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

How does that saying go? If you've done what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten? Well, I'm afraid for YouTube that no longer applies due to the constant changes to the platform's algorithm. It's time to unlearn the old stuff and get with the new. Let's dive in to some YouTube changes that you need to know about.

Welcome to another episode of TubeTalk. I'm here with Greg Jarboe, an expert on YouTube, and the President and co-founder of 

. He is a prolific contributor to many industry publications (including 

), and is also an author and an instructor at Rutgers for the Mini-MBA Digital Marketing program. In this podcast you will learn:

If all you do is chase what changed recently, you're always chasing the latest change

How to recognise what's important to YouTube

Why what's trending on Google doesn't always means it's trending on YouTube too

Subscribe to TubeTalk: The Video Marketing Podcast

TubeTalk has been informing video creators and 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!

How to Start Again with YouTube: Full Transcript

	Thank you Liron. It's nice to talk with the techie guy.

	Greg, is there anything I left out on this kind of vast list of items?

	You're merely summarizing the last 15 years. I have a long checkered career, but let's not go into that.

	How does it go, the famous saying? The only constant is change. These one thing that you do well is understand things that are changing and work out how to get around them and unpack this beast, unscramble this egg and give us some amazing insights.

	If all you do is chase what changed recently, you're always chasing the latest change. Sometimes it helps to step back and see the direction things are headed and then sometimes you want to forecast the direction as opposed to just know what happened lately.

 I have a YouTube channel, I am a regular YouTuber like a lot of people trying to make it, trying to find a little corner of YouTube. Where do we begin?

	Well, you have to begin with great video, so I don't want to understate that. But over the years there are elements of YouTube's algorithm that have changed and we generally focus on those because that's what we do. But there are elements that have remained the same.

Now I uploaded my first video to YouTube in August of 2006 and I thought I was late to the dance because YouTube had been around for a whole year and I was finally getting to it. But over all that period of time, one of the constants in the YouTube's algorithm has been relevance. So if you've made great video, terrific. Then when it comes time to write your title, write your description, select your tags, they need to be as relevant as possible. And that part, it hasn't gone out of fashion. There are people who would skip over it because, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's the same, the answer is, yeah, it's one of the few things that hasn't changed. So focus there.

	Making good content. That is what people are there for. We want to be entertained, we want to be educated, we want to do it in a way that we can relate to. And if you are not producing that kind of stuff, doesn't matter how awesome your thumbnail is. We're just simply not interested.

	Bingo. So, again, it's easy to skip over the basics and go to the, how can you fake them out? Well, the answer is it's getting harder to fake them out and good content is number one and relevant titles, descriptions and tags is number two.

	All right, so assuming for the sake of this discussion, we understand this. People have been onto the vidIQ YouTube channel. They have read your blog posts, they have read our blog posts.. Now they understand they're going to get the basics. They've made a commitment to really, really get in there. But then YouTube goes and says, okay, we're going to change the game a little bit. Have you noticed some big changes happening recently?

	Oh sure. Huge all the time. And again, there is a whole army of people who chase the latest algorithm change and God bless them and good luck. That way madness lies. So one of the things that hasn't changed and won't change is relevance, and let me go back to the basics. If YouTube starts serving up irrelevant content, when you do a YouTube search, it will stop being the world's second most popular search engine.

	So yeah, they have fiddled with that over time, there were occasions when they threw in ringers because they thought people were finding content that was just too relevant. And so they would throw stuff in and oh, by the way, people stopped paying attention to their suggested videos. Okay. So by force of human behavior, YouTube can't deviate very far from serving up relevant content.

Now the big mistake rookies make is they go off and they will use a Google keyword tool to come up with the search terms to use in YouTube and oh no, no, no, no, don't go there. Don't go there. In fact, if you want to just see this for yourself, go to Google trends and the default result for any keyword that you put in there is going to be what they call web search, which is a search on Google. But guess what? There's a tab that you can go and look for YouTube search and you will often find that the term that seems to be trending in Google doesn't exist at all on YouTube. So, again, recognize that it's a different set of users who know they are on a video sharing site. And so the terms that they're looking for are frequently similar but different.

	Oh, I love that. And I can tell you from personal experience, literally yesterday I had someone telling me that they're about to launch this new channel. They have done all their research, they've listened to all the advice, was all to do with RVing and kind of how to buy your first RV. And I said to her, "Well is there a marketplace for this? Are people interested in this topic?" And she says, "Yes. I went to Google trends and its cooking." And I did the exact same thing you just said. I put in the same search terms and instead of saying web search, I said YouTube and the results were flat. Now had she just simply gone ahead and done that, she would've essentially had a channel that might be amazing, but the search volume is not there. People don't care for that kind of topic on YouTube. Is there an overlap between Google searches and YouTube searches? We've seen those snippets coming up now in search, we've seen video coming up in search. Are the two worlds going to collide at any point?

