How to grow a YouTube Channel in 2017: YouTube Algorithm Revealed??

All right, so let's do this as a total experiment. Like this video and comment something down below. I don't care if it's your favorite color, your favorite number, just something. So if my theory is correct, that's going to increase the level of engagement and activity on this video and increase the likelihood of it getting recommended or suggested. And if this works, it'll serve as a great example and a great tutorial for new YouTubers out there to try to get their videos recommended, suggested, and ranked on the search results and get people to see the videos that they put out there. Because I know there are some amazing channels out there that I really love watching; they just don't get any views because nobody finds them. But there are amazing small content creators out there that I think deserve way more views and way more subs than they have.

What's up you guys? It's Graham here. So because I get asked so often how I was able to grow my channel from zero to over 35,000 in just a matter of a few months, I'm going to be sharing exactly what I've learned, exactly what I've done along the way, and a few of my thoughts and theories about what's going on and how that can help you if you're thinking about starting a YouTube channel or if you have a YouTube channel and want to grow your audience.

Now, keep in mind these are just my personal thoughts, my firsthand experiences, and my theories with how the YouTube algorithm works. Nobody knows a hundred percent about what works and what doesn't work, but from what I've seen, there's been a few things that have been fairly consistent among my videos that have gotten close. So I'm going to be sharing exactly what I've done and what I think works.

So, for the research I've done, it appears as though YouTube used to base their search results off SEO. That means that if you had a specific title that matched a description and an extra tags, chances are your video is about that topic. And as long as you had good engagement in the form of likes or comments or subscribing or shares, YouTube would rank you pretty high because chances are your video's good and chances are it's about the subject that you made the video on. It didn't really look into anything else much further than that.

Now, from what I've seen, this actually all still really works well, especially for a small channel. When you don't have a lot of views coming in, the best option you have is to try to get ranked in the search results. But even though I've been able to rank most of my videos on the first page of many search results, most of my views do not come from search results. In fact, I had over 400,000 views in the last 28 days, and of that, less than 10,000 views came from search results. That means that most people found me from recommended videos and suggested videos, which is probably how you're watching me now and how you found my channel.

So with that said, after a certain point when you try to grow your YouTube channel, your goal should not be to end up on search results. Your goal, instead, should be to get your videos recommended and suggested because that's where the bulk of the views actually come from. So completely unknowingly to me, this is how I've been able to get so many subscribers so quickly. It wasn't from me ranking in search results; it wasn't me doing something magical. It was me doing something the YouTube algorithm really liked, and therefore they wanted to push my videos and see them succeed. And that's what got me so many views, so many subscribers so quickly.

So this is what I think is happening, and this is what I think will work for all of you watching. Now, to get this out of the way, YouTube is a big business, and by that, businesses are drawn by profit. So it's so important as a creator of any YouTube videos to turn on monetization. Now, my theory is that when you turn on monetization, YouTube all of a sudden has a financial interest in your video succeeding and doing well because it makes money for YouTube. If you have monetization turned off, they don't really have any financial interest in it; they don't really care, in my opinion.

Now, when you have monetization turned on, all of a sudden you can make money from every view that you get or from every ad that's watched or clicked. Now, when this happens, YouTube is more likely to promote your video and help it succeed because at the end of the day, it makes them money. Money for business is obviously often important. So turning on monetization, in my opinion, will greatly heighten your chance of getting promoted and suggested.

So now let's start at the very beginning. If you're just starting out a YouTube channel, these are the top seven things that you can do to increase the engagements on your channel, increase the views on your channel, try to rank high in search results, and subsequently get your videos pushed and suggested by YouTube.

So the first and most important thing you can do is have good content, and I think that goes without saying. So we're going to take my first video as an example that I ever uploaded onto YouTube, and that was a few months ago. Right now, it has a little bit over a thousand views, and from the perspective of quality, I did a lot of things wrong. To start, it was an almost eighteen-minute video that I uploaded onto YouTube. It was filmed from my iPhone, and not even like the good side of my phone, like the selfie side of my iPhone. So the quality was crap. Now, despite having bad quality and a lot of things like that, the content was able to overcome a lot of that and help that video succeed really well.

So the second most important thing you can do is good SEO. Now, for those of you that don't know what SEO stands for, it is Search Engine Optimization, which is where websites take data and analytics from your video and decide to rank it accordingly based off the search. And when you first start out, it's very important, in my opinion, to have good SEO because if no one is able to see it, YouTube's not able to pull any data from the video and isn't going to be able to rank it.

No, I didn't know any of this when I made my first video, but unknowingly, I had a good title, I had a description that matched that title, and I had tags that matched that title. This gave YouTube enough data about my video to begin ranking it for certain search results. So in my opinion, when you're first starting out, it's so important to go for a very niche search result than it is to try to tackle something that's very general and broad.

