If you’re serious about growing your, don’t make these YouTube mistakes.
There are some great promotional tactics you can get eyeballs on your videos, drive viewers to your channel, turn viewers into subscribers and so on. But this post (and embedded video) is about the opposite. These are YouTube mistakes that many content creators make that can actually tank your watch time, hurt your channel, and drive the YouTube algorithm to stop recommending your content.
The thing is, some of these things sound like a good idea. I mean, sharing your video on social is smart, right? Maybe. If you do it the right way. Likewise, sharing your video with friends and family is a sure-fire way to get a few views when you’re starting out but will those views help?
Read on!
3 YouTube Mistakes that can Kill Your Metrics
#1 Not Leaving An Actual Link to Your Video on Social Media Platforms
We used to think it was weird when YouTube creators promoted their videos on social media without leaving the link to the video. It seemed inconvenient to make subscribers manually open a new tab and search for the video when the creator could have just embedded it for us.
Turns out there’s a good reason for this and what they’re actually doing is avoiding one of the common YouTube mistakes. It comes down to this: while people may watch your video on social media, YouTube doesn’t know they’re watching your video. And that’s a problem for a number of reasons.
See, when you share YouTube videos on social media sites and viewers click to watch, it will play right in the app or open in a browser window within the app itself. While you may get more views this way, this can become a real problem.
If they play the embedded video or if they’re not signed in to YouTube in the app browser window, the video doesn’t go into their YouTube watch history.
Now, when they go to YouTube, your video might get recommended to them. But they’re not going to watch it again. Why would they? They’ve already seen it on X, Instagram, Facebook, Discord, or elsewhere. If people see your video on YouTube and then choose not to watch it, that’s going to hurt your click-through rate and send signals to YouTube that viewers aren’t interested in your content.
So the best practice is, instead of sharing embedded links, just tell your viewers that you uploaded, and give them a reason to go to your channel and find your latest video.
get an unfair advantage on YouTube
Give your YouTube channel the upper hand and easily optimize for more views, more subs, and more of every metric that matters.
Or you can do what we do. We add our thumbnails to the social post so that the embedded video will get replaced by the thumbnail, but the link will still be there. And instead of your viewer being able to watch the video externally, they’ll be redirected to the YouTube app when they click on it, where the video will be added to their watch history, and they’ll be able to like, leave comments, and watch the next one.
#2 Sharing Your Content with an Audience That Doesn’t Actually Care
Not everybody that cares about you cares about your content. That’s fine because not everybody is your audience. Sure, they might watch your gaming video, your vlog, or your cooking video because they want to show support. And that’s nice. But those views may not actually help you. In fact, they might be hurting your channel.
Sharing your content with audiences that don’t want your content is another of our common YouTube mistakes.
The trick is to ask yourself this question: is the audience I’m sharing my content with going to get value out of my content?
When YouTube looks at this viewer’s watch history, will it give them good data about other content my target audience is interested in? And is it likely that this person would watch this video if they saw it on YouTube and didn’t know I made it?
If the answer to any of those questions is no, it might not be worth sharing it with them. It might not be worth asking them to subscribe because, let’s be honest. In the long run, you want to work on building an audience that’s really interested in what you’re creating, who watch until the end, engage in comments, or join your communities of people with shared interests and support you financially by becoming members, buying merch, or getting your course.
Basically, you need to build an audience of people who want to watch your videos. Not an audience of people who will watch your videos because they care about you.
#3 Buying Subscribers
Buying subscribers might drive up your subscriber count but buying subscribers is among the biggest YouTube mistakes you can make. For starters, any form of fake engagement is against YouTube’s community guidelines. Doing so could earn you a big fat YouTube Community strike… and that’s the last thing you want.
Likewise, doing a “sub for sub” or similar exchange with another creator might seem like a good idea. It’s probably not.
These subscriber-boosting shortcuts are scams. They might boost one channel metric to increase but they don’t do you any favors. Subscriber count is important but without watch time or community engagement, it’s just a vanity metric. When you buy or scheme to get subscribers, you’re not getting people who are interested in your content.
Avoid these Common YouTube Mistakes
Building a YouTube channel takes time and dedication. If people watch your videos when they’re not logged into YouTube, if they watch your videos out of obligation, or if they’re subscribers you schemed to get, they’re not going to help you grow.
Quite the opposite.
So, keep working at it, make content people like, and avoid these common YouTube mistakes. Your channel will grow.
get an unfair advantage on YouTube
Give your YouTube channel the upper hand and easily optimize for more views, more subs, and more of every metric that matters.
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