The Number One Way To Increase YouTube Views

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Welcome back to the YouTube Series here on TechNShare. I know you have been excitedly waiting for the next installment in the series, like a kid at Christmas, I know. Last week we discussed tips to optimize YouTube videos.  So this week we are going to talk about the number one way to increase YouTube video views.

Build Your Links

When it comes to YT videos, building your links is not exactly the same as building backlinks to your blog. I can compare this process to internal linking on your blogs.

When you link one article to another on your blog, or link an article to another page on your blog, you are building internal links. You are deep linking your blog.

The number one way to increase views on your videos is to build your links. You do this by inter-linking your videos together. This practice will work for linking videos and your channel. You are also able to show some link love to colleagues as well.

How To Link YouTube Videos

This is so easy to do. No, really it is…would I mislead you?!  So, here we go. Let’s take Ana Hoffman as our example. Ana’s YouTube channel is at a PR 6. Yes, I know I know, the little green fairy dust doesn’t mean anything. However, let’s pretend that it does, because in all actuality, it does in the SERPS.

The beauty of  this PR 6 is that based on her keywords, Ana will rank higher in the SERPS  than a blog with lower ranking.  As a matter of fact, Ana is on the first page of Google for “youtube embed code options.” And that is out of 23,000,000 results as of this writing.

With that in mind, she should optimize her channel page featured video. Since featured videos can be set to autoplay, we know it’s going to get views just from people visiting the channel. If she links another video inside the YT embed video, boom…people are sent to the next video.

Now let’s assume you don’t have a channel pageRank of 6. What you need to do is take your video with the highest views and begin linking.

Using the annotations feature of YouTube, you can easily link to other videos and even back to your channel page. Here is how to accomplish this task.

1. Click on your high viewed video.
2. At the top you will see this toolbar:    Edit annotations/ Edit captions/subtitles/ AudioSwap  Insight stats
3. Click on “Edit Annotations”
4. You are now on the edit video page.

In the lower right hand corner of your video, you will see a box with the “+” symbol that lets you add a word bubble. Click on the “+” symbol and bam! A link box comes up. See screen shot below.

As you can see in the top left, now you have a link option. You can customize the color of the link box and to the right, you will see a text box. Use this box to label your link utilizing your keywords and anchor text. Voila! You have begun the process of internal linking and generating targeted traffic to all of your youtube videos.

Another thing you can do with the link is link it to your channel and use “SUBSCRIBE” as your anchor text. This gives people an easy way to sub to your channel right from your video. Kind of like the RSS subscribe you have on your blog.

Now you may think this is too simple to produce results. I can tell you that it works just as well if not better than linking back to blog posts. Video is easy for people to consume and it comes in min to 2 min snippets. Perfect for our patience decayed society.

Takeaway

While you still need to engage your subscribers and respond to comments, promote your videos and remain active, you can easily begin to build your links internally on all of your videos. A huge benefit of this practice is that if someone else loves your video and embeds it on their site…your link goes with it.

So, start building the links and you will see that it is truly the number one way to increase  views on your YouTube videos.  Next week, we will discuss YouTube Insights and what they can tell you about your videos and audience.

Feel free to ask any questions, yell at me or show some love below! Also, if you feel the power compel you to, please share this with your friends.

Tagged as: building links, youtube