 How to increase engagement on your YouTube channel. Hey, you wanna do it, right? You want engagement, you want likes, and you want comments, and you want subscriptions, you want all this stuff. How do you get it? I know in the beginning I wasn't good at this. I screwed up bad. I'll share with you what I did at the end of the video and how I really screwed up my channel. And I got it fixed now, but doing that one thing really kinda messed me up. So I'll share that with you at the end. Hey, I'm JR Fisher. Thank you for coming to my channel and watching this video. I really appreciate it. I've sold millions of dollars about digital and physical products online over the years. Been doing this since 2009. So a couple years, a little bit of experience, and on this channel, it's your channel. That's right, it's your channel, because this is the channel you can come to where you can ask me questions about selling stuff online. I've sold digital products, physical products, coaching courses, you name it. I've sold it online, affiliate marketing, you got it, all of it here. And if you have questions, ask me about it. As a matter of fact, put it in the comments below and I may do a video on it. If you've had some successes, share that with us below too, so you can help other people. If you haven't subscribed yet, make sure you do so, and turn on all bell notifications. That way I can tell you about any new videos I do. Anytime I go live, you'll be part of the Fisher family, the VIP group, it gets notified before anybody else. All right, let's get into it. We want more interaction. Why do we want more interaction? Well, we want it because the more interaction we get, YouTube algorithm looks at that and says, hey, that's a good channel. That's a good video. And since it is, and people are interacting, we wanna show it to more of our audience because maybe more people will actually watch that video. And we can keep them on our platform. Now, I wanna give you some principles first off that are really, really important. The number one principle, and this is not an exact science, but this is just what I figured out from looking at thousands of videos, from making hundreds of videos myself. The optimum time you wanna make a video is 10 to 14 minute long video. Now, there are people out there that will say, hey, make a minute long video or two minute long video because more people will watch it. That is true. You will have more people watch it. But let's say you make a two minute video and your average watch time is 50%, okay? So you've got a two minute video and people watched it 50%. You've got a minute of watch time. Now, YouTube actually looks at your total watch time and the watch time on the videos. Now, if you make a video that's 10 minutes long and people watch 50% of that, what have you got? You get five minutes. So you got one minute or five minutes. Which one would you rather have? The other thing, and the other reason you wanna have 10 to 14 minute videos is that YouTube can put four or five ads on a video. They can't do that in a two minute video. They can't hardly put any ads in a two minute video, guys. So if you're making these super short videos and you're getting a lot of views and you think you're doing something, you're not because they don't wanna show your videos. They wanna show videos that they can actually put ads on and that they can make some money. That's how they make money. If you're doing videos that are super short, they can't make money so they don't wanna show your videos. So it hurts you two ways. It hurts you because nobody's gonna see your videos and it hurts you because you'll never make any money on those videos if you decide to monetize. You don't have to monetize, but if you don't monetize, your videos won't get shown as much. Think about it. Why would YouTube wanna show a video they can't put ads on? They don't. They would much rather show videos they can put ads on. So I will tell you, along with this length of time thing, I would tell you to monetize. A lot of people say, I don't wanna monetize my channel. I don't wanna ads on mine. Maybe you don't, but your videos will not get shown as much if you don't. So it's super important that you do that. Number two, employ basic SEO and marketing principles on YouTube. This is super, super important. Understand that your webpage or your video are very similar in as much as the way people find it. They search YouTube, like this particular here video that I'm making right now is engagement on YouTube videos. They may type in how to get more engagement on YouTube videos. That has to be optimized in my videos. So that means the title has to have those keywords in it. What else? The keyword optimization has to also be in my tags. So I gotta put tags in there that have those same keywords. In addition to that, the description has to also have those keywords. I see people who put videos out, they have no tags and they have no description. And those are two areas where if people are searching, they're not gonna get matched up to your video. Your video can't come up because it doesn't have the needed information. So you have to have the title. You have to have the tags and you have to have the description. If you don't have those three things in place, your video can't come up. So you're wasting your time. You would do better to do fewer videos and work more on your SEO than to do tons of videos and no SEO whatsoever because they can't get found. Super important that you do that. Number three, encourage viewers to comment, share, like your videos. Super, super important to do that because that is engagement. Now, we are watching this video and I'm making this video because you wanna get more engagement. The way you get it is through likes, shares and comments, but if you're not telling them to do this, they don't know to do this. They don't know to share and comment and like. And you say, well, I know that, surely they know that. No, they don't because they're not making videos every single day. They don't