How to Get More Views on YouTube: The 5-Stage System I Use on Every Channel

Every week someone sends me a channel and asks the same question in slightly different words: why isn't this working? Usually the videos are fine. The audio is clear, the edit is competent, the person on camera is likeable. And they get four hundred views.

The reason is almost never talent. It is that the channel has no loop — no repeatable sequence where each upload teaches the next one something. Videos get made in a slightly different way every time, so when one does well nobody can say why, and when one flops nobody can say why either.

This is the five-stage system I run on every channel I work with, in order. It is not clever and it is not secret. It is just the thing almost nobody does consistently.

First, the only equation that matters#

Before the stages, you need a model of where views actually come from. Here it is:

Views ≈ impressions × click-through rate × satisfied watching

Three multipliers. Because they multiply rather than add, a zero anywhere in that chain gives you zero at the end, and improving one while another is broken does almost nothing.

• Impressions are how many times YouTube put your video in front of somebody. This is mostly decided by your topic — whether there is an audience YouTube already knows about who wants this.
• Click-through rate is what proportion of those people chose your video. This is decided by your packaging — the title and thumbnail together.
• Satisfied watching is how long they stayed and whether they were glad they came. This is decided by the video itself, and it feeds back into how many impressions the next one gets.

Nearly everything below is about deliberately moving one of those three numbers instead of moving all of them at once and learning nothing. If you want the longer version of that diagnostic, I wrote one: why your YouTube videos get no views walks through eleven specific causes.

Stage 1 — Demand: decide what the video is before you decide how to make it#

Roughly half of your outcome is locked in before you press record. Not because effort does not matter, but because the ceiling on a video is set by how many people wanted it in the first place.

There are three kinds of demand on YouTube and they behave completely differently.

Search demand is people typing a query. It is the most predictable kind: you can look it up, the audience is actively looking, and the video keeps earning views for years. It is also capped — only so many people search "how to fix a leaking tap" each month.

Browse demand is the home page. Nobody was looking for anything. Your thumbnail appeared next to eleven others and it had to be more interesting than all of them. Uncapped upside, much less predictable.

Suggested demand is the sidebar and the autoplay after another video. This is where most large channels get most of their views, and it depends on whether your video is a natural next thing for someone who just watched something related.

Most creators only think about the first one, then wonder why their channel plateaus. Most large channels live on the second and third.

The overlap test#

The topics worth making sit in the overlap of three circles:

1. Something you can genuinely talk about without faking it.
2. Something an identifiable group of people wants.
3. Something you can put a clear promise on in six words.

That third one is the filter people skip. If you cannot say what the viewer gets in six words, the video will not package, and if it does not package it will not get clicked no matter how good it is.

Checking demand without paying for a tool#

You do not need a subscription for this. Type the start of your topic into the YouTube search bar and read the autocomplete list — those are real queries, ordered roughly by how often people type them. Then cross-check the trajectory with Google Trends (opens in a new tab), which will tell you if interest is climbing, flat or dying.

Then look at what already ranks. If the top results are three years old with modest view counts and dated thumbnails, that is an opening. If the top results are all from channels a hundred times your size and were published last month, pick a narrower angle.

I go much deeper into this in the practical YouTube SEO guide, including how to tell search-shaped topics from browse-shaped ones.

Stage 2 — Package: write the title and sketch the thumbnail before you film#

This is the single highest-leverage change most creators can make, and it costs nothing.

The normal order is: have an idea, film it, edit it, then spend twenty minutes making a thumbnail because you have to upload. By that point the packaging is a description of what you made. It should have been a promise you designed the video to keep.

Flip it. Before you film:

If you cannot make a title and thumbnail you would click yourself, the idea is not ready. That is not a failure; it is the process working. You just saved yourself six hours of filming.

Two things that break packaging#

Trying to say more than one thing. A thumbnail has about half a second. A title has about two. Between them you get to make exactly one promise. Most bad packaging is three promises fighting each other.

Designing at the wrong size. You design a thumbnail on a 27-inch monitor at 1280 pixels wide and it looks great. The viewer sees it at roughly 320 pixels on a phone, in a scrolling feed, at an angle, in daylight. Zoom out until it is the size of a postage stamp. If you cannot tell what it is, it does not work.

YouTube publishes its own thumbnail and title tips (opens in a new tab) and the current custom thumbnail specifications (opens in a new tab), which are worth a skim for the technical requirements. The judgement calls I have written up separately in 15 thumbnail rules that raise click-through rate and 27 title formulas that earn the click.

