It is a question which is asked every single day my thousands of people, “How exactly can I get my videos to have millions of views like the big YouTubers?”. It’s actually kind of funny that very few people have answers to this question, because it is fairly simple. Of course there is no magical secret that only us certain YouTubers know on how to climb to the top with a click of the button. The real secret lies deeper than a click of a button. It is something that won’t happen in a day, or two, or even three, but it is something that I can PROMISE you will happen if you fully read this article.
You can search the web and find sites that claim to “help you get to the top with these simple tags” or “pay us money and we’ll quote unquote, promote your video”, but being completely honest, every one of these websites is a load of crap. Why you may ask? Because any site at the moment is not written by a famous YouTuber such as myself, and is definitely NOT written by someone who has over 3 years of experience using the website. No, all those sites are written by a bunch of people who maybe have reached 1 million MAXIMUM in total of their upload views. Some of you right now may be saying to yourself, “Wow, Devin, I think 1 million views would be pretty awesome to have”. And you are not wrong, 1 million views is a great thing to have. But, why have 1 million when you can have 50 million? And that’s exactly what I’m here to teach you.
To let you know in advance, I am writing this article thinking that you going into reading this already have a basic comprehension of how YouTube works and the features it has to offer. If not, then you might want to catch up on some of the other articles I have written to help you fully understand this one.
So here we go, let’s figure out how to get some views. What you need to understand first to understand how to get views, is where exactly views come from. Views on videos come from 4 main sources:
1. The search pages when users search for things
2. Your video being in the related video sidebar of videos
3. External links from other sites or friends who have shared the video
4. Your current fan base or subscribers
You may now be thinking to yourself, “Well hey Devin, there are lots more places where views come from”. This is true, but from my personal experience for the last 3 years, those are the top 4 sources. Let’s start with number 1.
Getting to the top of search results
Being at the top of search results is the most IMPORTANT thing when it comes to getting lots of views compared to the other videos related to yours. Your goal must be to target a specific range of search results, and get to the top of those results. What do I mean by this? YouTube has changed over the last 3 years, a lot. Back in the day, people were able to overload their video descriptions with a bunch of random keywords relating to almost everything and anything and would be guaranteed top search results for all these keywords. The way YouTube works nowadays, you MUST stick to one genre of keywords to be able to be at the top of search results for that specific genre.
Confused? Let me give you an example. Let’s say you create a video that is a song parody to a new song, let’s just say Can’t Be Tamed By Miley Cyrus. In this video it is not really related to Miley Cyrus, but rather to let’s say Harry Potter. After uploading this video to YouTube you will need to make a title for the video, a description and put keywords. The average person would probably put as a title “Can’t Be Tamed Parody Song about Harry Potter”. The thing is you need to either pick Miley Cyrus, or Harry Potter as a title. Why is this? Most people don’t search for a song parody by Miley Cyrus related to Harry Potter. The would either search Harry Potter, or Miley Cyrus. This is why you need to pick which audience you think is bigger. Let’s say we choose Miley Cyrus, we would make the title something such as “Miley Cyrus – Can’t Be Tamed Parody Song/Spoof”. You will notice that I put Miley Cyrus as the first word because you are most likely trying to reach out to people whoa re looking for things about Miley Cyrus.
What I am trying to get to is that you must know the exact audience that you are trying to appeal to, and make your title, description and keywords accordingly. Don;t try to reach more than 1 audience, it won’t work in your favour. You’re better off getting to the top of a certain audience than the bottom of a bunch. Get it? Good.
The next thing you need to know about search results is how stupid they are. YouTube sucks. Yep, you heard me right. Why do they suck? Well first off, their search results are so set up. When you search for popular topics, music videos, or anything for that matter, the top search results will almost ALWAYS be popular YouTubers. This is because in the huge ass formula for search results that YouTube has, partner and ESPECIALLY sponsor accounts get to the very top. This is one factor that we just have to live with because there is no way around this, for now. I say for now because after I’m done explaining this whole article to you, YOU will be on the pathway to becoming one of these partners who are at the top! The other factor that makes YouTube stupid is how random their search results are. Some will argue that YouTube doesn’t actually have a formula for their search results. That may or not be true, but by following my rule of sticking to one audience, you will be able to bypass this.
