Have you ever thought of creating your own Youtube channel only to be stopped dead in your tracks because you don’t know how you’d get your first views?
I was actually in your position just a short time ago.
When I started my own channel way back in 2015, nobody was paying attention.
No traffic, barely any views, I had zero subs, and zero results.
I couldn’t let this stagnation, this lack of growth, continue.
So I decided to take action. I read a few books, skimmed a few articles, and started doing things that help my channel. And eventually, eventually, my audience started to grow.
So what made the difference?
Promotion.
Knowing how to promote your channel is critical to your Youtube success.
To save you from learning the hard way, as I did, I put together 5 different ways that you can promote your Youtube gaming channel so you too can start gaining more livestream views and subscribers.
No scummy and spammy schemes. Just a few fool-proof and beautifully simple marketing tactics that you can action immediately.
There are several points that I’ll talk to you about including:
- Why you should market and promote your Youtube channel
- How to create good content
- Creating a customized thumbnail
- How to come up with a catchy video title
- Doing SEO work on your Youtube channel
- Interacting with the Youtube community and engaging your audience
- Cross-promoting your channel everywhere
- And a few tips on what you can do next.
Why You Should Market And Promote Your Youtube Channel
You’ve spent hours crafting the perfect video, many more hours putting together a fancy thumbnail, and even more hours again writing and then rewriting the metadata.
But now you need to get people to come and watch your videos. And that’s not an easy thing to do…
Sure, you can just leave it up for Youtube to decide what happens next.
Best possible scenario: your video might end up being promoted at the end of some popular videos. Maybe it’ll even be at the top of a search or two.
But it’s far more likely, that your video will instantly become a needle in a gigantic internet spanning haystack. And it’ll be lost forever amongst the millions of pointless funny cat and fail videos.
So what do you do?
You start promoting and sharing your content.
Just a quick tip: Wherever you’re going to share your content, be it on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or in Reddit forums, make sure you do it in the first 24 hours of your video.
Getting some traction in your video for the first 24-48 hours gives your content a better chance of performing well even after a week or a month.
So if you’re dying to show everyone your mad shooting skills on PUBG, then let’s jump to it!
Hold on one sec! Before you carry on reading about how to promote your channel, it’s important that you have the right mix of videos on your channel. You need a mixture of audience attraction and audience retention videos. Don’t know what they are? Then head over to my Youtube Gaming Growth Secrets: Audience Attraction and Retention article to find out more! Honestly, knowing this stuff can be the difference between Chanel success and failure, and I wish I’d known it sooner!
Top 5 Free Ways Of Promoting Your Youtube Gaming Channel
1: Create Your Own Customized Thumbnail
One of the most important promotional changes I made very early on was to always create customized thumbnails for my videos.
They are one of the most critical elements in ranking your content and getting more views.
Having really nice thumbnails matter and it’s going to help your video stand out.
Without an attractive thumbnail, you won’t grab the attention of your potential viewers, which means you’ll miss out on the click and the view.
Remember, your thumbnail is competing with every other video for your category and niche on Youtube.
So how do you make awesome looking custom thumbnails that get you more views on your Youtube channel even if you have no graphic design knowledge at all?
Now the biggest misconception probably is that you need apps like Photoshop to come up with epic thumbnail images.
On the contrary, Canva, an easy-to-use online graphic design tool, can do just the trick.
You can start by pulling a free frame from the video you’ve recorded.
What you can do is do a couple of poses at the end of your recording, and just pick one frame that you think looks good, tweak it a bit in Canva, and use that as your thumbnail.
But the very best thing that you can do is make a separate photo intentionally for your thumbnail, add in an image of the game you’re playing, and you’ve got yourself a kickass gameplay thumbnail.
2: SEO Your Youtube Channel
One of the fastest ways to get your channel off the ground is to optimize your content for search.
Here’s what you need to do.
Whatever niche that you happen to be in, go up to the Youtube search bar and start typing in topics that you might want to make a video about.