	Oh they do on occasion, yeah. And if you are let's say a type A personality that wants to overachieve, you go look for the overlapping terms that are both popular on Google as well as YouTube and you hope to get that incremental hit from Google search results on top of the YouTube search results. I think it's a two bank shot. Okay. All right. But guess what I can do just fine. Thank you very much, focusing on YouTube search terms instead of trying to contort myself into thinking, the only thing that counts is Google. And the answer is turning up in Google's nice that I'm not going to sneeze on that, but turning up in YouTube is nice and you have a lot more elbow room to work with.

	Maybe experiment on the other occasion, maybe even write a blog post and have all these things kind of intertwine, but it shouldn't be your pass or fail metric.

	Got you. I am looking at my YouTube trending. I am doing my research. What's my next step?

	Well then you have to choose but choose wisely is, I think the movie line goes. In the early days, I would take advantage of every last character in the title, in the description. The tags are always a sort of guesswork as to how many tags YouTube wanted. But in the title that you had up to 100 characters. And so I used to advise people, if you can come up with a title that is 99 characters long, then you haven't left anything on the table. Because who knows, maybe you'll get found for the fifth search term that you've stuffed into that title. Well, it turns out stuffing is stuffing and YouTube over the years has not rewarded that behavior. And so what may have been good advice, oh, 5, 10 years ago is now bad advice today. The right number, according to the research that I write about in a recent post, in Search Engine Journal, is about half of that.

So if you've got up to 100 characters, that's the max. If you can find a headline that's oh 47, 48 characters long, that's the sweet spot. So you don't have to take advantage of every last word. But what that does mean, this is the implication, and it goes back to my question about you must choose but choose wisely. Okay, if I'm going to leave the fourth and fifth search term out of my title, then excuse me, what were my top two or three? And I can't be all things to all people and apparently I'm not even rewarded for trying to be five things to all people. So, what are the most important ones? And that's a question that only you and your marketing plan can determine. What are the key things that ought to be in your title?

	So I mean, again, YouTube is making us focused. The old days of your channel can do cooking today, vlogging tomorrow, text the next day, motoring the next day. Those days seem to be, the variety days seem to be a little bit behind us. Now it's all about focus, focus, focus, and really kind of use that first punch, that first 50 characters to get it out there.

	Exactly. Exactly. And even people who are in the news business understand this because in the old days they wanted variety and now people like news now basically are spinning off new channels that focus just on political news, for example.

	Oh, I was one of the first and again, believe it or not, I've got a book called YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day, that was published in 2009. Do not read it. Do not buy my book.

	It is so out of date. Its 10 years out of date. Think about that for a second.

	But back then I was the first to crack the code to say, "Oh wow, you could have up to 5,000 characters in your description. Thank you, YouTube. That's about 800 plus words, depending on how long your average word is." And so again, back in the old days, I would recommend that, write as much as you can. And if you're a writer, God bless you. That makes you stand out from the crowd of just people who can shoot video and don't know how to write. Well, it turns out that was then, this is now the new best practice is again something underneath about half of what you could stuff into the description.

So if you can get 300 to 350 words into your description, you've done a good job. You've gone beyond the two or three sentences that most videos have, but you haven't filled it into the brim with words may not have been quite as a useful. So a little under half, 300 to 350 words in your description. And again, that means you're going to have to choose, what do I put in that it's going to be more than a sentence or two, but it's not 800 words anymore and be selective, tell the most important element of your story.

	And do we still use keywords in our description?

	I think so, but I would use sparingly. I tend to try to write with synonyms as often as possible because it's good for humans, but it also turns out to be remarkably good for algorithms as well as they've gotten more mature over the years. They understand what synonyms are and they make the arbitrary and whimsical and capricious decision that synonyms are probably good writing, so guess what? It turns out if you use good writing, then you are doing what the algorithm is trying to guess at that you should be doing.

	Okay. Now the mixed pot is the one that's used to be insanely important. Now it doesn't seem to be, let's talk about video tags.

	Yeah. Actually, I think it's still insanely important. I think it always was, believe it or not, in the early days of YouTube you can actually see the tags that somebody was using. It was right there underneath the description and then YouTube decided, oh no, no, we can't let that happen. And so the tags became invisible, but just because they became invisible, I don't think that means that they became less important. It just meant that they became, I don't know, I got to guess. And now there's tools like the one that vidIQ makes that let you see the tags again. Oh, by the way, now they may have always been important, but now you can see them again. So I think tags are key. There are times where if I'm going to put a keyword in my description, boy, I'm going to put it in my tags.

