21 Things Every Smart YouTuber Does IMMEDIATELY After Uploading (2026)

So, about six months back, I uploaded this video right here. 10 things every smart YouTuber does immediately after uploading. And people absolutely love this video. It blew up. It's got nearly 750,000 views, and it just keeps going. And one of the reasons that people love this video so much is because I was telling the actual truth about what works on YouTube, what doesn't work, what's fluff that's just going to waste a bunch of your time. And I even gave a real life example of my own brother who enabled something on YouTube when he was uploading his video that actually caused his entire channel to crash temporarily. Now, a lot of things have happened since that video. It's now 2026 and there are way more features that YouTube has as an upload option. So, that's what I'm doing today. If you appreciate me doing this type of content, let me know by gently tapping that like button. And let's jump into it right now. And by the way, this isn't some guru fluff where they're going to tell you, you know, there's some random little thing that you can turn on that's going to 100x your video and in reality it's maybe minorly helpful or it can actually be harmful to your video in some cases. These are the things that we actually do to our channel and the few things that we don't do, we do them to other channels that are brand new in certain cases as well. So, I'm going to break down exactly what we do when we upload to our channel that, you know, this is something that pretty much all successful YouTubers are doing. And I'm also going to tell you what you should basically spend zero time or effort on as well. All right, guys. So, we are in the YouTube studio right here. Uh, we clicked on content. So, if you just go to your YouTube studio, you click on content, this is where you're going to pop up. And I am going to click on a video that is scheduled to go live. And I am going to click right here, details. And here is what has popped up. So, this video is scheduled to go live. It has not gone live yet. And let me literally take you through step by step all of our settings that we have. And then I'm going to tell you the other things outside of just the settings alone that you need to change. Okay. So, first of all, when it comes to playlists, we like to share it with a lot of different playlists. This is not something you should take a massive amount of time doing, but it's something that is really helpful because it's going to help the YouTube algorithm figure out what other videos to share with people that watch that video. Now, we not only share it to personal finance, regular videos, and YouTube growth and monetization, but these other playlists we share to basically help us to track different things that we're doing on the channel. So for instance, timestamps, we're actually sharing it to that because we do timestamps on some videos and we don't do timestamps on other videos and we want to see if the average view duration is going to be higher in the videos that we do timestamps on. So that's something that we are constantly tracking and messing with. You don't have to do that. That's something that we do. Same thing with the live CTA. Uh we're tracking the ones where we actually do a live CTA on to see if they perform better than other videos. And we also track who edited the video. So, in this particular case, John edited the video. All right, guys. In the editing process right now, and I just wanted to mention that if you're struggling to grow on YouTube, you're having trouble getting views, subscribers, making money, or even picking a niche, I'm going to be hosting a free one-time live workshop that goes over exactly how to help with that called How to Finally Profit from YouTube.com. So, make sure to mark that down and also make sure to click the link in the description and the pin comment below so you don't miss out. I'll be giving away the Niche Validator Pro 2.2 too completely free. This is the latest and most optimized version of my GPT powered niche validation tool. So, make sure you show up, click the link in the description or the pin comment to register. Now, back to the video. Next is audience. And this is one thing that a lot of people mess up, guys. Unless your audience is specifically made for kids. We're talking like Coco Melon, right? A channel that is specifically made for kids, like Blues Clues, do not mark that it is made for kids. Right? If your channel is kid-friendly, that's great. But that doesn't mean it's made for kids. Okay? So, do not ever under any circumstances mark that it is made for kids unless it is explicitly and only made for kids or it will absolutely destroy your video's chances of success. Okay. So, next is age restriction. And this is another one where unless your video is specifically basically like rated R, like it like it's, you know, only intended for adults. We're talking like a really serious like slasher type video or something like that where children should not be seeing it. Then mark this. No, don't restrict my video to viewers over 18. Okay, another very important one. Next is the paid promotion. Only mark this if it is a sponsored or brand deal type video. So, if you're just putting some affiliate links in the description or something, like you don't have to really mark this, right? But if is a sponsored video where you are actually going to be sponsoring a product, then yes, you do need to mark this. Then, scrolling down, altered content. So, this one is something that's messing up a lot of people. This is