So you want to know the secrets to getting views on Youtube? You’ve come to the right place.

I’ve generated 50,000,000 views on my channel, 12,000,000 views on my other channel, and so many views on other channels that I can’t even add them all up.

I didn’t get all of those views overnight or even in a month. I’ve uploaded over 500 videos to my Youtube channels, some of them get a few thousand views, some of them get a few million views, so I’ve learned through trial and error what works and what doesn’t work.

The #1 most powerful way to get views on Youtube is to produce content that people want to watch. Period.

Your content has to be entertaining or informative or inspirational, or else it’s not going to get attention, it’s not going to be shared, and it’s not going to get views.

But that’s not the subject of this video. I have a lot of techniques and strategies on how to prepare and produce your content in my other training videos. For now, we’re going to focus on 3 quick and easy ways to help your videos get more views.

Microdecisions

Before I tell you the three tricks, you need to understand something I call microdecisions.

When people are online, they make subconscious choices of where their attention will go and how long it will stay there. Microdecisions happen so quickly they’re hard to even notice. It’s like when you’re flipping through channels on TV – what catches your attention that causes you to stop scrolling for one second. When you’re flipping channels, a full second is still more attention that you’ve given all of the other channels. One full second is what sets apart the shows you decide to watch from the shows you didn’t watch.

The same applies to your Youtube video. When someone is browsing online, they’re making microdecisions about where to focus their attention. They’re picking up on subtle clues that tell them if something is worth their time.

You want every part of your video pass the microdecision test. The more these subtle clues are in your favor, the more likely your video will be watched.

So with that in mind, here’s trick #1:

TRICK #1: KEEP IT SHORT

Remember my 4 S’s of Social Media? Short, subtle, shareable, steady? There’s a reason that Short is first on the list.

Think of how the format of media has changed over the years. Movies can be multiple hours. TV shows are about an hour. And in the modern world of social media, it’s gotten even shorter.

When someone goes online, they’re typically looking for quick solutions and have very little attention spans.

A microdecision they might make is being interested in the video, but seeing the video is 10 minutes long, so they subconsciously decide that they don’t have enough attention span to watch it, so they just keep browsing. The video could be the exact thing they’re looking for but they’ll never know because the microdecision made the choice for them before you could even try.

If someone on Youtube sees a video that’s 10 minutes or 7 minutes or even 5 minutes, most users won’t even start watching the video, and even if they do, they likely won’t finish it.

Social media is all about the now. People want to be entertained or informed right now.

Youtube research has shown that the best length of a video is under 3 minutes.

My most successful Youtube show had 60-second episodes that got a total of over 12,000,000 views. One of the reasons it did so well was because it was easy. It didn’t require much viewer commitment. When they saw the video, even if they weren’t immediately interested, they were assured that the video was only a minute long, so their curiosity overpowered their short attention span. Even if they only watched the first 12 seconds of the video, they were already 20% finished, so watching the rest of it was easy.

Your videos don’t need to be a minute long, but try to keep it under 3 minutes and make sure every second counts. The longer your video is, the less likely people will watch until the end.

For example, this is the audience retention on one of my videos that is about 5 and a half minutes long (SEE VIDEO).

This chart, which you can find in your Youtube channel’s analytics, shows an average of how long a viewer stays on your video. Everyone watches the beginning. Sometimes this even goes above 100% because people replay the video.

But notice how the video retention goes down as the video gets longer. This is why you should put important details early in the video just in case they don’t reach the end.

There’s a reason big retailers price products at $5.99 or $13.95 instead of $6.00 or $14.00. Because the number is smaller, the price is perceived to be less.

So if your video is 3 minutes and 1 second, try to shave it down to 2 minutes and 59 seconds. Even those two seconds will dramatically affect how many views you get.

When it comes to Youtube videos, the shorter, the better.

TRICK #2 WRITE ENGAGING TITLES

The title of your video has even more power than you might realize.

Youtube is the number 2 search engine in the world, second to Google. For the same reasons your website pages are optimized for Google, you should also optimize your video titles for Youtube.

Remember: think like the visitor you want.

What are they searching for on Youtube?

Here’s an example. Let’s say you have a niche website that sells products for pet chinchillas.  Your Youtube strategy is to upload weekly videos to Youtube.com/CuteChinchillaVideos showing actual chinchillas interacting with the products you’re selling.

“My Pet Francis” wouldn’t be a good title. Nobody is searching for that phrase, there’s nothing in them that mentions your topic, and it doesn’t promise anything exciting if someone watches.