Stage 3 — Hook: earn the first thirty seconds#

Somebody clicked. You have won the hardest part and you are about to give it back.

The opening of a video has exactly two jobs:

1. Confirm the promise. Show the viewer, fast, that they are in the right place and this is the video the thumbnail implied.
2. Raise a new question. Give them a reason that the next thirty seconds are also worth staying for.

That is it. Notice what is not on that list: your name, your channel, what you usually make videos about, a request to subscribe, a sponsor, an animated logo sting, or an apology for not uploading in a while.

Every one of those costs you viewers at the moment when viewers are most expensive, because the people leaving in the first fifteen seconds are the ones who were interested enough to click.

YouTube's own analytics treats this as a distinct metric — the Intro section of the key moments for audience retention report (opens in a new tab) tells you what percentage of your audience was still watching after the first 30 seconds. That is the number to watch. As a rough working benchmark, holding 70% or more there is healthy; below about 55% and your opening is usually mismatched with what your packaging promised.

The full breakdown, including six hook patterns you can reuse, is in the first 30 seconds.

Stage 4 — Hold: build a middle worth staying for#

Retention is structural, not cosmetic. Where you put a section matters far more than how cleanly you cut it. Faster cuts on a boring sentence just make it boring faster.

Three structural habits do most of the work:

Open loops. Tell the viewer something is coming that they want, then deliver it later. "The third one is the one that actually changed my numbers" is a loop. It works because it converts a linear list into a reason to stay.

Front-load value, back-load context. The instinct is to explain the background first and get to the point later. Invert it. Give the payoff, then explain why it works for the people who want to know.

Cut anything you would skip. Watch your own video at normal speed with your finger over the arrow key. Every time you want to skip, that is a cut. Be ruthless — nobody has ever complained that a video was too tight.

Then read the graph. The audience retention guide covers the four curve shapes you will see and what each one is telling you, including why a gentle decline is healthy and chasing a perfectly flat line usually means cutting things people actually wanted.

Stage 5 — Read: the same four numbers, every video#

This is the stage that closes the loop, and it is the one people skip because it feels like admin rather than creativity.

Check these four, in this order, at 48 hours, 7 days and 28 days:

Two rules about this table. First, look at all four together — any one of them alone will mislead you. High click-through rate with terrible retention is not a win; it means the packaging wrote a cheque the video did not cash, and that costs you more than the click gained.

Second, do not check hourly on upload day. You will react to noise, panic, change the title twice, and destroy your ability to attribute anything. The eight metrics that actually predict growth covers the rest of Studio and, more usefully, which parts of it to ignore.

Closing the loop#

Here is the part that makes it a system rather than a checklist.

What you learn in stage five changes what you pick in stage one. A video that overperformed did not just get lucky — it found a group of people YouTube now knows how to reach. The right response is not "make that video again", it is "what else would those specific people want?"

Look at the traffic source breakdown. If a video won on search, make more of the thing people search for. If it won on browse, you have found packaging that competes on the home page. If it won on suggested, find out which videos it was suggested next to and make something that sits naturally beside them too.

That is the whole trick. Each upload becomes a slightly better-informed guess than the last one, and after twenty of them you are not guessing much at all.

What to do this week#

If you do nothing else from this article, do these three things:

A short list of things that do not work#

I want to be specific here, because a lot of advice on this subject is confidently wrong.

• Tags. They play a minimal role and are mostly useful for common misspellings. They are not a lever.
• Posting at a magic time. It helps slightly on day one because your subscribers are awake. It does not change how a video is ranked over its life.
• Uploading more often, by itself. Frequency is useful because it gives you more data, not because YouTube rewards volume. Three rushed videos lose to one considered one.
• Engagement pods and comment-for-comment. These generate signals from people with no genuine interest in your topic, which makes your audience data worse, not better.
• Deleting old low-view videos. Videos are evaluated individually. Your old flops are not holding you back.

If you want the authoritative version of what YouTube itself says about any of this, YouTube Help (opens in a new tab) and the Creator Insider channel (opens in a new tab) are the two sources actually worth your time — everything else, including me, is interpretation.

Where to go next#

If you want to understand the machine you are working with rather than just the process, read the YouTube algorithm explained next. If you are earlier than that and just want the first thousand people, how to get your first 1,000 subscribers is the more useful starting point.

And if you would rather have this arrive one piece at a time — a real channel pulled apart each week, with one change small enough to make before your next upload — that is exactly what the newsletter is.