So for instance, if I were just starting out, I wouldn't want to make a video about how to sell real estate because there's going to be a lot of competition for that. Instead, I would want to rank about a niche subject about how to sell real estate in Los Angeles because far fewer people are going to be searching for that, and you're more likely to show up on that search result. So that's why it's so important, especially as a new channel, to be in a very niche subject so you can stand out versus being in a large market with nobody seeing you because there's so much competition and there are so many other people making the exact same videos as you.

So with that said, the third most important thing you can do is make sure your title matches up with your description, which matches up with your tags. From that, like I said, YouTube is able to conclude that your video is probably about what you're titling it, and chances are they're going to be able to rank it based off the title of the video. So one of the things I also recommend you doing is putting as much information in the description as possible and making the description as detailed as you can.

The fourth most important thing you can do is upload videos frequently. Now, I recommend two to three times per week or more for YouTube to begin taking notice of you. Now, it wasn't until I started uploading two to three times per week that YouTube took notice of me and started recommending my videos. YouTube really favors people who make a lot of content because it keeps people coming back to YouTube, and when people come back to YouTube, YouTube makes more money. So obviously, they're going to favor the channel creators that make as much content as possible.

Now, one of the other things I noticed is that when I started uploading regularly, YouTube started ranking me higher in the search results because they see me as a creator who's putting out a lot of content, and therefore they're more likely to recommend my videos because more people come back to see them. So the fifth most important thing you can do is have good engagement on your videos. This means that a lot of people like your video, subscribe, comment, or share, or have some sort of interaction in some form or another with your video. So you just look at the ratio between the amount of views that you get and the amount of interaction you get with that video. The more interaction you get, chances are, the better it's going to be for YouTube to promote because it gets people engaging and interacting with your content.

And this is why you see so many YouTubers say, "make sure to smash that like button," "comment down below," "let me know your favorite color," "make sure to share this video with every single one of your friends," "and post on Facebook," "and post on Instagram," "and post it on LinkedIn," "and tell all of your work colleagues about this video." Share this video everywhere, you guys! And I think the more animated and energetic you are, the more likely you are to probably get people to actually like your video, to comment, and share it.

So the sixth most important thing you can do is have a good thumbnail. And I think this is pretty common sense. I don't think I have to say this, but what I've noticed is that people actually look at the picture first and then read the title second. So it's so important to have a good custom thumbnail for people to see before they actually read the title, and that increases their chances of clicking through to your video.

So the seventh most important thing I've noticed is it's called social proof. It's when people see that a lot of other people subscribe, they're more likely to subscribe because they think, "well, if 35,000 other people subscribed, it must be good," and therefore, I'm going to subscribe as well. So basically, the more subscribers you have, the more likely people are to subscribe to you, which means the more subscribers you have is just a snowball effect from there. Plus, once you start to get more established, people see that you have regular uploads and are more likely to subscribe to you because they know they're going to get content from you.

So as a new YouTuber, the methods I just mentioned will help get you started, but it won't get you the big views. Now, this is where YouTube's algorithm starts to get really interesting. So from what I've seen, the larger you get, the less important SEO becomes. YouTube changed up their algorithm in early 2017 to favor videos with a high watch time, high retention rate, and high engagement, and they prefer those videos over videos with a lot of views or how searchable that video was.

So instead of promoting short videos that people are going to watch all the way through, YouTube is more likely to promote a long video that keeps people watching for a longer period of time because people stay on YouTube longer. So it's a lot less about making videos that you're going to rank on search results and more about just making good, entertaining, engaging content that keeps people watching as long as possible and keeps them coming back to YouTube as often as possible. And YouTube is more likely to push your videos to see them succeed if they see you following these guidelines.

So when you're first starting out, it's very difficult to get your video recommended because YouTube first needs to see how many people watch it, how long they watch it, how often they engage with it, how many people like, subscribe, and share, and interact with the video. And when you have a small following, it's not enough data for YouTube to pick up and analyze and decide where to place it on their algorithms, and that's very difficult to do unless you already have a bit of a following.

So what can you do? Well, these are my thoughts: when you've already mastered the basics of the seven things that I recommended that worked really well for me, YouTube will begin analyzing all the data from all the viewers and from all the engagements that you get and will decide to rank and push you accordingly. Now, I'm totally guessing that this happens when you reach about 10,000 views. I think prior to that, YouTube just isn't able to get a large enough data sample to decide where to rank you. They're going to see how many people like or dislike your video; they're going to see how many people comment on your channel; they're going to see how many people subscribe after watching your video; you can see how many people see other videos from you; they're going to see how long you watch the videos.

Fourth, they're going to see how likely you are to click on one of the ads that's being played before the video—probably Tai Lopez. The higher the ratio between the amount of views that you get and the amount of engagement that you get, coupled with a long watch time, suggests to YouTube that chances are your video's good, that people like it, and they're going to be promoting it because you turned on monetization and that video will make YouTube money, and that also keeps people coming back to YouTube because you have regular uploads that keep them watching for a long time.

