When running a YouTube channel, getting consistent views, improving watch times, and increasing subscription rates are your machine’s engines.
There’s a lot of talk about the bump new channels and videos get from the algorithm, but that isn’t a basket you should put all your eggs into.
It’s inconsistent, and you have no control over how or why it happens.
So, how can you grow your channel effectively?
There are tricks for more YouTube views that expert content creators use that we at Raffiti Media are happy to explain to you.
But who are we?
We are Raffiti Media and are a full-service YouTube agency that partners with creators to get the best results for their channels and subscriptions.
If you’re interested in learning how to get more views consistently, keep reading, and let’s dive into the tips and tricks to grow your viewership on YouTube.
The first thing is that you’ll need a strategy. And not just any strategy will do.
You’ll want an effective growth strategy to help your YouTube channel grow subscriptions, views, and watch times.
With YouTube as the most utilized video platform in the world, you’ll need to understand the platform, the algorithm that makes it tick, and how to optimize your content to get the widest reach and most views possible.
And one of the most important things you need to understand about YouTube is that it is a search engine. In fact, it’s simply the video version of Google, where instead of links and other forms of content, users search for and get results in the form of videos.
The Importance Of YouTube Views
When you run a channel or are a content creator on YouTube, the goal is to get your content in front of people who want to consume it.
Views, then, are critical for your success, and the way YouTube works is that the more views a video gets, the higher the ranking the algorithm gives it, driving it to appear even more frequently and driving up more views.
It’s a positive cycle, but only if you create relevant and optimized videos for what the user is looking for.
Watch times, viewer engagement, and clickthrough rates are other factors impacting a video’s success.
The better these metrics perform, the more the platform will boost the visibility of the content. In other words, the higher number of views informs the algorithm that the content has more relevance and indicates greater popularity, further impacting increased exposure and enhanced visibility.
And with the increased views it improves user engagement, further driving up view rates and increasing the possibility of comments, likes, and shares, which are metrics important to the algorithm to determine the value of content on the platform.
Understanding the Algorithm
When you’re trying to grow your views for a video or a YouTube channel, the next thing you need to understand is how the YouTube algorithm operates.
The algorithm considers various factors such as views, watch time, user engagement, and how optimized the content description is to help the YouTube search engine determine overall popularity and relevance.
The algorithm’s objective is to keep users consuming content on the platform, so it will promote and recommend similar content to keep users engaged.
One factor in increasing relevance for users is collaborative filtering, which is when the algorithm makes recommendations based on the preferences of users with similar interests and videos already watched.
By learning and understanding how the YouTube platform operates and the algorithm is programmed, creators will have the upper hand with outcome objectives to grow viewership and subscription rates.
As we’ve seen, several factors can contribute to ranking a video or channel, and the better engagement and watch time a video has, the higher the relevance and user satisfaction on the platform.
One of the more important criteria that the algorithm uses to determine how to rank content is weighted on a relevancy score.
Relevancy is based on how valuable the content is toward a user’s search pattern, how engaged viewers are with the content, and the length of time that a user spends watching.
And one trick to get your video content in front of a larger audience is through optimization strategies that include using relevant keywords in the title, description, and tags and creating compelling thumbnails that promote your content to entice the potential audience.
But for more consistent growth, content creators will want to dive deeper into a more strategic plan to increase their view count.
Understanding Organic Growth
When you’re trying to increase your views on YouTube, you can pay for traffic, but that will only give you an artificial boost. Your views will drop accordingly when you stop paying for traffic and ads.
So, it’s better to be strategic about growing your view count and audience through organic methods.
On YouTube, organic growth refers to growing your reach and expanding your viewership without artificial or paid methods.
An example of artificial methods would be programming several bots to click on your channel, but the problem there is that engagement is minimal and that view times suffer.
Paid ads like Google and Facebook that promote your content will only succeed if the ads are getting in front of the right people and you continue to pay for that reach.
Instead, growing organically involves a little old-fashioned hard work to build a fan base by producing high-quality content that the viewer perceives as having value for what they want.
Growing organically will involve strategically and smartly creating optimized content to get in front of people searching for your content, driving them to your channel, and leveraging YouTube to put your video in front of a wider audience.
Now that you understand what it means to grow your audience organically let’s explore nine critical strategies for achieving this organic growth that includes:
- Content Is King
- Define Your Niche And Find Your Audience
- Optimize Your Channel
- Master YouTube SEO Principles
- Create Eye-Catching Thumbnails
- Be Engaging
- Don’t Be Afraid To Ask–Use Social Media
- Collaborate
- Use End Screens And Screen Cards
1. (Quality) Content is King
If you publish content on YouTube and it’s only so-so, all your optimization strategies won’t do much to help grow your views. So, the first trick for more YouTube views is simple: make better content.
The quality of your content will be the cornerstone of a successful YouTube channel, so when creating your content, focus on informative, entertaining, engaging, and unique videos that resonate with your target audience’s interests and preferences.
The more consistent you are with your video content, the more recognition your brand garners, helping you build trust and a loyal following interested in what you produce next.