understand that there's an algorithm. They don't understand that, you know, if they like and share and comment, that's gonna help your video. So you gotta tell them that. Tell them in the actual video. Now, I'm gonna share with you that embarrassing mistake I told you I made. When I first started doing videos a few years ago, I didn't know what I was doing. I did it really sporadically and they were too short and they weren't good. And matter of fact, you could go back on this channel and see the beginning ones are terrible. Please don't go back and look at them. Please don't do that. But if you went back and looked at my original videos, you would see I didn't know what I was doing. And the other thing I didn't do was I didn't respond to comments. I looked at them as irritating. I would say, oh my God, these people are asking me all these questions. I don't have time to answer their questions. I don't wanna do that. I just wanna make videos. When in fact, what I should have done is answered their questions and make fewer videos. And that way I would have gotten interaction on the ones I did. So after I woke up one day and somebody said, hey, do you know that interaction and comments can really boost your video views? I was like, no, I didn't. In addition to that, having those comments there, other people see them and they may comment on them. Now, when you comment on somebody's comment, so they may say, hey, I liked your video. It was really good. You wanna make sure you thank them and then ask them another question. Super important you do this because if you thank them and ask them another question, they may comment again. So you turn that one comment into four comments. So at the end of whatever reply you put on there, you may say, hey, I'm glad you liked this video. Did you think the SEO part was better for you or the SEM part? And put that question in there. And if they answer again, you've now tripled the amount of comments that came off that initial comment. Super important that you do that. Number four, this is also very important. And I went back and answered some comments from three or four years ago recently. I waited too long, I think, yeah, I think. Number four is respond to viewer behavior in a timely manner. So if somebody comments, somebody asks you a question, if you could respond that day, all the better. Now you may not be able to, but try to. Don't say, well, every 30 days I'm gonna go through and answer comments. Don't do that. Try to set aside some time every day and if you can't do it every day, maybe every week, but make sure you answer these comments as quickly as you can because they forget about them. They forget they even put anything there. And if you respond in a timely manner, the odds of them responding back again when you ask a question go up against. That's gonna also help your engagement. Number five, be consistent, being consistent. Very, very important. I just did a video on how to get subscribers and this one here is on engagement, but both of them, both of them require consistency. And what I mean by that is you need to spread your videos out because there's an algorithm at YouTube that looks at consistency. So if you were to make 20 videos and post them all on Monday and Tuesday and not make videos for three months, your channel's not gonna do well. You're just, you're not gonna get the engagement you want because there's no consistency to it. And what's the point anyhow? You know, let's say you got a subscriber and you upload 20 videos in two days, they can't watch 20 videos in two days. Not for the most part, they can't. They need little bites of information. So if you've got that 20 videos, you'd do better to do two a week for the next 10 weeks and then YouTube would see the consistency of it. They would be more likely to show your videos to other viewers. They would be more likely to make them suggested videos. So you wanna spread this out and be consistent. Number six, use call to actions. And what do I mean by call to actions? Well, you can put something on the screen where they can actually click and go somewhere. You can put in-screen cards where there's other videos and at the end of this one, there's gonna be a great video. You don't wanna miss this. It's gonna be up there, up right here or here. I can't remember which. It'll be one of these places. But you'll wanna click on it if you really wanna improve your business. And if you put those there and you instruct people to click, because a lot of times they don't know. You know, I could put an in-screen video up here on each side of me and they may see it go, oh, looks like he's got other videos. But if I say, hey, click here right now, they're more likely to click on that video and I'm gonna keep them on my channel and I'm gonna get more watch time. So utilizing those CTAs, super important guys. Number seven, use the tools that YouTube gives you. They give you a thing called analytics. You wanna go into analytics on a regular basis. And don't do it in the beginning. If you've got 20 videos posted or 30 videos posted, it doesn't matter. Don't even bother. But once you've got 50 or 100 videos posted, you wanna go in there and you wanna see which videos are doing well, which ones are getting clicked on, which thumbnails are working. You've got to learn your own channel. These things are a process of growth over time. So you need to actually go in there and see what's working, what's not working. You just gotta test the waters. There is no one way to do things. It's different for every single channel. Now, here's the truth. Patience plus strategy and effort are gonna win all the time. You have to have patience. If you're thinking you're gonna go on YouTube and you're gonna do three or four videos and they're gonna blow up, you're gonna make a ton of money, you're wrong. It's not gonna happen. Now, I'm not saying that hasn't happened. I know of a channel right now that has four videos on it and it's got millions and millions of views. It's a subject matter that everybody was