How to Get More Views on YouTube Views? 3 Things to Focus on !

If you’re a new YouTuber and you’re having trouble getting views on your videos or you want to level up the amount of views that you’re getting on your YouTube videos, I’m going to tell you three different things to focus on. And if you focus on these three things, everything’s going to change for you.

When I tell you what these things are, your brain is going to say, “Oh, I’ve heard that before”. But I want you to focus on the details that I will tell about each of the method. You have to read everything out with full focus and start executing it right now to get more views on your youtube videos.

Tips to get more views on YouTube

Your have the ability to get clicks from all of YouTube’s different traffic sources—not just YouTube search, not just YouTube homepages, not just suggested videos, not just your subscription feed—you’ve got to focus on being able to grab people’s attention everywhere.

Focus on YouTube Search

On YouTube, you have the main traffic sources, or the pages on YouTube where the most views come from. Those pages are YouTube Home, Up Next, and Suggested Videos. And, of course, YouTube Search.

Depending on what you watch or read, you’re going to see different information about the value of each one of those traffic sources. But I’m going to go ahead and tell you what that is; you don’t even have to watch or read anything in order to get this.

First, let’s talk about YouTube search.

YouTube search is where people are actively looking for your videos; it’s really easy to get clicks there because people are looking for the content that you made. They’re already interested in the topic when the page loads, and because of that, it’s really easy to get views in YouTube searches.

In fact, if you are a brand new content creator and you’re having trouble getting interaction in general, going after YouTube search is a great place to start.

And the reason for that is because every single person who’s looking for your type of content is a good fit for your type of content. And if those people go and interact with your content through YouTube searches, that is the way that they find you.

If the person who finds your video in a YouTube search enjoys it, then that helps train the YouTube system on who is and who is not a good fit for your content when they are recommending it to people through the other features.

Because of that, going after YouTube searches when you’re first getting started is a great thing to do. It’s a good foot in the door when you’re first learning how to get people to click on your videos.

Additionally, if your videos come up in YouTube searches, there is a bonus possibility that they will also come up in other text-based search engines like Google. Your audience will now be able to discover you on audiences that often use various platforms to find similar content.

The waiting period required with only using YouTube search, however, is a disadvantage. You have to wait patiently for people to look for your particular stuff, find it, and then like it. This feature makes YouTube search more of a long-term approach.

As of 2023 July, you cannot expect results instantaneously from youtube search since it takes time for people to find and interact with your content.

Get views from YouTube Homepage

YouTube homepages are part of YouTube’s recommendation system. What it means is that YouTube is recommending your content to people when they log onto YouTube or when they’re just interacting with the platform on a computer, TV, mobile device, or any other way that people access YouTube.

There are important aspects you must take into account while trying to attract attention on YouTube’s homepage. First of all, YouTube users who find your videos are specifically looking for content like you’ve already created. However, viewers aren’t explicitly seeking for your video on the homepage or in YouTube’s recommendation engine.

Your task is to grab their interest and get them to view your videos even if they weren’t originally planning on doing so. To do this, you must write interesting titles, captivating thumbnails, and interesting intros that capture viewer’s interest and entice them to view the full video.

You can pull them in and raise the likelihood that they’ll subscribe to your channel on a regular basis by carefully appealing to their hobbies and curiosities.

Because of that hurdle, YouTube’s recommendation system is the hardest to get traffic from. However, it is the most bountiful traffic source in terms of speed if you’re trying to get views quickly.

Thumbnail Game

When you’re trying to get those “quick” views from YouTube’s recommendation systems, specifically home, one thing that you have to make sure is how your thumbnail is grabbing someone’s attention.

How does your thumbnail help the person you’re trying to reach identify that your video is related to something they are interested in?

When creating your thumbnail and title combination on YouTube Home, there are some crucial aspects to consider in a verbal or mental exercise you should run through with every thumbnail and title you make.

Your thumbnail should quickly convey something that connects with the audience you’re attempting to attract when someone sees your video suggested on their YouTube homepage. It must be aesthetically beautiful and engaging to draw them in.

Learn more about Youtube Thumbnail CTR here !

Define the key element that will grab your audience’s attention for a powerful thumbnail. If you are unable to determine this key element, keep working on your thumbnail until you can decide what will encourage people to click on it.