Because millions of videos are uploaded on the platform daily, it’s easy for yours to become lost in the sea of competition, so make yours consistent and stand out.
By offering original, interesting, innovative content, you’ll position your channel as something people want to visit, garnering their attention and piquing their interest.
To pull this off successfully will require a lot of work and know-how, so if you are short on time or creativity, outsourcing your content production to a YouTube service like Raffiti Media makes a lot of sense.
To make less than enjoyable, creative content can be disastrous for your channel, but if you do it right, the payoff can be tremendous in terms of increased views, subscribers, and overall success on the platform.
2. Define Your Niche And Find Your Audience
To make content your audience wants, consider their interests and perspectives as part of your creative process.
To understand your audience, you’ll want to start by defining your niche and work to position your content in such a way as to become the go-to authority in that sphere.
Ideally, you’ll want to identify a niche with a large audience and craft videos that mirror what’s already successful in that niche.
By understanding your target audience, you can better appeal to their viewing interests, helping you get a better following that helps your channel grow organically.
In other words, don’t think of broad appeal when trying to craft your videos.
Instead, think about a small group that would be hyper-interested in one or two specific aspects of a niche or category and focus your videos on answering what those people may type into the search parameters.
By focusing your video creation on becoming as precise as possible, you will better cater to the wants and needs of your target audience.
For example, a coach like Krista Mashore focuses her content on realtors looking to grow their businesses. All her content addresses the concerns and questions her target audience may have.
A trick to help you identify and understand your target audience is to create a persona, sometimes called an avatar, that enables you to define that persona’s interests, behaviors, and demographics.
This focus on their identity will help you create personalized content that will attract new viewers while increasing the likelihood of retaining subscribers.
3. Optimize Your Channel
Third on our list of tricks for more YouTube views is to optimize your channel through relatively straightforward ways.
One thing is to think about your channel’s user experience and make it as visually appealing as possible.
When we say to optimize your channel, it means that you need to research what people are looking for in your niche, create a name, and write a description that answers those search queries.
Another area to optimize is to create a banner that conveys your content within the niche.
A way to do these things is to research and find relevant keywords in your video titles, descriptions, and tags.
When used correctly, these keywords will enhance searchability, increase the chance your video appears in relevant searches, and are crucial metrics in how the YouTube algorithm ranks videos and channels.
To optimize your content, create engaging content for your target audience and encourage them to like, comment, and share it.
Engagement, discussed a little later, can be a potent trick for more YouTube views that often go overlooked.
4. Master YouTube SEO Principles
The first thing you need to understand is that Google owns YouTube, which is a video version of the Google search engine.
Yes, that’s right, YouTube is a search engine, so comprehending how SEO principles work is another trick for more YouTube views you need to increase your organic growth.
SEO is short-hand for search engine optimization, which is a fancy way of saying that when a person is looking for an answer online, they type in a query, and the most relevant answers are ranked to help that search.
The key is to conduct quality keyword research that will help you identify the needs of the search so that you can craft your video content to be the most relevant response to those queries.
For example, if you’re into the Rolling Stones and want to supply a fan channel about the band, you’d want to research what other people are looking for.
In that case, people might search for and use those keywords in your titles, descriptions, and tags so that when someone looks for anything related to the band, your videos and channels appear in their search results.
Another thing is that you’ll need to focus on the viewer’s interest when it comes to their searches.
To do so, research topics and other search queries to see what is related to your niche to help you understand what others are looking for and guide your content creation.
5. Create Eye-Catching Thumbnails
Another of the top tricks for more YouTube views is to create awesome YouTube thumbnails.
For your video, thumbnails are the first impression a viewer will have with your content, so it’s essential to design visually appealing thumbnails that represent your content accurately.
Our research shows that when you create and optimize your thumbnails, you can increase your video reach and click-through rates and generate higher organic views by upwards of 10-100x.
That’s right.
If you do it right, you can optimize your thumbnails to generate up to 100 times the click-through rates!
The key is to create eye-catching thumbnails that represent your content and are attractive enough to grab the viewer’s attention and get them to watch.
The amateur relies on what YouTube provides to generate thumbnails automatically. Still, when you dive into it to craft the perfect customized thumbnail, it can make a significant impact.
That’s because a customized thumbnail will showcase your video’s highlights and help you create a cohesive and professional brand.
One of the more effective strategies for creating highly engaging thumbnails is to include a human face.
Videos with faces in their thumbnails attract more interest than bold type and images, helping your audience identify with the content and spark interest in watching it.
6. Be Engaging
One of the more effective, cost-effective, and efficient tricks for more YouTube views is through engagement with your viewers. When we discuss engagement, we want to encourage viewers to leave a comment and start discussions around the content of your video.
Responding to comments and feedback about your video will help your audience feel a connection to your brand, foster a sense of loyalty, and increase the recognition of your video with the algorithm.
Engagement is one of those metrics that the YouTube algorithm uses to validate if a video and channel are something to rank higher or not, so the more comments and engagement that you have, the better the platform recognizes and ranks your content.