If I've got a synonym in my title, you better believe I'm going to get that in my tags. But, here's the trick. Here's the new trick. I generally take about 80% of the space that I devote to tags. And you can have anywhere these days of anywhere between 30 and 40 tags. I try to set aside 80% of them that are unique to this video. And I'd try to take the last 20% and say, okay, those are the tags that I want to use on every video on my channel. I want people who finish watching one of my videos to realize, oh by the way, I have other videos and yes I got to get this video found. So I'm going to do that with 80% of the tags, but I want to take the last 20%.

	And again, at the end of the day, YouTube is a search engine. It wants to marry those relationships. You want to force those relationships between your videos and a tag is a great place to do that. I always put it in my channel name, I put in my name. That's my constant between all my videos, everything else becomes unique to that particular video. Giving YouTube the metadata that it needs to kind of understand what this particular content about. But I want to force those relationships between my videos. Let YouTube suggest the next one for me.

	And again, at one point in time I would recommend, oh, only pick 12 tags. And at one point in time that seemed to be the right number. The right number is now about three times that number. So does that mean tags got more important? No I think what YouTube recognizes is that only a small number of videos are going to be found as the number one result in search. More videos will get watched if the recommended suggested videos are also relevant and people then stayed longer. Sessions on YouTube are now somewhere north of 40 minutes. That's average. And as a result, I'm not making 40 minute videos. I don't know about you.

	But what that does mean is that people in that session are not only watching my video, they're probably watching four or five or six other videos and hopefully a couple of those are also mine.

	And one of the things that really is intriguing for me is that YouTube has repeatedly said that tags don't have as much importance as they used to, right? But when I look at the new Studio beta, the one that's currently is being rolled at, guess what they brought across, tags. So if it's no longer relevant in the new upload flow that we've got access to, you upload your video and you put your title or your description and on the very next screen is ask you to put in tags. So if it's not that important, why are you bringing it across to a brand new platform?

	Yeah, I think it's actually unfortunately more fundamental than even that, it comes down to when you do a search in Google, Google can look at tons of texts and try to pick up signals about what is quality content. When you look at video, YouTube has very few signals that they can work with and most of those signals are in the metadata. So I think tags are one of those things that will continue to be important up until the day where YouTube is transcribing what is said on the video. And also interpreting accurately the visuals on the video so that they aren't faked out. And then maybe tags become less important. But we're not there yet.

	We get it, I mean the transcription is really getting much, much better. It's the AI is learning all the time. We already know about Cloud Vision, where you can upload your thumbnails that you can see what Google thinks of what things you're representing. So it just these tools are just becoming stronger and stronger and stronger, but I'm kind of getting the distinct impression that don't forget your basics, feed the beast, feed the metadata, at the end of the day it's still that search engine. I'm going to repeat that a bazillion times, but that's what it is. It's the world's second largest search engine.

	All right, let's move a little bit forward and now the one thing that you mentioned and I want to kind of go into that, all clicks are not created equal. Let's unpack that. I Love that.

	This has been an ongoing sea change that started way back in 2012 and that was when YouTube decided to dump the view as the key element in its algorithm and replace it with watch time. And so what YouTube is now paying attention to, and by the way, this is a huge difference between the YouTube algorithm and the Google Algorithm, which can't do this. But what YouTube is looking at is how long are you watching the video. Now they're actually going beyond how long you watched the video. They're also, how long are you staying in a session? Or is this the first video that you watch in a series of six. Views beyond your video are also factored in. Percentage that someone watches is factored in, et cetera, et cetera. And so all of a sudden you have a very robust algorithm that basically says, if I start watching this video and about 10 seconds in, I gag and go, "Oh, give me a break. This is corporate propaganda, barf. I'm out of here."

Oh, by the way, without even writing a comment underneath that video, which when people leave a video, they don't take the time to comment as much. They just leave. And YouTube knows that you just gave that video a thumbs down. You just spewed, "Do not waste my time with this kind of garbage, again." So YouTube is interpreting the viewer intent. Now if while I'm watching, I also do some nifty things like share the video after I watched it or I comment on it. Or even heaven forbid, give it a thumbs up.

	I know. I know, old school really old. Although really old schools, we go back to the five star system, but sort of old school. But if you interact with that video in a variety of ways, then those are a bonus brownie points. But the point is that YouTube is now looking for long clicks, not short clicks. And that thing gets back to, "Boy, your content better be good. It better be compelling. You better know how to tell a story or I'm out of here in 10 seconds."

	Cool. Can I tell you, I absolutely concur with that. I spent a couple of days with some of the world's largest YouTubers and amazing to me how most of them, by their own admission say they don't know this stuff. You know what they know? How to tell a good story. And that's all they focus on. It's just making it better and better for the viewer. And they get rewarded for that.

