How to Quickly Increase Your YouTube Channel’s Watch Time – A Complete Guide

Ever Wonder How YouTubers Make Millions of Dollars?

We break it all down in our new podcast. After you click the button below hit the
“Listen On Apple Podcasts” link and subscribe to discover the truth.

Listen Now

You started your YouTube channel just to talk about what’s important to your life.

Then one of your videos went viral and you gained 200 followers in one day!

Can you take this to the next level?

It’s a possibility, but you have to work at it.

Take a look at our complete guide on how to quickly increase your YouTube channel’s watch time with these relevant tips.

YouTube prefers videos to be around 10 minutes in length. It gives AdSense a chance to throw an ad into the middle of the video.

But your video should be as long as you want it to be to get your point to your audience. Make your video 30 seconds, five minutes, 30 minutes.

With TikTok coming onto the scene (and they just allowed videos to go up to 10 minutes long), don’t be afraid of doing short videos.

YouTube pays attention to how long people watch your videos when it decides to put an ad on it. If you lose 20 percent of your viewers after a minute, YouTube will notice and change the way it does advertising for your videos.

It might be better if you create shorter videos to keep your audience on board for a greater percentage of the video to get your watch time up.

It all depends on your audience and what you’re going for. You can make a recipe video go for a minute or 30 minutes, depending on what you want to achieve.

 Try making videos of different lengths to find the sweet spot. Sometimes, 10-minute videos are all you need. Other times, you might need three minutes to keep your audience’s attention. 

Don’t forget to share your videos on other platforms to increase engagement that way. Those metrics can help you gauge what length your videos need to be.

Your viewers will get used to your neural input patterns when they see you release videos every Thursday at 3 in the afternoon.

They’ll find out because they get an alert if they’re subscribers to the channel and they see it pop up in their inbox.

Once you pick a time, keep it consistent. As you get more popular, consider releasing content every other day, every day, or as needed beyond your regular timeslot.

It’s almost like when TV shows come on a certain time every week. Fans of those shows tune in at those times when the new episode drops.

Similarly, do the same with your content.

Publish content when you know your audience is going to be online. You can look at your YouTube metrics to see this.

If you’re interested in getting more people in Europe to watch your videos, release content when those people are awake and active on YouTube. Do the same for American audiences or people watching in Asia.

You have several ways to do this.

Speak to your audience using your own words and your own style, like “Hey guys” or “Wassup” or whatever greeting fits your groove.

Then make sure to include your audience in the video at some point by saying thanks for watching, using the word “you” in there a few times, and making your viewers feel as if they are a part of the experience.

 Respond to comments in the videos. Viewers who leave comments will get alerts when you respond, which may encourage them to come back for the next video. 

Another way to interact with your audience is on live streams or video premieres.

Here’s how video premieres work:

You can set a time for when your next video will be made live, and subscribers to your channel will receive a notification. It will also show up on your video feed that a new piece of content will come online at a specific time.

The video has a two-minute countdown until it starts.

Along the side of the video, people can chat live as the video plays. You can do this too since the video was prerecorded. Interact with your fans as they chat among yourselves and with you.

You can respond to comments they leave and even agree or disagree with them.

As a mod on the channel, you can also chat during a live stream or have someone else chat with your audience as you’re doing a live video.

Look at your engagement metrics through YouTube Studio when you’re logged into the account.

You can see how many people still watch your videos in certain intervals. You can also check to see how many unsubscribed viewers are watching it versus subscribed ones.

Like Google, YouTube has 10 million different ways to see your metrics. Dive into your metrics to see how best to make content based on length, time of day, demographics, and what devices people watch your videos on.

YouTube videos have interactive elements to them that appear at various times in a video.

Info cards may pop up to show you other videos to click on, links to sponsor’s videos, or links to your website or articles that dive deeper into a particular topic. If you have a collaborator, you can link to an info card for them, too.

These are the subtle ones that appear as small gray bars in the corner of the video screen as someone is watching. It appears for about 10 seconds before going away.

End screens give you a chance to feature other videos on your channel or someone else’s channel. They almost look like small cue cards that encourage your audience to choose another video in the series, go to a related video, or just any video you want to feature at that point.

Info cards and end screens offer great ways to skip to another video for fans to watch.

Playlists are a big deal if you have a series of videos that cover a larger topic. Creating a ready-made playlist for your audience to listen to makes it easy for people to go to the next video in line without missing a beat or having to hunt for part two in a series.

Asking people to like, comment, and subscribe is a no-brainer.

How about asking your audience direct questions that may spur them to leave a comment?

Try:

• What did you like most about this video?
• What do you think about this topic?
• How did you feel when you saw this particular part?
• What do you want to see me talk about next time?
• How did you find this video?

See what response you get. Once you get responses, make sure you reply to any comments as a way to interact with your audience and keep them engaged with your content.

You see this all of the time with music videos that have high production values. The artist, after the music stops, may talk to you for a minute or two about a story behind the piece of music, why the video is important, or make some kind of informal announcement.

You can do the same thing with your videos.

Let’s say you do a workout video for 10 minutes, and it’s set to music, it has some cool animations, and it has a professional feel to it.

Following the workout video, you appear in different clothes and you’re facing the camera and talking to your audience in a less formal setting than your normal video.

It’s a great way to show your fans that you’re an ordinary person creating videos. It makes you more approachable.

Plus, when you do this, it encourages people to watch your videos for longer periods of time because they want to hear your informal talk afterward as you speak to them.

You need to take care of a lot of little details to make your YouTube videos palatable to the GoogleBot Overlords.

You need to create:

• Thumbnails
• Tags
• Descriptions
• Notes
• End cards
• Info Cards
• Credits
• Social Media Videos
• Direct Uploads

And other details that take time to do.

There are plenty of services out there that can help you with your YouTube video production value.

 Vidchops saves you time and effort so you can get back to what you do best, and that’s creating great content for your viewers. 

Our YouTube Helper takes care of the little things that take a lot of time away from your day and can save you four to eight hours of time a week!

Talk to us and see how we can help your channel succeed. We know how to do it because we’ve been there ourselves.