If You're Under 4,000 YouTube Watch Hours, So Try This Now!
Credit: Mr. Walsh
Want to know how I turned my watch time from this to this? Well, today I'm going to share with you five different ways to get your YouTube channel watch time up to 4000 hours every YouTuber needs to notice that they seriously want to grow their channels this year and beyond have the going content creators.
My name is Ryan Walsh, I'm sharing with you my YouTube channel experience, we're all about mastering growth and monetization on YouTube so we can take control of our lives.
Best Tips for YouTube Beginners
Tip number one is longer videos. One of the biggest mistakes that I see most YouTube creators make whenever they're coming out with their videos is that they always make them too short. Now, this definitely depends on the niche.
But I would say for the majority of niches, you probably want to come out with longer videos and the reason you want to do that is because by making shorter videos say for example maybe about a five-minute video,
You're only allowing your diehard viewers only to watch that video for about five minutes when if you actually put this video maybe 10 minutes or 15 minutes, they would probably watch that entire thing.
And basically, you'd be able to get 15 minutes of watch time from that one viewer instead of just five. So if you were able to make longer videos,
It would take you less views in order to get to that 4000 watch hours that you need to get monetized I noticed this on my channel about three or four months ago when I started posting more consistently.
And I saw that whenever I posted a video that was probably about eight minutes, maybe five minutes. That's when I got very few minutes of watch time. And I personally was like well if I want to hit 4000 watch hours,
I'm going to need to make longer videos and whenever I put up longer videos and I started to do that, that's when I started seeing people stay on my videos for four, five, or even six minutes at times. Of course, this all comes down to experimentation.
You could upload a video that's 10 minutes long and you can get someone only on there for about two minutes. But whenever you upload a five-minute video you get them on there for four minutes.
Now that's something you have to wait and you really have to look at and be like okay, I'm getting much better audience retention, and much better watch time on this video that shorter than the one that's longer.
That's what you really need to consider here. Because it's not just for every single channel if you're someone that has a comedy channel and I could be totally wrong about this but whenever I look at that kind of content and what succeeding on YouTube, usually I see shorter videos succeeding so maybe you want to play around with YouTube shorts.
Or maybe you just want to make shorter videos that are maybe like two to three minutes long. So if you're brand new to YouTube and say you're going to make your first five videos,
I would experiment with maybe making a five-minute video then maybe making a seven-minute video, a 10-minute video, and then a 15-minute video,
And then whichever one does best there then you can take that last video and basically just do it again and see if maybe 10 minutes is better for your channel or maybe five minutes is better for your channel.
It really just comes down to you being self-aware. Also, something that I noticed on my channel as well. Whenever I personally with my data. whenever I upload a video that's longer than 15 minutes,
I always noticed that my audience's attention in the amount of watch time that I get on average with that video always declined.
So I've noticed that within my own data and that's something you have to recognize once again in your data you need to understand, hey, maybe if I make a video too long, people are just getting bored more often or maybe they think it's too much of an obligation to even click on. That's something that you need to understand as well.
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Tip No. 2 (If You're Under 4,000 YouTube Watch Hours)
Number two is competition. I feel like this is a tip that I have in every single one of my videos but honestly, this is just always one of the best things to do whenever you're confused about your channel.
It's usually the best idea to go to the top channels within your niche and then find out hey, what are they doing and how can I try to do that on my channel but do it a little differently.
The same thing comes with watch time if you notice that the channels that are at the top of your niche are making longer videos maybe 2025 minute videos, or maybe they're making really short videos, they're only a minute or two minutes long.
You need to recognize that you need to go and do your own research. I personally would go into their most popular videos and then just see on average, what video length do they do and what do they get the most views on however, this isn't the best way to do it either because it could vary between each individual topic.
So if I'm looking at my channel whenever I do a tutorial video usually those are extremely long videos because they'll be giving an in-depth tutorial and it's just going to take longer than a regular tip video. I remember I didn't do this at all on my first channel that got to 50,000 subscribers webhead when I started uploading on that channel, I wasn't looking at anybody else's channel.
I was just looking at my own and I was doing my own thing. The problem with that is that I never understood how long my video should be and how to get more watch time on my channel. So I had videos going on my channel that were all different kinds of lengths.
I had some videos that were 10 minutes. Most videos I would say we're about six to seven minutes. And I personally should have been uploading at least 10 to 15-minute videos every single time just because I would have gotten more watch time and that's what my competitors were doing with those specific topics.
Tip No. 3 (If You're Under 4,000 YouTube Watch Hours)
Tip number three is audience retention everything I mentioned before in this video is a great starting point to really understand exactly how long your video should be.
But that's only one piece of the puzzle because the biggest piece that the majority of content creators completely dropped the ball on is their audience retention. Basically, the mistake is that they never try to go in and improve their audience retention.
They're not reviewing their older videos, they're not seeing why people click off their videos, you have to look at the different spikes where if you see a spike in your video where it goes up, that means your audience enjoyed that part of the video. So you should go back and try to recreate that same experience in your next video.
And if you see a huge decline in your audience retention that tells you Okay, obviously this is a part where people really don't care about me skipped so I need to go and try to correct that in my next video and then if you have audience retention were just slowly goes down. That just means that your audience is getting bored over time.
So you can go and try to make it a little bit more interesting by finding different spikes or testing out different structures within your video. There's a ton of different things you can do. And honestly, it's really just a testing experience.
You have to go and test different ideas, different structures within your video to see which one sticks. I personally always go through my audience retention probably about once every single week, and I just go through the videos that I made that we and I really just write down exactly where people getting bored.
