Sport videos rank up there with cat videos when it comes to popularity. We love to watch our favorite teams and players doing well – or opponents embarrassing themselves. However, if you’re a budding sports channel making your own videos or a team/individual building their brand online, or just someone making compilation videos, then you need to know how to make YouTube work for you. The Sports Techie community blog YouTube channel requests your subscription on our drive to 1,000 subscribers from the 114 currently subscribed at http://www.youtube.com/user/sportstechie. We have had 94,885 views and 655 subscribers in ten years, thank you all. The reason I am focused on getting 1,000 subscribers is that YouTube aka Google, does not allow users to use the ‘Live’ streaming mode anymore or generate income from views for us users with less than a 1,000 subs. Help us help you.
Why YouTube is your priority
There are other good video sharing platforms out there. For example, you get security from BitChute in the fact their torrent-based platform is shared across the world making it impossible to lose videos. There are other moderately successful platforms too like Vimeo where we also have a channel with but one follower to date.
However, YouTube remains the granddaddy of them all. Why? As well as being by far the world’s biggest video sharing platform, it is also the world’s second biggest search engine. Does that surprise you? There are 1.9 billion users on YouTube and they watch an average of 1 billion videos a day. Yet, the platform has it’s issues that are preyed upon by malicious accounts which drives away potential new and existing users. Doctored videos, videos that have subtle clips inserted with content you are not wanting to see and child surfing issues are just some of their ongoing problems. My son is a whiz on both YouTube where I monitor him and YT Kids where he is much safer searching and playing videos.
Why you need to optimize your videos
The competition is fierce on YouTube and the algorithm favors new users. This means you need to run a tight ship when it comes to uploading your videos. There are many good videos out there which get little attention because the basics are not followed.
You need to employ basic search engine optimization (SEO) tactics on your videos in order to maximize the slice of the viewership pie your videos get. This opens you up to getting more views, getting more subscribers, and then being able to access monetization for yourself or your team.
Keywords will be your building block
You will need to ensure your video has the correct keywords, honest keywords, to best present what the video is. These keywords will be found in the title, in the tags, and in the description. Be aware also that YouTube’s algorithm is able to transliterate your spoken word (should it be such a video) and can apply those terms too.
Title: Put yourself in the mind of a person who is looking for your kind of video. What would they write into the search bar? You want your title to be the question or the phrase they are searching for – for example, who are streaming the Netball World Cup in 2019?
Tags: Your tags should include relevant search terms related to the topic, names of people included, names of teams, the sport, location, etc…
Description: Talk about what the video shares. If it’s multiple videos like a “best touchdowns of 2018” topic, then name the teams, dates, and players involved. Some people include timestamps so people can skip to the one they want to see. The description is a good place to include affiliate links, links to the channel home page or to your website and social media links.
Optimize your thumbnail picture
If they’ve found you because of your keywords and tags, that does not mean they’ll click on your video. Have a clean and crisp, but interesting, on-brand image for your video. Do not let YouTube pick a thumbnail for you, but have one designed – even if you do it on Canva, and upload it yourself. Include the title in the image.
Be honest when optimizing it
The YouTube algorithm is excellent at spotting errors and fabrications. In times past YouTubers could keyword stuff their videos to get more views, even for those searching for something different, or they would add a picture of a hot looking person to entire views. Doing so now will cause only trouble for your channel. Be honest when optimizing your videos and you’ll be rewarded in the long run.
Sports Techie, my biggest issue with YouTube in terms of viewership tallies is the sincerity of a given videos view count. I have used my iPhone, tablet and PC when looking over my video counts and they are all different for no apparent rhythm or reason. The best I can figure is they only count viewers that are watching a video while doing so from an actual YouTube account meaning if you are not logged into YouTube, my educated guess is that it is not considered an actual view.
I personally like YouTube both as a consumer and video producer.
Look for more unedited Sports Techie videos this year and please sub – http://www.youtube.com/user/sportstechie
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