Consider what particular thing in the thumbnail would be able to draw the viewer’s attention or act as the main point of interest. It might be an interesting picture, a text overlay with strong font, an appealing symbol, or any other visual component that conveys the spirit of your video’s theme.

This particular focus of yours will increase the likelihood that your thumbnail will stand out and encourage users to watch your video. Keep in mind that a visually appealing thumbnail is a must for getting clicks and boosting the exposure of your content as a whole.

Key element for a good thumbnail in different niches:

If you’re a food channel, that key element might be just a picture of the food.

If you’re a gamer, that focus might be a very large and prominent character in the game, or it might be a game logo.

If you’re making tech content, that focus could be the actual device that you’re talking about.

If you’re doing entertainment content, then it gets a little bit more complicated because, of course, it’s going to come down to the specific type of entertainment content that you’re doing.

If it’s something like a prank, then you want to make sure that things are big enough that people can see what is getting ready to happen with the prank in your thumbnail.

If you’re doing other types of entertainment content, my entertainment content has a stylistic look to it, to the point where you can easily identify that it’s my type of entertainment content just based on the Photoshop treatment of the pern’s face, the colors used, things like that. When it comes to the thumbnail, they are typically super overdone and extremely vibrant.

If you’re doing educational content of this kind, then make sure that whatever it is that you are teaching people is easily identifiable. You want to make sure that you’re just picking one clear focus for your thumbnail and making sure that the attention is going directly to that thing first.

Don’t make thumbnails messy

If you want to get traffic from YouTube’s home page, you should consider if any of the parts in your thumbnail distract away from the key point you want to convey.

Consider if there is anything in the thumbnail that might distract users’ focus from the main idea or aspect you want to highlight. It’s important to make sure that every element of the thumbnail enhances the main idea and encourages people to interact with your content.

For example, if you put a picture of a delicious cake as your thumbnail because you’re a food channel but then cover it up with a bunch of text, then it makes it really difficult for someone to see at a glance that it’s a cake.

If you’re a gamer and you’re using one of the characters as the main thing that’s going to grab attention to the image, but then you have other elements in your thumbnail that are super bright, way brighter than that particular character that’s going to actually grab that viewer’s attention that’s interested in that thing.

In that case, it’s essential to ensure that other elements in the thumbnail, particularly overly bright ones, do not overpower or distract from that character. If those bright colors draw more attention than the character itself, it could hinder the viewer’s ability to identify the video’s content related to the game and might obscure their view of the central character, which is crucial for capturing their interest.

Make Catchy Titles

Next thing about getting clicks from YouTube homepages is the title that you’re using as well. When it comes to your thumbnail title, you always want to make sure that you’re thinking of how they work together to win the click.

The thumbnail grabs attention, the title is the thing that pulls them through, and in some cases, your thumbnail can cause them to click directly as well, but you want to always think about how they work together because you have two different things that you can use for context and to encourage people to click on your content.

Keep titles short

For the title itself, what you want to think about first are the words that would help that person understand what this video is about and why it would matter to them. Are those words as close to the front of the title as possible?

The reason you want to think about this is because YouTube truncates or cuts off titles on YouTube Home; they do the same in suggested videos. Because of that, if your title is too long, then they’re going to cut off information.

You need to make sure that whatever words would help the people that you’re trying to reach know that your video is about that thing, you want to make sure that you’re putting those words as close to the front of the title as possible.

If you do that, it will help them get the context that they need to make the quick decision to click on video.

Another thing you want to make sure you’re doing when it comes to your title is that, just like you were doing with the thumbnail, you define exactly what about your title or your thumbnail and title combination would be compelling enough for the person that you’re trying to reach to click on your video.

You’ll want to think about, “Okay, does this title create some type of curiosity gap, or is this title informative enough, or is there something compelling about this title” and if so, what exactly is it that’s compelling that if you were to see it, you would say, “Oh, I need to see this video. This looks like something that may be interesting, I need to watch this video.” That’s what you want to make sure you’re going for when you’re writing titles for your videos.

Gain views from Suggested Video

Let’s talk about “recommended videos”. It’s crucial to keep in mind the same crucial component we focused on for the homepage. When it comes to recommended videos: make sure it’s big and easily visible. The target audience should be able to determine this element’s relevancy and interest, which will encourage them to click and interact with your video.

