YouTube Channel Improvement Notes

I have been releasing more YouTube videos recently and trying to learn how to ‘improve’ my YouTube numbers.

There are two strands to this:

• core
• periphery

The core feature that will allow success on YouTube is clearly quality content. Clearly, having watched a lot of videos, quality is a very subjective attribute, but it clearly has to revolve around providing the viewer with value.

There are an enormous amount of periphery features which support success. Unfortunately, these are easier to target than the core so it might be tempting to only target these e.g. thumbnails, channel descriptions, video descriptions, etc.

I’m learning that I have to do both.

Core video quality takes time and requires me to continually improve and experiment so that each video becomes better than the last.

Periphery, because it is fast to act on, can be done immediately.

Some periphery changes I’ve made recently.

• First few lines of “About” description

First few lines of “About” description

When you hover over a ‘name’ in a comment you see a truncated version of the “About” Description.

Edit this so that it makes sense in that context and can be used as a teaser to drive traffic to your channel.

To do this:

• leave a comment on a video
• hover over your name
• edit the About description until you are happy

You can edit the About description by:

• Goto “My channel”
• click “About”
• click the “Description” to edit it

Channel Name

I want the Channel name to be more than a “Name” I also want it to have a subtitle that explains the subject of the channel so rather than “EvilTester Videos” I have “EvilTester - Software Testing”.

I don’t know if this also feeds into SEO, although I’m assuming it does.

Thumbnail Branding

I still need to improve this, but as a short term step I’m adding a logo on each thumbnail so that it is obviously from my channel when shown in a list.

Production

I’ve just started to experiment with ChromaKey and the first ChromaKey video received a lot of positive comments.

Next Steps

I have the following items on my periphery todo list:

• Channel Header - remove links to external sites, add image of me, make simpler
• Channel “For new visitors” - need to change the text here and a different channel trailer
• Consistent thumbnail branding
• Better “About” text
• Different Intro

For the core todo list:

• Videos covering ‘popular’ topics, not just topics I want to cover
• Ask for ‘subscriptions’ more
• More overlays - lower third etc.

Recommended channels to help you improve:

• Brian G Johnson TV
• Nick Nimmin
• Derral Eves