	Oh, and you're hanging out with the good people then because I hang out with a different crowd. I hang out with, oh, how do I say this? Agency types who know how to create a TV commercial in 15 seconds and think that's all you need to do on YouTube. Right? The answers. "Oh, man." So, I have to get them to unlearn what they learned in a different medium to take advantage of this new one. Well, maybe this is the part of the checkered background that I didn't delve into that I should reveal now. Once upon a time, way, way back, I was a journalist. Oh my God. I was an editor of a newspaper. I know. Print media. It's an old concept. Look it up in Wikipedia.

	You'll find a listing for newspapers. But one of the things we learned really quickly is you don't sell many newspapers today with yesterday's news.

	So maybe I got the right training and the wrong place, but I understood that this has got to be state of the art. You can't rest on last month's trend.

	Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, let's get back to 2019 for a second.

	Moving along. All right, so as we kind of going down our list, we know about content, we understand we've got to make good thumbnails, titles, descriptions, and tags. We now understand that content is key and not all clicks are created equal, still love it. Not all clicks are created equal. We want to get that watch time. We want to get people to really stay on and perhaps watch another one of our videos. We're using end screens, we're using cars and we kind of call to action. Getting people to stay longer. Are we not going to win this? Are we going to get a million subscribers by tomorrow morning?

	Maybe. Possibly. Some people do. Yeah. So it helps, how many subscribers do you have? Because they're going to be notified that you've got some new content out. And if you've got, let's say PewDiePie numbers, then guess what? Every new video he puts up gets about a million views in the first day. So yeah, yeah, it happens. It happens. But for most of us mere mortals, you were going to have to work at that. But it's worth knowing that the YouTube algorithm is now looking at your channel and trying to figure out how many subscribers and total views your channel has. And that's part of the algorithm that sort of determines, you've got a track record, you are worse boosting in the rankings because you've demonstrated in the past that you could do this.

So that matters. Another thing that matters, and this is one that snuck up on me, is the length of videos. I have always argued that longer was stronger. But a lot of people thought that was just strange in an era where a long video meant two to three minutes. But again, we've seen new data that says that the sweet spot for a video is somewhere in the 11 to 16 minute range. And that's a lot longer than most of the content that most of us are making. And again, a place to the watch time algorithm, but if you know how to tell a story, why cut it off at four minutes or five minutes just because that happens to be the length of the normal, let's say popular music video? Guess what? Michelle Phan is the one who pushed to get the 10 minute limit on YouTube expanded to 15 minutes because she couldn't finish putting on her makeup in 10 minutes.

And guess what? People were watching all 15 minutes. So if you've got content that is compelling and useful and interesting and takes you on a roller coaster ride, wow. Boy does the YouTube Algorithm rewards you. And again, incrementally you're going to be building your total views as well as your subscribers and you're going to get all the other magic benefits that come with the metadata optimization.

	Oh, absolutely. Each channel is different. So know your own audience and know that the audience is critical. But I have a feeling you don't agree with that?

	Oh, well, okay. I'm very open to new ideas. Hit me.

	Okay, well here's the deal. If you're looking at your analytics, you're trying to drive forward looking through the rear view mirror because all it will show you is what you've done up to now. And frankly, what most people have done up to now has been pretty cautious. And I find very few people who are really, really experimenting by pushing the envelope and let's test something we haven't done before. Then if you see that, well that bombed, we'll never do that one again. Okay, fair enough. But again, I spend a huge amount of time struggling to get people to stop making 15 second long videos because that's what we've always done.

And what I have to do as a sort of a tactic to get their attention is, I'll take them to influencers. And I said, here's an influencer that you could sponsor if you want to. Let's look at the average length of their video. Oh my God, it's eight minutes long. And oh look how many views and shares and likes they got versus your 15 second long video. And so I have to hit them on the side of the head with other people's videos to get them to think, "Oh hmm, you're right. We haven't been doing those kinds of videos."

	Instantly jumps to mind is the how-to channels. So and I use myself as an example. I have a how to tick channels, how to fix your router, how to get better internet speed. People, they want the information, they're hungry for the information that they wanted in and out. If you start telling long stories, either I'm a bad storyteller, which are 100% possible, absolutely, or people just want to know, how do I fix my toilet? How do I unblock that drain? They just want the information. They don't care about the other stuff around it. What do you think?

	Well, it's almost, almost right, but here's how I would frame it. You don't want to tell people how to fix half of their toilet and then come back next week and we'll fix the second half of your toilet.

	In other words, believe or not, you are trying to tell a story is just the format is such that here's the problem, here are the parts that you're going to need to get ahead of time. Here's the right order to put those parts together. Here's the way to test that your solution is working. In other words, you still want to go through a sequence.

	And it may not be anecdotal, it may not be funny, although boy, it really helps if your personality helps make that process an enjoyable journey. But nevertheless, people still want to, "Get me to the conclusion." And so it is a form of storytelling. It's just not an entertainment based form. It's more logic based form. But guess what? If you want to find it, it's in a book written by Aristotle called Rhetoric and these storytelling methods and there are more than one of them, have been around for a couple 1000 years and they still work.

