I was halfway there already and it took about 20 minutes
Sometimes solutions present themselves and they're easy because of the work you've already done.
Over the past few years I've built a small YouTube channel dealing with (mostly) cool and fancy serial numbers. I haven't been at all consistent with putting up new videos, so it's not surprising that I'm well away from monetizing it. I stand today at 565 subscribers and about 600 hours of view time during the last year. (The thresholds are 1000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of view time.)
My near-term stretch goal is to make $100 in the Medium Partner Program in one calendar month before the end of August. That's my #1 priority, but I'm going to try to work with my YouTube channel some and write about it on Medium to move both forward.
That almost sounds like I could do a challenge of some kind. Hmmmm …
I wasn't plugging my videos at all. And it was so easy to do so.
I have 27 videos currently arranged in three playlists. The biggest one has 21 videos and is called “Fancy and Cool Serial Numbers.” I may eventually get rid of the other two because I'm targeting the channel toward serial numbers.
So I had uploaded a video for the first time in a hot minute (here it is), and then kind of on a whim I searched youtube seo and found this article over at RockContent.com.
Tip #13 (there were 21) dealt with end screens. I guess I had seen these many, many times but didn't think to investigate how I could use them on my own channel.
End screens are overlays on the video that plug various aspects of the channel. It encourages people to watch more of your stuff or subscribe to the channel.
But basically I was yesterday years old when I found out how to do this. Here's how.
How to add end screens to YouTube videos
In YouTube Studio for my channel, I clicked Content on the left sidebar, and then clicked the link for one of my videos.
This brought up the Details screen. I then clicked on End Screen in the lower right:
This brought up the End Screen details:
Here I could select among several layouts for what to show, and when to start showing it. I chose to show the end screen for the last 15 seconds of the video. Most of my videos are just me talking and asking for people to subscribe, like, and comment, so it's not like I was covering up content.
As for what to show, I chose for now to show another video on the channel, and my Fancy and Cool Serial Numbers playlist. On some of them I put up the subscribe button as well. It was as easy as selecting one of the combinations, and then specifying the playlist.
Once I figured it out for one video, I did it for most of the others. It took about 20 minutes to do them all.
At some point I'll figure out how to tell if it helped or not
I have to believe that there's a way to track where people come from to watch a video, so that's a task for another day.
In the meantime, though, I know now that viewers at least have the opportunity to check out other videos when they watch my channel!
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Header photo by alleksana
