YouTube Mistakes to Avoid

YouTube Mistakes to Avoid

I get it, you’re frustrated, your channel’s not growing, whereas everybody around you is going viral. You’ve tried everything but simply put, YouTube is against you, right?

Wrong, the chances are you’re committing YouTube sins right now that are damaging your channel, and you’re looking for someone else or something to blame. I know, I’ve done some of these things in the past, and you know, in yourself, some of the silly things you do on YouTube that simply don’t work. Let us know in the comments below what they are so you can help other creators.

So stop doing them or keep doing them, just don’t bother reading this post.

MISTAKE 1

Promoting your content to anyone by any means possible simply doesn’t work. And let’s start with the obvious and ancient one, sub for sub.
Hey, YouTuber.
– Hey.
– Fancy doing sub for sub?
– Absolutely.
– Great.
– Some dodgy green screen right there. If you wanna waste viable time gaining worthless subscribers, good look getting 4,000 hours of watch time out of them. Posting comments, promoting your channel and content in other creators videos. This has to be the most monumental waste of time.

There is for two reasons.
First and foremost, whoop!
Do you see that off in a distance?
Nobody cares.
The only thing anyone cares about is what you can contribute to the video everybody’s watching, not one of your own.
Second of all. And most of the time you’re gonna be typing into an echo chamber you’ve created. You see this tip mark on a comment. It means I have to approve it before it will appear on the video. Because YouTube automatically assigns all of its nonsense to the comments, dumpster fire. And the more you do this the more likely the content owner is going to hide your comments forever.
The problem with self-promotion and 95% of the promotion you do outside of your own videos and social platform is that it’s appealing to the wrong audience.
And if by some miracle that wrong audience does decide to check out your content. It will likely damage much of the organic work the videos have already done in terms of getting discovered.
Put simply be patient and let YouTube’s algorithm do the work because in truth it’s not actually an algorithm.
It’s a recommendation system.

MISTAKE 2

And in this sense, it’s a good way to promote your content because it’s relevant to what somebody is already watching.
The problem is they kill retention. If the call to action is strong enough to pull a viewer away from what they’re already watching. If the viewer is settling into a good piece of content.
The last thing you want to do is send them anywhere. Just here anyway. If you do want to use video cards, leave them till at least the second half of the video by which time the viewer is likely committed to the current content which means they’re gonna do one or two things.
They’ll either watch the video in the card immediately and then come back to the original content, or finish off a video they’re currently watching and then go back to the card.
Also interesting random side note. I didn’t realize this until today but info cards are now apparently called annotations. And I always thought these were annotations. I really do miss these. Having said that there is a far better way to promote your videos through end screens which are more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
But unfortunately I can’t show you what I mean right now because I’d have to do that through a video card.
So I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until the end of a video to show you what I mean.
But anyway, back to info cards slash annotations that have a party trick up their sleeve that I bet you’re not even aware of. For a very long time, YouTube was very restrictive about external links within videos.
But recently YouTube opened this up more so that you can direct viewers from your videos, to external links as long as they follow
YouTube’s external links policies.
Now, arguably this is even worse than an info card that sends a viewer to another video. This is going to send them to an external link and end the YouTube watch session which YouTube really hates. But if that link gets somebody to sign up to your emailing list or buy one of your products and services, the trade off is probably worth it.
For example, here’s an exclusive sneak peek at our new AI title recommendation tool that will take your idea or keyword and generate incredible click worthy titles.
How cool is that?
So if you want to take advantage of this and many other YouTube growth tools then make sure to download it from internet, right now. But of course you can carry on reading if you want to.

YouTube Mistakes to Avoid

MISTAKE 3

So just between you and me, I’m gonna let you in on a little secret.
In YouTube world, every day is a school day. If you get too comfortable on this platform as a creator you’re going backwards. And it won’t belong before new competition sweeps in and you see your channel growing to a hole.
Now having said that we all occupy the same YouTube space. We all share the same audience. Therefore, in the cold light of day, they are my competition.
Now, you know, I be honest and transparent on the website.
And while there are many reasons why this happened you can’t ignore the data that tells you that these two creators offer an alternative viewing option.
So had I got too comfortable as a creator?
Was I just coasting along to a million subscribers?
Never stand still.
Never stop learning.
Always strive for that next 1%.

