Tips for partners: Gimme content (and then analyze it!)

As promised, we’re excited to feature a series of blog posts with advice and actionable suggestions regarding what has helped partners be successful on YouTube. By now, all your videos should have lots of metadata, and you should have added annotations to at least one video, or grouped a series of videos through a playlist. Up next, our third post is on the importance of finding a niche with your videos and then analyzing data to determine how viewers are finding your content.

As always, we want your feedback. If there are things we are missing, or other optimization tips you want us to cover, let us know via the comments section in this post.

Find Your Mojo
It is easy for us to say, “make great content!” We know that is ultimately what you are are trying to do with your videos. When you first start out, experiment with different approaches and topics until you find your niche. It could be vlogging, beauty tutorials, a character sketch...really wherever your passion takes you. YouTube gets over 100 million views a day, so the world truly is your oyster. Find your mojo and then cultivate your content.

Once you create and publish your great content, are you paying attention to your Hot Spots? Are you maintaining a schedule so viewers know when to check back for more? There is actionable data you can use in your account to tweak your videos to keep your audience coming back.

To do:

• Use Insight Hotspots to see if your video is hot or not. Do you see a full red thermometer in the top red corner of your Hot Spot video report? If so, great! If not and your video hovers on or below the “Average” line on the graph, you are not keeping your viewers’ attention.
• Edit your videos to keep your audience engaged. See where viewers are leaving your video, and determine why (and consider using annotations to keep users engaged).
• Use Insight to figure out how people are finding your content. Is it through search or related videos? To find out, go to ‘My Videos’ and click on ‘Insight’ for one video. Then click on ‘Discovery’ and under ‘Links Followed to this video,’ you’ll see top referrals. You can click on ‘YouTube Search’ to find tags viewers queried to get to your video, and then add these tags to your video to boost your ranking in the search index. 

How to find more tags through the ‘Insight’ tool:

More tags to add:

• Review YouTube charts to check out the most viewed videos, and how you stack up.
• Use Google Analytics to understand the source of your YouTube traffic. The better you understand your audience and how they find you, the better you will be able to produce new content, promote the discovery of your videos, engage with your audience and build your brand.
• Keeping a video upload schedule is important, and we encourage you to upload consistently. When you are starting out, a technique that has worked well for many successful partners is maintaining a schedule that your subscribers will remember.

Now is a great time to log into your account and analyze your data to make sure your tags are fully updated, and your top referrals are either increasing or changing for the better. Tune in this Thursday to hear from one of our partners who found his niche, and will discuss first-hand how he uses ‘Insight’ to make smart decisions.


Julie Kikla and Mahin Ibrahim, Account Managers, YouTube Partnerships recently watched “The Unseen Sea.”