10 Things Every Smart YouTuber Does IMMEDIATELY After Uploading

So, there are certain things that smart YouTubers like myself do that almost every beginner YouTuber messes up on. And this just gives us an unfair advantage. And this is coming from someone who owns a YouTube channel with over a million subscribers. And last year, I made $477,000 just from AdSense alone. And what you do after you upload in many cases can be just as important as what you do before you upload. And these are the things that I do every single time. and it's a winning content strategy that just gives an unfair advantage. So, I'm going to show you these things and I'm literally going to take you through my analytics as well to show you exactly what I do. But before I do that, I want to say something important cuz I didn't want to make a video on this because I thought other channels had already covered this topic. But then something happened that made me realize that I have to cover this topic. My brother, who just started a channel on YouTube, messaged me panicking, saying that he enabled this thing called Player for Education because he heard it was a good idea from a YouTube video. And he noticed that his AdSense revenue started to drop right afterwards. Now, Player for Education is basically a setting that highly academic teaching videos might use because people would be watching it in the classroom. But his channel isn't really designed to be watched in the classroom. And the AdSense for player education is extremely low because as you can imagine, there's not that many ads that are played in a classroom setting. So turning this setting on can actually hurt the channel if it's done in the wrong way. And so I started watching some of these videos and I noticed them giving some of the dumbest advice that no actual experienced YouTubers would care about. But some of the advice can actually hurt your channel. And it was clear a lot of these YouTubers were just doing this content as clickbait and they would just give random advice to newbies that didn't know any better just to stand out. For instance, one YouTuber said that you need to be AB testing thumbnails when you're a beginner to give your video the best chance of success. This is probably the worst advice you could ever give to a new YouTuber. AB testing thumbnails is something you do after you already have a successful channel and you're trying to make it even more successful. AB testing thumbnails when you first start a channel makes absolutely no sense. It would probably take months to even get enough impressions to do the AB test when you first start your channel. Oh, not to mention that AB testing isn't even available for brand new channels anyways. So, it just makes no sense whatsoever to give this advice. So, I decided to make a video talking about the things that actually matter after uploading a video that can actually make a huge difference and will make sure that you aren't hurting your channel's chances of success. So, make sure you watch this video until the very end. And also, if you appreciate me doing this type of content, let me know by gently tapping that like button. And let's dive into it right now. All right. So, the first thing that you should almost always do, with few exceptions, is wait 24 to 48 hours after uploading your video before you publish it. And this is especially important for a brand new channel. Now, why do you do this? Well, you can check out this video right here. Uh, five free online courses that are replacing college degrees. We have not made this video live and you can see that we have it on private and it's going to be on private for at least 24 to 48 hours before we consider publishing it. And the reason for that is because it takes YouTube's AI around 24 to 48 hours to read your video. And once it does that, as long as it doesn't find any bad things in the video that it doesn't like, it's going to trust your video more. And so therefore, it's going to be much more likely to show your video to people. Now, this is especially important for a brand new channel because the rules for new channels are different than the rules for older channels, right? So, if you have a established channel, they basically crawl or the AI reads your video relatively quickly. But if you have a brand new channel, they're not going to dedicate as many resources to your channel because they don't know if you're even going to be successful or you're even taking it seriously or you're even going to be consistently uploaded. And so they're not going to dedicate nearly as many resources to your channel. And so it's especially important that you wait 24 to 48 hours before you publish those videos. Quick break. This video is sponsored by me. Most of you don't know that I actually have my own coaching program on personal branding and then growing and making money on YouTube. And this is good for complete beginners, maybe even people who just want to get a job by growing their personal brand, all the way up to people who are very advanced on YouTube. And they get to work directly with myself and my team to help them reach their goals. Now, we are opening up three to five spots. And this is pretty rare. We usually don't have these open. We usually only limit them to select people, but we're opening up three to five spots, and you can check those out down in the description and the pen comment below. And in this program, you'll get to work directly with myself and other people who are highly successful on YouTube. Just as an example, Shawn was able to go all the way from being stuck, not making very much money on his channel to making over $500,000 a month. Now, that's an example of one of my more advanced students, but there's lots of examples of people who started off from scratch and they got to 5K a month, 10K a month, etc. So, check that out down in the description and the pin comment below. All