the YouTube platform itself, what it does with video tags.

While YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, if you put in enough gibberish, it's not going to give you any results. Put in a highly searched term, on the other hand, such as ‘vidIQ’ and you'll get results from, not only our channel, our videos, but all of those video creators who have mentioned vidiq in their content.

So here's the idea I'm proposing to you. Let's create a unique, digital tracker, and see if YouTube can find it. And the way we're going to do that, is through a brand new search term called, ‘

’. All right, it is just vidiq spelled backwards, but I'm always leaving Easter eggs in our content. But in all seriousness, we needed a unique phrase, that only we were going to create on YouTube, so that we could track it ourselves. We weren't just talking about video tags, we want to put this phrase in all sorts of metadata, including title, descriptions, translated titles, comments, even in channel tags. Yeah, you remember those? Basically, wherever we think YouTube may index a search term, we want to insert it there and see if it appears on YouTube search.

To give YouTube a fair chance of finding 

, I inserted it into our channel and onto our videos a month ago and analyzed the results and this is what I discovered.

Without doubt, the bullet proof solution to making a phrase appear in a YouTube search, is to stick it in your video title.

, the video would appear in search within 10 minutes, if not less. It's also important to note that if you remove a phrase, from a title, implications are almost instant as well. That video may no longer appear, if someone searches for that keyword. So if a video is getting a lot of views, particularly through search traffic, that does support the time honored advice which is to not tinker with a video that is performing well, especially its title.

I should also mention that I tried putting the phrase at the end of a title to see if that would make any difference, but the result was always the same. It instantly appeared in search results. Inserting a phrase into a video description, also produced a very similar outcome. Searching for it on YouTube would bring up a result, although it would sometimes take up to 24 hours to appear. Also, something interesting to note here, is that while a video is listed as new and has more views in the top results in this search term, a video with the phrase in the video title, will take priority in search results over a video with a phrase just using the video description.

I also want to draw your attention to this video too. The reason it appears in search results, is because I translated the video title and description, into Turkish, but only inserted the phrase 

 into the Turkish translated description. Yeah, let me just repeat that one for you:

Even if you set your language on YouTube to English, when you search for a phrase, and YouTube finds that phrase in a translated language, it will show it to an English user of YouTube!

I don't even know if I can get my head around that one. All right, then let's get on to one that everybody wants to know about. Video tags that don't show up in search. Now of course, I wasn't going to check this once by putting the tag at the top of a video. I'll double check it by putting the tag in the middle of a video, or triple check it by putting a tag at the bottom of a video, or quadruple checking it just to make sure. I had to quintuple check it for my own sanity, but the result was the same every single time.

If I put the phrase 'quidiv54321' in the video tags only, that was not enough to make it appear in a YouTube search.

Now of course, this is very interesting. We'll explore this more a little later, but first of all, let's go through the rest of the YouTube metadata and whether or not it appears in search. There are two metadata opportunities when it comes to playlists, the title and the very infrequently used playlist description. You can filter YouTube searches by a playlist type only, but to my surprise, when I inserted 

 into a playlist title, or playlist description, no results were ever found. Now on to the channel itself. As keen as I was to test the channel name, I didn't fancy renaming ourselves 

 for an entire month. But I think we can safely assume that it would appear in search results, because when we added the phrase to the very end of the about section of the channel, that was enough to prompt a search result.

However, when it comes to channel keywords, which astonishingly, you can edit in a new Creator Studio, even though with time of recording, other features such as playlists, live streaming and translations are still unavailable, inserting a channel keyword does not make your channel searchable through that keyword.

On to comments. I thought I would give this one a try. Inserting a phrase into one of the comments on a video, with little to no expectation. And I was right. Comments do not add to a video's metadata, when it comes to YouTube searches.

What Does This YouTube Keyword Tag Test Prove?

I admit that this is not a highly scientific way of testing the YouTube algorithm for how it treats metadata. I'm testing this in a very binary way. An exact search term, which you won't find anywhere else and it appears on one channel and maybe a couple of videos. YouTube is usually trying to deal with very common words, or very common phrases that can be matched in many different ways across millions, if not billions of videos. But I think in isolation, this test does reveal some interesting results:

The first being that YouTube is always checking the titles and descriptions of videos because whenever you change them, they appear in search results almost instantly. And secondly, in isolation, video tags do not seem to affect search results.

 into five videos on our channel and not a single one of them appears in search for that term is very telling. So I would say, in very basic terms, YouTube appears to be telling the truth when they tell us that tags don't matter as much as they used to. And if that is the case, that leaves me with two questions for YouTube. The first one being, video tags used to be a lot more important didn't they? But if video tags aren't that important anymore, then please tell us exactly what video tags do these days?

YouTube has stated that sometimes tags can be useful if “the content of your video or your channel name is commonly misspelled, and we haven't yet made that connection based on people searching for that and finding your video.”

YouTube Keyword Tags. Do they matter? Should you use them? Will they make your videos rank better in search? We take a deep-dive into the answers.

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