A lot of YouTubers act as if YouTube is a slot machine – they upload, check the analytics, and pray that the algorithm decides to bless them with success. Rather than playing the YouTube slot machine, the predictable way to increase the number of videos that do well is to work on two things: – Optimizing the video for YouTube and testing the impact of different parameters – Optimizing the flow of your website to continuously send new relevant viewers to your channel, during at least the first 48 hours following the first watch.
Remember to keep any paid adverts (as in advert $’s, as opposed to advert as a promotional piece) very focused and quantifiable. An inexpensive, time-limited YouTube promotion package test is fine for testing the impact of a given title and image, but it won’t work if you’re not already getting those elements working with your opening thirty seconds of a video.
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Win the Click, Then Keep it
You can only promote videos that are relevant to the content that you choose, then watch. This one is sort of self-evident, but its implications are a bit uncomfortable, as you’ll see.
Start with the package before you spend time making the content. Come up with 5-10 title options that clearly suggest what viewers are in for, and a couple of thumbnail ideas that still read on a phone. It frustrates me to see songs that are clearly worthy of being a great live performance being uploaded as nothing more than some guy in a room “jamming” with a title that’s something like “Studio Jam #12”. The title and thumbnail are unhelpful to the viewer, and so nobody ends up watching the thing.
Once the viewer has clicked on your video title, you have approximately one minute to keep them engaged. Cut the “hello, I’m here” preamble in favour of a quick payoff, and then you can afford to take it easy and actually explore the details of the topic at hand. These video retention tactics and best practices are all part of the tactics I summarise. Focusing on the opening seconds to get the viewer hooked on the rest of the video, as well as matching the promises made in the title, are just a few of the strategies that creators seem to overlook in their “it’s all the algorithm’s fault” apologetics.
Also Read: YouTube Descriptions: 10+ Proven Hacks To Boost Visibility
Turn Every Upload into a Series
Single videos are fragile. Series are durable.
Here is one possible way to look at it: every video should answer the question, “What is the next video a satisfied viewer would want to watch?” And then turn that next video into reality and promote it heavily.
- Use playlists as a path, not storage.
- Pin a comment that points to the next best video (not your homepage).
- Add end screens that match intent: tutorial to tutorial, performance to performance.
- Write descriptions that include 1-2 internal links to closely related videos.
One of the teams I worked with in the creator education space decided to stop chasing the hot “viral” topic of the week for a month and instead focused on making a little 3-part series. The view counts for each video didn’t really change on day one, but by day two, the session time was way up, and they knew why.
Make Your Website The Traffic Engine
One place you actually control the narrative, the order of the content, and the follow-up is your own website. YouTube is rented land.
You “rent” the land on YouTube. Embedding a random video on a random page and calling it “marketing” is a common blunder. You need to build a watch funnel. The main introductory video belongs on a dedicated page, and the structure of the page should guide viewers to watch the 2nd and 3rd videos in the series. Think of it as an abbreviated introductory piece with an embedded video, 2-3 related image thumbnails, and a signup for viewers interested in new releases.
Your video library is hidden. We want to see more videos in a “Videos” hub page with sections like How-to, Behind the scenes, Live, and Gear. This way, Google has content to index, and we as an audience have a convenient way to view your media. We’ve already come up with a bunch of ideas to promote your site, but a website hub is an often-overlooked tactic with long-lasting impact, as the social post that triggered it will be long forgotten.
You have no control over the page that the end user is on when they view an embed. So a slow-loading slider behind your video, or a huge header banner that takes up all the space on the top of the page, will mean that people will abandon your page on mobile in seconds. And people shouldn’t have to think. You should always explain why they should watch your video.
Also Read: How Many Views is Viral? Powerful Benchmarks That Define Success in 2026
Promotion That Does Not Feel Spammy
Distribution is about spreading information in a way that is beneficial to the audience, rather than asking them to pay attention to you and your project. This is especially important for musicians and other small businesses that have to frequently post on social media platforms in order to maintain visibility.
To distribute your video effectively, choose 2-3 consistent “outlets” that you’ll be using. For me, these are the email list, website, and social media. I chose one social channel to act as the narrative bridge for my video. Because I want to keep my audience engaged and diverse, I’ll cut 3-5 short “advertising spots” for my video that will capture the unique hook, outcome, and surprising moment of each segment. These clips will then be rotated and broadcast across my chosen channels over a 10-14-day period. A newer marketing tactics guide I recently came across that covers things like the effect of distributing shorts with longer videos, and is worth a read if you have a minute.
The test for any type of advertising (even advertising “free” services like YouTube and their videos) is that you are actually reaching an engaged audience rather than just inflating your view count or other metrics. Many content creators pay for advertising (services) that can assist with reaching their desired audience, and this includes services like PromosoundGroup. However, the true measure of whether your advertising and promotion activities worked is to measure engagement metrics after “exposure,” such as watch time, audience retention (aka return viewers), and whether they watched your second video as well.
Once you’ve got all that sorted, focus on the mundane details: making sure that your video thumbnails are engaging, that your videos are sequentially planned in a way that keeps your viewers engaged, and that you’re using your website to continually re-expose your viewers to your content. Do all of that, and your views will start to feel a lot less like a game of chance and a lot more like a repeatable process.