Are you struggling to get views on YouTube? Do you want a simple solution that you can get started with today? I know as a full-time YouTuber myself —that I'd love for you to join us as a subscriber to see new videos every day— that how many views I get on my videos has been a very obnoxious and annoying challenge over the last few years and figuring out a solution that works and that consistently helps build the following. This has been a big struggle.
I've tested so many different things on my channel and if you're ready for a solution, I challenge you to read this entire post. If you've got any questions, just leave a comment and if you find any helpful, please hit that like button and subscribe.
Because what I'm about to give you here is the best of what I've learned and experimented with after eight years.
To begin, let me show you an experiment I did just a little while ago.
I did a video on this is called 176 Subs vs 286,000 Subscribers on YouTube
If you think it's all about just doing a good job in your thumbnail and making a high quality video and maybe sharing it with your friends, this experiment has some very bad news.
I put the exact same YouTube video on my channel with 286,000 subscribers, and I put it up on a brand new channel. Now I put it on my channel first a bit earlier, then I put it on a newer channel a bit later, that was the only difference in the experiment.
The results were 100 times as many more views on my channel, as on the smaller channel 100 times as many views. You've got to find a way out of that trap. If you've only got a few subscribers you're trying to build.
Even if you make a video that was really good. It still won't get very many views. Most of the time, 99 times out of 100. In the exact same video, I encourage you to watch this to see more.
But long story short, you've got to have a foundation of views on your video, you need at least 1000, if not 10,000 views to really give YouTube enough data to start showing your video out there to get more views, even for free.
This experiment was very good proof of that.
If you'd like to see a lot more about how to succeed on YouTube, I've got a complete course that's seven hours long on how to get more views and do all the details well on YouTube that puts all this into much more detail. You can check for the link right here: How to Get More Views on YouTube 2020 — The Complete Course for YouTubers!.
What I'll give you is the abbreviated version specifically talking about views.
Obviously, you need good quality thumbnails, you can use something like Canva.com to make a nice thumbnail like this and just a couple of minutes. Obviously, your title needs to be something that people are searching for. Obviously, you need to write a decent description and put some tags on it and then share it on social media.
These are all so super easy that you probably know them. And yet it's important to cover the basics.
Now the question is, what do you do from here to make sure your videos get a lot more views.
I've tested this, both doing this and not doing this and lots of different ways to do it. Let me give you a little look at the data on my channel. I've tested a lot this year, not doing this strategy and the results have been very disappointing, even with a large channel.
If you don't do the strategy I'm about to tell you to build an audience that has critical mass and then keep that audience engaged, then the results are pretty bad. What you'll see is I've had some of the smallest growth this year without doing this strategy that I've seen on my YouTube channel in a long time.
To get the huge growth that I had on my channel, if you look at lifetime, to get the huge growth that I've had on my channel over the life of my channel, I did the strategy I'm about to share with you and it's important to explain why it's so important.
As you can see only 600 new subscribers out of 286,000 you can see these huge periods of views.
You can see these huge periods of watch time on my channel and you might ask —Okay, well, what did you do to get these huge periods of growth on your channel at times when you just got tons of new subscribers, tons of views, tons of ad revenue.
What did you do to do that? What are you still doing today?
Let's look over at the videos on my channel and we'll see if you can notice a pattern.
These are videos I've put out in the last month, you'll see a few thousand views on this one video less than 1000. But most videos consistently make a few thousand and then look, if you look at the videos, just the views, and you can also see the engagement, the likes and the comments.
You can see on my videos, it looks like on the surface, I just suddenly blew up and most people never go below the surface, potential sponsors almost rarely dig below how many new views and when people are considering subscribing. If you're legit and you know what you're talking about. Rarely do people go much deeper than just a quick look at your newest or somewhat recent videos and how many views, likes and comments you get.
If you look at the views, you might think —Wow, you just have been blowing up recently— It's all the strategy I'm about to share with you and show you what to do. —Look, man, this one's over 30,000. You can see some of these lots of likes, comments and interaction.
Let's scroll up to my newest video, my newest video 164 views on the first 24 hours without doing this strategy. Now that's a reflection of YouTube doing whatever it decides to do.