kind of a double-edged sword here. Okay, so this is one where you could mess up in both directions. I I need to be very, very clear when I say this. This question is all about AI videos. Okay? Now, YouTube does not necessarily have a problem with you using AI in your content. Just as an example, for a very long time with my content, if I forget to say something very important, we will have like little 3se secondond clips of the AI version of me basically saying that thing. And we've been doing this for a very long time. We've been doing this for like 2 years. You probably don't even notice it because it's just such a quick little clip. It's like 3 seconds. We do not need to mark the channel as altered content in that case. Additionally, if once in a while you come up with like an AI uh altered photo or an AI altered piece of B-roll, right? So, it's not your entire video, it's just a little bit here and there, you also do not need to mark this as yes. And if you do mark it as yes, it likely is going to kill your reach a little bit. Why? Because right now, YouTube has a massive AI spam problem. And especially if you're a small YouTube channel that's just getting started on YouTube, they don't trust you yet. They don't know if you're a spam channel or not. They are going to basically keep you in the sandbox a little bit until they can trust you. And that means that if you mark this as yes, when you don't actually have AI altered content, it likely will throttle your channel just a little bit. I don't think it's going to be a death sentence for your channel, but it'll likely make it, you know, maybe 10 to 20% worse. Now, here's where you absolutely do need to mark your video as altered content. If you're using an AI avatar of a person who is not real to present your content, right? So, it's a moving AI avatar of someone who is not real, you need to mark your content as altered content, especially if it's the avatar as well as the voice. If you're using an AI avatar and voice of yourself when you're making content, so it's it's you, but it's the AI version of you. It's an AI avatar version of you. You need to mark this as altered content. And the most important rule is if your video could potentially deceive somebody else into thinking it's a real person when it's not a real person, you need to market as altered content. Now, to be completely honest with you, this is sort of common sense to me. So, Penguin Zero made a video on this. AI old people channels are huge now, and many other people have been making videos on this as well. And here is the channel that he was talking about, Peter Whitmore. This makes my absolute blood boil because this channel is deliberately designed to fool old people into thinking that this is a real person and probably fool young people as well, but especially old people. So, this is Peter Whitmore. Clearly, it's basically shown to be like a real human being. Like, anybody would just assume that this is Peter Whitmore, this guy right here. And it even says, "Welcome to my channel. I'm Peter, 73 years old, and I'm sharing the life lessons I learned the hard way so you don't have to. No regrets left unspoken, just honest conversations about what truly matters. And it's clearly pretending to be a real human being. And this is the most popular video they had right here. I'm 73. It took me 52 years to learn this. Don't waste yours. And you click on the video and it looks like a real person. It is a very wellgenerated AI video. Now, there is this quick little piece of text that only lasts about I'm 73 years old. It one second, literally one second into the video, it's gone. Quick little piece of text on the top right of the video that said, "Inspired by a true story, images are for illustration only." And then, of course, it is marked as altered content. And so for a very short period of time, this channel is getting away with it. But of course, they're going to get deleted pretty soon because this channel is deliberately fooling people. For instance, here is an AI generated fake picture of himself. An AI generated fake picture of himself while he's talking about his life story. Unbelievably manipulative and deceptive. This is absolutely disgusting. And this stuff really just makes my blood boil that there are probably millions of older people out there. They're getting fooled by videos like this. And these people are 100% doing this on purpose. So if your content is altered content, you need to market as yes. And more than that, and I'm telling you this is going to happen. There's probably going to be laws passed about this and all kinds of stuff because there's just massive amounts of fake videos everywhere online right now. But more than just marking it as AI content, you need to disclose both verbally and visually at the beginning of the video that it is an AI avatar. Julia McCoy, she does this absolutely perfectly. So, she has a channel where it is all AI. Like, all of her videos are the AI version of her and it looks super realistic. Like, this looks like a great AI avatar, but she marks her content as altered, but she verbally and visually discloses that it is her AI avatar that's doing this. So, this is an ethical way of doing it because she's not tricking anybody and she's still getting lots of views. she's still crushing it. So, sorry that I I went on a really long rant there, but yeah, basically just if it's altered content, mark it as altered content if it could fool anybody at all. You need to verbally and visually disclose that it is AI content. Please do not be a part of this AI slop because