Where do people click off and what points in my video spike up. Or maybe you're just having a giant hockey stick effect where literally the beginning of your video, everybody clicked off, and then it's just one giant hockey stick. Well, I personally have had that too, and don't worry about it.
I know maybe you don't have many spikes in your audience retention and you don't know what to look for. Well, the one big change that I think you really need to focus on is just the hook of your video. You have a huge hockey stick effect that basically means that you just have a really bad hook in your video.
So when people looked at your thumbnail a title they thought they were going to get a particular value from your video, so they click on your thumbnail and when the video starts the first 15 seconds the audience is watching this video and they're thinking themselves Wait, this isn't what I clicked on.
This isn't what I wanted to see and so they decided to click off immediately and that's when it affects your video. That's why you have no one watching at the end.
Of your video or even in the middle of your video because everybody clicked off right at the beginning just like I said And tip number two you can once again go to your competition if you're having trouble with your hub and just see how did they open up their videos?
What language do they use to open up the video? Are they teasing results that you're going to get by the end of the video? Or maybe they're teasing experiences within the video.
Tip No. 4 (If You're Under 4,000 YouTube Watch Hours)
All this stuff matters and you really need to pay attention to this tip number four is N screens. If you want YouTube to literally blow up your channel you need to pay attention to your end screens and exactly how you're ending your own videos.
This ties directly into your audience retention and you can see it in your audience retention as well. So if you have a video where maybe you're getting really good audience attention in the beginning, you pumped your viewer then everyone's staying on in the middle but then you see a giant drop off at the end.
Well, most of the time you're seeing that because you're ending your videos really poorly whenever you see an amateur YouTuber they always have the same type of ending may say oh make sure you guys subscribe to my channel don't forget to like the video. Oh, don't forget to go watch this video in this video. Thank you guys so much for watching.
I appreciate every single one of you guys. Stop. Nobody wants to sit through that because everybody does that on every single channel. So you want to go to the end of your audience retention, see where people are dropping off and then you want to cut your video right there and be like okay, everything else after this. It didn't work.
So we really want to transition and maybe recommend one video or maybe we could recommend them subscribing to the channel and you just want them to take action on one thing you want to have one call to action at the end of your video.
So you can see with my videos a lot of the time whenever I'm ending the video, I usually just recommend one video or one playlist and I usually try to relate it to the topic of the video I'm talking about as well.
So whenever I'm talking about how to get more views on a video, I try to point people to a video or playlist that talks all about getting views on your channel so people are inclined to go watch that video. And because it's on the exact same topic,
I'm probably going to have a higher click-through rate of that end screen. That's how it's usually done on say a channel like mine, but say if you have more of an entertainment channel, not an educational one. Well,
I personally would go in there and I would try to tease another video maybe show a quick short 15-second clip of the next video and then just put the picture of the video right there so they can go and click and that's a great way to increase their session time and to keep them on your channel and your videos longer.
And that's something that YouTube really cares about as well. And when you're able to string your audience along for many different videos, that's when the algorithm is going to blow off your channel. And this is what people miss all the time.
Tip No. 5 (If You're Under 4,000 YouTube Watch Hours)
And this is a great transition right into tip number five, which is a playlist outline. Now I personally go in and I basically make an entire outline of how my playlists are going to be structured. What video is going to recommend what video and how can I transition from one playlist topic to another playlist topic Hey, content creators I just want to jump in here,
And obviously this is not a part of the original video but I don't think I explained the playlist outline all that great my original videos so I wanted to go over this and really get in-depth and explain to you exactly how I structure my playlists outline. For instance. This is basically how I write out a playlist outline.
I can focus on my camera here. You can see that I just have different playlists that I list out and then I number all the videos in there and put all the titles of the videos and that's generally how I do it on paper. But to give you an even better way to how to structure this playlist outline explain it to you. I'm going to leave that to my graphics.
So you can see that I have two playlists here. What you want to do is write out playlist one or you can really just write out the title of what this playlist is going to be the titles and playlists are actually pretty important because they can rank in search.
So you want to make sure you're putting a really great title in there so you can rank higher in search and get people to watch more of your videos and say within each of these playlists we have three videos. Obviously you're going to want to put the titles of these videos right next to Video one video two and then video three.
And essentially what you're doing is when you go into playlist one video one and you're filming that video when you're filling the end of that video and you're transitioning to another video and you're gonna put in an end screen there you want that end screen to be from playlist one video two,
So they go directly from video one to video two and of course, you're going to do the exact same thing to video three.
Now once you get to the last video in playlist number one, you're going to want to film an outro slash transition and put in an end screen to Playlist number two so that you can get your audience to go from one playlist to another playlist and of course the cycle continues through that playlist.
It's pretty straightforward. Of course you want the topics from playlist number one, employee list number two to be related in some way you don't want them to be completely disconnected because it's not going to make logical sense for that viewer to go from one playlist to the next they're just going to click off your video so for my channel say that the first playlist is all about getting views on YouTube.
Well, the next natural step that I would say for my topics in my playlist would be going from a playlist all about views to Playlist number two, which is all about how to get YouTube subscribers now I'll be putting out all my future videos.
And if your older videos don't match up with the playlist outline that you have now that's okay, I don't want you to stress out about this, just put them in the playlist and continue with the outline and that's exactly how you can get your viewers to go from one video to the next in through another playlist.
And you can just keep them going down a rabbit hole and you don't want to stop it just to playlist. You want to keep going playlist number four but I know a lot of you want 4000 watch hours because you want to get monetized on youtube. I'll see you over there.