So I just messaged a friend and fellow musician who is getting into doing Youtube videos more with some tips on Facebook. I then figured that the information I gave her might help some other people new to doing Youtube videos. I’ve learned tons since I first started doing them regularly around 1 year ago, so here it is – tips for getting more views:

Basically tagging with relevant tags is key to getting lots of views. Of course you want to tag the name of the song, if it’s a cover etc, and your artist/band name. But also stuff like ‘acoustic’ ‘live unplugged’ ‘singer songwriter’ ‘unsigned original artist’ – stuff like that (applicable to your genre of course.) Also the make of your guitar/instruments/equipment used can be worth putting – I’ve gained a lot of views by tagging ‘Martin DXK2AE‘ in my vids as people are often looking for video examples of that guitar. Tagging your camera also – I’ve gained views from people looking for video examples of the Kodak Playtouch (what I currently use.) Adding the area you’re from – eg ‘Nottingham music’ is a good one too.

Adding keywords to your video title is often helpful too. If you look at my videos I often add stuff like ‘male acoustic unsigned singer songwriter’ to end of my titles. You have to be careful for it to not look too spammy, but it can really put you ahead in search results.

A good video description is key too – leave a link to your Facebook/website, and ‘subscribe for more videos’ etc. Add a bit of info about the song – if it’s a cover, say why you chose it etc. Make it interesting, but keep it brief. If you have your music for sale anywhere – on your site, iTunes, Amazon etc – link to them!

Lastly, make use of video annotations! You can add a little button to your video that people can click on to subscribe to your channel, link to other videos etc, have a message that pops up saying ‘thumbs up if you liked this video’ ‘leave a comment below’ etc. Annotations that ask questions can be cool too – like ‘what did you think of this song/video’ etc – it gets people engaged with you. Oh and once you’ve got a lot of videos up, create some playlists for your channel. I have a live videos playlist, ‘originals‘ playlist and ‘covers‘ playlist etc. The cool thing about playlists is if someone watches one it will automatically move on to the next video in the playlist, so people are more likely to watch several videos.

All this stuff is a total PITA to do on every video (especially annotations), and very time consuming – but it really makes a difference to the views you’ll get, so it’s worth doing.

Hope that helps!