mdolla: 4 Pillars of Becoming a Successful YouTube Blogger

Every blogger is aware that content marketing is the cornerstone of our ability to reach out and get through to potential and existing audiences. People are lazy readers, whereas in videos, you can dish out valuable info in an engaging and easily-digestible manner. How do you kick it off and make your content stand out from the YouTube crowd? Check out the four most important tips on how to jumpstart and foster your channel’s visibility as a YouTube blogger.

1. Understand the Mechanics

Even a preschooler knows how to start a YouTube channel – that is, you can sign up with Google and then register a channel in several clicks. However, making it work for real isn’t a cakewalk. Apart from having awesome content, you’ve got to grasp which factors YouTube’s video ranking primarily takes into consideration. The most important factors for the ranking are:

The title tag info and description keywords are SEO cornerstones of your video’s visibility among the gazillions of others. It’s still plain old text that matters in YouTube search – further on, we’ll dwell upon the right ways to make it work.
Watch time is a super-important factor – it shows whether people just stumbled upon your video and left after several seconds or watched the greater part or the whole of it. YouTube introduced this algorithm to crack down on those who used to buy fake views to bolster the total volume of views for higher rankings.
The number of subscribers, likes and dislikes, comments and shares are another litmus test that shows whether users actually care about your content.

Such self-evident things as the channel name, proper category, profile image and channel art matter as well. Make your channel name as memorable, unique and up-to-the-point as possible – you don’t want it to be generic lest you go unnoticed forever. When selecting channel art, remember to position the name and logo so that they’d be visible across all devices.

2. Master Title and Description SEO

SEO experts suggest that you don’t skimp on video descriptions – because so far, YouTube knows what your videos are about only thanks to the surrounding text. More text means more keywords, both target ones and long tail ones. Do some research using, for instance, Google Trends, and pick out the most relevant keywords for your niche. Also, keep in mind that Google search favors some keywords more than others: the former are video-specific, so they will give your content a chance to feature among first-page video results.

Moreover, your account’s Advanced Settings section allows you to enter channel keywords – make sure you don’t miss it.

Avoid misleading tags and keywords like the plague – if viewers find that your content actually has nothing to do with their query, you’ll earn nothing but a bad name.

3. Leverage Annotations and Captions

A call-to-action included in both descriptions and video annotations also plays an important part in your video’s SEO ranking. Make sure you place it unobtrusively yet effectively, and get ready to welcome new subscribers with more awesome content!

As for transcribing your videos, it’s far from mere busywork – Google and YouTube do index transcripts! Besides, adding captions will show your audience that you care for them – in case they have to view your blog in mute mode, they can still read the content; this gives you an edge over competitors who didn’t go that extra mile.

4. Share Across Different Communities

To naturally increase your content’s visibility, enable automatic sharing of new content via your Facebook and Twitter profiles. In addition, join various discussions to which your video can be a valuable contribution. People frown at links in comments, but they usually favor videos – as long as they are relevant, of course.

Hopefully, you’ve got an insight into what you should consider in building your YouTube strategy. Best of luck implementing it!

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