your channel will almost certainly get deleted. It's just a matter of time and then all that time and effort you put into building the channel will go to nothing. Okay, moving on. Of course, you can invite a collaborator, but only if there's somebody else who's collaborating with you. For automatic chapters, I do not like to do this. I like to actually create my own chapters or just have no chapters at all. And for some niches, having timestamps, having chapters will actually help. For some niches, it actually hurts your video. So, it's something you kind of just have to test out. But generally speaking, you don't need to do this. More on chapters here in a bit. But basically, if you have like a tutorial or a very long educational video or a podcast, something like that, you probably should do chapters, but you should probably just type them out yourself. And you can do that pretty easily with AI. You don't necessarily need YouTube to do it automatically for you. But the problem is a lot of the time if you add these chapters, it basically just spoils the video for you or people think that it spoils the video when in reality you actually had a lot of value to add on top of the thing that they just read and they just assume they already know it. Then there's featured places. So, this is allow automatic places. I do not enable this. And then with automatic places, I feel like this is kind of a privacy risk. So, if I'm out and about at some kind of place and it automatically tags where I am, people might like know the city that I live in or something. And so, I mean, if you don't care about that, then that's fine, but this is a bit of a privacy risk here. And then there's automatic concepts. So, this is help viewers learn more about unfamiliar terms without leaving the video. Concepts mentioned in your video may automatically appear in the description. I do not enable this as well because it's an experiment and I don't know if it's going to help or hurt my channel. Now, with automatic concepts, some of the dangers of this as well is it could potentially take people away from your video. They could literally like send them away from your video. And I'm guessing that YouTube is probably going to start running some ads on this type of thing, right? So, they're kind of trying to be almost like chat GPT and YouTube at the same time. That's probably what they're doing with this. But as of this moment, I do not recommend turning it on because that could be good or it could be bad. But right now, it might send people away. It might also confuse users, right? Maybe it'll make them misinterpret concepts. But yeah, overall, I just recommend keeping it off. Then when it comes to tags, guys, I think we probably spend like I don't know 30 seconds on our tags, something like that. So basically, we have some automatic tags that get uploaded. You know, Shane, Shane Hummus, Shane Hummus, YouTube monetization, you know, all these different types of things here. And we just use Vid IQ. I think this feature is free on Vid IQ doing tags. But let's just say it's not free. And by the way, we literally would just click click click click click click. Like literally less than 30 seconds. Tags don't matter that much. But let's just say it's not free. Just upload your title to ChatGBT. Maybe even upload the transcript of your video if you want to to ChatGBT and ask it what tags you should add to the video. And then just add those tags here. Right. So I'm going to copy this video right here. Five simple YouTube niches so profitable it's actually ridiculous. I'm going to copy the video. I'm going to enter in something super simple. Please make tags based on this YouTube video title. And it's going to come up with a bunch of really good tags that you can literally just copy and paste. And these are definitely good enough. You do not have to make it any more complicated than that. Now, by the way, guys, if you're confused about picking your niche, coming up with the title, how to properly set up your channel or any stuff like that. We are going to be covering that in a live that we are doing this week. Click the link in the description and the pin comment below to attend the live. You do not want to miss out on it cuz I'm going to be telling you all the things that are important, more importantly, all the things that are not important that you should not be wasting your time on that 99% of people do waste their time on. And then a simple step-by-step process to actually get results on YouTube. And this will literally be a Zoom workshop directly with me. And then at the end, we will be going through a Q&A where you can ask me any questions you possibly have about YouTube. And more than that, I've been working super hard on an AI that helps with all of these issues with YouTube. I'm only going to be giving it away this one time at this one event, and you have to show up to the event to get it. So, click the link in the description in the pin comment below to sign up for it, and I look forward to seeing you there. Okay. Next is language and caption certification. So the video language I would assume if you're doing it in English you would do English United States. Again if your audience is speaking English and then and most of them are in the United States then I would click this and same thing for the title and the description language. And then the caption certification basically as long as your video did not end up on national television then you should be good and you can just go none. For the recording date and location I would just leave this blank or mark