Ready to unlock the secrets of YouTube success? Join us in this episode as we sit with Fran Asaro, YouTube mentor and strategist for mature creators. Today, Fran takes us on a comprehensive journey through the art of YouTube optimization, sharing 11 game-changing best practices to enhance your channel’s visibility and grow your audience. Fran reveals it all, from dissecting the basics such as creating eye-catching thumbnails to utilizing revolutionary AI tools such as Tubebuddy and Pictory. Throughout the episode, he unveils the magic behind the right tools and strategies, and how to best utilize them. Tune in now to better understand what makes or breaks your YouTube success. Your YouTube adventure begins here!

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YouTube Optimization The Solution To Getting Seen And Earning Money

For those of you who are reading, I want to encourage you to go over to YouTube if you want to see the training because it is live training. There will be slides that Fran is showing, so if you read and you think this is going to be a valuable resource, then jump back on. Everybody here is pretty much are writer, so they’ll be excited. Who’s Isaac?

He’s with me. He’s one of my guys.

Ally, do you want to tell everybody about the event that you and Kris Johnson are running during the month of October 2023?

She’s here. Kris, you can add in anything you want. Kristy and I are running OctoberQuest BOOKtacular, a 31-day writing challenge throughout the month of October 2023 over in a group on LinkedIn. It’s 31 days to help aspiring authors step into their author hats, embrace their books, write every day in some fashion, and get a lot of tips, tricks, resources, and professional insight from Kristy and me along the journey in that month.

If you want writing, please go over it. The other thing too with the tips is that these are both high-level book developers. I know from my own experience that writing can get out of control. Kris edits my fiction novels. I swear she takes half of them out and rewrites them because you can be a good storyteller but not a great writer. That’s exactly what I am when it comes to fiction. These guys can be a huge help on your journey. Kris, did you want to add something real quick before we introduce Fran?

The BOOKtacular is going to be so much fun. Join us. We’re going to have lots to give you. If you have questions, we’ll be there every step of the way for you. You guys are going to love Ally. I adore her. She is so much fun and she brings joy to the whole experience.

She does. We all call her Ally B because she has a name that nobody can pronounce. I have it written on a piece of paper after ten times of just calling her Ally B and nobody knows who she is. Our guest now is the amazing Fran Asaro. She is a YouTube mentor and a strategist for mature creators. Pretty much except for Tracy and Isaac, all of us are well into our maturity and sharing how to optimize and monetize their YouTube channel. She’s the Founder of the Senior Tuber Community, and she helps both professional and hobbyists lead their gifts and legacy on YouTube.

I know you guys know that we’ve had Nina Froriep as a part of this group. There’s a little bit of differentiation here. Nina and her crew are great at getting you comfortable and the content. Fran knows YouTube inside and out, like playlists. All those things that we just throw a video up and we don’t necessarily know how to optimize, that’s what she is fantastic at. Take it, Fran.

Thank you so much, Juliet. This is such an honor to be here and to be able to help people do this. It’s like my two loves putting together, YouTube and also helping people get where they want to go. That’s a big thing. As Juliet said, this is about optimization so that you can get your channel where it can earn money. We’re not going to talk about the income part of it. To be honest with you, I could barely fit in the optimization features. There’s so much to learn. I thought about giving you a portion of it, but everything that I’m going to tell you now is part of the one encapsulated best practices bubble. That’s what we’re going to be learning.

Fran is a contributor to our magazine. If you haven’t signed up for the magazine, go to BreakthroughAuthorMagazine.com because she’s going to be sharing these tips on a regular basis now.

I wish I had a platform to do it all because there’s a lot and it doesn’t get overwhelming if you drip it. Hopefully, we’ll get to not kill anybody. What we’re going to discuss now is why it’s important to optimize. There are two types of optimization, and then we’re going to talk a little bit about what nobody wants to know about, and that’s the algorithms and why it’s important with optimization and how it helps the algorithms. We’re going to get to the part that probably everybody wants, and that’s to learn the best practices to achieve your desired goal, which is building your ideal audience, people who are buying your services, your products, or your books, and earning money.

Before we begin, I want to let you know a couple of things. First of all, I’m going to give you a lot of information, as I said, and I’ll break it down step by step. I’m a New Yorker. All I’m going to ask you to do is be ready to capture something if you don’t want to lose it. What I’m teaching you now and that you might go home with a headache is that eventually, it becomes a second nature practice for you. I promise that, but you have to do it for that to happen. There’s a tool to simplify the process. I’m putting this down here for a reason.

