🎬 Distribution & YouTube

Too many creative people put so much consideration into what they are making but so little on where they will show it when they’re done. This fault of a distribution plan happens on every scale, and sometimes with people who put a lot of money into their videos. There are lots of ways to distribute your work, but the one most accessible to this audience is unquestionably:

I’m honestly not the one to go to for this information, but I have several friends who make a living on YouTube so let me tell you their big secrets. You won’t like my magic sauce formula, because my definition of success on YouTube prioritizes making good content rather than on “virality”. So determine your metric of success before going down this road and determine exactly what it is you ultimately want out of your TouTube channel. Everyone with their special formula for success on YouTube usually omits this one secret:

Work hard.

Surprise. The same lesson that applies to every other facet of life applies here. The people I know who succeed in this world work harder on that one thing than 95% of the people reading this site. Now that the secret is out, there are a few practical things you can consider:

• Ultimately view count is determined over the long-term by how much your audience likes what you made and how shareable it is with other people. Again, it should be self-evident, but make good videos and people will like them. A video that adds no value to anyone simply wastes bits on the interwebs.
• Consider, how likely would I be to share this? Does it solve a need, answer a question or explain a process? Is this something currently on people’s minds? Is it universally appealing or does it successfully appeal to a specific niche? Picking one or the other means more eyes will likely land on your video.
• Only after you’ve done the above, use tools like TubeBuddy to figure out key words (not so much tags as the actual title of your video) and see how likely your search term is to succeed. Owning your place for a common search query on YouTube’s first page of results will help.
• Make a thumbnail that’s both informative and visually pleasing (it reads well small).
• Throw tons of ad money at your video to increase view counts if that’s your thing and you have those resources.
• Keep uploading high quality content over time (years) and don’t expect to live of the monetization (running ads over your video) any time soon.