it as none unless you have a very specific type of business. So, an example of this is if you're a real estate agent in Las Vegas, you do want to set your location to Las Vegas because most of the people you're going to be selling to are either in Las Vegas or very interested in Las Vegas, right? So, if you're selling like a local business, if you're like a local business and you're trying to attract people to your local business, then this actually matters a lot and you'd want to set that video location. But if not, it really doesn't matter. And to be honest with you, a lot of people would say this is a privacy risk and they wouldn't want to set it in the first place. So when it comes to license and distribution, most YouTube creators should just set this to standard and everywhere. If you change it, it might actually reduce the amount of people that it shows it to. And there are very rare niche cases where you shouldn't do this. But for 99% of people watching this video, this is probably the way to go. Then when it comes to allow embedding and publish to subscriptions feed and notify subscribers, both of these you should click. I mean, why would you not allow somebody to embed your video on their website, right? That's just free traffic, free views for you and free marketing for you. And then same thing with publishing to subscription feed and notifying subscribers. Like, of course, you want to notify your subscribers of the video. They're the people that want to know about your video. So, yes, these two should absolutely be on. And when it comes to video and audio remixing, again, this is just free marketing for your video. I guess if you don't want people to be able to kind of talk bad about your video, you should turn this off. But again, even that is free marketing, right? Because some people are going to agree with you, some people are going to disagree with you, and the people that agree with you are going to agree with you even more because they sort of have to pick a side, right? So, I I would still leave this on unless you're highly sensitive uh to criticism, then maybe you would uh say don't allow remixing. All right. Now, at this point, when it comes to the category, I would just put it as education. Obviously, if you're making educational content, if you're making news style content, I'd put it as news. And if you're making like entertainment content, I'd put it as entertainment. Some of these other ones are a bit weird and they can be a little hard to categorize, but I would just stick with education if you're making educational content. Now, for Thai problems and academic system, to be completely honest, I don't think these matter all that much. This is probably just something that YouTube is testing out a little bit. They're basically using us as guinea pigs if we want to kind of like label our own content, but at this point, it doesn't make that much sense. Now, make sure you come back to the channel a year from now because we are testing this stuff all the time and if it does actually make a difference, we will tell you. But at this point, it doesn't. And to be honest, you can probably only hurt your video by labeling this stuff because it would only reduce the reach of your video. So, for academic system, we put United States, which you know, just seems like the one that makes sense. Or you could also just put none. And then same thing goes for level. I would just leave this off as well. the algorithm is pretty smart and it's going to find the right people for you. So, there's just no need to do this because it's just going to show it to less people and less people are going to be able to watch your video and enjoy it. Now, I could see this becoming more important in the future, but right now again, just don't even mess with it. Now, when it comes to comments and ratings, one of the main reasons that people watch your videos is to go to the comment section, leave a comment themselves, and read other people's comments. And so I would highly recommend turning this on in like 99.9% of cases because people are going to leave your video when they see that the comment section is off. Now, additionally, I say that anyone can comment and I like to sort it by top comment. And when it comes to moderation, I have it marked as basic. And to be honest with you, I don't care if people have like negative comments on my channel. I've had some really nasty negative comments that have gotten a lot of views. And I'm a free speech type of person. So, I think that people should be able to leave those comments and it should be totally fine. However, the reason that I do mark basic moderation is because before this feature was available, there was massive amounts of spam and scams on every single YouTube channel. So, it is important to have that basic moderation on because you don't want your viewers to get scammed in the comment section. Also, I allow people to show how many viewers like this video. And that is all of the basic settings. Okay, so next, let's talk about the title and the file here. So, this is actually extremely important that you make the title and the file the same or very very close to being the same. So, I made a slight change to the title. I actually add five simple YouTube niches so profitable it's actually ridiculous. And I'm not going to change the file, but it's close enough. It's very, very similar. And that is going to help your video to get more views because it's going to help the YouTube algorithm to categorize your video. I've been doing this for years. It's been super helpful. I got way more