The practices that I’m teaching you come from TubeBuddy. TubeBuddy is my friend. I do not do this without using TubeBuddy as my go-to. There’s a free version of TubeBuddy, and you can get that by just going to TubeBuddy.SeniorTuber.com. If you did want most of the features that it has, there’s a 50% off for anybody who has under 1,000 subscribers. What that equates to is about $26 for a year for something that is going to save you a lot of time. It is just a suggestion, but I’m going to mention everything that I teach you, most of it, was taught to me by TubeBuddy’s best practices.

The first thing is applying the best practices. You apply them because you want to be found and you want people to engage with you. These are very important. You also want to become a friend of YouTube. When you play by their rules, they’re going to be promoting you and you want to play by their rules for sure. You want to build a strong foundation. When you do, you’re building continuity, credibility, and trust. The biggest thing is you’re going to save time. If I give you eleven best practices now, your first thought is, “That’s a lot of things I have to do. I’m already taking an hour to upload my video.” What if I told you when you learn these best practices, it will probably take you less than fifteen minutes to upload your videos? Wouldn’t that be better? It doesn’t happen until you learn the practices.

There are those algorithms that nobody ever wants to know. I have been the same way for years I failed on YouTube because I put up a video and walked away and just said my prayers. I do that with my website. Once I learned about the algorithms and the best practices, it changed things for me, and I help change things for other people as well. To put it in a very human nutshell, not to use all the technical terms that they use, the algorithms are YouTube’s way of keeping you on their platform. Based on what you put out there, it helps them with their advertisers. They just want to make money.

If they keep everybody who goes there longer on their platform, then they make money. The same thing works for you. If you put out video videos that other people like, then YouTube likes that you’re keeping them on the platform. Guess what? You have your algorithms. The longer you keep people on your channel, the better chance you have of making money. I want you to know the ways that you can keep people on your channel. Wouldn’t that be great?

Here are the two ways to optimize. The first one is your channel. Your channel has a back office. If you set up your channel correctly, that’s going to make a huge difference. We’re not going to discuss it in detail, but I don’t want to leave you without knowing the importance of it. Your uploaded videos are the next way for you to optimize your channel. I’m going to give you a little short view of optimizing your channel.

When you do set it up, it’s going to be a set and a forget, which is going to be good for you, but you do have to get it there first. You can change it as things change for you, but you don’t have to change it regularly like you do with a video. The first thing I want to recommend is that you add a welcome video that plays automatically when people get to your channel. In this video, which I notice a lot of people do, they say, “I have a video there,” but they have a 90-minute podcast or a video that has nothing to do with telling people why they’re there.

Make a video 1 to 3 minutes long, welcoming people to your channel. Don’t tell them your name right away. Take those first few minutes I tell people, “Are you a mature person who has something inside of you, you just have to let out and you’re thinking of becoming a creator?” That’s what I say, “If you’re interested, then subscribe.” Very short and sweet. They recognize themselves and they pass or they choose you, one or the other.

Once they subscribe, if they subscribe, you have the option to have a second video that shows up. It’s for subscribers. That could be something you change regularly based on if you have an event coming up. For me, I had a new podcast, so I said, “Welcome back. I have a new podcast. Check it out. Thanks for being here.” You could give them a little tour of your place. It could be anything. Also, 1 to 3 minutes long.

You want to make sure your channel art is using what I call reels state. There are several places on your channel where you can put your name 42 times, your logo 40 times, and the name of your channel. Try to keep it where you’re using it for different things so when people go there, they recognize themselves. You’re not promoting you, you’re enticing them. What are they looking for? That’s what you want to make sure your channel artist is going to do.

You are also going to have a place to put links. These links are going to be wherever you want them to go, whether it’s to a Linktree, your Facebook group, or your website. You’ll put those in there too. Those will be able to be found in a couple of places. One is on your About Me page at the very bottom. It used to be that you could see it on the channel art, but that’s not that way anymore. You cannot click. If you have anything there that says, “Please click here,” you can’t click there anymore. You might as well want to take that out of your channel art. It also shows up right under your video. There’s a place where one of your main links, so make sure the link you want people to see first, will show up a dropdown to see 4 or 5 other links.