	Actually I think he had a five part outline which is get their attention, state the problem, state the solution, explain the benefits of the solution and then I'll talk about next steps but, but yes, yes, yes. There are formulas for all of this.

	As we kind of wrapping up and we’ve spoken about a lot of really deep insight which is going to give us lots of food for thoughts. I know for myself I've made notes and for all of you listening out there, don't worry. I've got you covered. Everything will be in the show notes so all these links will be there as well.

Now I want to move on to the equation that I have been wrestling with, which is the value of embedding a video versus not embedding a video. Here's what I mean by that for those who don't know, I run a technology blog. A lot of people have company websites, have personal blogs and I do an article about a particular set of technology that I happen to be speaking about on my YouTube channel and I always like to embed the video so that gives people the opportunity to either read or push play. We've been told a couple of different things that things on embedded videos don't count as much as videos that I've watched directly on YouTube. Have you got any kind of insights into that area?

	Yes, and the answer is, a view is a view, is a view, in fact, if it is a view from an embedded site, it may actually give you an extra boost because I think a YouTube figures out, "Wow, this video got embedded that used to be popular it's not so popular anymore. And if this person has got an embedded video pool, maybe we should get Brownie points to it." So, where your video can be embedded, please embed it. I've worked with again, more commercial clients but there's one that was a medical device supplier and they made portable ultrasound products and they were creating two versions of every video. One for their website, one for their YouTube channel and we cut the production costs in half by having just one video and they boosted their total video views by embedding the YouTube video and oh by the way, they passed their leading competitor in views after trailing them for years.

So it works, it works, it works. Do it. Now, here's the one caveat. There are exceptions and it comes to the YouTube player which you embed basically is built around getting people to watch more YouTube videos. And there are times when I want to embed a video on a website and I don't want the call to action to be to watch my next video. I want it to be, can you buy my product please? That's why it's on the website and I don't want to send you back to YouTube for those occasions. And they are real and they are commercial. I then looked for a player that I can embed the YouTube video into that gives me those extra calls to action on my website as opposed to other things I could do on YouTube.

YouTube is constantly changing and adding new features so as a creator it is vital to keep up with new developments on the platform. This week's episode of TubeTalk tells you why.

Why You Need to Forget Everything You Know About YouTube: TubeTalk 176 with Greg Jarboe

Have you started live streaming on your YouTube channel yet? If not, why not? What's holding you back from pressing the Go Live button? And if you have gone live, are you looking to build a bigger audience to get those views and subscribers and spread your message even further?

Going live is one of those strategies that helps you reach out to a much broader audience to hopefully convert into subscribers. However, going live can seem a lot more intimidating to many creators than pressing a record button on your camera that you can edit later.

We’re joined this week by the guru of live streaming, 

, who will guide us through the whole process. Luria is a live video Strategist, who 13 years has created over 5,000 videos with over 1 billion views using video and live streaming shows. She’s worked on for top brands like AT&T, Samsung, GoDaddy, and Panasonic, and appeared on CNN, NBC, FOX, NBC, MSNBC, ABC & BBC, to talk about her specialist subject. In this podcast you will learn:

How to get over the fear of live-streaming

How to maximise your live streamed content for future use

How to prepare a winning strategy so you don't dry up

How to use social to build an audience around your live streams

How to keep the conversation going after the live stream has ended

Subscribe to TubeTalk: The Video Marketing Podcast!

How to Succeed at Live Streaming Video: Full Transcript

Liron Segev: Welcome to TubeTalk! Tell us a little bit about your background in live video.

Luria Petrucci:	Oh, I'm so excited, I love chatting live! I help people create professional and authentic live videos, so that you can grow your audience and have an impact in the world. It was 2005 when I first started, and that was the early days of podcasting, and when podcasting meant video and audio. Now it just means audio. This was before YouTube was really a thing, so I actually didn't start YouTube for five years, because I was building my audience on iTunes, because that was the only option back then.

I did a tech show, starting back in 2005. It was recorded video, but I very quickly in 2007 dived into live video, and then started doing live video consistently for my own audience, using professional gear, really expensive gear at the time. It's brilliant how it's come down in cost.

I started with Leo Laporte, doing TV shows, and was co-hosting with him. And then, it was like, "Live video is where it's at, I got to start doing this," and so, I've been doing it since 2007 on a weekly basis or daily basis for myself, and then for Panasonic, and AT&T, and Samsung, and a variety of names.

So, yeah, it's been a long journey of different brands, different names that I've used over the years, and just a lot of exploration, in terms of live video, recorded video, and building audiences and communities.