views by doing this. And maybe it's not as helpful anymore, but it doesn't hurt to just do it because why not? Anything you can do to help the YouTube algorithm categorize your videos faster and trust your channel faster and show your channel to the right people so they're not wasting impressions. Showing your channel to the wrong people is almost always going to be a good thing. So, you might as well do it. Additionally, guys, this is something else that I do right here. You might notice the video quality here is standard definition, high definitionin, and also 4K. Now, the funny thing is I did not record my videos in 4K. I recorded my videos in 1080p. Why? Because 4K files are huge and I don't want to have to deal with them. However, what you can do is after you're done editing, you can render the video in 4K. Many different editing softwares that can do this. And even if the editing software can't do that, you would render it in 1080p. But then you can upload the video in 4K. Now, this is another thing I do that has probably resulted in an extra at least 10% of views for me because YouTube is going to prioritize showing your videos on TV if they're in 4K. And guess what? TV is now the number one most common way to view YouTube. It's even more common than phone. So, the two most important ones are your phone, like viewing YouTube on phone, and also viewing YouTube on TV. And so when you have 4K as an option, YouTube is going to be more likely to show it to people who are watching on TV and they're also going to be more likely to click it because it's going to look more beautiful on their TV. So I see a ton of people that don't do this. Definitely start doing this. This is absolutely worth it. It doesn't take that much longer to do it either. And even if your video is in 1080p, you can still upload it in 4K technically. And by the way, if you render a 1080p video in 4K, it actually keeps more of the information and it keeps the picture quality better. Just FYI. And that brings me to the next tip, which I guess technically you should do this before and after uploading a video, but you should definitely be doing it after you upload the video too if you haven't been doing it already. And that is make sure that your video looks good on phone. And also make sure your video looks good on a big screen TV if possible too. Those are the two most common ways of that people are watching YouTube. And you need to make sure they look good on both. So, just as an example, very common thing I see is people will be watching on their phone and someone will record their screen and it's just showing the whole screen. And when somebody's watching a video on their phone, they can't see anything cuz the screen is just too big. So, you might have noticed throughout this entire video, I like to zoom in on the most important things. And that's because it's really important and it looks better on TV, but it also more importantly looks better on the phone. Additionally, if your recording quality is kind of bad or you don't render it the right way or upload it the right way, you might notice that when it's on the big screen TV, it's a little bit blurry and it's just not a great viewing experience. Or you might notice that that very tiny pimple that wasn't very noticeable when you were watching it on your phone was actually very noticeable when you're watching it on a big TV. Right? So, this is something where you want to just do a quick quality check on your phone, watch YouTube on the phone, and also watch YouTube on a big screen TV if you can as well. Additionally, when you're showing stuff on TV, people have a lot of trouble clicking on your description. And so that's why it's very important for you to actually have QR codes pop up whenever you do a call to action in your video. Now, unfortunately, that's not something that you can do in post-production. That's something you actually have to do when you're editing the video, but I thought I'd mention that. And the QR codes make it possible for them to just scan the QR code with their phone and then they can go to whatever thing you're promoting. Additionally, after you've done the video check, you want to do an audio check. So, this is something I cannot believe how common this is. I have seen people that have uploaded hundreds of videos on YouTube with bad audio. So, the way you do an audio check is you want to listen to the audio with headphones on. So, you can do that, you know, even with just like iPhone earbuds or normal headphones, but you want to listen to the audio with headphones on. And you might notice that your audio is too loud. Certain effects, editing effects, for instance, might be too shrill and it's kind of painful for your ears. If you're doing that, you need to adjust the editing. You need to adjust the audio and editing and make it less sharp or shrill. Additionally, you want to listen to the audio on a phone or on a TV as well. And make sure that it's booming, but it's crispy, right? It's good audio that's crispy, it's booming. You know, they don't have to turn up the audio in order to hear it that much. But at the same time, even if they do turn up the audio, it's not going to be shrill or anything like that. So, this is another very important thing to do. And I can tell you that a lot of people mess up on the audio. And the easiest way to fix this, by the way, is to literally just take some of the most popular channels in your niche, channels that have been around for, you know, 5 years. They're really good at YouTube. And then just put your video on one phone, put another