You’re going to want to tag your channel differently than you tag your videos. If your channel is for a certain type of people, mature creators, or whatever else, what you think people are looking for is going to be how you want to tag. We’re going to talk about tags a little bit more. Your tags for your channel are going to be a little bit more like an umbrella of what people are going to be looking for.

Your About Me page is very important. There’s a new feature in your About Me page where the first 55 characters on the first line only get moved over to under your video. Those 55 characters are going to tell somebody if they want to be part of your channel. Welcome them. What do they hear? If you are an author who wants to learn have those 55 characters make them want to click the rest of your About Me page.

How to get there is you’re going to go to your YouTube studio. When you’re on YouTube, you click on your picture, and then the dropdown comes and says YouTube Studio, and then go all the way to the left column, to optimize your channel, you’re going to be working in your settings or your customization. There’s more, but I just wanted to give you some basics so that you can get rolling, and maybe I’ll write about it in a magazine, the next issue, or provide a link to a video that I create.

This is what it looks like when you have a video, then people show up at your channel that plays automatically. It’s just a small little thing. Make it fun, descriptive, entertaining, whatever you want to do. Let people hear from you right away. They get to see you, hear you, and know what you’re all about. We’re going to talk about the good stuff, optimizing your videos. In optimizing, I use it interchangeably with best practices because that’s what TubeBuddy calls it. I need you to know they don’t always make sense. We are not here to try to argue with YouTube. YouTube’s going to have us do some crazy things like stand on our heads, and if it doesn’t hurt, then let’s stand on our heads if it means that we’re going to get shown, and you’ll see what I mean in a little bit.

YouTube Optimization: When people show up at your channel, make the video that plays automatically fun, descriptive, or entertaining. But let people hear from you right away. They get to see you. They get to hear you.

They will become second nature, these best practices. To be honest with you, people didn’t like me at the end because I put up too much information and then they called me a week later and said, “Now I’m noticing other people’s channels. Do you know they don’t even use tags? Do they don’t even have their channel optimized?” They start becoming a little self-righteous about it and start doing it themselves. You can expect that you’re going to be overwhelmed now and you’re going to feel good in about a week.

I use what I call my term combing order. The way I’m going to show you the best practices is what I do in that order every single time. Except for the thumbnails and everything else, you’ll be able to see how I do it in that order. The very first thing we’re going to talk about, I’m sure you’ve all heard about it, but the importance of thumbnails.

I wish I could see you all now, but I’d like to know who prioritizes their videos with their thumbnails. They say to create your thumbnail and your title first before you even have a video idea because then you know what you have to live into, and your thumbnails and your titles will match your video. They want to see consistency. Thumbnails are the first impression that you’re going to be making, and that’s going to entice your viewers whether they want to read the title, which is the second most important best practice for you to do.

YouTube Optimization: Thumbnails are the first impression that you’re going to be making.

If you don’t know what thumbnails are, if you’ve ever seen a video that starts and somebody’s mouth is wide open, they haven’t chosen a thumbnail, or if they’re sitting there and they’ve got this funny look. YouTube chose it for them, and sometimes it’s not your most attractive shot.

Maybe they have their mouth wide open, but they chose it that way. That’s true. Some people do not have any thumbnails. I’m referring to the people who have thumbnails, but they’re not converting. If you think, “I have thumbnails,” but if nobody’s seeing your videos, then it could be your thumbnail. That’s good, thank you.

If you’ve got no views, it’s got to be your thumbnail, your title, or your tags. They haven’t even seen your content yet. We’re not even talking about content now because we’ve got to get them there. We have to get them to click. If they don’t click, it doesn’t matter how good your content is. If you have no views, go back and change your thumbnails. Just so you know, you can go back and edit old thumbnails on old videos. It doesn’t matter. Same thing with your titles. Don’t overwhelm yourself. If you have 200 videos, go back and do 1 a week or 1 a day, whatever feels good for you. Make sure you go from now forward using a better thumbnail.

Tips for creating a good thumbnail are compelling images. Use something relevant to your title. It could feature yourself or some other person, but using a person is good. For the authors, you want to use your book. You want to use expressive faces like Juliette was saying, with your mouth open. If that pertains, then you want to maybe look a surprised look on your face, something that evokes emotion. You also want to use contrasting colors. You want it to stand out, be bold, and grab attention. You also want to have legible text, big and bold. I have too many clients that have beautiful thumbnails that never convert because they’re written in script, can barely see the script, and it doesn’t show up against the background well.

