YouTube channel owners are growing by the day as it’s now a platform where millions of people earn money online, and also where brands can connect further with their audience.

Paying for advertisement is one way to promote your YouTube channel, but not the only way. There are numerous ways to inform people about the existence of your YouTube channel or the fact you recently created one without having to pay big bucks for it.

Here is how you can promote your YouTube channel without paid advertisement

Start with a great profile

Every popular YouTube channel has a profile that has been completed by the owner. A great profile can also serve as a significant SEO boost to your channel. Don’t just start creating content immediately; you open a channel. You should start with the task of filling out your profile.

When creating your profile, think aesthetics. Ensure your writing style and use of colors is consistent with other social platforms and website. When you get to your channel description, optimize it using relevant keyword but avoid keyword stuffing, so you don’t get penalized.

Also, endeavor to include your contact information to make it easy for people to reach you for business consultation. Don’t forget to include the schedule for posting your videos so viewers can have it at the back of their minds and come back for more.

Optimize your video description

Before posting your YouTube videos, ensure that you optimize your videos descriptions with keywords and hashtags to get more views.

Start by adding keywords to the first line of the video description and title to increase its effectiveness. Ensure that the video description is not more than 5,000 characters.

You can also include keywords in the video itself by mentioning it. But also remember not to say too much of it as people could quickly get bored. Also, be sure to add relevant hashtags.

Cross-promote

You can always let your target audience outside YouTube that you have a great channel, and you’ll love it if they can subscribe to it. There are various platforms you could promote your channel such as your social media accounts, blogs, newsletters, etc.

While promoting, include one of your videos in the promotional content and optimize the content for every platform.

Remember to stay consistent with what your brand represents to avoid confusing your audience. Also, ensure that the video meets the recommended specification of each platform.

If you are promoting your channel on your blog, add the videos in your post to increase video views alongside the regular page views. It will also encourage your blog readers to check out and subscribe to your YouTube channel to view more content.

Offer value

You need to keep your viewers coming back for more through your excellent content. Even before they come back for more, you need to create video content that will drive engagement and limit drop off. YouTube’s algorithm keeps track of how much time a viewer spends watching a video, and they use this data when ranking the video or channel.

When creating a video, keep in mind that for viewers to keep coming back, you need to provide real value. Have a clear definition of the problem the video intends to solve, and how it will improve the lives of the viewers. You should know the viewer’s pain points and optimize your video to address them.

And finally, aim to make the video entertaining. Even if you are talking about something serious, don’t let the viewers get the vibe that it’s going to be a long boring video. Learn to inject some excitement in your voice, your movements, background, and everything present in the video.

Create your thumbnails

It might be tempting to use the thumbnails YouTube provides, but that could be a deal-breaker because they might not connect to your video, and on top of that, they are usually blurry.

Creating custom thumbnail is the best way to increase your brand identity and get viewers to notice your videos immediately.

Create playlists

Get people addicted to your content by making playlists where you add several videos in which one begins playing after the previous one ends.

To create a playlist, go to your channel page and group existing videos together. You can as well get videos from relevant people in the same niche as you and add to your playlist. Creating playlists helps your videos become discoverable, and you can also add the appropriate keywords to the playlist title to increase visibility too.

Create a series

Another way to ensure you get and keep viewers is by creating a series of videos with the central theme and posting it at a particular time so that the viewers keep coming back.

Ensure that you create the same thumbnail for each video so that they have a series look, and viewers can quickly identify it. This method will get subscribers to your channel faster than anything.

Always include a call-to-action

After entertaining your audience with value-filled video content, you need to get them to do something for you by adding a call-to-action towards the end of the video.

A CTA could be anything from requesting that they visit your website or the like the video. To increase the chances of your video and channel getting more views, you want to begin by asking them to share your videos. You can also tell them to leave comments in the comment section.

Aside from telling them what you want to do verbally, you can also use other methods to call your viewers to action. Other methods include adding a call to action screenshots to some sections of the video, which could either be at the beginning of the video, ten minutes into it or at the ending.

Whatever you ask them to so, ensure your CTA is clear and compelling.

Work with YouTube’s guidelines

Ensure you are always on the right side of the platform community. Avoid uploading any inappropriate videos that will cause it to get flagged and penalized. Ignorance is not an excuse when it comes to YouTube, so you must cross-check the guidelines before uploading any content to the platform.