right, so the next hack is using the community tab or other social medias to promote your video right after you upload it. Okay, so right after your video goes live, you can use the community tab on YouTube, assuming you have access to it and now they call it the post tab, so I guess they changed the name. But you can use this community tab on YouTube to upload your video and you can actually get a decent amount of traffic from YouTube to your video right when it uploads. Now, you can do this for your main channel or if you have other channels, you can actually promote your content on the community tab for those other channels. Now, this is actually especially effective for a brand new channel. Now, you'll notice I actually don't usually do this on my main channel anymore. And that's simply because I just I have enough people who initially watch the videos, so it doesn't really matter. And if anything, I want to drive people from my main channel to my other stuff. So, for instance, my email list or potentially to buy something. So, it doesn't make sense to promote my videos when I'm already getting a massive amount of views. However, if I start another channel, I'm probably going to be using the community tab to promote it. Additionally, if you're friends with a YouTuber, you could ask them to promote your video on their community tab as well. Now, you can also promote videos on other social media platforms, etc. And YouTube loves that. YouTube loves it when you send traffic from other social media platforms to them. Even if it's just a little bit of traffic, they absolutely love that. And they're going to send more impressions out once you do that. And it's especially a good sign if people are watching it right when it gets published. So, this is a hack for new channels. It's going to grow your channel significantly faster if you do this. So, just as an example, let's just pretend that this video right here uh just went live. You would go share. You would copy it right here. Now, it does have an actual like create post function. So, you can do that as well. But, let's just assume you might be sharing it to for a different channel, right? So, you have a second channel or you know you have somebody who's sharing it for you. This is what you do. You create post. You would go to the community tab and you're going to go ahead and paste it. And then you'd go ahead and copy that image. You would drop it here. And then you'd probably want to, you know, edit the preview a little bit, like, you know, 85K per year, something like that. That kind of looks somewhat attractive. And then you would literally just copy the title and put it there. Put the title there. And then you'd maybe say something like new upload just to make it, you know, make it people know that, you know, it's new. So it's like it's almost like news, right? New upload. Give them a little bit of urgency. And then you would post it and that's it. You just post it right here and that's it. I'm not going to do it cuz this video isn't brand new, but yeah, that's exactly what you do. And this can actually drive a lot of people to your content. Honestly, it's actually like super effective, especially for a brand new channel. So, this is a piece of advice that I would highly recommend you do. And I did this exact thing uh for a long time on my channel. Now, by the way, it used to be that you needed 10,000 subscribers to use the community tab. Then, in 2021, they changed it to 500 subscribers, and now you don't actually have to have any subscribers to use the community tab. So, you have to be doing this. This is an absolute no-brainer. Now, additionally, my next tip is instead of AB testing thumbnails, especially when you have a brand new channel, do not AB test thumbnails. It makes absolutely no sense. If you do want to kind of figure out which thumbnail is more attractive, what you can do is again use the community tab to ask people which thumbnail they like the most. So, in this example, what you do is you would just use an image poll. You drop one thumbnail here, another thumbnail there, and then you just ask them uh you just say, "Hey, here's the title of the video. Which thumbnail do you like the most? Now, that's if you want to make the right thumbnails. Because my philosophy on YouTube is all about just choosing the right video ideas. If you choose the right video ideas, everything else doesn't matter that much. You can have a mediocre thumbnail and the video is still going to do well. So, you really don't have to do this, but if you have the time to kind of test out different thumbnails, even if it's just a tiny little test, right? Like, let's just say you make your thumbnail and then you just test like yellow text versus white text, right? Even just little tests like that can be super useful. And if you want to do that in a way where it's not going to take like two months to get the results back, you can do that using your community tab. All right, the next tip that I always recommend doing right after you upload is to respond to a bunch of comments right when the video posts. And here's the trick. You can respond to comments on that video, but you can also respond to comments on other videos, right? So, it can be overwhelming to respond to all the comments. It's literally impossible to respond to all the comments on my main channel, for instance. there's just way too many comments. I would literally be responding all day long. However, if you are going to respond to comments, a really smart time to do it is right when the video uploads. Why? Because all of those people that you're responding to are going to get a notification in the top right corner of the screen. It's going to be a little bell notification and it's going to be red. So, they're probably going to see it and they're going to click on it. It's going to take them to the past video and then they might respond to you, but