TubeBuddy | The #1 Free Tool to Grow Your YouTube Channel

So what the heck is TubeBuddy? You may have heard of this helpful tool.

If you are an absolute beginner read on to find out how you can use this tool to leverage your video production as a YouTuber.

What is TubeBuddy? Do You Even Need it?

I've talked about TubeBuddy in the past, I use it a lot and was with Andrew from TubeBuddy at VidCon 2019. I wanted to give you an idea of what the heck TubeBuddy is if you're an absolute beginner to online video and YouTube.

TubeBuddy is a browser extension, all that really means is that when you go onto YouTube, TubeBuddy will be right there after the install. You may need to accept some permissions but once you have done that, it's right there ready for you to go. It's there to help you do better on YouTube by showing you some of that back end information, on the front end so it's more easy and digestible to understand.

I've worked with clients and some of them are a little confused about what it does. Some of them are kind of afraid wondering if it is just doing stuff for you in the background.

It's a tool but it's something you have to actively use, kind of like a hatchet. Like a hatchet can be used to chop down a tree. Yeah, you could technically chop down a tree with your hand but it would take you hours and be incredibly painful. Similarly, people find YouTube to take hours and be incredibly painful.

TubeBuddy basically helps you do keyword research. It helps you manage your comments all within YouTube so you don't have to go to a third party website. You can do it on the website you want to be on, which is YouTube.

So instead of having all of these needs of different teams, you can do it as a one man band.

I use TubeBuddy with my clients and my students. I show them how to use TubeBuddy cos it's very convenient. But if somebody's totally new to this, what are some of the results that they get by using a tool like TubeBuddy? What kind of person is the ideal client for using TubeBuddy?

Who is an Ideal Client for TubeBuddy?

Anyone really interested in starting on YouTube or getting into that space is really the ideal client because most of the times people see YouTube as just people who upload videos, but they don't really understand how they found their success.

If you've ever done Google SEO, it's very similar on YouTube because it's owned by the same company. Google. YouTube is a search engine and one of the primary ways to grow on YouTube is through search. TubeBuddy's tool such as the keyword explorer gives you the ways that people are finding your content and ways that people are searching for so your content can be the answer to their searchable question.

What the heck is a keyword and how can you use TubeBuddy to help you with that?

If you're just starting out on YouTube and you want to leverage keywords to help increase the views on your videos, TubeBuddy is for you.

Keywords, Keywords Everywhere

I use TubeBuddy as a tool that helps me with keywords. A lot of times people tend to overthink keywords. The best way to describe a keyword is the way YouTube looks at them. And YouTube follows wherever the audience is going.

Keywords in a very blatant term are how YouTube uses to describe the video, to send it to people looking for it. So we're doing a video on what are keywords, for an example. People are more likely to type in what are keywords. A common mistake I see is someone trying to target just one word – ‘keyword' in our case. How long will it take you to find your content if you type just one word? It would take ages.

So you want to use something called long descriptive keywords. In our example they would mean:

What are keywords?

How can TubeBuddy help me with keywords?

And again the whole point is keywords but the search is specific.

Keywords in themselves are used to describe whatever the video is about. Keywords on YouTube specifically can only be based on whatever you title the video. So before you ever look at keywords, they are dependent on what you title the video.

What if you tried to cheat and you tried to put “World Cup Winner” in your keywords? That's not what the video's about, you're just trying to use that to make your video trend because that's what everybody's talking about. But this video is really a dance video. That's not really going to help you out. No, and YouTube doesn't want to mislead people.

We've all been click baited at some point in our life and it's not a good feeling. So YouTube tries to eliminate that by seeing what the keywords are based on the title. And if you do have misleading titles and keywords, it can actually get you hurt on YouTube.

Hey, did you just Click bait me?

You're not delivering the promise. That's what click bait is, by the way, if you haven't heard of that term.  It is where you write a description that gets somebody to watch the video, but you've actually tricked them and the video is not what the title is about.

Sometimes people write very provocative titles like “I'm leaving YouTube forever” and what they really mean is “I'm taking two days off from YouTube and I just wanted to be dramatic so you'd click my video!”

People get mad at such tactics.

We see this every year. “I'm quitting YouTube in 2019” but in two days it's 2020 it's like you're not really quitting. I see that a lot.

So don't click bait. It's okay to think of sensational headlines if, you're actually delivering that promise. But the keywords need to match the title.

Instead of being, click baity, be click-worthy.

So finally, another question I get asked a lot is thumbnail strategy, and since TubeBuddy has a lot of tools related to that. I have another video on that.

Let's talk about thumbnails because they're really, really important. They're one of the factors YouTube looks at.

You can't SEO a poorly performing thumbnail

You're brand new to video and you know that thumbnails are important, but you need to learn the strategy. I'm going to talk about how you can use this tool to help improve your thumbnail strategy to get more people to click on your videos.

You may have heard thumbnails are very important because it helps improve your click-through rate. Meaning it helps people click on your videos. But how do you improve your thumbnail strategy?

Well, you can use the Tubebuddy tool.

That's something that I use. I didn't get paid to say that by the way!

What Can TubeBuddy do to improve your Thumbnails?

Within the free version, there's something called the TubeBuddy Thumbnail Generator. What this does is you can either choose a still from the video, a pre taken the photo or just a solid color in the background. Then from there, you can make and craft around whatever your video is about.

You can definitely intrigue and compel viewers to click on that thumbnail and through TubeBuddy you have a lot of customization tools, all for free.

So basically, if you're pretty new to thumbnails and you don't have a way to create thumbnails there's a nice quick Thumbnail Generator Tubebuddy allows you to do straight from the YouTube website. That is if you've got their plug-in installed.

A/B Testing with TubeBuddy

If you have the higher tier, like the Legend tier of TubeBuddy there's this really fancy thing you can do called A/B testing.

When you're A/B testing it's basically showing two images and seeing which one the audience react to the most. TubeBuddy takes two thumbnails, one you originally uploaded with the video and then they let you create and craft a second one or you can do it on your own. You can upload it and TubeBuddy will tell you the data side by side which one got more viewers to actually watch your video.

Because you can have the best video in the world but if no one clicks on the thumbnail, no one comes into the storefront, no one actually contributes or decides to come in.

It doesn't matter how good the video is if the advertising for the video is bad. 

A/B testing is something that's used a lot in marketing. There is a lot of talk that goes back and forth about what's big on YouTube and what's not. People talk that faces are important but sometimes you don't need faces. For instance, if you're making a cake maybe people want to see the cake instead. So that's a great example of where you might want to do a test and see does the thumbnail perform better with just the cake or the cake and a face?

That's why A/B testing is so powerful. If you are a larger creator going for faces on thumbnails makes sense. But if you're not, just having the cake can be all it means. But always A/B test with TubeBuddy.

You can guess but why guess when you can actually test and have measurable results?

Thumbnails are important but what's more important than that is if once they click through and watch your video if you're not confident on camera, it doesn't matter that they click through because they're not gonna believe in the messaging you're saying.

If you want to be able to get better on on-camera confidence check out my other blog posts on the website.

See you Dare to Dreamers!

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