I’ve noticed that many auditors get a lot of traffic to some videos, but here are some tips that will help increase overall traffic, watch time and thus make more videos show up in the recommended areas for viewers.
This also will make your channel stronger, and the movement even bigger.
When you do a video with someone else, all auditors should go back to their videos and update the description with each other’s video of the same audit.
- When you do this, you may feel that you’re giving up traffic to go to other auditors, but it will, in fact, help you because viewers will know that you have the right links to related videos and they will appreciate this, thus making you a go-to resource.
- Youtube also appreciates it when a video helps the viewer stay on Youtube longer. If you send people from your video to other related videos, it will help you in the long term.
- You’re also giving the viewer the choice, maybe they don’t like this particular point of view this time, so provide them with an alternative you’ll be the winner.
Update your description when an update happens.
- All the viewers that have followed you for a couple weeks or even a couple years want to know what’s going on. Take the time to reference your related videos in the description, for example, if you have a follow-up audit then include in your description, the link to the previous audits you did at that location.
- In the same token, if you get arrested, file a complaint, do a FOIA request, personnel complaint, or anything related to a previous video, then make sure all the videos have the other related videos. To be clear this is what I mean, if you get arrested in Video A, for example, then you do an update about the case in Video B, you should update the description in Video B to have a link to video A and vice-versa.
Don’t mirror or repost without credit
Many channels do this and it’s totally disingenuous and it helps cannibalizes the movement. These channels will mirror a video, or add commentary to an existing video and repost. That’s fine, but then the first 2 links that should be in the description should be to #1, the original channel and #2 the original video. Or at least to the original video.
At least one of the biggest channels does this on a regular basis and it’s despicable. They link to all their merch sites, social sites and then forget to link to the original creator.
Example:
In other more common cases, a crappy thing these channels do is to add all the links to their own stuff, but when giving credits they purposely NOT link to the original channel and video, but instead put the url in a way that isn’t clickable, they make it incomplete.
Example:
To avoid doing this, which most likely is perceived as an underhanded move, is to make sure the link to the video and channel have the “https://” part in front.
The channel admin, in this case, has deliberately removed that to make the video not clickable. They know that the majority of people will not copy and paste that into their browser and will just move on. People are lazy and when you do this, you’re taking advantage of that for your own benefit.
If you didn’t know, well, now you know. Go back and fix it. Which leads me to my next point…
Go Back And Fix It:
Take time to fix your video descriptions as things get updated. It will help you rank better, and it will help your viewers get more information, learn more and ultimately trust you more.
You should also take a couple of minutes every few days to update your previous videos with new and updated tags, titles and descriptions. This will help you rank better and come up in searches more easily.
You may think that just because typing part of your channel name brings you up right now is going to stay that way. It will not, the reason this works right now is that you don’t have competition yet. It’s better to properly title your videos, write a good description, put a kickass thumbnail and work on your tags.
There are actually over 10 best practices you should follow to optimize your videos. Check out this tool called Tubebuddy to help you optimize your new videos and past videos.
Plenty of cookies to go around
To summarize…
There’s so much traffic on Youtube, the cop watching and accountability movement is growing by the hour. The more you provide the viewers what they want, the more you’ll win.
Make things easy for them to click on and to navigate around and you will not only see the returns, but you will be a go-to resource and your authority and trust will grow exponentially.
Work with the other auditors when you do a group audit and agree to link to each other’s videos, even if they get published days or weeks apart.
Keep your links updated in your own descriptions when you post follow-up videos.
Make links to the original creators so they’re clickable.
Use Tubebuddy to optimize each video and you’ll see a significant increase in activity and traffic.