The key thing to go down with your own videos is to realize it's not up to you who YouTube shows your videos to, that's out of your control. This, you could say, is the accurate picture of how many views YouTube is giving me for free on a little bit below the average video, on other videos, the views or anywhere from 300 to 600 or 1000 views for free within 24 hours.
Well, how are you getting so many views and likes and interactions on these other videos? What are you doing? The key is you need to get these initial views up here, or you won't get any more views.
If you've got low subscribers, or even high subscribers and low views, you've got to get out of there. What I'm doing to get out of there is YouTube ads.
And I'll show you exactly how to do that. I've done YouTube ads on all of these other videos. The YouTube ads I'm doing our is this is what I did to originally build my channel. And that's what I did to allow me to release videos that I was getting, some videos to get hundreds of thousands of views completely for free on my channel.
If you look over at the analytics, you can see that the majority of the views on my channel, if you look at the lifetime on my channel, the majority of the views on my channel have come for free.
The key takeaway from this is that you need YouTube advertising to give you free views. A lot of YouTubers don't mention this in anything except their full paid coaching programs.
Most YouTubers I've seen in their tip videos don't mention this, they reserve this information for their high price coaching programs.
But I give it to you for free here because it's what you really need to know.
Now if you look at the views on my channel, you'll see that YouTube search is the number one traffic source for my channel suggested videos, browse features external, those are free views.
But what you'll notice is that YouTube advertising, I've gotten 5.8 million views on my channel with YouTube ads, and the single highest source of minutes watched on my channel is YouTube ads, and it's YouTube ads that got my channel off the ground.
When you're seeing a lot of YouTubers that you might be impressed with and have huge amounts of views, they often if not always, are doing YouTube ads on their videos as well.
When you combine YouTube ads with an existing following, you can get absolutely outstanding results as I've done here.
If you look at all these other views, I would probably not have gotten 98% of these views if I had not done the YouTube ads first.
If you look at my channel, the first thing I did to blow up my channel was YouTube ads. I tried some other strategies that did not work very well. And the first thing I did that was successful and blowing up my youtube channel was these YouTube ads.
If you look over here, you can see when I started doing YouTube ads right here, all of my other views start to take off you can see at almost nothing on my channel, I was putting out videos that were helpful. I was putting out videos people were enjoying, but they were hardly getting that many views.
As soon as I start consistently for a year, doing YouTube ads Now I'll show you a much more efficient formula than I used. But I started doing all kinds of YouTube ads on my channels, advertising a bunch of different videos and then I got some videos ranked very high in organic search.
I had the number one position on hacking for a while, the main one word search term, I had a video up to the top of that using YouTube ads before they adjusted the algorithm for minutes to be more accurately balanced against minutes watched.
As I did all these ads on my channel spending thousands of dollars then what you'll notice my suggested videos and YouTube search Results start blowing up and my browse features start blowing up also, and I had ran so many YouTube ads, I had such a diverse following that I even did types of content like gaming videos I didn't normally do.
That ended up going viral and getting a whole bunch of views on browsing features. I tested this the very hard way on my channel.
Now you can't just advertise anything in YouTube ads and expect your channel to blow up. I did a big experiment here, I got sponsored to do a huge video promoting something and then that was completely unsuccessful.
You will only get great results using YouTube ads if the video is decent and something people want to watch if it's just purely an ad and it doesn't offer much value as this experiment of $40,000 experiment shows this will not bump your channel.
What you'll notice here is that for about a year I stopped doing YouTube ads.
I stopped doing YouTube ads and looked at what happened to my channel. Do you see all of these free views? I was getting tons of views from browse features and suggested videos.
I ran this ad campaign and I stopped doing ads for anything else. And look what happened to my channel.
My Channel has dwindled and dwindled and dwindled. Right here I put out a video on a topic that I previously ran a lot of ads about, but then YouTube just added that to the list of videos you can't do anymore. So then I took that down, and my channel dwindled and dwindled. There was almost no growth, except for that one, or those series of viral videos I put out on hacking that YouTube then said you can't do anymore. And outside of that my channel had almost no growth, I hadn't been advertising.
