Thread by @vonwilpert

24 hours ago I promoted a video on YouTube.

It's floating around the top 5 positions for the target keyword "get more traffic" atm.

Here's what I did to get it there:

1- I searched in YouTube for videos similar to the topic of the video I wanted to make (i.e. a guy taking his site from 0-10k traffic in 30 days).

2- I saw videos getting a lot of views (>10k) for the topic "get more traffic" so I optimized my video for this.

3- After 2 weeks getting a good video made on Fiverr, I decided to trash it and get my brother to make a great one focusing on fast transitions to hold peoples attention.

4- I made an orange thumbnail to stand out against the other popular videos in green, red, white + purple.

5- I front-loaded the title with the keyword first, then at the end i used parentheses with a specific result the video would show.

6- In the description I used a "truncated teaser" for the first line loaded with the target keyword. The goal of this was to increase CTR on the YouTube search results page.

7- For the next 100-200 words I briefly told people what the video was about.

8- At the bottom I included links to subscribe on YT, to social and to the website (YT say they like seeing this). Just don't do it at the start, or it messes with your CTR.

9- For the tags I looked at the 3 most popular videos (by view count). I right-clicked each one and went to "View Page Source." I did a CTRL+F search for "keywords" to find what tags they used and copied them.

My first tag matched the keyword exactly. Others were variations that I copied from the most popular videos.

10- I went to "Transcriptions" in the YT settings, added English, and checked the automatic YT transcription was accurate.

It was.

If it wasn't I was going to get a time-stamped transcript from Rev for $1.25 a minute so YT could understand the whole video content accurately.

11- In the email I sent to promote the video I gave people an incentive to comment. I said "drop a comment with your biggest traffic challenge and I'll answer it."

It didn't work. However some small mis-pronunciations in the video got people giving early comments.

🔥 tip: people love pointing out small errors, no matter how good a video is. Use it to your advantage.

12- I embedded the video inside 3 blog posts related to the topic of the video.

13- I cut a one minute clip from the start of the video and posted it across social media. I put the link to the full video in the comments (cause social platforms give less reach to posts with links to keep people on their own platform)

After 24 hours stats for the video are:

Views: ~1k
Comments: 5
Thumb up/down ratio: 25:1

90% of the clicks to the video were from email. ~10% from social media.

This video may not be at the top forever.

However analytics is showing me clicks coming from Suggested videos now which is promising and where i expect most ongoing views to come from.

Even if it dies in the ass, one thing is for sure...

It's possible to get a new video ranking fast.

If you look closely at the screenshot below you'll see my video has a "New" tag.

YouTube seems to be favoring new videos getting traction and giving them a shot at the top.

Do what I put above.

Focus on getting the first 1k views + a bit of engagement.

If your video is good enough to hold people's attention and keep them on YouTube longer you may find a winner that drives you views for a looooong time.

Btw this video was based on a blog post 😏

This was the video: