As we all know, the competition on YouTube in pretty much any type of video category (how-to guides, music, documentaries, product ads and others) has exponentially grown during the last few years, making it harder to get viewers to your content.

I believe that we’ve now arrived at a point where creating the actual content is only half the work – so in other words, it is becoming necessary to spend more time promoting your video through various available traffic sources (we’ll list a few in this article) in order for it to become successful.

So, here are my 3 favorite ways of getting more traffic to YouTube videos:

1.       The Power of Related Videos

Never underestimate the amount of traffic that “related videos” get. You’ve probably noticed that while watching a random YouTube video, that on the right sidebar (and after the video ends) that YouTube lists other videos that have similar content to the one that you’re already watching.

Part of this algorithm works by comparing the similarity of the video title, description and tags (keywords) with other videos. This means that videos with similar meta information are more likely they are to be placed together.

So, research a few videos that are getting large amounts of traffic, and use a similar (but not copy-pasted) description to theirs.

Once the listings get updated, your traffic will begin to spike.

2.       From Readers to Viewers

While or after watching a video, many users like to read the comments below and sometimes reply-back, or if they find a comment amusing/controversial/educational enough, they check out that user’s channel.

So, what I’ve hinted at here is that you should be active in the comments section of videos that have similar content to yours by posting your own genuine comments. These comments should not be generic (i.e. “Wow, nice video!”) so you should try to make them either funny, controversial or educational/insightful.

This is required in order to grab the attention of passive readers, and get them to click over your username so they can check out your channel – and with that – your videos.

3.       Google Rankings

Perhaps you’ve noticed this trend, as some time ago, Google started to link to a lot of YouTube videos on its search pages.

The next time you try searching for something on Google, notice how at least on 30-40% of its search pages it’ll place one or two videos (these are either links to YouTube or DailyMotion). Now, Google receives millions of searches per day – and ranking for just a few of these searches can skyrocket the amount of visitors your video has.

The secret to rank like this is in building backlinks to your YouTube videos – so, the more backlinks you have pointing to your content, the higher the chance that it’ll start getting traffic and viewers from the search pages.

There are just two rules to follow in order to get this right:

–          Absolutely Crucial: Make sure the title of the video includes the keywords or phase that you would like to rank (ex. “PC Repair Service” + some generic words). Mentioning the phase once in the description helps as well.

–          What are backlinks and how to get them: Backlinks are one-way hyperlinks that point to another page (in this case, they link to your video – example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aYFivXy9FE). Once done, you should start placing these links on pages that you have access to, like Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Tumblr, your own blog/website, forum signatures, profiles, posts and other places.

Make sure that you don’t create too many backlinks in a short period of time as that can be considered “spammy”, a label which can have a counterproductive effect on your video rankings.

To conclude, these are just a few of the best ways to becoming proactive in increasing the amount of views and traffic that your videos are going to get.

If done properly, you can be sure that your videos and hard work will finally be rewarded with a large increase in views and traffic – otherwise what’s the point in creating content that no one watches, right?

Ian McFadden is a regular author on the Playinator blog – Playinator is a YouTube views software that can get you thousands of new viewers per month and also increase YouTube video views. Try it out today!

Today we have reached a new milestone – Playinator 5.0 has just been released, and is now available for order.

This new version has new plugins and tools available (more on this in the next post), works on your videos faster (over 300-350 views a day for the starter packages, and over 2,000 views a day for the

special edition) and all this has been achieved by using less resources in a much more stable application.

Here are a few high-resolution screenshots of the new GUI elements:

The whole process to reach this version took us several months of thorough testing for compatibility with the new YouTube system, for which I can finally say that we have a working version that is ready to be used by our clients. I would like to also note that starting from today, we’ll be fulfilling the pre-orders, so for those of you that own a copy, let me thank you for your support and patience – the views that you’ve ordered should start appearing in the next 24 to 36 hours.

