3 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your YouTube Channel

This is probably the biggest question for any YouTube artist starting out. While there is no set formula for success in this industry (especially since the market is so saturated nowadays). Aside from the obvious tip of producing great content, I wanted to share 3 tips that I have used in the past for my clients that have helped increase traffic to their YouTube channel.

1. Integrating the Right Keywords – Have the right keywords integrated to Coming up with the right keywords typically takes about 30 minutes – 1 hour. You need to do research in seeing which keywords have a high search rate AND also have a low competitive rating. So how do you get this data?

*DISCLAIMER*  - Keep in mind that data produced by these 2 sources are not entirely accurate, so please use these numbers just as a small aid in finalizing your keyword list for your video.

• YouTube Keyword Tool - This is a pretty good tool in figuring out the searches a specific keyword gets monthly.  If you using a keyword as a tag and find out that this keyword gets no monthly searches, then whats the point of wasting space and keeping it? This tool can save you time and increase your exposure rate in YouTube organic search since you know which keywords you come up with gets higher monthly searches.
• Google Keyword Tool – As some of you may know, Google now display YouTube videos in their organic search results. This tool gives you monthly search data for specific keywords AND it shows how competitive they are. Use this tool and choose the keywords with high search rates AND has a low competitive score (this measures competitive these keywords in Pay-Per-Click campaigns). Targeting these types of keywords will help propel your video quicker in the Google organic search rankings.

When you have your nice list of keywords, now you need to integrate them into the 3 hot spots. The beginning of the TITLE of your video should include your TOP keyword for the whole thing. The rest of the keywords should be integrated into your description space, and the rest on to your tags. Doing so well help increase your video ranking both the YouTube and Google search results which translate to more targeted traffic to your channel.

2. Integrate your own custom social media share buttons to your video – Here are 2 custom share buttons for your video and where to place them:

• Twitter: Use ClicktoTweet to generate a link to the message you want your audience to post on Twitter when they share your video. Be sure to remember to include your YouTube link into your message because a lot of people forget that part. Then use bit.ly to shorten the link.
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=<INSERT URL YOU WANT TO SHARE>. Take that and shorten with bit.ly.

Now that you have your 2 share links. Here is the crucial part. You need to make sure to put BOTH buttons on the FIRST line of the description box, that way the viewer will see it without having to click the “Show More” button. I would use CAPS or asterisks between the words to drive more attention to the buttons. Doing this should increase the click-through-rate of your share buttons. Refer to the image below for reference:

3. Submit Your Video to Crowd Sourcing Sites – My top 2 crowd sourcing sites would be Stumbleupon and Reddit. I have gotten thousands of hits alone through submitting contents through these sites. Make sure that you have catchy titles for each our your submissions to help increase CRT% (Click-Through-Rate) .Research on “getting more exposure on stumbleupon/reddit” so you know how to utilize these tools in the most optimal way.