For every creator out there getting started on YouTube, it can be tough. Getting your videos in front of the right viewers should not be a mystery.

Thankfully YouTube has provided its creators with a course designed to help creators get discovered on the platform. For a more high-level understanding of how YouTube works. In 2016, a research paper was published by YouTube explaining how the back end of the platform works.

For creators starting out on YouTube, there are two main sections that you want to get your videos onto. YouTube’s Search and Suggested Videos lists.

Search

Similar to Google’s search lists, getting your video higher on the list will bring you more viewers to your videos. So how do we do that?

To get onto the front pages of YouTube Search, Youtube recommends finding niche keywords to base your video titles, tags, and descriptions off of. This means looking for a niche that is not packed full of competition.

However, if YouTube Search was just based off of keywords, then it should be effortless to get to the top. YouTube also takes into account how your current viewers interact with your videos. Do they watch the full 20-minute video, or do they leave after 10 seconds? What is the like to dislike ratio? Do your viewers leave comments, and are those comments positive or negative?

Next time you are creating your video interact with your community. Ask your viewers questions about the topic of your video. What piece of advice that you gave are they going to try first? For my channel BryceIsTubing, I always like to ask my viewers what they think about a character in the game or which character is their favorite.

When it comes to comments, YouTube has given creators a neat little tool that lets us heart a comment. Now hearting a comment sends a notification to the commenter saying that you have hearted their comment. YouTube says that by doing this, the viewer is more inclined to interact with you and your videos.

Every view, comment, like, and minute watched brings your channel a little higher up the YouTube Search list.

Suggested Videos

YouTube wants people to remain on their site. To do that, YouTube has set up an algorithm to recommend videos to viewers.

For creators to get their videos in front of viewers, YouTube recommends creating longer videos that have a strong call to action to watch another video on your channel. This call to action can be done by creating playlists and using end screens to recommend videos to your viewers.

On my channel, BryceIsTubing, I put three different items on my end screens. A playlist to my most popular video series, the most recent video, and a subscribe button.

This way, I am giving my viewers options to watch more of my content, keeping them on YouTube longer. In turn, YouTube puts my higher up on their lists of recommended videos.

It Takes Views To Make Views

That is the main lesson I have learned from uploading to YouTube. I started off by uploading weekly; however, I could never get a single view. Even if I did get a view, most people only watched the first thirty seconds of my videos. As a result, I sought help from our creators in my niche of gaming commentary.

I found Facebook groups dedicated to my niche of creators who worked together to give creators those first few views to get started. The most successful group I have been a part of is the Gamers of YouTube. This group of creators uses an honor system to build up its members’ channels. Every day the page admins will start a post chain where creators can post one of their videos to the chain. However, before a creator can post to the chain, they have to watch at least one video from another creator and comment on that video.

If you are starting off with no audience once so ever, I highly recommend finding a group of fellow creators in your niche so that you can get your channel off the ground and help others in the process.

Thank you for reading my blog post! Let me know down in the comments what you found most useful or what you know about YouTube that I may have overlooked. Thanks again and have a great day!