I have been experimenting with my own YouTube channel found here for a few years now. The channel has existed for a while but didn’t see any real growth until recently. As of this post, I have two videos that have almost 45k and 47k views respectively. These two videos deal with vectorization: one for vectorizing an image by hand; the other for vectorizing via Adobe Live Trace (an auto trace plugin that comes standard with Adobe Illustrator). Both videos rank well under certain search terms. The one that drives the most traffic being “how to vectorize an image in illustrator”. Both tend to rank in the top 5 on the video results page, and usually one of them will end up being on the “all” search category just above the organic search results.
Both videos rank highly under certain YouTube search terms as well: illustrator vectorize image, live trace, vectorize, vectorize image illustrator, and how to create a vector image illustrator cc. My rankings on two dozen keywords or so ranges from #18-#2 for YouTube results.
What I know has worked for these videos: they are a good length (10 minutes and 26 minutes) with useful content; the keywords I use in my video tags are in my title, description, and uttered in the video itself, (YouTube automatically transcribes videos, so the words you actually say matter); these videos have been shared in countless places on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and so on multiple times to as many places as will allow it; these videos have more comments than most of my videos, and I always respond to every one of them to encourage more interaction.
We’ll see how far I can take this experiment. I may top out at my current monetization rate, or maybe I can double it in 2019. Only time will tell.
My YouTube channel showcases tutorials for Adobe products, primarily Adobe Illustrator with a little Photoshop and other graphic design related videos sprinkled in. Check it out here!