then they might check your channel out and be like, "Oh, he just uploaded a video." And over time, people are going to realize Shane uploads videos at a certain time. And right when he uploads the videos, that's when he likes to respond to comments. So it almost turns your comment section and videos being uploaded into an event. It's almost like it's a social hour, right? So this person uploads XYZ time, maybe like you know 4:00 for instance, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and they're always going to be available to chat during those times. So people will actually put that on their calendar and they'll start showing up to your videos right when they go live almost like it's a show that they're watching. Okay? So right after you upload your video for the hour after you upload, try to respond to every comment definitely on that video. But if there's no comments yet on the video, respond to comments on older videos. All right. Next thing you should do is have an SEO optimized description. Okay. So this is super easy to do and I'm literally going to take you through the process to do this. So you go to chatgbt. You can use the free version of ChatGBT. It's totally fine. And then you're going to go to your video and you know the video has been uploaded. You're going to go down to the very bottom of the description and you're going to look at show transcript. Then you are going to copy the entire transcript. So you can just do this. Copy it. There's also some tools where you can copy it with a click of a button, but you don't need those tools. But yeah, you're going to copy the entire transcript and you are going to paste it into chat GPT. And then you're going to type something like this. Okay. So, create an optimized SEO description for the YouTube video transcript I pasted above titled AI skills that employers are desperate for. Obviously, that would be whatever your title is. And then make the description short, engaging. Tell them what the video is about and what they can expect from it. And make sure it's SEOfriendly to attract the right people to the video. Then you're going to click enter. Then you just wait a moment. And there you go. You got an SEO optimized description. It's that simple. And all you got to do is go to your video, go to edit video, and then what you want to do is you want to put it just under your most important link. So, this is the area that you'd put it right here. So, you don't want to put it uh above um your most important links, like these ones here, cuz obviously these are links that you want people to click on, and you want this to be above the fold. So, you'd put it just below uh these right here. So, so it's still super helpful when it comes to SEO and people might actually read it, but it's not going to affect your click-through rate for these links that you actually want people to click. And then you would go save. So, yeah, that's exactly how you create an SEO optimized description. It's super simple. You can also do the same thing with timestamps. Timestamps on the other hand are hit or miss. It kind of depends on your channel. Sometimes timestamps might actually hurt the performance of your video and sometimes it helps. So, it really just depends on the channel. the SEO optimized description. That's basically always going to help. Again, if you're a super big channel, it doesn't make that much of a difference, but this really helps for small channels. All right, next strategy is the pinned comment strategy. And this is both for engagement and also for links. So, we do this in every single video, every single time. We pin the most important links. Sometimes we'll also pin a question or maybe a little joke or something like that. You can kind of just look back at my most popular videos and you'll see exactly what I mean. But we always do this strategy and we also always pin the comment directly after the video posts. And this is going to dramatically increase your clickthrough rate because the truth is not everyone looks at the description, but almost everyone looks at the comments. And so there's a much higher chance they're going to see this and they're going to click it. Now, additionally, there's a good chance that people are actually going to comment on your pinned comment. So this is going to increase the engagement for your video. And then you can even respond to those comments and that'll increase the engagement even more and then they'll respond to you etc etc. So this can be extremely effective and it's probably going to increase the amount of people that click links on your video by a good 50%. Plus you commenting on your own video, believe it or not, does count as engagement. So you get engagement literally directly after the video posts. And this is actually something I've done for my clients from time to time where I'll actually just like share their channels and it can give a really good boost to a new channel. So, book a call in the description in the pin comment below if you want to become one of my clients. Now, this pin comment strategy is super effective. I've worked with a lot of channels that weren't doing this and they almost immediately boosted their revenue by simply doing this. Just as an example, one of my clients, Shawn, was stuck making about $10 to $30,000 a month. And after 9 months of working with me, we scaled him all the way up to over $500,000 a month. And by the way, if you don't want to work with me directly, I actually compiled thousands of hours of my coaching sessions as well as my content, put it all in one GPT, and then trained it to answer questions exactly the same way that I would. So, it's the closest you're going to get to being able to work directly with me. And you can check out that GPT by clicking the link in the description and the pin comment below. And there's actually three different GPTs. They focus on picking your niche, picking