Now, speaking of watch time, from all the videos I've had significantly pushed, they all have one thing in common, and that is a long watch time. Now, I have zero concrete evidence behind this, but from what I've seen and observed by watching a lot of videos on YouTube, it seems as though 11 to 18 minutes is about the golden mark of time for YouTube to want to promote your video. It's long enough that keeps people engaged and entertained and on YouTube, but it's not so long that people just get intimidated and they see it and think, "what, 55 minutes? Not watching that."

Now, keep in mind, as a reminder that retention rate and watch time are also just as equally important. So if you have a 15-minute video but people are clicking out after the first 30 seconds, YouTube is going to think this video is probably not that good; we don't want to have anything to do with it because people are leaving this video really quickly. You want people to be engaged and watch the long way through. So it's so important when you make content to keep it engaging and to keep people entertained.

So, like I said, when you start making videos, YouTube analyzes all the data and the analytics from everybody that watches it—subscribes to, likes, and comments. It pulls this all together and then after about 10,000 views, it decides what to do with your video. If your video passes the test, which is, in my opinion, a video with a high engagement rate, high watch time and a high chance of people watching the video, subscribing, and watching other of your videos, YouTube starts to promote your video in the recommended and the suggested searches.

So when YouTube starts suggesting or promoting your videos, they do it on a very small scale from the start. They take a very small sample size and they might suggest it to a few hundred people at a time or maybe a thousand people at a time. And you notice this in YouTube's analytics. You'll see a very consistent amount of views and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it just shoots off. Sometimes the views are like 10 times what you're getting an hour ago, and you keep those views within a very tight range, and they analyze the data that they get from those viewers. Do people like the video? Do they subscribe? Do they share the video? Are they likely to watch it all the way through? It takes everything into consideration about the person and then decides if they're going to suggest it again.

And usually, if it does well on the initial test by giving it out to a few people and seeing if they like it, it'll then promote it on a much larger scale. So for example, I've had videos that range between two and three hundred views per hour all of a sudden, out of nowhere, they'll jump from 650 to a thousand views per hour for a few hours, and then it'll die down. Then the next day, all of a sudden it bumps up to 1,500 views an hour; sometimes it reaches 2,000 views an hour, and that will last for a few hours and then it dies down again.

When it passes these tests, which means that every single time someone clicks through, they have a high chance of subscribing, they have a high chance of commenting, they have a high chance of watching all the way through and watching other of my videos, YouTube says, "hi, this video is probably pretty good. If we're going to recommend it to even more people now, because obviously a lot of people like it and it does well with our analytics."

Then after that, YouTube goes all out, and I have videos that get 5,000 or more views per hour out of nowhere because YouTube decided this is probably a good video, we're going to put it on YouTube's homepage, and a lot of people are going to see it because a lot of people like this content creator, a lot of people engage with it, and it's probably a good video.

And from this, completely unknowingly, is how my channel grew from zero to over 35,000 in just a matter of a few months. Little did I know, which is YouTube's testing out my video to see what the analytics are like, to see if it's going to continue testing my video because that video had good engagement and good interaction based off coming up in search results and based off coming up as a next video for other videos about the same topic of real estate.

Now, to be completely honest with you, most of this was just complete dumb luck. I had no idea what I was doing, but little did I know I was doing a lot of the things that YouTube liked to see in their videos. It wasn't until I started doing more research and looking into this further that I actually got to understand what was really going on behind the scenes.

So, while I could pretend to know exactly what's going on and pretend to have all the answers, in reality, I really don't. I have no idea 100 percent what works and what doesn't work. YouTube keeps the exact algorithm a secret, and I don't think we're ever going to be able to truly crack the code of the algorithm to try to gain YouTube. I don't think that's never going to happen. But from what I've seen, everything I mentioned in this video has worked really well for me.

So as always, you guys, thank you so much for watching my videos. It seriously means the world to me to see everybody enjoying it. If you haven't already, feel free to click subscribe. Also, feel free to add me on Instagram or on Snapchat. I post there pretty much daily, so if you want to be a part of it, feel free to add me there. Thank you, guys! Thank you seriously for watching, and until next time.

So one more little tip: if you're trying to rank on search results, if you're trying to go for a very broad subject like how to sell a home and you don't have the following or the subscribers to back that up and rank on the search results, what you can do is this: go to the search "how to sell a house" and copy the name of whoever has the first search result in your tag of that video.

Now, what I've noticed is that even though you might not show up on the search results in the first five or ten pages, you may show up as a recommended or suggested video on the first search result when you type in "how to sell a home," and sometimes this is just as good as being on the first or second page of a search result. So as an example, when I was first starting out, I wanted to get on the first page when you type in "Lotus Exige," but I didn't have the subscriber base or the following or the views to ever do that. I think when I first uploaded that video, I was on page nine or page ten.

But what I did is I copied the channel name of the person that was in first on "Lotus Exige." Imagine when people clicked that video, my video came up as the next-up to the first search result, which started getting me some engagement and some activity on my channel. Just a quick tip!