Remember, contrast and bold and short amount of words, 1 to 4 words, if you can get away with it. I’m guilty of putting too many in. All we want to do is romance them to take the next step, which is to read the title. You want it to be consistent. If you are building a brand, you can create a template. I have one guy. He’s 72, and he has a channel where he teaches students. Everything is in purple and yellow, and it’s beautiful. He changes the picture and the title. You don’t have to have that. I have it for some, but not all of my channels. You’ll get to see that.

There’s also an opportunity if you do go to a TubeBuddy for an A/B Testing feature. There are also analytics that will tell you which one of your thumbnails is working for you. You have a shrink test. The shrink test is when you go on your phone and you’re scrolling videos that are all about your topics. Let’s say your topic is, “How to write a book?” When you pull it up, you’re going to see all the other people who have their thumbnails. How do yours compare? Not only does it compare, but how can you read it? Can you see what it says on your phone? If you can’t, then somebody who doesn’t know you isn’t going to read it either. You want to make sure you do that.

This is what a thumbnail looks like, and these aren’t even contrasting. You can get more dramatic than this. I did a random search for the artist’s way. You could see how it just says, “Be more creative.” You’ll click, and if it’s not, you’ll move on. We are trying to get people from the thumbnail to the title, and I’ll show you how we do that in a second. Very few words, holding up a book, smiling, looking confused, whatever goes with the title.

If you’re going to have a title, some of the tips for a good title is it has to be relevant to the video topic. I always use my John Travolta thing because we’re older people here and I’m a John Travolta fan. I can’t put John Travolta in my title because people search for him and it’s going to help me with the search. They want to know that you are putting something in your title that matches your description and your video. It’s got to be relevant to your topic and it’s got to be something that people are searching. I noticed a lot of people where, and I’m going to address this again later for chapters, they might put, “This is number 2 of 433 podcast number meeting.” It means nothing to anybody except for you and your people who were there.

You want to make sure it’s something people are searching for. What was the content of that show? What was in there that people would want to know? “Today we talked about the ten tips for,” and so you want to put that in your title somehow, some way with clarity in the form of a sentence so that people can read it, not just see a bunch of words, something that people are searching for. You want it to promote engagement. It could be intriguing, pique their interest, questions, hooks. “Here’s my six ways that I did this. Guess what I did that changed my life,” so people will go into the content.

Here’s another thing where I said that sometimes YouTube’s algorithms are a little crazy. You have 100 characters that you can use for a title. Don’t use them because you’re going to lose credits. I call them brownie points. You’re going to lose some YouTube brownie points. If you go 70 characters or less, first of all, it won’t be truncated because a lot of it’s not going to show when it comes up in a Google or even a YouTube search. You want to keep it 70 characters or less with your most important heavy-weighted material in the first few words. You want to make sure that it’s powerful 70 characters. If you go to 72, you might say it’s just 72, but you’ll notice in your best practices it might say that you’re over.

It should also be an extension of your thumbnail, which is important. What did the people do once they saw the thumbnail? Here’s the same picture of the thumbnails. If you look to Be More Creative, The Book That Unlocked My Creativity: The Artist’s Way, and Art Block, Watch This if You’re Art Blocked, it’s like a segue. You’re taking them on a journey, and then if they like this, they’re going to click. We’re not talking about content now, but if your content is doing the same thing, you are going to keep these people. They’re going to be so engaged and so enrolled in what you have to offer. Take a quick notice that some of the views on this, and I don’t know if anybody has views like this, here’s 130,000, 60,000, 83,000, and 52,000 views. That’s pretty good. That’s because they have a good title and a good thumbnail.

It is not going happen to all of us, and it’s not going to happen on all our videos, but we want to do the best we can to get the best opportunity to do that. Take note of this right here. This is fairly new. Underneath, it’s got the title of their channel, but then there’s a sentence or two. That’s where we are going to be putting in those. I have it right here, too, and I didn’t even realize it when I searched. It’s right here on top of my book stack. That’s so funny.

This is what we were talking about in the description, the first three rows, which would have your call to action or whatever, that’s what’s showing up here. Whatever you want people to see, that’s what’s going to show right here. This is for your description. That’s what comes in after you do the title. Now people are going to go to your description. Your description has a capacity of 5,000 characters. You can use them all. It will not hurt you, but I will let you know that you want to keep them aesthetically appealing.

