YouTube Creator Academy Bootcamp

I Took The ‘Grow Your Audience’ YouTube Creator Academy Boot-camp So You Don’t Have To!
From time to time Google and YouTube offer mini ‘courses’ for their various products like Google Analytics, AdWords, Webmaster Tools and YouTube. The Letter of Completion isn’t as impressive as being Google AdWords Certified, but the courses are still a great opportunity for Digital Marketers like myself, as well as small business owners, to learn new tips and tricks and test their knowledge.

I have been doing a lot of work in some of my client’s YouTube Channels lately, optimising their video content as well as their actual channels – YouTube is the second biggest search engine (Google is the biggest, obvs), so optimising your video content can result in a noticeable increase in video views, conversions and website traffic.

So, without further ado, here are some of the tips and tricks that I learned:

Video Titles:

I already knew that you need to include relevant keywords in your video titles, but the boot camp showed a couple of examples of great video titles and really broke them down into their different elements to discuss what makes them great – like many of Google’s other ranking criteria, it is all about finding the balance between good keywords and a good user experience.

Thumbnails:

I’m not going to lie, in the past I have generally just let YouTube pick the thumbnail for all of my videos; I knew that there was an option to upload my own but I didn’t think that it was worth the effort.

90% of the best-performing videos on YouTube have custom thumbnails.

But YouTube proved me wrong! The boot camp video explained how the thumbnail appears on different devices (desk top, mobile, tablet etc) and that a lot of users don’t read the video descriptions – their decision to watch a video is based on a combination of the thumbnail image and the video title. So having a great thumbnail that captures the theme / personality of your video is essential.

Playlists:

Playlists are a user experience feature; they make it easy for users to watch content that is has a similar theme or content. If a user starts watching a video from from one of the playlists on your channel then the other videos in the playlist will automatically play one after the other without the user having to search your page or YouTube manually, which is pretty cool.

Annotations:

I’ve used annotations ‘blindly’ a couple of times – I just kind of figured out how to do them but didn’t really put much strategic thought into it. The boot camp series has shown me how to use them to keep users watching by driving them to other videos with related content.

Collaborations:

I’ve used the strategy of collaboration in other areas of marketing before such as collaborative blogs, Facebook and product launches. A collaboration is basically just a strategic alliance – you find a brand or business who has a similar target audience to your brand or business (but whose product or service offering is not a direct competitor), and join forces with them to promote both of your brands.

YouTube points out that it is pretty easy to create collaboration content with other brands or personalities these days – simply request that they take a 30 second clip on their iPhone of them speaking about a particular topic and then ask them to send it to you. You don’t actually need to be in the same location to make it work.

Want to learn more?

So there you go, a quick run down of the ‘Grow Your Audience’ course. YouTube Creator Academy actually has 95 different lessons that form 22 different courses, covering a variety of different YouTube topics, so if you are interested in increasing your knowledge then I would definitely recommend checking them out: https://creatoracademy.withgoogle.com

If you would like some assistance in optimising your YouTube content, then give me a call today – 0413 844 190.