Everything we discussed earlier for homepage recommendations, the same exact thing applies to suggested videos, but the difference is that, in smaller screen devices, they come up small. Because of that, it’s a really good practice to make sure that you look at your thumbnails at a smaller size so that you can make sure that the same information still translates well when YouTube is showing your content next to other videos on YouTube.

Now, I know they’re experimenting right now with a different layout for the YouTube watch page on desktop computers where it shows suggested videos right underneath the video that’s being played, which is awesome because it makes ’em a little bit bigger and a little bit more prominent.

However, in all of the other places where they do come out smaller, and really even in that case, you just want to make sure that the thing that you’re trying to get people to focus on is big enough that it can still be clearly understood that the video is about that particular thing.

When it comes to the titles, the same exact thing applies that we were talking about before, where you want to make sure that the most important things are at the front of the title, so that when YouTube cuts the titles off next to other videos, people can still clearly see what it is that your video is about and make the choice to click on it or not.

Study your channel with YouTube Analytics Tool

In order to see exactly how people are responding to your content on the different pages on YouTube, here’s what you need to do:

1. Log in to your YouTube Creator Studio.
2. Click on the “Content” tab and choose the specific video you want to analyze.
3. Access analytics by clicking on the “Analytics” tab on the left-hand side.
4. Switch to “Advanced Mode” located at the top right corner.
5. Click on the “Traffic” tab to explore the sources of your views.
6. Scroll down to view details such as watch time generated from each traffic source, average view duration, and impressions.
7. Impressions represent the number of times YouTube has shown your content to users on the platform.

This data will provide valuable insights into how your content resonates with viewers across different YouTube pages. You’re going to be able to see your impressions and click-through rate, which is basically your ability to convert people from the different pages on YouTube into your video. It’s how many times people have clicked compared to the number of times that YouTube has shown your content to those people.

If you see that you’re doing great in YouTube search but bad everywhere else, that means that you’re doing great when people are looking for you but not much when it comes to grabbing people’s attention from homepages and suggested videos.

If you see that you’re performing well everywhere except suggested videos, then you have to make sure that you are looking at your content at a small size, making sure that everything in your thumbnails is prominent and easy to see at a small size, as well as your title.

It could also mean that you need to work on the compellingness of your video if you’re not getting much attention from suggested videos. When it comes to the homepages, the exact same thing applies. If you notice that you are not getting any activity on homepages, then you need to make sure that you are going through the exercises that we talked about a little bit earlier.

Try to maintain Good Audience Retention

Okay, the next thing that we’re going to talk about is audience retention.

When it comes to audience retention, this is a report on exactly how people are responding to your videos and how your videos compare with other videos on the platform of a similar length. What you want to look for in your audience retention reports are problem areas.

You want to look for places in your video where people are leaving, and you can find that by just looking for drops in your audience retention. You can also see where people are skipping by looking for dips in your audience retention reports.

You can tell where people are rewinding to see things again by the spikes in your audience retention report. When people share your content externally at a specific timestamp, if it gets a lot of use from that external source, then you can also see spikes because of those things as well.

The main thing that you want to look for are the dips and the areas where people are holding or not leaving the video. You can identify that by a straight line. When you study this particular graph with every video that you publish, it’s going to help you make better videos.

But here’s the thing: you have to be open to the information that you’re receiving and say, “Hey, if people are leaving in this part, even though I like doing that particular thing, or even though that particular part of the video is something that I thought would be cool, if people aren’t responding to it, then it’s going to help me if I cut out those types of things.”

By cutout, I don’t mean use the YouTube editor to cut them out. You can do that too as a temporary fix. I just mean in the next videos that you publish, just don’t do those things. When it comes to the compared to other videos option, the reason that you want to use that one is because it shows you how competitive you are.

If you find that you are underperforming compared to other videos of similar length, then that means that you’ve got to work on all of your videos because everybody else is beating you out. Currently, if you notice that certain parts of your video are getting beat out, you just have to try to make those particular parts of your video better in future videos that you publish.

The graph itself can give you tons of insight into why your videos are not performing well, if you are having problems getting views on your videos.

The “Detailed Activity” graph in your audience retention statistics is a useful but often a neglected statistic. The thorough activity graph turns into a vital tool for creators when associated with the abstract audience retention statistics that specifically is related to your video.