You want to use things that break it up a little bit. Use your links, lines, and bullets. I use little asterisks all the way across to divide things up. You could use some caps, but not all. Some people can use emojis. Sometimes you could copy in an emoji. You want to talk about your first three lines should be your call to action before you See More. If you have a video that you want people to see, it should go below the call to action. The title of your video goes below the call to action, but no space. When you have a space, it might not show up until after the See More, but if you keep the space closed, you could add About the Title, but you don’t have to. All they want to know is that the title is in the description.

YouTube Optimization: If you have a video that you want people to see, it should go below the call-to-action.

Unless your video is a minute or less, you don’t want to add chapters, but we’re going to go over chapters in a second. That’s what you’re going to put in your description. You’re going to add as many tags as possible that pertain to your video. You’re going to put that in your description. I’m going to tell you a little secret about what I do because I don’t always put them in the description. Add as many links as you mentioned in your video. If you talked about somebody’s channel, a product that you have, or a link to your book. You want to put those in there, but you want to label them too. You want to make sure they’re labeled not just a link and even a little story about it if you want them to know more.

You want to add any acknowledgment. If you’ve had somebody that you’re using their music or their artwork, or if you’ve wanted to thank somebody or you want to put them in your description, this is the place to do it since you have so much room. If you’re an affiliate for any products, you want to have an affiliate disclaimer. I’m an affiliate for TubeBuddy proudly because I use it every day. Another thing I teach people when monetizing is how to become an affiliate with products you love and make money. At this point, I haven’t even started my affiliate thing. I’ve got about 30 or 40 affiliates, and I get checks. I call them checks, but I get deposits every month, probably between 5 and 10 from different places. I want to see people make money besides your book.

We’re going to talk about chapters. Tips for chapters, first of all, they’re timestamped and segmented sections of your video, just like in a book. They’re clickable. At this point, you can’t have a chapter in your description until you have 1,000 subscribers, but that’s supposed to change what I heard. I want you to read as if it’s changed and you can have chapters now. What it does is it creates clickable sections of your video. I use these all the time, especially if I leave a video for my Watch Later. I can just go back to the chapter I was on. It formats like this where it’s got hours, minutes, and seconds. I’ll show you how that looks in just a second.

Your chapters have to be at least ten seconds apart and you have to have at least three chapters for you to get you two brownie points. This is a little cheat if you’re in a rush and you want to get all your best practices in, but you want to get your video uploaded. Put those three chapters in, go back later, and put the rest of the chapters in. At least you’re getting ranked enough so that they’re going to help you share it when you first put up your video.

You want to use words in your chapters. This is what we were talking about before that are not things like part 1 or part 2 without the description. Let it be something people are going to want to click in. “This is about how to do this. This is the secret to this.” It’s intriguing. Some people look at the chapters before they even watch the video and they go through it first. They won’t know what part one means, but they’ll know if it’s something they’re interested in. Also, it boosts your SEO scores. If you’re interested in doing that, I’ll show you how to check that. It’s a great feature.

This is what it looks like. You can put in chapters now on YouTube without TubeBuddy, but you don’t have it all on one screen. You’re working on your video on one screen and your chapters on another, and you’re going back and forth where TubeBuddy offers that. It’s all on one page. What you can see here on the bottom left where I’m showing these little black dots where I’ve marked my chapters and the little red one is when you stop it, you click on it, and then it all of a sudden documents the time and you just add in the chapter topic.

We’re going to talk about playlists. This is one of my pet peeves because if you are interested in becoming a YouTube partner, to become a YouTube partner, you have to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours every 12 months. That equates to 333 watch hours. Go to your analytics and see how many watch hours you have. For most people, it’s like 10 to 100 watch hours. Here’s a way that you could step up your watch hour game. What you’re going to do is you’re going to create playlists. You’re going to add videos that have something in common to one playlist. One video can go to more than one playlist if it has more than one topic that it fits into.

The benefits of this are that you can share a playlist easily, and it can play continuously. I’m going to show you how that works. People search for playlists on your channel and they could just search for the topics that could be your playlist. It helps keep a series or a course together. Whether you have something like that that you give away for free as a lead capture and they get an unlisted link to your series, or if you charge for it, you can keep it in a playlist format. It also increases your visibility on search engine results. They increase views for sure. I’m going to show you how that does that. The playlist boosts your watch time dramatically. They are designed to save time and provide value for your people.