YouTube Mistakes to Avoid

MISTAKE 4

Now let me be clear here.
What we’re not talking about is the introduction of a video which convinces a viewer to watch more of a video.
That’s a video hook.
What we are talking about here is a brief branded graphical segment that you’re just plunking at the beginning of every video.
Something like this.
Basically, you’re just telling people what your channel’s called. And they probably already know that.
Branded intros kill audience retention because viewers have seen this type of stuff millions of times before in decades worth YouTube watching.
They and rightly so just wanna get into the content.

YouTube Mistakes to Avoid

Now when it comes to this particular YouTube sin, we are guilty as charged. I would confidently say that there are at least lots of videos on so many YouTube channels that have a branded intro. And the data proves time and time again that a significant portion of the audience abandon a video as soon as they see a branded intro.
So instead of a branded intro what should the beginning of a video contain?
We can use this video as a reference point.
I’m not saying I’m an expert at this yet but the hook of this post is attempting to do two things. It’s immediately trying to deliver on the promises made in the title and the thumbnail.
So the viewer knows they’re in the right place. And from there, it’s trying to convince you the viewer to continue watching through to the end of the video. I know that’s a very simplistic way of looking at this but you’ve gotta get away from telling people who you are, what you do and why they should subscribe to your channels.
Just wasted oxygen in the first 30 seconds to a minute of the video.

YouTube Mistakes to Avoid

MISTAKE 5

Chances are, if you’re this far into the post you are a passionate creator committed to growing your channel.
So you probably already know all of this stuff.
But just in case, don’t be that channel that infuriates creators.
And let’s start with the obvious, copyright claims and strikes.
Downloading music, videos, clips, random stuff either directly from YouTube or from random places on the internet is a potential recipe for disaster. If you are getting stuff for free and using it on your videos, even if the source of that content says that it’s royalty free, copyright free etc., etc., double check, then triple check.
I’m not sure what check comes after that but do that as well.
If you come from the TikTok creating world, let me stress this.
YouTube is far more strict when it comes to matching copyrighted content ID and the penalties are pretty clear. Copyright claims will prevent you from earning revenue, copyright strike after three of them, will terminate your channel. And then there’s a less obvious, less well known offense, reuse content. If you are taking other creators content and using it without their permission, that’s even worse.

YouTube Mistakes to Avoid

Typically the victims of this type of content theft are small creators who don’t have the resources or the support to tech their content like big movie studios or large music labels. These people are creators just like me, just like you. It still really angers me just how much TikTok stuff is directly lifted from a platform and uploaded onto YouTube clearly not from the original creator.
YouTube really needs to stamp that out before I truly embrace shorts for example.
Anyway, if you do this type of stuff you may get views to begin with, but you’re not earning any money and YouTube will eventually track down your channel. And let me be clear here. I’m talking about people not creators because not creating anything. People who just steal over creators pieces of work without any transformational effort.
Creators who take existing content and transform into an entirely new piece of work they are more than welcome in the YouTube community.

YouTube Mistakes to Avoid

But for the thieves of the YouTube world, well, I’m gonna bring in another Simpsons reference.
Urge to kill rising.
All right, as promised back to YouTube end screens.
Let me show you something truly incredible.
If you get this right, long after a video’s published it can get tons of views from end screens. In this case, more than 50% of its traffic. YouTube end screens are turning this video into evergreen content. And what’s more when people watch a video from an end screen they tend to watch for longer than other traffic sources.
So if you wanna know how to do exactly that on your channel, then I highly recommend reading this post over here.
Yes. That’s how you do self-promotion the right way.

YouTube Mistakes to Avoid | 5 MISTAKES that Send You to HELL!