Now look what happens, I start doing ads on my channel and now my views you can see I just got a lot of the ads cranked up to some of the previous levels that I was advertising before. Now my channel growth is immediately picking up and I've only started to see the beginning of my channel growth.
The best part about this is for you that have stuck around and got 12 minutes and I'm going to give you the exact YouTube ads formula I use that I've tested, I've gone over as you can see, I've done a lot of different tests with YouTube ads with different types of videos of different types of content. And if you get your subscribers on one kind of content, and then you want to switch and build a new channel or just keep using your same channel, this can lead to a lot less views for free.
You really need those ad views to get the initial foundation and then once you've got that as long as you keep putting out content that's consistent with the subscribers you've got, you can get a lot of views for free.
I started up YouTube ads right here and my channel growth is already picking up and I'm very excited to see how much growth I think I'm going to get to record growth levels. With the new ad formula I've shown you.
I've taken so much time to explain the value of ads and show you that I've done years of research on this and to show you if you want these views from search these are some of the very best free traffic you can get in the world is from YouTube search suggested videos, browse features external, these are some of the very highest quality leads you can generate. These are some of the very easiest ways you can get customers.
If you want the good stuff you need to pay to get your video out of the majority of YouTube videos that have hardly any minutes watched hardly any views any like any subscribers generated.
YouTube advertising is the way to do that.
What I will do now is show you the exact formula I've used after testing for years to get the best results, I'll show you the actual ad spend I've got and I'll show you here.
What I'm going to do is do a very key rate that shows the different types of ads.
There are two basic types of ads you want to consider: either discovery ads where YouTube puts up essentially a banner or to put your video up as a recommended video where people have to click on it to watch it.
And then there's the "in stream" ads, these play before other views. Now you're going to get some information here that some of the best anywhere online about YouTube ads, and I'll show you the huge data behind this.
Look at this. I've spent $88,000 on YouTube ads.
What I'm showing you now is the ads I've done, I will turn these ON all but removed. I also deleted all the campaigns I did earlier this year to make this more accurate.
If you're looking at the data here $3,471 on Discovery ads, these are ads where people have to click on your video to watch it and discover you, on this ad spend for $3,400 I've got 8000 free views.
I have 1,954 subscribers and 2,600 likes out of $3,400 now out of the total $88,000, $67,000 in earned views 5,000 subscribers and 5,000 in likes, and this is shares for some reason the shares aren't tracking correctly.
What you can see out of this is if I had spent all of my ad budget on video discovery ads and gotten the same level of results on 3,400 that I got on 34,000. Let's say.
If you multiply these results by 30, and compare those two doing in stream ads, you can see a massive increase.
That would mean instead of getting 5,000 subscribers through YouTube ads, I would have got about 60,000 subscribers to YouTube ads.
Instead of getting about 8,000 earned views. With the display instead of 60,000 earned views I would have gotten something like 240,000 earned views.
This is the biggest change and discovery I've made in YouTube ads recently, it's taken me several months to test this I didn't use to use video discovery ads because when I first did YouTube ads is all about minutes watched.
You have to get people to watch a video to get it to rank off the minutes watched but YouTube adjusted the algorithm and now you need some videos you need comments and shares and you need subscribers and you need minutes watched and you need views.
YouTube's balanced algorithm is where it's not so heavily skewed in favor of minute watch, therefore the Video Discovery ads are absolutely the best way to promote YouTube videos.
And therefore all of my ad campaigns I'm doing now are video discovery ads where people have to click on them.
Now the downside of video discovery ads is video discovery ads often don't get that long of a watch time because people click the ads by accident.
However, when you compare it with the YouTube in-stream ads, YouTube in stream ads often results in a lot of bot or ad blocker views. When you get those ad blocker views, you get a lot of minutes watched, but there's no engagement, and no one sees the video.
Therefore, you really want the actual real human eyeballs on your video, even if it's only for a few seconds, and then you can convert subscribers out of that.
What I've done is I promote all my new YouTube videos and YouTube discovery ads, and then the ones that do the best. I can keep running those indefinitely to get more and more subscribers views and interaction on my channel.
