How to get YouTube to promote my content

January 26th, 2022

"I just uploaded a video and it has 8 views, YouTube will never promote my content!"

Before you start complaining about YouTube not promoting your content let me tell you something: It doesn't work like that. The key to success on YouTube is consistency. If your channel isn't getting many views in the beginning - don't be discouraged! There's still a lot of room for growth and promotion from YouTube if done correctly.

If you're uploading videos at a regular pace chances are Google has already reviewed your account and found it to be relevant enough to show up in their search engine which means that even though there's currently very little traffic going to your videos they've been indexed by Google for future promotion. In other words: If you upload regularly and you're active on your channel (which is indexed by Google) then it's only a matter of time until traffic picks up and subscribers start piling in.

Have patience, stay consistent and follow the steps I'm about to outline for you!

YouTube doesn't promote channels based on views - it promotes them based on community activity . If you've been watching closely over the past couple of years you'll notice that YouTube has been working according to their new algorithm: Anything with good community engagement will be promoted by YouTube, anything without engagement will fall off the radar. This means that simply having lots of views won't increase your chances of being promoted but it does mean that a steady stream of quality viewers will.

How do we get quality viewers you ask? We build engagement!

If your channel isn't showing signs of traction right now the next best thing you can do is start building your community by encouraging interaction. The more people talk with you and each other on your channel, the better chance you have at YouTube noticing that there's enough discussion going on to justify promoting your video(s).

The first step in building engagement is getting an initial stream of viewers - which brings us back to patience ;) Once your first couple of videos are out there you can use what I like to call "forced marketing" to get some early traction. There are dozens if not hundreds of different strategies here but I'll go over two easy ones that will take less than an hour combined to set up.

1. Custom thumbnail

First thing you want to do is create a custom thumbnail for your video. Thumbnails are absolutely essential these days - the days of just throwing anything up as your thumbnail are long gone. If you want YouTube to promote your content then it needs to catch people's eyes! Using an image that makes people think "what's this?" will result in more traffic than using any random image because viewers don't know what to expect which means they'll click on it out of curiosity so they can find out.

Here's what I recommend: Look at other, similar videos and try to come up with something different but good enough that people would still view the video based on the thumbnail alone. Remember, you don't always have to show what the video is about but you do have to get viewers interested in at least clicking on it.

Once you've come up with a thumbnail that's good enough, save it as a new image file on your computer and upload it as "custom thumbnail" when creating new videos. Make sure the image is exactly 1280 x 720 pixels! If you're not great at Photoshop feel free to download my custom thumbnails here for this video to see how they should look. Note: if some of these are NSFW make sure your kids or colleagues can't find them ;)

2. Thumbnails for related videos

This one might be obvious but some people still don't realize its potential: Create custom thumbnails for all related videos! You can find these by clicking on the "Show more" button under the related videos list.

You'll notice that thumbnails for related videos can be similar. As long as people click on your content out of curiosity you're meeting one of YouTube's new algorithm requirements so don't worry about anything else but that! If they like what they see then they might subscribe to your channel, view other videos and engage with your community - it all starts here! Once you've created a few related videos make sure to upload a custom thumbnail right away because uploading a custom thumbnail takes time (a day or two) before it takes effect!

There you have it: Two easy and free ways to increase your chances of being promoted by YouTube. If you've built a community around your channel then these two things will start off your engagement and also make people curious enough to click on your content in the related videos list (where YouTube puts most views). By building an engaged community around your content now, when there's very little viewership going on, you'll be much more likely to get viewers when traffic picks up - even if Google isn't promoting your video(s) anymore. The best part is that this strategy works for any type of video so it doesn't matter what you upload or who you're targeting because any well-deserved promotion from YouTube is good for you!