Craft your content where there’s a question at the end, either with a request for additional video suggestions or ways to spark a discussion.
What’s more, it only takes a little time to respond to comments, making it budget-friendly, and the connection that engagement creates will help you quickly grow your channel organically.
7. Don’t Be Afraid To Ask–Use Social Media
Like having a question or an open-ended way to close your video can lead to a discussion and better viewer engagement, leveraging social media is another excellent way to get more views.
And, often, all you need to do is ask. In other words, create quality videos that entertain, educate, and ask viewers to share with others they’re connected to through social media.
You can also promote your videos through different platforms to drum up interest.
Share behind-the-scenes content and teasers, and engage on platforms like Discord, Twitch, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram, anywhere your target audience may hang out and start a discussion.
Forums like Reddit and Quora are good platforms to share content and reach your target audience.
That’s because forums are filled with people looking for solutions and suggestions about various problems, so make content that addresses these and links back from the forum to your channel.
Using these platforms to promote your videos, you can also indirectly research what is most important to the community and your target audience, further helping guide your creative process.
For example, suppose someone on Reddit is looking for diabetic-friendly Paleo recipes. In that case, you can create and share a video that addresses that topic with a tasty recipe or options and link back to your channel for more content similar to the one you just promoted.
8. Collaborate
Everything you need to have learned to be successful was learned on the playground while you were young.
And the most important lesson is to play well with others.
To grow your channel organically, collaborate with other creators.
The reality is that no matter how much you promote your content, there will be a limit to how many you can reach. Collaborating with others allows you to share your content with their audience and their content with yours. It’s a win-win for both of you.
When you reach out to other creators, you’ll want to choose one whose content aligns with your audience and niche.
One way to do this is through guest appearances, which help provide fresh perspectives for your channel.
To drive more views through strategic cross-promotion is a great way to boost your ranking and recommendation of videos.
The cross-promotion from collaborations can be mutually beneficial, increasing your reach and exposure that you may otherwise not get and helping you grow more organically.
9. Use End Screens And Screen Cards
How you end your content is crucial.
You can produce content that ends much like The Sopranos cold close did, where the screen just went black at a dramatic moment, or you can help direct your viewers to take action.
As great as the ending to The Sopranos was, it left some viewers confused as to what happened and what was next.
Don’t do that; instead, use end screens and end cards, which are simple tools that YouTube allows you to use to help direct your viewers to take a specific action.
With an end screen, also called an outro, these features will promote additional content, increasing overall watch time, which makes it great for organic discovery.
Promoting your other videos through these tricks for more YouTube views will drive more of your targeted audience to engage and watch your content.
These features are a great way to keep your viewers engaged with your content and help drive them to consume more of your videos.
End cards are another tool, which are interactive elements you can have placed in your videos that have links, playlists, websites, or channels.
When you strategically use end screens and cards in your videos, you’re giving your audience and viewers more opportunities to watch your content, helping your channel grow.
Key Factors That Influence Video Ranking On YouTube
As mentioned, a variety of factors impact how a video ranks on YouTube, and to get more views, you’ll want to create a comprehensive strategy optimized for each of these categories.
To begin with, you’ll want to optimize your title and description so that the YouTube algorithm can quickly determine your video’s relevance based on a user’s search.
Getting comments, likes, and shares is a way for your audience to signal to the algorithm that the content is valuable and relevant based on the search parameters they set out, so getting users to engage with your content is crucial.
End screens are a great way to get people to like, share, and comment, but only if your content is worthwhile and relevant to the viewer.
And if your end screen includes a call-to-action (CTA), you will see a more significant increase in audience engagement.
Also, consider the quality of your video content because the higher the quality, the more likely audiences will watch it to the end and see your CTA.
Your overall production value, video resolution, sound quality, and overall viewer experience will significantly impact your audience’s watch time, which further impacts how the algorithm perceives the value of your video.
Consistency is another crucial metric.
The more often you post quality content, the higher your subscription rates and views will increase, further influencing how the algorithm ranks your content and giving your channel added authority.
Finally, consider external factors such as backlinks, social media sharing, and video embedding, which can also influence the platform in your video rankings.
There are a variety of tricks for more YouTube views, from buying likes and subscribes to doing it more organically through what we just showed you.
If you’re thinking strategically and in the long term, an organic approach is best, but it can also be time-consuming.
At Raffitit Media, we’re a full-service YouTube management agency providing everything from strategic thinking optimization to content creation for our partners.
We take all the hard work from you so you can focus on growing your channel and your revenue by leveraging our expertise in knowing how the algorithm works and how to impact the audience effectively.
Our turnkey solutions provide our growth partners an upper hand in organic growth for their channels, and if you enjoyed this article about various tricks for more YouTube views, subscribe to our YouTube channel and our blog for more content like this.
If you’re a content creator looking for ways to grow your reach and revenue on YouTube and need help, schedule your no-obligation, FREE consultation call with Raffiti Media, and let us show you how we can help you achieve your YouTube goals.