This is what's allowing and the beauty of this strategy is you can do this at any level, whether you've got no subscribers at all or rather you've got thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands.
The goal of this strategy is to bring in new subscribers. If you really want your channel to grow, it's all about new subscribers.
The person who gets excited watches your videos on YouTube every day and subscribes to your channel. As the I've tested out the hard way myself having old subscribers often won't get you that many views because old subscribers often have become inactive on YouTube old subscribers aren't watching the same kind of videos anymore.
It's all about getting someone who's really into this specific subject and then keeping them coming back.
For this reason I do a lot of remarketing ads. If you've watched one of my videos, you'll see a display ad for another one of my videos.
I also do ads that are targeted to go out on various categories to find new people who haven't watched my videos before.
What I'll do now is show you inside the key things you need to do to create the campaign successfully and then the video will be completed here.
In order to make ads on YouTube you need to sign up at ads.google.com then you will put your billing information and you go to new campaign.
I like to click on Create a campaign without the goal guidance. When I click on video, the key thing to do is to just use a customized video campaign here.
Click on Continue.
Now these are the settings you want to use for based on my testing. I always do a daily budget because the ones that work you want to run them at definitely maximum cost per view allows you to bid on the right videos.
I take video partners off on networks because I don't want people who aren't on YouTube. I only want people already on YouTube.
I put my language in here in English and then for the locations I do just for quantity of views, I do all countries and territories. I also do especially remarketing ads in the US, Canada and United Kingdom for potential customers.
For inventory. I do expand its inventory because I don't care what people are watching when they see my ad, someone clicks on my ad, then they're potentially interested in my channel and this can give me cheaper ad clicks, cheaper clicks on my ads, which is ideal.
I also took off the content not yet labeled, I don't care what the label is for it. I'll show you everything.
Now there's a couple of key settings I've learned that a really important down here, you need to put frequency capping ON hit Captain freshen frequency. I like to do one per month, this way. I get my ads out to as many different people as possible.
Then I just do ads repeatedly for many different videos. That way, someone doesn't keep seeing the same ad for the same video over and over again. They're always seeing different ads.
You can test things like devices that right now I'm just doing all the devices. I don't care whether you're on mobile, or desktop, if you can potentially discover me That's good.
Sometimes you can target different devices, then the key is to pick out an audience here I've tested it, sometimes not putting any audience at all, YouTube will still rank the video high. Other times if you put the right audience in, you can get a lot more like subscribers and earn views out of that.
What I do is I do lots of small campaigns that have just one audience I test between the different audiences and then the ones that do the best, I keep those running and the other ones I pause those.
You can also do keywords, I do keywords and for the bid if I'm going global for new people often put in one cent if I'm doing global remarketing I'll often do four cents and if I'm going USA often do something like 22 cents to make sure I get impressions in the UK in Canada, something like 17 says usually good.
Then once you're ready to do your ads, paste a video here. And I'll just take a URL to give you an example now of a video.
Then you take the video URL here, let's do this. I showed you this one earlier, will tab it back over here and go like that. Now I've got the video URL, paste that in there, and you'll see the video pops up.
The key then is to click on the Discovery ad you don't want the skippable in stream ads.
You want the discovery ads and this is just what it looks like. This is really good because then people will click on these and have some genuine interest in watching it. Now the key is to write a good headline here that gets the right kind of person to see the video and click on it.
The headlines are essential because this is what people are seeing. Therefore, you want to write your headline towards the exact kind of person you think would be ideal to watch this video.
The description here doesn't matter too much because it will only be shown on desktop and either desktop or as the YouTube search ad However, you do want to put what the time into it, but the main thing is to write a good headline then just quickly do the description and put the ad name in.
Now that you've got that done, what you can do is copy the different ad campaigns out to test different targeting YouTube also will give you over here, your estimated results. You can see what it thinks your cost per view to be how many impressions you'll get and how many views you'll get out of this.
The beauty of this is that you get an idea of what you need to bid and how many people can potentially watch it.
The one thing to avoid doing is targeting too small. It's really annoying to make a campaign and then it won't run or get the views that are really expensive.
