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A quick Google search on “how to get more views on YouTube” will result in an abundance of blog posts, all filled with great advice and all the steps you’ll need to take in order to grow your viewer count. In today’s article, we're going to talk about one of those steps that, surprisingly enough, seems to be grossly overlooked by creators.
With over 22 billion views a day, YouTube is today’s largest source of entertainment (no secret there). But what a lot of creators tend to forget is that YouTube is also an important resource of information and daily searches, finding out what's trending in your niche is a great way to attract more viewers to your channel.
Today, we’re going to find out how by using Google trends we can find your next content idea and along with the ThoughtLeaders platform we’ll show you how valuable this info can be.
Before we get started, it’s very important to note, this process of finding trending topics for your channel, does not mean you need to compromise your content and only look for “popular” themes. In fact, consistency is one of the most important attributes of a successful channel, the objective here is to show creators a way of understanding what their audience is curious about and finding content themes that both fit your channel and potentially attract more views.
To help us along this journey, I wanted to share an example of a great social science and history channel we work with. When we first started working together a few years ago, this channel had an average viewership of over 100K per video, but a few months later this average had fallen to 20K views per video. The quality of his videos hadn’t diminished (it even improved) nor had the frequency of his releases.
It’s difficult to say what could be the cause for such a drop. YouTube changes its algorithm quite often and is quite vague about the effects of these changes and the reason isn’t always right in front of us. Having said all of that, we wanted to sit down with the creator to help them decide the topic of their next video and choose a subject that would guarantee greater success.
So, let's go through the process together:
We start off by researching what’s trending in this channel’s area of expertise in the past few months. I like to start my research as broad as possible and then drill down until I find the topic I think could be a good match.
Since we chose a channel that covers social science and geopolitics, it’s good to take as wide a look as possible and see what topics have been trending around history on YouTube. We took a look at Google Trends over the past 30 days.
After we chose to explore “war” as a topic, let’s continue down this path and see if we can find out, click on “explore” to see what else we can find there.
So we already see there are a number of potential topics to choose from if you're a geopolitics channel. So let’s go ahead and focus on one of them. I decided to go with “War in Armenia”, but I think either of the topics in front of us could be great as well.
Since I’m thinking from the standpoint of the creator here, I think we can go ahead and drill further to find what’s right for my channel and audience.
By clicking on that specific query, and continuing down this rabbit hole, I found an even better term, “Armenia”, meaning the audience are way more curious to learn about the country as whole then about the war.
So, a quick recap, we found out that at the time the creator was working on their video, one of the most trending topics in the world of geopolitics was the War in Armenia. People are really curious to learn more information about the country rather than the conflict.
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With this knowledge in hand we created a search campaign on the ThoughtLeaders platform to learn what was happening behind the Google Trends numbers.
We entered the keywords, “Armenia”, “Karabakh War” and “War in Armenia 2020” and searched when, where and how often they had been mentioned in the past 30 days on YouTube. This was what we’ve learned:
Diving deeper into these 51 ThoughtLeaders, we find that most of them are either lifestyle or news channels both covering topical news (YouTube likes to assign categories with a pretty broad brush so a lot of media outlets channels are listed as lifestyle).
However, we also found that there are two channels similar to our test subject that covered this topic in the past 30 days and it’s very clear that it paid off.
Avg views - 61,000
Their video on topic - What is TURKEY pursuing in NAGORNO-KARABAKH? - VisualPolitik EN
Views - 203K
Avg views - 268,000
Their video on topic - Why Armenia and Azerbaijan are at war
View - 541k
Both videos have exceeded their regular average views, furthermore, out of the 25 videos posted on VisualPoliticEN over a two month period, this has been the most popular release and among the top videos in 2020. Since CaspianReport publishes far less often, we see that their video was also trending and was already among the most watched videos on their channel in the past few months.
Like we said in the beginning, there is no clear way to become a YouTube sensation, but if you work hard on your craft, respect your audience and put in the time and effort on researching what topics to cover, your chances are pretty good. If you're a creator struggling to get more eyes on your channel, let us know and we’d love to help you out.