Liron Segev:	So, clearly, video's in your passion, you understand it. You seem to prefer the live, versus the recording. Is there a reason for that? Did something draw you specifically to that live kind of element of that?

Luria Petrucci: Yeah. I love live, because of the connection that you're building with your audience. It's an actual conversation, and an engagement. Live video is so freaking powerful, from a community perspective, and from a natural human being perspective, right? We desire, we don't desire, we need human communication as a human being. And so, that live video is the best way to connect with other people around the world, and build real friendships, without having to travel, and without having to be physically in the same place.

And so, that's why I love and focus on live video. I did video-only, video and live video for 10 years. And I still do a lot of video, but live video is definitely my passion, because of the power that lies behind it.

Liron Segev: And it's so funny how many people are so scared of the fact that you cannot edit. Whatever happens happens. But you need to embrace it. If you're going live, it's going to go wrong, and just own it, and just roll with it. That's how live, that's what happens in a live broadcast environment. How do you get people over that initial fear of, "Oh, if I press the Live Record button, or the Go Live button on my screen lab's IBS, or on my camera and my phone?

Luria Petrucci:	You know, it's a decision. I totally get it, because I live it. I lived that fear, as well. So, back in 2005, when I recorded my first video, I called my mom crying, literally called her, crying. I was like, "I'm never going to make it. People are going to hate me." And of course, that didn't happen. And then, my live video, my first live video experience was on TV. It was crazy of me to just jump in the pool, right?

So I get it. I've lived that year, but the choice is, to do it or not to do it, right? So we all have fear, and fear is a natural instinct. It's a necessary part of our being. We use fear to stay safe, and to stay alive, but fear gets involved when it shouldn't. And so, we have to control our own brains, and say, "Okay. Is this going to hurt me physically? Am I going to die? Or am I going to just live through it, and have some uncomfortable moments?"

And with live video, let's face it, you're not going to die. So, you have to realize that fear is not a useful thing, in that moment.	It's not trying to keep you safe, so you have to overcome that, by making a choice. And it's as simple as that. I don't know it doesn't feel as simple as that. But it's a choice, and you have to realize that you are in control, and you are in the power, you have the power to get over that fear.

Maybe not necessarily get over it. A lot of people don't ever get over it. I still, when I'm doing something new in live video, or I feel like it's a really important video that I need to make, and I really want to get our point across, am I going to say it right, am I going to screw up? I still feel that after 13 years of doing this stuff, right? So don't get over it, don't try and win at it. You win by just doing it anyway, and realizing that it's not going to kill you. It is just going to be an uncomfortable moment that we have to get past, and feel the fear through, right?

Liron Segev: Things are going to happen, but I'll be okay. Life will be fine. I've spoke to, with a lot of people who are going live for the first time, and their interpretation, it's just off the scale. I normally say to them, "What's the problem? What are you worried about?" Most of their responses have been, well, two things. One, that gear and technology's going to go wrong. It's going to let us down. And the second as being, what if nobody shows up? And that seems to be the worst fear. How do we deal with that?

Luria Petrucci: So, here, just to speak to those two things, and then, the other thing that people fear is, what people will think of them, right?

So, first, the tech. Guess what? It's going to go wrong! And with everything, when it comes to live video and all these fears, if you adopt fun as your attitude and your video, then you'll get through anything. You need to realize that the experience that you're providing your audience is the most important thing that you need to focus on, right?

So if you are providing an amazing experience, regardless of what happens with the tech or the tornado warnings or anything, then they're going to have fun. And they're going to enjoy it regardless. They love live, because anything can go wrong, so, enjoy the process.

Yeah, get good at the tech. Practice with the tech ahead of time, and understand what you're doing. When you go live, it may be the first time out, it may be the tenth time out, it may be the hundredth time out. Something disastrous happens and your stream goes down, but it's live, and it's going to happen. It happens to news stations, TV broadcasters, it happens to everybody. Just Google, and pull up "TV bloopers." You'll see, it's not you.

*Liron Segev:	Oh, but that's a great point, though. Because we keep on forgetting that live wasn't invented by Google. It wasn't invented by Facebook. It wasn't invented by LinkedIn. Live was invented way back in the broadcasting days, when you had an on site broadcast, where your people went live on the scene, and things went horribly wrong, so that is a great way of looking at it. *

If they could mess this up so badly, and they're a team of 50 professionals, why are you putting yourself under so much pressure to be perfect, every single time? So that’s the tech issue - what about the scary thought of "I'm pushing live. I get zero people showing up."

Luria Petrucci: You should celebrate it! Because you know what? It gives you a chance to actually get good at it. In the beginning, it is very possible that no one shows up, if you don't have an already big audience, right? So it's going to happen. If you're just getting started, or you don't have a huge audience yet, you might get one person to show up. Treat that one person as your best friend.