For instance, you want to create content that focuses on Twitch. Just type in Twitch on the search bar and from there, Youtube is going to autosuggest things to you that people are looking for based around that topic.
Pick some of those phrases and make videos about those as a way of bringing people to your content.
And make sure that you’re optimizing your title, your tags, and your descriptions with the phrase that you’re actually trying to rank for.
3: Come Up With A Killer Title
Any of you guys who are Youtube creators probably know how important a good Youtube title is for your video.
The video titles can make or break your channel. A title can be the difference between hitting 1,000,000 views or your video falling into obscurity.
So how do you come up with a catchy Youtube title for your video?
First off, make sure the title is relevant to your content and avoid click-baiting people.
Why?
Because if your title is not aligned with what exactly is on the video what happens is people click on your video because they see that it’s got a compelling title and expect to see something in the video that they don’t, so they end up clicking away from your video.
This causes Youtube’s algorithm to think your video is of low quality. Youtube will then demote your video, and future videos, because of this signal.
Tip #2 is to use your most important keywords at or near the beginning of your title to optimize your video for search.
You have a total of 100 characters to work with but avoid going over the 70-character mark since long titles will be truncated in Google search results.
When creating a title for your content, it’s important that you tap into the people’s curiosity and make sure that you deliver what you promised in the title.
Look at the titles other successful videos are using in your niche and copy their title structure for your own videos.
4: Cross-Promote Your Youtube Channel Everywhere!
Take advantage of your social media and cross-promote your gaming channel on all your social media platforms.
When promoting on social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or Instagram, however, make sure that you don’t end up being too spammy
Why? Because nobody likes spammers. Period.
If it’s on Facebook, make sure that you’re sharing your content on relevant groups.
Now the worst thing that you can possibly do is to join a Facebook group, go in there, and start posting stuff saying things like ‘hey this is my channel’ or ‘this is a video that you need to check out’ or whatever because nobody cares yet.
So what you should do is become an active participant in the community before you start posting your content.
A good rule of thumb is that you post 10 times about other people’s content, for every one post about your own. Become a world-class curator of the best content in your niche. Build an audience and connections on the shoulders of other people’s fantastic content.
If you do this, your audience will develop and eventually you’ll be able to leverage your social following.
5: Interact With The Youtube Gaming Community
Now this involves you making comments on other relevant videos, joining live streams and engaging with other people in the Youtube gaming community.
I’m not saying to spam the comments section or live streams. You can get your account deleted for that.
What you should do, just like I said on Facebook groups, is to become active in the community.
You should also do that on Youtube channels that you like and actually enjoy, and by participating in the community, people will start recognizing you more.
They are also more likely to click on your name, go over your channel and watch some of your videos. You might even get a couple of new subscriptions in the process.
You don’t have to leave comments saying “Hey, come and check out my channel”. If people like the comments that you’re leaving, they’ll click on your username anyway to see what you’re up to.
Conclusion
For those of you just starting out on YouTube, there’s a lot involved.
How you promote and get the word out about your channel will make or break your Youtube career.
Thankfully, there are several ways of giving your channel a jumpstart for free!
All you really need to do is remember to stick with the basics:
- Make a creative thumbnail
- Write a killer video title
- SEO optimizing
- Using social media to your advantage
- Making friends and adding to other gaming communities.
What Next?
Can you lose monetization on Youtube?
Yes. Although YouTube will not automatically remove your channel’s access to monetization if it drops below the threshold, your channel will definitely lose monetization if it violates any of the YouTube monetization policies, regardless of the watch hours and subscriber count.
How do I get the community tab?
The Community tab is available to all channels with over 1,000 subscribers so if you’ve gone past the 1k subscriber mark, give it a week for the Community tab to appear on your channel.
Can you restore a deleted youtube video or channel?
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to recover a deleted video. However, it is, in fact, possible to recover a deleted channel via Google account recovery.
And of course, you could always find and practice growth marketing manager jobs here.