When sticking to this one specific audience, you have to be careful that your description and keywords also follow this same audience. No one really actually reads the descriptions of videos, so don’t even bother having it have complete sentences or sentences that even make sense for that matter. Just overload it with a BUNCH of keywords and phrases about that ONE specific topic. Don’t just jumble it all together though, make sure to skip lines to make phrases related to that one topic per line. Trust me, this works. As for keywords, don’t put a lot. Only just 5 or 6 words that relate to the topic you chose. Any more will have you breaking the rule of sticking to one topic.
Being in the related video box
Looking at my YouTube insight page at the moment, I am seeing that over the last 3 years that 61.6% (13.55 MILLION) of my video views have been generated from being in the related video box. 13.55 million views, that is a MASSIVE number for one specific source. This is why in my opinion, having your videos in the related box of videos is the single most important thing on YouTube to generate views. The funny thing about this is that hardly anyone thinks about it, and that’s why YOU are going to see yourself receiving MILLIONS of views after this technique.
The way YouTube related videos work is that on each video page on YouTube, on the right hand side will be a column of related videos to the one that you are watching. These videos are videos that match or are very similar to the keywords, description and title of the current video you are watching. You probably already can see where I am going with this. Want to get a video have a lot of views? Match it’s title, description and keywords to a popular video. Now, just don’t start changing all your current video tags to match popular videos, that isn’t going to work. This is only going to work for new uploaded videos, and you’re going to want to make sure that your video content actually does relate to the video you want to match or you may end up being reported and being banned.
So, find a popular video that has been released fairly recently, make a video related to that, make your title, description and keywords SIMILAR (Make there they are semi-different or this may not work) and then give it a good week or so and you will most likely find yourself in the sidebar of this video. You’re probably just as amazed as I am on how easy this technique is, and I know from personal experience that this technique DOES work.
Just take a look at a couple of my most viewed videos ( and keep in mind this is only a FEW of the video I have uploaded on only my MAIN account) :
Going Viral
The third source of video views is from having your video going viral. This means having you video being embedded on external sites, having your site linked from websites such as forums and last and most importantly, having your video seen and sent by people to their friends. The one problem with viral videos is that you can never know what videos will go viral and what videos will not. It is basically formed on luck. Many people sit them self down at a table for hours on hours trying to come up with an idea of a video that will go completely viral. DON’T DO THIS. Trying to make a viral video is exactly how you do NOT have a viral video. Viral videos are mostly spur of the moment things caught on tape, or just a video that was LUCKILY seen by the right person and sent to other people. Having a viral video is something that is almost impossible to plan out. Maybe it will happen to you, and maybe it won’t, that is something you will have to wait and see. Let me tell you this though, trying to make a viral video is just going to waist your time, and this time can be spent on doing other things useful for maintaining your YouTube success.
That is all I’m going to talk about for viral videos in this specific article. Since it is something that is based almost completely on luck, I can’t really sit here and try to teach you how to have one. I will however teach on how you can use other viral videos to your advantage in some of my other articles. Make sure to take a look back at allaboutyoutube.com for more articles on that.
Though going completely viral is almost impossible, there are ways for you to still have your video sent through a lot of people. And this concept is a very simple one, promoting the hell out of your videos. I do it each and every time I do a video, and trust me it helps a lot. As SOON as your video is uploaded to YouTube and done processing for maximum quality, you should be sending it to EVERYONE you know. This means family, relatives, friends, friends of friends, people you only met once, everyone. There is no limit on to who you can or can not send the video too. If you have any contact whatsoever with a person, they should be hearing that you have a new video. This also means promoting through social networking sites such as Facebook by posting the link to the video on your friend’s walls and putting the link in your status. Your initial goal is to have the world know about your video. This part may seem a bit tedious and a bit ridiculous, but it is something VERY important to get the word out about you.
4 months ago no one in the city where I lived knew that I made videos. I was more of a global thing. Now it is almost impossible to find someone I know that doesn’t know I make videos. Friends, relatives, random people, its amazing. This is exactly what you want.
So this is the conclusion of this specific article unfortunately. This has been my intro into getting you into the world of getting lots of views on YouTube. I hope some of the information here has been very informative. If not, you should start going to allaboutyoutube.com and looking at my other articles. This has been a beginner article. If you want more of my complex in depth looks at how to get more views, then come explore allaboutyoutube.com. Let’s get some views.