phone right next to that phone, and put their video. And then just play the videos together, right? Play your video for 10 seconds, then play their video for 10 seconds, right? See if the audio is similar, see if the video quality is similar. And then you can do the same thing on your TV as well. That is the easiest test to make sure that your video quality and your audio quality is good enough. Now, when it comes to the description, you want to put your two most important links at the very top of your description. It is very important to do this. So, whatever your call to action in your video is, you want to put the most important links at the top of your description. Now, you'll see here that I have a link to live training that we're doing at the time. And I also have a link to apply to one-on-one YouTube coaching. These are the two most important links. These are the links that I had a call to action to in this video. And they are at the very top of the description. The first two lines are going to be above the fold in the description. That means you do not have to click more to see them. They are visible whether you click more or not. Then at this point, what I would do right here is I would write the description. Now, I have a large channel that YouTube has had years of data on and YouTube knows it very well. So, I no longer write the descriptions. However, if you have a small channel, writing the description right here will make it very easy, especially if it's SEO optimized, for them to tell what the video is about and more about what your channel's about. So, it is worth it to write a description here. Now, by the way, once your video is uploaded, you can actually go to the bottom here. You can go to show transcript and it will show the transcript on the bottom right side. And then you can just copy the whole transcript. You can then paste that transcript into chat GPT and then ask chat GPT to write an SEO optimized description for you. short A1, right? And then I'm just going to type this in here. Please write a one paragraph YouTube SEO optimized description for this video transcript. Don't keyword stuff too much and make it valuable. All right, there you go. That is an SEO optimized description. You could just copy that just like this. Copy or you can even click copy right here. And then you go back to the video and you can paste it right there. Now it says 2025 here. you got to switch that to 2026, but that's about it. And this would be the best place to put it. You don't want to put it at the very top of the description, but you also don't want to put it too far down. Now, uh the other links that we have here is just my other social platforms. And then we have a four business inquiries. So, people can message or email that um if they're like businesses and they want to do business inquiries. And then we've got the timestamps. Now, the time stamp is something you can also do relatively easily with AI. The time stamp is a hit or miss to be honest with you. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't help, but it can actually help if it's SEO optimized. So, I'm going to go back here and I'm going to type this out. All right, so I got it right here. Take the same transcript and make SEO optimized timestamps that won't cause people to skip through the video or skip the video altogether and add value to the viewing experience and are intriguing. There you go. So SEO optimized trans uh transcript just uh timestamps just like that. you can copy and paste that in there. Now, I know that some of the tools like Vid IQ, etc. also can help you with this, but I believe that is a paid feature of the tool. So, Vid IQ will probably do it even better than that, but if you're a beginner and you don't want to pay for a tool like Vid IQ, you can just do what I showed there. And then disclaimers. It's good idea to have disclaimers here. And then any sources that you used in the video or might have used in the video, too. Oh, and one other thing, make sure that you not only name the file name your video title, but also name the thumbnails your video title as well because again, it just helps out a little bit. Speaking of the thumbnail, if you are a beginner on YouTube, do not AB test your thumbnail. This is a piece of advice that I saw from a so-called, you know, YouTube expert where they told beginners to AB test their thumbnails, and that's just an absolute waste of time. It shows their lack of knowledge. When you're a beginner, the last thing you should be doing is AB testing your thumbnails because you're not getting enough views for the AB test to even go through. It would probably take months for a single AB test to complete, maybe even years. So, you're just completely wasting your time by AB testing thumbnails. And you should be using that time to just simply make more videos. Right now, once you're a bigger YouTuber and your videos are getting hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of views, that's where it's probably worth it for you to AB test thumbnails. And the AB test will actually complete relatively quickly, too. Now, on that same note of people who give bad advice, my brother listened to some YouTube guru that told him to enable what's known as player for education. I'll show it on the screen. But you do not want to enable player for education. And here's why. Player for education is designed for content that is supposed to be shown in a classroom, right? So content that is exclusively shown in a classroom and only in a classroom. So unless your content is designed to exclusively and only be