Whether you’re a professional content creator or simply a business owner or marketer who wants to get more eyeballs on your brand, increasing the number of views you get on your YouTube videos can help you achieve significant growth and accomplish your top goals.

The question is, where do you start?

5 Tips and Techniques for More YouTube Views

Views aren’t the be-all and end-all for a YouTube content creator, but they’re certainly an important metric. Views are like the fuel for your channel’s success. Without them, it’s difficult to get the sort of brand exposure or conversions you need to be successful.

And with that in mind, here are several useful techniques for getting that elusive view count up:

1. Create Better Video Content

This might sound obvious, but it all starts with high-quality video content. If you don’t have good content, people aren’t going to watch it (and YouTube isn’t going to recommend it to people). So before doing anything else, make sure you strategize around improving your content quality.

If you don’t have the in-house resources or expertise, you can use a video production service to edit and optimize your videos for you. This allows you to focus on other elements.

2. Try BOGY Thumbnails

Thumbnails can make or break your views. (In fact, your thumbnail and title are the two most important factors in whether or not someone clicks.) And while there are plenty of different theories and strategies for how to create magnetic thumbnails, the BOGY approach is one of the most effective.

BOGY stands for blue, orange, green, yellow. The idea is that the most clicked thumbnails incorporate these four colors. This is due to the fact that everything else on the YouTube platform is red, black, and white (the site’s brand colors).

By going with a BOGY color scheme, your thumbnails are much more likely to stand out. The 5-Minute Crafts channel is a great example. Notice how their thumbnails pop off the screen.

3. Pick a Keyword-Rich Title 

While the thumbnail is often the first element to grab someone’s attention, the title is usually the “make or break” element. A viewer will quickly read the title to see if it’s something that they’re interested in.

Additionally, titles are one of the determining factors in which videos YouTube serves in the search results. If you want to reach the right people, you need to use keyword-rich titles that drive excitement and curiosity.

4. Nail the Video Description

Most YouTubers treat video descriptions as an afterthought – something they only pay attention to when it’s time to click the “publish” button. But, truth be told, this is one of the most important elements for ranking well.

Your video description is a place to communicate to the YouTube search algorithm what your video is about. You should write at least 300 words (and preferably more) – injecting plenty of long-tail keywords and a basic synopsis of what the video’s content is about.

When writing your video description, you should know that YouTube puts a greater emphasis on the first two to three sentences. Be sure to plug a couple of your focus keywords in this section.

5. Let Your Audience Guide You

It’s easy to get caught up in thinking we know what our audience wants. Sometimes we’re right, but other times we’re wrong. This can result in wasting time and money on videos that our viewers don’t actually want to see.

The best way to increase views is by creating content that your audience wants to spend time watching. You can do this by studying what they’re already searching for.

Go to YouTube and type in the first couple of words of your keyword (or related search terms) and see what suggested searches populate the dropdown menu. YouTube is actually telling you what people are already searching for. By creating video content around these long-tail keywords, you no longer have to guess.

Adding it All Up 

Implementing these tips is basically guaranteed to increase your views. However, the extent to which you see your views grow depends on a blend of unique circumstantial factors. Thus, it’s important that you continue to push forward, try new things, and iterate as you go.

Ultimately, what works for you will be different than what works for the next creator or brand. Use these tips to establish a solid foundation – then adapt as you see fit!