This is a regular video. It’s on a playlist, but what I did is I posted just the video, not the playlist. You can see it’s got a shorter link. All these videos in the right-hand column are YouTube-suggested videos. When your viewer is done watching your video, they’re suggesting they go to these videos. They’re not yours, so you lost them. I’m going to suggest that you get a playlist that looks like this. This is about my ten fails in years of being a YouTuber. I was not always able to talk to you like I am now.

This playlist alone has its own URL. You can share it just like this and people can have it and go watch all your videos. Each one of these videos has its own playlist link. I call it the long link. What it would look like if you shared that is I would play the long link to the video I want and look what shows up here, here on the right-hand side, all the rest of the videos that are part of that playlist. When people see this and they’re interested in learning more, they see what’s listed here, and they could click on it, but even if they don’t, at the end of this video, it’s going to automatically go to the next one. It’s great if they even walk away and keep it going because it’s just going to play your playlist the whole thing. You want to share your playlist.

We’re going to talk about tags. Tags are important. Remember, I said three things keep people getting to see your content. For instance, have you ever tried searching yourself on YouTube? Are you showing up with your channel or your podcast name? See where you show up because if you’re not showing up, you’re not tagged properly. I have to confess. I found out that when I pulled up Fran Asaro, an old YouTube channel from 2009 that was dead showed up. That’s embarrassing. I was embarrassed to have that. My channel didn’t show up. I had to change all my tags. Now, if you look up Senior Tuber Community or Fran Asaro, I’m pretty proud of where it shows up.

YouTube Optimization: See where you show up because if you’re not showing up, you’re not tagged properly.

When you have tags, you have up to 500 characters and you want to use them all. Here’s something you have to remember. If you go over 501 characters, you cannot save it. It will not keep it. There’s a little red line that goes around your tags, and there’s a little red line that goes around your description. If you ever can’t save your work, it’s because you have put too many characters in one of those fields. Go and start removing some of your characters. It brings you discoverability. You choose what people are searching for. What do you want? Who is your audience? What are they looking for? You want to reach those people.

For audience targeting, for me, a lot of my tags talk about “Are you mature creators looking for YouTube channel support?” Something like that. I call them long-tail keywords. The reason for that is because I put it the way people are searching. It enhances your SEO and improves how YouTube and Google will share you. The long-tail keywords are great, but what does that mean? How do you know which ones to put? I’m going to show you that.

One day we’ll have an analytics class and I’ll show you how you can see which tags are working. You want to take your tags and you want to add them to your description. This is my secret. If you’re not going to go through your description and insert tags that you have down here, copy your tags and paste them at the very bottom of your description, and now all your tags are showing up. Sometimes I’ll go and add a hashtag. Sometimes I’ll remove the commas or add commas. Basically, I have taken the tags, I have pasted them at the bottom of the description, saved it, refreshed the video, and I saw the SEO go up high. It worked many times. I’m going to show you how you could do the same thing.

This is what tags look like. If you’re going to notice that some of them have little green circles with numbers in them, that means they’re rankable tags. That means YouTube is saying, “You’re in the right direction. You’re using continuity with your video title, your description, and the video content, and we’re going to reward you for that.” One of the things is you copy your video title and put it exactly verbatim. This is what this is here, Senior Tuber Incentives First Podcast. That rate’s number one. As soon as you put your title in verbatim, that’s your number one. It ranks high in your tagging. The tags go all the way to 20 and 30. You might have tags that did rank, but they rank not as high as the other ones.

I am going for a lot of tags. This is fairly new. I did not optimize this, but I like to get 11 to 15 tags going. It isn’t always going to be that. This is a TubeBuddy feature. You wanted to know how to take your long-tail keyword to know if it works. The second to last title is Start A YouTube Channel At My Age. There’s no ranking on there, but is it a good title? Is it a good tag? I went and I pasted it in here. Guess what? It’s a good tag. I’m using it.

If it didn’t rank there, because it goes from poor up to excellent, I might massage it right here and say How to Start a YouTube Channel at My Age or Start a YouTube Channel at Any Age or something like that. I would’ve played with it and then brought it back as a new tag or a long-tail keyword. I live with this feature for every video, but it sounds like a lot of work at first, but it takes just a few seconds to get each one checked. It becomes part of your routine.