Live video includes a whole lot of technical issues, it includes a lot of brain space, brainpower. You're multitasking. You're thinking about comments, you're thinking about the tech, you're thinking about what to say, you're thinking about what could go wrong. I call it the Live Adrenaline Monster, LAM, for short.

And yes, he's attacking, constantly, right? Telling you all the things that can go wrong, and he's just attacking your brain. And so, it's okay that no one's there yet. Treat it, at that point, as a video that you were doing in one take, and you're just going to power through it, you're going to mess up how you say it, and that's okay, because, hey, it's just, you're just doing it in one take. And if you say something, you just keep moving.

If there's no one there to engage with you, just wrap it up, like you would a normal video, and then, guess what? It becomes a regular video after the fact, and it's totally okay. If there's one person there, treat them as your best friend, really make them feel special, and prepare ahead of time, so that you know what you want to say, so that you're not thinking of it on the fly. And then, over time, you will grow your audience, and if you want, we can discuss that.

It's not a bad thing if no one shows up right away, because you got to figure it out in the first place.

Liron Segev:	You know your five bullet points. You know what you're going to say. You kind of, you have an idea. Well, at least you should, by now. I mean, really. And then, when you go live, it's the same thing. Is there a show formula that you would advise people to have, or some idea of what they should say when? Or is it just as fluid as these kind of discussions?

Luria Petrucci:	Yeah. And I can actually give this to you in an image. This is the structure. I call it the show flow. So it matches very closely what you would do in a recorded video, so you're probably familiar with most of it, right?

So you do want to prepare, you want to think, "All right. What do I want to say?" Try and break those things up into three steps, or three ways to accomplish something, or segment it out, so that you have break points. So that's that your preparation. When you go live, you start by intro, or teasing, "Hey," what are they going to learn? "I'm going to share with you today the secret to life. You're going to live to 200 years old." Okay?

You can tell them what they're going to get. Then introduce yourself, and ask a question. You'll play up the questions a little bit more than in recorded video. But you're going to ask a question of the audience, and this is more for the replay viewers than it is for the live audience, because by that time, you may not have a live audience, because this is going quickly, right, tease, intro, question.

And then, you maybe answer the question yourself. So there's a delay with live video. So any time you ask a question, just be prepared to wait, but you don't want to just wait awkwardly, right? It's so awkward when you make it, like, when you call out the silence, so be prepared to just answer that question yourself. "Hey, what's your favorite animal? For me, I know my favorite animal is chickens, and here's why."

And then, once you've answered that, look at the comments. You don't have to make a big deal of it. Just briefly glance at the comments. If there are other comments, then actually respond to the comments. Call people out by name, and say, "Oh, well, Liron says his favorite animal is dolphins." And then, if there's no comments, again, don't call it out, just keep moving into that first point that you want to make, right?

Focus on that point, and think of that as an engagement-free zone. Don't get distracted by comments. Deliver your information, deliver some value, if that's what you're there to do, and tell a story, or tell people how to do something, or whatever that value point is for you. And then, when you're done with that first segment, then you break for engagement.

The worst that you want, that you can do, and what you're trying to avoid by doing this segmentation process, is actually saying, "Okay. I'm going to give you the secret to life. If you want to live to 200 years old, you're going to buy... oh, my gosh, Sue, I can't believe you're here. Thank you so much for showing up!" Right?

Like, "Wait, hold on. What am I supposed to buy? Well, wait, what?" Okay? You're leaving the audience the audience hanging, and it's not a good experience, so you're just breaking it up. Giving the value, breaking for engagement. Then move on to segment two or point two or step two, however, you have it broken it up. Then engage. And then, you just, however many points you have, that's how you, how it flows. At the end, definitely a call to action, and maybe even wrap up the points. Repeat what they learned. And then, tell them where to find you, and subscribe, and all of that good stuff. And then end it.

So that's kind of the formula, the show flow that I like people to go through, because it's a really powerful way to get your brain space around it, and not leave room for, "Oh, my God, what am I supposed to say now?"

Liron Segev:	The more you prepare, and the more you know your stuff, the easier this becomes. Which is why I could literally call you up with no warning, and say, "Hey, I want to ask you a question about love." And you go, "Yeah, shoot, what do you want to know?"

You won't need three days to research, because you know your stuff so well. If you're an expert in our subject that you're going live about, well, then, be the expert. But then deliver. I hate it when people drag the stuff out. "Well, we're just waiting for another five minutes. We're just waiting for another 30 more people."

Liron Segev: I don't have that kind of time. I'm here for a course. You told me, "It starts at 12:00, let's go at 12:00." One of the tricks that I like to do is to go live, kind of five minutes before the due time, when people are already starting to congregate in your chat. You're starting to already have that engagement. It just gives you a little bit of time to relax, make sure the audio's working, they can see you, you ask them questions, okay?