– Ian

This is just a quick update –

In the meantime while we are working on the software/server side of the product, we now have a few open invites for larger YouTube (partnered) channels for an exclusive JV deal. If interested, please email us back over at sales@playinator.com with some basic description and statistics of your YouTube channel –  which, if it fulfills the rest of our criteria, will get you the inside details of this JV deal (hint, this is our BEST package to date, meaning it’s larger, has zero costs and is faster than anything before), so you can choose what to do next.

– Ian

This is just a quick update – Playinator 4.5 is in the later stages of development, meaning it should available by the end of August (this is the earliest deadline).

New features include:

– Option to add/remove multiple videos at the same time

– A few bug fixes in the video removal system.

– Plugin support for additional websites.

– Support for out upcoming addon – a YouTube auto subscription and commentor application, which basically adds hundreds of comments and subscribers to your videos and channel, all done naturally over time.

– Easier to use GUI, plus a new option to see statistics about your Playinator account.

P.S. This, and all the future available versions of Playinator will be available to current users for free (they can be downloaded via your personal Playinator download link).

After over a month of development and bug fixing, I’m happy to announce that version 4.1 of Playinator has been released.

Here’s a screenshot of the actual software:

Note that existing users can download this update from their own personal download link, free of charge.

Changelog 4.1:

– Numerous bug fixes in the video adding and removal process.

– Free support for increasing channel views in YouTube.

– Support for plugins for the following websites (meaning gain the ability to increase views/plays on other websites): MetaCafe, DailyMotion, MySpace (Profile and MP3 song plays), Vimeo and Ezine Articles.

– New and improved interface.

Today we are close to finishing with a few server hardware upgrades, so in the future this should offer a better and more reliable service for everyone. To continue, we are close to finishing version 4.1 of Playinator, which will include a LOT of new features. These features will offer new marketing opportunities for our users. Some of the key new features are:

– YouTube Channel Views Increasing

– Support for views increasing on MySpace (Mp3/Videos), MetaCafe, Vimeo, Break, EzineArticles (excellent feature for article writers!)

– New redesigned interface

Though I do have to note that our current packages are going to edited (to reflect the new features and fund further development), so remember that prices may go up in the near future. Old users will not have their packages edited, so they will keep their feature set.

Update: As you may have noticed, we had a few delays with the release of Playinator 4.1, due to the addition of a few new features. In any case, there shouldn’t be any further delays, so the new version of our software should be out pretty soon.

Also,  I should remind you that the 4.1 update is absolutely free for all current 4.0 users (you will be able to download the new version from your old download link), meaning if you planning on purchasing Playinator, you don’t have to wait for the new version to be released, as both new and old users will receive it.

I know that this post comes a few days late,

But I’m happy to announce that after months of development, Playinator 4.0 has been released to the public. A lot of people waited for a long time to get a views increaser that actually works without freezing.

If you are asking yourself why did it took us so much time, it’s because after last year’s YouTube changes,  they basically made views increasing impossible.

Videos started freezing at around 300 views, and we had no explanation about this. No one was sure whether it was a bug, a new protection system or were YouTube just beta testing new features.

In the end, after having no solution for what seemed an eternity, we realized that the only way to beat this new system, is to play by it’s rules. Instead of thinking how to fake the views and bypass the protection, we changed our mindset, and decided to try and actually send “natural” (in other words, real) traffic to videos. We placed hundreds of client applications in several countries around the world, and these clients automatically watch and browse through random videos in our network.

As these views are all unique and fresh (the “viewers” also play, stop and skip in random intervals in the videos), YouTube cannot distinguish them from other views.

The first test run was really exciting, and after the beta testing was done, we are ready to release and enjoy in the works of this new views increaser. Freezing YouTube videos are a thing of the past and Internet marketers, musicians and companies can now freely boost their videos and get higher rankings in YouTube.

We believe that great content deserves to be seen by the rest of the world, and for video content publicity – boosting views is one of the most effective and time efficient methods available.

I’ll continue to post more information about Playinator 4 and other views increasing related themes, but for now, I have to end this post.

Ian