Also, we’re going to talk about captions. Why have captions? Why is it so important? First of all, it is what you would think. It’s good for anybody who’s hearing impaired, but it’s also good for improved audience comprehension. I read titles while I’m listening. In this way, I catch the words that I didn’t get what they said. If there’s any language barrier or any accent, I’m able to read the captions. It helps the person if they’re doing that because it keeps them on my channel longer because there’s no barrier. It’s for flexible viewing.

YouTube Optimization: Captions are good for anybody who’s hearing impaired, but it’s also good for improved audience comprehension.

You’re at the doctor’s office and you want to watch some videos, you can search for things that are closed captioned, and you could watch everything with just the subtitles in them. It also helps your SEO and your video views because people will watch them longer if they understand them. It enhances a video search and user experience. It improves your watch time because they’re staying engaged. You’re not losing them at some point.

This is what it’s going to look like for a subtitle. It’s listed right here on the right-hand side of your video details page. This is what it looks like when it’s hooked up. Before you have it set up, it looks like this. You click on the subtitles and your options are upload, auto sync, and type manually. I always choose autosync. When I do that, it automatically pulls my words out. I didn’t have to put it in, but I can go and I could check on it later and see if they’ve misspelled names. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t.

Now we’re going to do the end screen. If I could see you all, I’d be asking who knows what an end screen is. The benefits of having an end screen are amazing. You can have up to four selections. The selections show up twenty seconds before the end of your video, which tells people what to do before they leave your video. You could adjust when they pop up, if they could be at 20 seconds, or they could be at 5 seconds before the end of the video, depending on what’s on your screen.

If you’re beginning a call to action, you don’t want to put an end screen over your call to action. You’ll want to take a look and see where you place it. It helps steer people to what you want them to do next. If we have those playlist suggestions, end screens, and what I’m going to be talking about next, you’re keeping people on your channel, just like YouTube keeps you on their platform.

What you can share are videos, yours or someone else’s. You can share one of your channels, and your playlist, and want to put your subscribe button on your end screen. This is an end screen where I only use 2 of my 4. I have what my next video is and I have a subscribe, but I could have put it up in the top left and the top right corner, another two. You can move them around if you want. They’re changing it now. You can move it anywhere on the page to avoid any calls to action or information.

Now we’re going to talk about cards. Cards are similar to end screens, where you’re going to lead people where to go except you could put them anywhere. My suggestion is you have up to five cards. This is for teasers on how to get people to take action. If you have a very long video, you want to be mindful of where you put your cards. Those cards could include playlists, videos, links, and other channels if you want to. You want to strategically place them in your video. At some point in your video, you say, “I have this new book out.” If you check right here and you can point at it, they can go to that little button that says “Check book here.” You can put a little keyword in there that has them take action. Sometimes I put them strategically wherever I want them. As I said, if it’s a long video, you want to place them right.

Here’s what you do when you have a card, how you’d want to place it. You click on here and you get to choose what you’re going to do. A playlist and a video card, those are the ones I have already on that one. You get to choose where it starts. Once you choose where it starts, you also get to choose some of your teasers. What are the words you want people to see? That’s the top. If you look on the right-hand side of the image, it says Meditation To Get You Started. That’s on the right-hand side or a teaser. Once they open up, it has words for that. Here’s where you get to choose your playlist or your videos.

You set each one up. It used to be that you could set this and save it as a template. They don’t have that anymore, but they’ll be coming back with it. Here’s what it looks like. When they see the video, it’s going to pop up at a certain time. You can click on that and you’ll start doing this now. You’ll start seeing somebody else’s cards and you can see what they have and what they’re trying to tell you. Are they selling you something? Are they sharing something with you? Usually, they have a teaser in there to help you why you want to be there.

The next one is Facebook, like, and post. It sounds pretty crazy, but they want to make sure that you have taken it to another place and shared it. You’re going to post your video on one of your pages and you’re going to like it. That’s it. You want to use a Facebook page that you probably have on your channel so that it’s taking note of that. Your last best practice is how to comment on your own video. You go to your comment section. It’s got to be your video and you’re going to promote something and discuss something about the video, or you’re going to encourage engagement. You’re going to share a testimonial, you’ll ask questions, but you’ve gotta pin it and hard it.