“My Pet Chinchilla” is one step up. Now you have the target keyword Chinchilla in your title. People search for pet videos on Youtube all the time and a lot of them might find yours. However, there are a lot of pet chinchilla videos on Youtube already. That video title doesn’t stand out so you’ll miss a lot of views.

I’d title a video “Cute Pet Chinchilla Flips Over!” In fact, that title already helped one of my videos get 160,000 views.

It has buzzwords that people will be searching for, it’s more specific so they know they’ll see something unique, and the targeted keywords are narrowed down so I have more chance of appearing high in Youtube’s search results for things like “Cute chinchilla” or “chinchilla flips” or “pet chinchilla”

That title is a wide funnel. It could get many views from people with an interest in chinchillas, but not specifically people who will buy your products.

That’s not a bad thing either. To make money online, you need two types of traffic: potential customers and future potential customers. There are many more future potential customers because those people watch your videos based on an interest. If I title a video “Cute Pet Chinchilla Flips Over” people who actually have chinchillas aren’t going to watch it… because they have a chinchilla. So how am I going to sell to them?

Views that don’t immediately make you money still matter. Audience is the new currency.

If you grow an audience of people with an interest in chinchillas, they are more likely to share your videos with people who do own chinchillas AND their views help your video rank higher in Youtube’s search.

But even though views are important, you want to make money online. You have to think like the visitor you want, and you want customers too. So you can have the best of both worlds with video titles like:

“Cute Chinchilla Explores “Super Pet Home Deluxe” – REVIEW”

“Chinchilla Eats Kaytee And Oxbow Pet Food: Which Is Better?”

“Chinchilla LOVES Eating Timothy Hay Cubes”

 All of those titles have buzzwords for both potential customers and future potential customers. Which by now is turning into a tongue twister: future potential customers.

“Cute Chinchilla” “Chinchilla Explores” “Chinchilla home” “chinchilla pet” – all of those are great for getting views from people with an interest.

And with “Super Pet Home Deluxe review” “Chinchilla home review” – those keywords are great to pulling in people who already own a chinchilla and are ready to buy.

Now you’re probably not selling chinchilla products. This same strategy applies to anything:

Instead of calling your video “Do You Have Spyware” maybe call it “How To Scan If Your PC Has Spyware For Free”

TRICK #3: OPTIMIZE THE FIRST 3 LINES

A lot of people don’t know this trick. It’s something I discovered years ago and still works today.

If you have a website, you know how Google works. It takes your title and keywords from your page content to figure out when and where it’ll show a link to your website in their search engine.

Youtube works in a similar way when they rank videos in search results. But they tend to add place value on words that are in the first two lines of the video description, if they’re written in a way that’s similar to your title.

Here’s an example:

For my video Cute Pet Chinchilla Flips Over, I made the first two lines of my description say:

My cute chinchilla does flips under the couch! She is the cutest pet ever and knows so many adorable tricks. MORE CHINCHILLA VIDEOS: http://cutechinchillas.com/

Notice how every main buzzword from the title is also in the description, but not exactly in the same order.

My cute chinchilla does flips under the couch! She is the cutest pet ever and knows so many adorable tricks. 

And then after all of the keywords, I put a link to my website with an incentive to click.

In fact, Youtube places so much weight on these first two lines that when I search for Chinchilla Flips, it actually puts those words in bold in the description… even though they’re not exactly in that order.

I once interviewed the actor Robert Pattinson and I titled the video “My Phone Call With Robert Pattinson” and in the description I wrote “My secret phone call with Robert Pattinson, the actor who plays Edward Cullen in the Twilight movies”

Because I matched the keywords from the title with a sentence in the description, now when people search Robert Pattinson Phone Call, my video appears at the top of over 120,000 others. And I got 250,000 views that promoted my blog.

You have a lot of space to work with in the Youtube video description, but Youtube hides everything except the first few lines under a button that says “Show More.” So by optimizing your video description and fitting the most important details into the top, you’ll immediately improve your search rankings AND make it easier for viewers to click a link to your website.

So let’s review!

KEEP IT SHORT. 3 minutes or less is the ideal.

WRITE ENGAGING TITLES. More people will watch your videos, and even more will find them in search results.

and OPTIMIZE THE FIRST 3 LINES: Not only do your viewers see it, but Youtube’s search algorithm sees it too.

If you apply these techniques to all of your videos, you can release a flood of new viewers who are discovering you for the first time!

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