How to Get a Lot of Views on YouTube: The Two Games

A lot of people ask how to get a lot of views on YouTube, so let me explain the two games people are actually playing right now. One is browse. One is SEO.

Almost nobody getting big views is doing anything outside these two. The problem is most small channels don't realize they're games, don't pick one, and end up playing neither.

Game one: browse

Browse is recommended content. The homepage, the suggested sidebar, the feed.

Here's how the game works. You create a channel and content, and early on you get people watching each video yourself, more often than not by posting your links where your audience hangs out. You push out content on a schedule, once or twice a week, with the best, most hyped content you can make in your niche. And the whole point is to get better and better at it every upload.

What that does over time is feed the algorithm who your audience is. YouTube starts figuring out exactly who to recommend your videos to, and then it does the distribution for you. That's how you get a lot of views on browse, and it's how a lot of people build channels fast, at least in my opinion.

The major influencers you see out there? Most likely playing the browse game.

Game two: SEO

The other way people get a lot of views is search. And SEO on YouTube is totally not what people think it is.

If you think YouTube SEO is adding tags to a video and boom, search traffic, that is a terrible approach. Tags do basically nothing.

What it actually is: you start from keywords, heavily searched, low competition, real search volume, using tools like VidIQ and Google Trends. Then you make videos about each one inside a given topic. As your library compounds and a few months go by, you start getting a lot of views.

I've done this myself. I pulled around 150K views from YouTube search in a single month doing Call of Duty content. I was uploading constantly, tens of videos, but the traffic came from search, not luck. And I've helped clients 10x their YouTube search traffic playing the same game.

The great thing about SEO is it's evergreen. It doesn't go out of style. Okay, sort of, with CoD there's a new one every year, but there's also always someone still searching the old one. That's the compounding.

Pick one and get good at it

So that's how you get a lot of views to me: play one of these games and get good at it. And apply the best practices no matter which one you pick. Best thumbnails you can make, tightest cuts, make it entertaining, and keep getting better.

The problem a lot of people run into is they don't look at their competitors, they don't pick one game or the other, and they still don't take their time to make each video good. It's not just a quantity game. You need to constantly get better. Some people eventually play both browse and SEO at once, and that works too, but that's later.

You asked how to get a lot of views. Pick a game. Get good at it.

If you're still figuring out what your channel's winner even is, start with How to Get 1,000 Subscribers on YouTube, that's the post on finding your pillar before you scale it.

I write this blog for creators going from zero to their first 1,000. Subscribe below and every post lands in your inbox.