shown in a classroom, do not enable player for education. My brother enabled it. His channel absolutely crashed. His CPM actually shrank by about 60% when he enabled player for education. Because if you think about it, in a classroom, there's probably not going to be that many ads. The ads that are shown are going to be extremely limited. And so you're just not going to make nearly as much money from the video. And YouTube is probably not going to promote it as much either. So, do not turn on player for education unless your content is specifically and only designed to be shown in a classroom. Now, the next tip is for most channels, but not all channels. I recommend that when you upload a video to YouTube, first of all, you should be batch making your videos. And so you should always be ahead by like a week or two if you're a normal channel. But when you upload your video to YouTube, you should let it sit for about 24 to 48 hours, especially if you're a beginner YouTuber, especially if you have a new channel. Because again, YouTube has so much AI slop being uploaded to the platform that they don't know who to trust. They don't know which channels to trust. and you want to give the YouTube AI 24 to 48 hours to kind of scan your video or crawl your video to make sure that it's actually quality content and it's a real person. If you don't do this, if you publish your video right away, YouTube is going to have a lower trust score for your video. Now, the exception to this is if you make like news style content, content where you need to get your content out there extremely fast because you're covering things that are happening in real time. So, if you have a news channel or you're putting recordings of some type of game, you're reacting to a game that just happened or something like that, obviously, don't let it sit for 24 to 48 hours, that would be the exception to the rule. But for any other type of content, you might as well just let it sit for 24 to 48 hours cuz why not? It's only going to help you. Plus, you should be making content ahead of time and be 1 to two weeks ahead at any given time anyways. Now, the last thing you absolutely need to do is to deep link your video on playlists. So, we already talked about playlists a little bit, but basically at the end of your video, you should almost always be telling people to watch another video. I do it at the end of all of my videos. All the top YouTubers do this as well, because one of YouTube's biggest goals is to keep people on the platform, and you want them to continue to be on the platform, and preferably, you want them to binge watch your content. And so, I always link one of my videos at the end of every single one of my videos. I'll like say, "Click right here." And one thing that's especially helpful if you're a newbie, if you haven't had that many videos, is to deep link it inside of a playlist that you're going to be adding more videos to in the future. And so you can do that by going to the editor and you can do that by editing the end screen. So you want that end screen to be edited and you want to actually add element here and then you want to link it to a playlist, right? And you can link it to a video. But if you link it to a video, what you want to do is go choose specific video. And then you want to actually find the playlist, right? So you can see right here, this is my Corsera certificate playlist right here. And you can see all of these videos. When I click on that playlist, all of these videos are on the side. So if I were to go to sleep, it would just cycle through all of these videos. It would play for like, you know, 10 hours straight. So you want to find that playlist, go to edit, then you want to go to the video that you actually want to link. So you would, you know, maybe data analytics for instance, right? And that is the one that you would add here. Okay? So you could do that or you can do a playlist and then just put your, you know, your favorite video at the top of the playlist. But the important thing is it's something that people would actually be interested in. So that example that I used of the Corsera certificates would actually be terrible for this video. I should very likely link a Shane Hummus YouTube playlist. But if you don't want to get super fancy with the playlist, at the very least just go ahead and add a video at the very end. And when you choose that video and when you put the video in the playlist as well, you want to make sure that it's a video that they're likely to want to watch. So, just as an example, I have a bunch of different topics I talk about on this channel. I talk about remote jobs. Sometimes I talk about certifications, all kinds of different stuff. This is a YouTube video right here. So, I wouldn't want to link a college degree or a certification or a remote job video at the end. I would want to put it in a playlist that only has YouTube related topics and I would want to link a YouTube related topic to this video and that is going to help you out tremendously if you do that. Now let's talk about right when the video publishes. So this video isn't publishing yet so I can't use this one as an example but right when the video publishes the first thing you want to do literally the minute it publishes is you want to comment on the video a pinned comment. Now, you'll see in all of my videos, I have a pin comment. And on this pin comment, I basically promote the same exact stuff that I put at the very top of the video description. So, yeah, not everyone reads the description, but almost everyone is going to read the