You can pinpoint certain sections of your video where a lot of people are quitting since it gives you more insights on viewing behavior. This knowledge is essential because it enables you to identify areas that need development and take the appropriate steps to maintain viewer interest throughout the video.

But in order to find this specific report so that you can learn exactly how people are responding and fix problem areas, what you want to do is go into your Creator Studio again, then go into your content tab again, and then select whatever videos you want to explore.

And then, once you are in there, click into analytics. And then, if you just scroll down that first page that you see, you’re going to see a graph going across the bottom with your video on top of it. If you click on the option there to see more, then you’re going to see the dropdowns and more detailed information about exactly how people are responding.

Audience Interactions: Likes, Comments, Subscribes, Shares MATTER

Okay, now the next thing we’re going to talk about is what happens when people interact with your videos, because this is another thing that can help you get more views. When people are clicking on your videos at a competitive rate for the platform and they’re enjoying your content at a competitive rate for the platform, then you’re going to end up getting more views just by default because people are enjoying your content more, which is what YouTube wants.

However, you can also amplify that when people are doing additional things with your content because, in addition to people enjoying your video, YouTube wants direct engagement from them as well.

Watch time counts as engagement, as do other factors. For example, even though there are technical aspects to it in terms of how often people like videos and things like that, when people are liking your videos, that is a very positive signal for YouTube that people are enjoying your content. Because of that, it’s helpful to either add a graphic or invite people to like your videos.

For example, if you’re finding value out of this, make sure you give it a thumbs up because it’ll help me out.

But what you want to do is just add a graphic or simply ask people to like your video. In addition to that, if people subscribe to your channel at a high rate, that’s also a positive signal because it demonstrates that people are enjoying your content.

Make sure you’re asking people to subscribe in a non-intrusive way. And of course, you can use a graphic for this as well if you would like, but the important part of this is that those two things are really easy.

There’s not a lot of action that anyone needs to take. They just have to press a button or tap a button if they’re on a mobile device. The difference comes when people watch more of your content because that takes up more of their time.

What you want to get really good at, in addition to getting as many people as possible to the end of your videos, is getting people to click on your end screens and go watch more of your videos. When you’re putting your videos together, thinking about the entire viewer experience can make a really big difference when it comes to how your videos perform on YouTube.

But in order to find out how people are responding to your end screens, what you want to do is go back into your analytics just at the video level, like I showed you in the last one. But instead of going into the audience retention reports, you want to go over to the engagement tab.

Once you’re in the engagement tab, you’re going to see the end-screen element click rate. They’re going to show you your channel average, and then they’re going to show you exactly how people responded to this video.

Boost Your YouTube Viewer Retention: Expert Tips for Engaging Endings

What you need to do as part of your study and as part of your experimentation and implementation is make sure that you are trying to get as many people as possible to watch an additional video.

And here’s how you do that: As your video is coming to an end, do not let the viewer know that your video is coming to an end. For example, instead of saying, “That’s why I thought this, or That concludes our trip too, or That’s how you do X, Y, Z”, or anything like that, that suggests to the viewer that your video is complete.

To maximize viewer engagement and encourage them to click on your next video, avoid signaling the end of your current video explicitly. Instead, smoothly transition into promoting the next video. Here’s how you can do it:

1. As your video nears its conclusion, refrain from phrases like “That’s it for today guys ! ” or “That’s how you do X, Y, Z,” which suggest the video is over.
2. Build anticipation for the next video by saying something like, “Just so you know, I’m going to demonstrate how to do this by actually doing it. Let’s dive right in.”
3. Mention the topic of your next video and create intrigue: “If you enjoyed this video on three things new YouTubers can do to get more views, then you’re probably a new YouTuber. In my recent video, I discussed various tools that can aid you on this journey, and you might not be aware of them yet.”
4. Prompt viewers to click on the next video: “Go ahead and click here right now to watch that video. It’s packed with valuable insights and tools to help you grow and manage your YouTube channel effectively.”
5. Make the process feel natural and engaging, motivating viewers to take action and explore the content in the next video.

By implementing these techniques, you can seamlessly guide your audience to the next video without disrupting their viewing experience, increasing the likelihood of their continued engagement with your channel.

I hope this detailed guide provided many new insights and ideas for you to succeed on YouTube. If you properly followed this tutorial, you will start seeing your content being enjoyed by more people in a matter of weeks.