5 Easy ways to spring clean your YouTube channel
After a rough winter for much of the U.S., warm weather is finally here—which means it’s time for some spring cleaning!
If you’re sick of cleaning out your room or your garage, take a break by tidying up your online video life too. Let’s take a look at five simple things you can do to spring-clean your YouTube channel.
1. MAKE YOUR PLAYLISTS
When you upload a video to YouTube, it just gets thrown in a pile with all your other videos. Viewers can sort upload date or popularity, but your videos aren’t organized in any other way—unless you do it yourself. Playlists make your content easier for audiences to navigate, especially if you release videos on different topics, or videos in series.
Playlists also boost your chances of ranking higher in YouTube’s search results! When viewers search on YouTube, the results include not only individual videos but playlists too.
To read more about playlists, check out this post!
2. DESIGN SNAZZY THUMBNAILS
The thumbnail is the billboard that advertises your video. And it can make a huge difference in whether viewers actually click and watch your content.
What makes a good thumbnail?
- Large, bold text that acts as a second title
- Bright, catchy colors
- A simple image that describes the video’s content accurately
Check out our in-depth article for more tips on creating the perfect thumbnail! And stay tuned for our Uploader (coming soon), which lets you design custom thumbnails in seconds.
3. TOSS OUT TAG SPAM
YouTube has been enforcing their ‘no tags in your descriptions’ policy pretty heavily recently, and have even shut down some channels permanently. If you didn’t catch our blog post on this, you may want to double-check your descriptions.
What you shouldn’t do:
What you should do:
If you’ve included extra tags in your descriptions in the past, remove them ASAP! YouTube is actively looking for—and taking action against—channels that violate this policy.
4. SUPERCHARGE YOUR DESCRIPTIONS
While you’re looking through your videos’ metadata, you may want to beef up your descriptions to help with search rankings. A good description is about 250 words long and includes information on the content of your video, links to your social profiles, and a link to a relevant playlist.
Keep in mind that updating a video’s metadata can cause YouTube to re-index that particular video, which may reduce views for a few weeks. We recommend that you update your metadata only if you’ve previously violated YouTube policy or you’re familiar with strong SEO practices.
To learn more about what makes a good description, click here!
5. GET GOING WITH YOUTUBE CARDS
YouTube recently launched their new cards feature to all creators. Cards are mobile-friendly annotations that can push viewers to additional videos, Fan Funding, merch, and more!
Many creators are seeing much higher clickthrough rates compared to traditional annotations, so we recommend that you add a few cards to your older videos. Start with your most viewed videos and go from there! Read more about YouTube’s new cards feature here.
Good luck with your spring cleaning! Read more here
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