interested at the time. He did a good job on it. But the odds of you doing that are not good. It's better to follow best practices like what I just went through here in this video. It's better that you make a good video that's 10 to 14 minutes long that they can put some ads on. It's better that you do a video that doesn't have a lot of flash on it and stuff going on and loud music and all that stuff. It's better that you have good content that somebody says, hey, I watched that video and now I know this, now I learned this, now I can accomplish this. Or if it's entertainment that they feel entertained that they wanna get more of it, that's another way of going about it. But the point is you gotta follow all these best practices. If you don't follow these best practices, you're not gonna get engagement. It's not gonna happen. And like I said, it's not gonna happen overnight. You can expect it's gonna take months, if not years to build a channel. Now, some of you will say, well, gosh, I don't have months, I don't have years. I need some money right now. Well, you can make money now on your videos by putting links in the description that lead to a download that get people on your list so you can email them and sell them whatever you got. You can do that. But as far as getting ads on your videos and all that stuff, it takes a while. You're gonna have to have a thousand subscribers. You're gonna have to have 4,000 hours of watch time in the past 12 months before you can even qualify for advertiser dollars. So that's gonna take time. It just is. And it's true, it will take months, it may take years. But the point is months and years are gonna pass anyhow. The time's gonna go by, you know? So a lot of people say, well, I don't wanna invest the time in that, I don't have that much time. Well, if you're gonna be alive in a few years, you do have that much time, okay? And it's an investment. It's something that once you build it up, it'll be there and it can produce money for you on going. Working on any, any, any online business is gonna take you time. It's taken me years. In the beginning, I wasn't making money. I tried a whole bunch of different products. I started off selling cell phone cases. They didn't work. Then I sold some camping items. Some worked, some didn't work. I never really made any money and then I hit upon some survival food and it worked and then that supply went away. So I was out of business again and then I got my own survival food and I've had that one for a number of years now, about 10 years. But the point is it doesn't always go smoothly. It's not always easy. You see these YouTubers with big audiences and a lot of watch hours and all this stuff and all this money coming in and this lifestyle. They've worked, man. I'm telling you, they've worked. And if you watch the videos really closely, you're gonna notice they put a lot of effort into the videos. I watch a lot of different food bloggers and when you do a video, you have to do edits and edits take time. They do, to zoom in, zoom out, have music, have B-roll, whatever. And I watch some of these guys and the edit is every two or three seconds. That's hundreds and hundreds of edits on a single video. So take some time and watch some of my videos on my channel. Spend the time to learn doing this stuff. That's really super important. But the other important thing is once you've learned this stuff to start putting it into practice, don't try to learn everything there is before you start. You do better to hit that record button and start doing a video. Just hit the record button, start doing a video, put it out there, see what reaction you get, make corrections on it, make corrections on the next one, do another video and consistently do this. You will get better. I promise you'll get better. When we started doing videos, I didn't even know how to focus the camera. I'm embarrassed to say, I literally did not focus the camera. I didn't know about how to do that. You say, well, that's basic stuff, Jay. Everybody knows that. No, everybody didn't. And the funny thing is my wife didn't either. She was, you know, doing the videos and we did blurry videos and put them out. So that's embarrassing and you can go back and see those on this channel. I don't want you to do that but you could go back and see how blurry they were because we did not focus the camera. That's pretty sad. That's pretty sad. But the point is you will learn. You will learn from your mistakes. You will learn, you will get better. And if you consistently try and you consistently put in the effort, you will get better. I promise, I promise you will get better. Thank you so much for listening to this video. I do have a $97 course. You can get below. All you have to do is click and learn. You don't need to put in a credit card or anything like that. You can grab a $97 course absolutely free. So make sure you do that. In addition to that, there's a link down there to Cartra. That's how I do all my marketing. People ask, you know, how do you send out emails? How do you make sales pages? How do you do these downloads? I use Cartra. Cartra is all in one. My courses are there, everything. You only need that one piece of software. You don't need email providers. You don't need course things. You don't need page builders. You don't need any of that. Get Cartra. You can watch the video if you click the link below there. If you like what you see and you don't have to put in your email or credit card. If you like what you see, you can get a $1 trial to Cartra. That's a pretty good deal. She got to use my link below. Thank you so much for listening to this video. Don't forget to comment below. Don't forget to do that. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all notifications. Tell me what you've tried. Tell me what's worked for you. I want to see that below. Or if you have a question, put that below. Thank you so much for watching this video. I'll see you in the next one. Don't forget, check out this video here. It'll really help your business.