Well, if it was more to kind of break the ice, more, "Where are you from?" Kind of, "Tell me what nice are you in?", "What is your channel about?", that kind of format.

Luria Petrucci: There's really no point in asking those questions, "Can you see me?", "Can you hear me?" If you've tested your setup, and obviously, things can go wrong. But for the most part, you should just assume that your setup is good to go. If you see anything wrong, you'll fix it. If they see anything wrong, they will tell you. The audiences are great at doing that, right?

Liron Segev:	Absolutely, okay. So, it's okay to kind of chat with them before you go live, but the thing is, just avoid the stupid question, like, "Is this thing on?"

Liron Segev: So one of the things that you've mentioned was, "I have my show formula, great. I'm now prepared, I'm on plan, I know what's going on. If nobody shows, I'm still going to deliver my message. I'm going to deliver my intro and my outro. It looks like a normal video, okay."

Luria Petrucci:	This is a really important point to drive home. You said, "Treat it as another video on your channel." If you actually take what you just said to heart, then you are optimizing the heck out of your video before you go live. You're making sure that you have the right title. You're making sure that you have the right description. And then, trim off any of that pre-engagement, or afterwards, or anything like that. And we can talk about some examples, if you want, of people who do this well. But you want to treat it exactly like you would any other video on your channel.

Liron Segev: The one thing we need to remember, when you trim a live video on YouTube, you will lose the chat replay.

Liron Segev: Unless that's super, duper, duper important and critical, which in most cases, it isn’t but just a heads up, it's worth noting, if you trim things off in YouTube, on a live video, you will lose that replay off the chat. If you got any example of somebody that does this really well, we would love to study that.

Luria Petrucci:	Yeah, so, three people who do it really, really well, Sean Cannell, does live really well, from an education perspective. And there are different ways that you can do live well, right? So, he does it from an education perspective. He will actually go live. He gets right to the point. He does engage a little bit in the beginning, by calling some people out, but he doesn't spend a ton of time on that.

He gets right into the information, has slides, has visuals. He teaches, teaches, teaches, and then does Q&A at the end and really engages. So that's a different format that works really well for the host optimization, because at that point, people have no idea watching it on the replay, that it is a replay of a live, until they get to the end, where there's Q&A, right?

So that's one way. Nick Nimmin is another great person to look at, from a community-driven perspective. He does a show every Saturday, and he's live for six hours. it's a long stream, and it's Q&A-based, and it has a lot of fun factor built into it, super chats, hanging out etc... but he also does channel reviews, so there's a lot of value involved, as well. So, from a community perspective, it's a lot more relaxed. It still works for the replay, because people are still getting that massive value.

Liron Segev:	Got it. Could you download a live video to your computer, once it's done on YouTube, once it's done processing?

Liron Segev:	So then, you could then technically repurpose that content, and then use it elsewhere on other platforms, in square formats, things like that.

Luria Petrucci:	Yeah. And you can, on any platform, if you're using the right software, you can record a copy to your computer. But, to be honest, even we rely on the YouTube video to just download it, so that we're not taking up processing power on our computer to record it.

Liron Segev: All right, so, let's recap. So we've got our setup. We're now trying to relax as humanly possibly. We're delivering lots of value. You've mentioned that some of these guys use slides. Do you recommend adding, kind of, a slides element for some visual impact, versus just like, a talking head?

Luria Petrucci:	Depends on what you're trying to do, right? So the more visually you can do, the better. But it's not absolutely necessary. If you're trying to teach, or educate, do how tos, demos, things like that, you need a visual aspect. If you're doing Q&As... By the way, don't do Q&As if you're just getting started, and you don't know if you're going to have a live audience. That's the worst feeling in the world.

So only do Q&As live when you know that you will have an audience show up and ask questions. Or you can do pre-submitted questions, or you can plan out your FAQ, or something like that, those are alternatives.

If you are going to just do more hangout streams, and Q&As, and things like that visuals are less important but there's no one way to do live video.

Just as there's no one way to do anything in life, there's no one way to do this. It's how you want to supplement your existing content with live video. And so, you decide what you want to do with live, if you want it to be its own point of education, if you want it to be a community hangout, if you want it to be private for people who are Patreon members, right? There are multiple ways you can do it.

So what's your strategy? Decide that first, and then build on top of that, in terms of, "Do I need visuals or not?"

Liron Segev: Perfect, okay. So, and the key message is, there isn't one right way that absolutely you need to fit into that mold. I suppose different channels are going to have their own uniqueness, their own community. If you're a, I don't know, knitting channel, it's going to be different to a tech channel, different to another channel, and then, the audience is going to expect different items from you, as you deliver your live.

Liron Segev: Could you do live in virtually every niche?

On this week’s episode of TubeTalk, we're diving deep into live streaming, and giving you the best tips and tricks so you can rock your live streaming session.

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