That’s the part of the best practice that you have to do. What that looks like right here is I posted this call to action, I hearted it, and all the way to the right, you’ll see there are three dots and you click on that. This one’s already pinned, but if you do edit it, you have to go back and reprint it. That’s something to remember. We’re talking about seeing SEO scores at the end. This is what TubeBuddy shows you but not only on your channel and your videos. You can go and watch my videos SEO. You could see anybody in this room’s video SEO if you pull up one of their videos if you are a TubeBuddy customer. It’s fantastic.

You feel like you’ve got the secrets. You can go in and say, “I’ve got a 90 SEO score. I like to get to 100, but sometimes no matter what, even if I do everything right, it doesn’t get to 100. I want to see how many rank tags I have.” You have to click on it. It doesn’t just show. I tried to get that up more, but I didn’t hear. What you’re also going to look at, whatever I have outlined in red, are your best practices by TubeBuddy. You’re going to see anything that’s got a check mark, you’ve already done, anything with an X in it, you haven’t done, and you just go do it and get it done.

When you hover over this, it tells you what you didn’t do to get 100. You’ll be able to go and fix it. Here’s your tag, so you can see what’s ranking and what isn’t. Another feature of TubeBuddy is a thumbnail analyzer. If you need help see, it’s a brand new feature. There’s a title generator so that you can put your title in there where it gives you some AI and helps you with your title.

Take note, these are all the best practices we talked about. You might want to write them down, take a picture with your camera, or take a screenshot. are the best practices, eleven of them that I use every day when I’m putting in a video. I do use TubeBuddy. I’m also going to leave some of my information here as a screenshot if you want to because if you want to go to my podcast or meet with me, it sounds a little overwhelming. That’s why you take a screenshot of it. If you want to have a Q&A session with me, go to MeetWithFranSeniorTuber.com or Podcast.SeniorTuber.com. It’s all pretty easy. If you want to join my community on Facebook, you could do that as well. Thank you.

Another note on here before we get to the Q&A, Fran is one of the media panelists at Media Magic. Media Magic is October 26th, and 27th, 2023 at Media Panel. Kristy is part of it as well. They have a media panel learning power BIOS, how to pitch, just a whole plethora. It’s two days of solid learning. I’m one of the keynotes as well. I don’t know what I’m going to talk about yet, but if you go over to MediaMagicBootcamp.com, I have, as a speaker, a selection of tickets that you can grab for free by using Media Magic Gift as the code. You can get that ticket for free.

What I would encourage you to do, and the ticket is to usually $250, is upgrade. Take that free ticket and upgrade. It’s not very expensive to upgrade, but it gets you time with some of the mentors. You could get some time with Fran with that upgrade. I highly recommend that you go over it. That was so much information. Media Magic Gift is a free gift. Get in there and get it because I only have a limited number. If you use it and I’ve run out, you may have to pay for a ticket or call Fran. I bet Fran and Kristy have free tickets too.

I just want to say that I like the TubeBuddy thing because I’m a big believer in leveraging AI to maximize and work smarter and not harder. That is amazing things that you shared with TubeBuddy and how that can help so much. Even with the stuff that you teach, those eleven things, that TubeBuddy seems to streamline the process and make our lives so much easier. I’m super grateful that you showed and shared all that. I’m interested to go in there and start messing around.

That’s great. I love it.

There’s a ton of new tools out there, AI tools. I know the Silversteins are on here. I have them using Gamma.Ai. Kevin’s on, he’s using Gamma.Ai for presentations. There are a bunch of great AI tools out there now.

There’s an AI Pictory where you can create a whole video without ever being in it. You just put in the dialogue and it makes it into a video. You could probably upload a video in just a few minutes. It’s pretty cool.

Thank you so much for reading. I know you’re all probably super overwhelmed because I know I am and I know how to do some of this stuff. This was a great lesson. Once again, Breakthrough Author Magazine, if you’re not already subscribed, Fran is going to be a regular contributor now. You’ll see her first article is in the issue that we just released in September 2023. It’s a pretty good one with some good basics in it. Thank you guys. I’ll see you next time.

Thanks, Juliet.

Thank you.

Important Links

• YouTube – Superbrand Publishing
• Senior Tuber Community – YouTube
• BreakthroughAuthorMagazine.com
• TubeBuddy
• Podcast.SeniorTuber.com
• www.MediaMagicBootcamp.com
• Gamma.Ai
• AI Pictory

About Fran Asaro

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