pin comment. So, you want to comment this and then you want to pin it at the very top. Additionally, there are some strategies that you can use to get engagement on the video where you can kind of comment something clever and then a bunch of people will comment under it and it'll get more comments and engagement. I did that a little bit when I first started on YouTube. I don't think it's that important. Additionally, something else that you want to do is promote your video on the community tab. So, it used to be called the community tab, but now if you go to any channel, you'll see this right here. It says posts, and you can post an update to your fans. So, it's as simple as just maybe taking a little bit of the thumbnail of the video, putting that thumbnail as the image, putting the title in there, and then telling people about it, and giving them a link to click on the video. It's super super simple. Now, this is super effective, especially for smaller channels. You know, obviously you can't use it until a certain point of your channel growth, but after you can use it, this is super effective to get other people to watch your content. Additionally, if you have a second channel, you can promote a smaller channel that you have, or if you have friends that are bigger on YouTube, they can promote you in their community tab. You know, once in a while, for instance, I'll promote some of my students or clients if I think there's good synergy between our channels. So, attend the live training if you want to potentially become a student. Click the link in the description, the pin comment below. But yeah, community tab right when the video is posted can be super super useful as well because that will get more people to come to the video right when it's posted. Another tip is to respond to comments right when you first upload the video. So now I don't do the community tab anymore, but I did it when I was a smaller channel, but it just doesn't make sense for me to do it anymore as a bigger channel cuz I already get massive amounts of views and I want to send people to other platforms, right? I might want to send them to my email list or something like that. So I don't do the community tab anymore. It doesn't make sense to do it. Additionally, you do typically want to post the video at around the peak viewing time or an hour to two hours after the peak viewing time on your channel. Of course, you have to actually upload to your channel for a while before you can actually see the peak viewing time, and you'd have to go to your audience tab to see that, but generally speaking, afternoon in the United States is typically a good time if your audience is in the US. Some people really like the morning as well. So, yeah, responding to comments right when the video is uploaded is amazing. Now, on a channel like mine, there's just way too many comments to respond to. When I had a smaller channel, I responded to every single comment. And then eventually the comments became too much. So, I started only responding in the first hour after I uploaded a video. And I've continued doing that for quite some time now. So, basically, a lot of people know that I will respond if they comment right away on my videos. And it's almost like a little event or party in the comment section. And again, this boosts the algorithm, it boosts engagement, and it gets more people to watch your videos for longer, which is a positive sign. and it gives your video the best chance of succeeding. Now, you don't absolutely have to do it, but it's something that I've done and it is something that I recommend. You could also hire somebody else to do it for you to be fair. Okay, so I know that 99% of people who watch my videos are never going to work with myself or my team directly and that's completely fine. I give a massive amount of value in these videos. I give even more value in my free live workshops, which one is happening this week. So, click the link in the description, the pin comment below. But with that being said, we do work with a select group of people one-on-one with coaching. So the types of people we work with are people who want to take YouTube very seriously, right? People who are serious about growing and making money on YouTube and they're willing to put in the work and listen to guidance. Business owners that want to get more leads by posting to YouTube. YouTubers that are getting views, but they're not monetizing correctly. Or YouTubers that are crushing it, but they want to crush it even more. Those are the types of people that we like to work with. If you are one of those types of people, apply to work with us down in the description in the pin comment below. And if it's not down there, check our about section on the channel. If you book a call with us, we'll figure out where you are right now, where you want to be. We'll make a plan to get there, and we'll see if we're a good fit to work together or not. The call will be valuable whether or not we end up working together or not. And we only accept about 18% of people who apply to work with us. So, if you're not a good fit, we won't let you join the program. We won't try to sell you anything. And we do this because we only want to work with people who have a very high probability of success. And that is why we have literally gotten hundreds of success stories and we've helped countless people grow and make money on their YouTube channels. So, if that sounds like you, book that call. And also check out this video right here where we go over exactly how we helped this client blow up their YouTube channel.