I see this approach is all about quantity, I just want to put my ads out to as many people as possible all over the place. And then when I've got the right video someone's interested in and they click on it, then I've got a good chance to earn a subscriber, I've got a good chance to get some meaningful comments and interactions going on my channel and all good things go from there.
This is exactly how you can create these now you will need to be aware of YouTube ads of the terms and conditions there are certain things you cannot advertise on YouTube ads, you can just read the YouTube ads terms and conditions.
What I found is that out of all the advertising platforms YouTube is one of the most lenient and flexible on what they do allow you to advertise. For example, you I've been able to put ads on YouTube that I don't think I would have been able to do in Facebook ads because Facebook ads are so many things you're not allowed to do. YouTube is really pretty wide open. You can't outwardly put things directly on a video like making $1,000 a day or something like the title of it.
However, if you can just look at the YouTube ads terms and conditions, write your videos in a way that they have a genuine interest to help someone else's not overtly and outwardly doing something negative to users, then you've got a very good shot to get your video approved in YouTube ads and then continue advertising yet indefinitely.
Right now I spend $100 to $200 a day on YouTube ads and I then expect to get hundreds of new subscribers a day if you look at the growth on my channel and we'll go back to the main analytics screen and take a look at the last 90 days. Almost all the best days in terms of subscribers have been when I was running ads.
The problem with having a channel that's as big as mine is, every time I put out a new video, I lose subscribers and people click not interested which knocks the ranking of my video down. Therefore I have to get a lot more new subscribers who are really excited about and enjoy my content because YouTube put so much emphasis on negative feedback and a lot of the subscribers I got were on types of videos I don't do anymore.
Things like Android app development. I don't make videos on this hacking. I don't make videos on that. So a lot of the subscribers I've got are not interested in watching my videos, which means I need a critical mass of new excited subscribers and almost all the top days where I've gotten a lot of new subscribers like this recent one where I got 84 that was from running YouTube. display ads.
The downside is that when you do in-stream ads, those almost rarely result in new subscribers. The key is you've got to use the display ads to consistently get a lot of new subscribers and you can see the periods where I have hardly done any display ads in here and then I start doing the display ads my subscribers immediately pick up over here from and I'm just taking the display ads to the highest level now.
And this one here YouTube closed a bunch of accounts site wide on that day, which took those subscribers down. But this runs through a lot of display ads on the day getting all these subscribers and I imagine going forward.
I'm going to be consistently getting 100 to 200 subscribers a day just from ads alone, and the longer I get subscribers just on ads, every single day the more YouTube will rank, all my new videos will rank higher and get more views for free, the more YouTube will keep bringing more people into my channel totally for free. And the more it just snowballs
The secret is, if you don't use YouTube ads, you're not going to get off the ground level so to speak.
If you don't use YouTube as a foundation of views on your channel, you won't get to the point where you can get all that free traffic that I've shown you before.
I appreciate you watching all the way to the end of this video. If you'd like to get much more in depth to work with me go to jerry.tips/partner I've got a mastermind and coaching where I can help you rapidly advance your channel because I've done so many things on YouTube I have a huge list of what not to do that I finally learned from the hard way and I've got a massive list of things that work and can work really well in specific areas.
If you want some coaching and some help from my mastermind or networking group go to jerry.tips/partner on I'd love to help you there and be of service to you.
If you want me to make a video for you go to jerry.tips/sponsored, I'm very effective at using Google ads to get huge reach for videos. And that is very effective at bringing the right kind of people in to your product or service.
I've just done three sponsored videos recently and those are some of the most viewed videos on my channel because I push with ads, my sponsored videos farther than I do a lot of my own videos.
Thank you for reading all the way to the end. I'd love to hear what you have to say please drop a comment with any questions on the video.
If you find this helpful, I trust you'll leave a like on it and if you haven't already, somehow hit that subscribe button and turn those notifications on.
You'll love seeing my new videos and following my journey on YouTube and helping me to get more views. If you want to keep watching and you're just bingeing and watching everything you can look into description, I'll put some video as I think you'll really like to watch next in the description, and I'll see you in the next video.
I love you, you're awesome.
Jerry Banfield
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