the right video idea, and properly monetizing your channel. Now, additionally, and this one is super important for SEO, so many people mess this up. What you want to do is you want to make the title of your video the file name. Okay, so right here, AI skills that employers are desperate for, no coding required. MP4. That is the file name, and it's also the title of my video. This helps tremendously when it comes to SEO. Now, in order for it to help, you do also have to make your titles SEOfriendly. So when you are making your titles, which again you can use AI to help you make the titles, make sure that you make the title somewhat SEOfriendly. So an example of an SEOfriendly title is right here, AI skills. Your main keyword, try to have it as close to the beginning of your title as possible. And you'll see that I do this almost every time. There are a few exceptions. Just because I really want to make a title that sounds really good, I'll put the main keyword a little bit further down. But usually the main keyword is either at the beginning or very close to the beginning of my title. And that's important. I want to rank for AI skills. But at the same time, I want my title to be attractive so that people actually click it because some people will actually just keyword stuff a bunch of SEO words in the title and that is not effective. So AI skills that employers are desperate for. No coding required, right? So I make it super attractive to click. But yeah, make the title your file name. Super super helpful tip. This tip alone has probably gotten me an extra, I don't know, 10 or 20 million views over the years. Okay, next tip is super important and that is watch your own video on your phone and also your TV. And this is right after you upload the video and it's both for watch time and also to see how the viewing experience is on both devices. The two most common devices for viewing experience right now in 2025 are number one, the TV. Yeah, literally more people are watching YouTube on their TV than any other device. And that changed early in 2025. It used to be phones. But number two is phones. So, it's still super important for it to look good on a phone as well. Now, you want to make sure that the viewing experience is good both on a big screen like a TV and also on a tiny screen like a phone. I've seen this a million times where people will, for instance, be showing something on their screen and they showed the whole screen to the point where when people view it on their phone, they can't even see the words, right? So, you'll notice in this video, I zoomed in on the things that actually mattered because I want people, even people that are watching it on their phone, to be able to see. Additionally, you might watch your video on a TV and you notice that like pimples are showing or your hair looks really bad. like you you wouldn't have noticed it if you just watched it on your phone, but when you watch it on TV, it becomes super obvious. So that's something that you can improve on in the future as well, right? So super important to do this and I recommend doing it right after the video goes live. Now, next tip is to deep link playlist versus regular links. So you will notice that a lot of the time at the end of my videos, I will tell people to watch another video. And that's something you should always be doing every single time. But a few things you can do to actually dramatically increase the amount of times that people watch one video and then end up watching a bunch of videos on your channel is one, put other videos in the description of your video that you think would be relevant and you think people would actually enjoy watching if they watch that video. And then two, when you link the videos at the end of your video in the cards or the end screen, link it to a playlist. Right? So don't just link it to another video. link it to a video that's embedded within a playlist. Now, don't just throw all of your videos into these playlists, right? So, just as an example, here is my Corsera certificate playlist. It's got about 63 videos. And if I was doing a Corsera certificate video and I wanted to recommend a different Corsera certificate. I would link to the playlist to the video, right? So, I would go to the playlist and let's just say I wanted to share the Google certificate tier list. I would go share right here and then I'd go copy and then I'd put that video in the end screen. Right? So it wouldn't just link to this. It would actually link to this and the entire uh Google Corsera certificate playlist. And this is going to make your videos get recommended way more. So for instance, people would be watching this Google Certificate tier list video and then a lot of these other videos would be popping up as suggested on the side because of the fact they're watching it in a playlist. And if for whatever reason they just left the video playing, it would literally just keep cycling all the way through all of these videos in your playlist. It would just keep playing through all the videos. And that sends a lot of super positive messages to the algorithm that your channel is high quality because people are binging your content. What's happening guys in the editing process of this video and I have an opportunity for a select group of people. So these are people who are serious about growing their personal brand on YouTube. So basically, we figured out recently how to grow a personal brand and combine all the upsides of a personal brand with the upsides of automation, right? Using AI, using things like this to basically grow your personal brand 10 times faster, which in the past used to take decades to do. And now you can do it significantly faster. And you can do this to get a better job. You know, we work with beginners that just want to get a better job with their personal brand. You can do this to make money as a side hustle. We work with a lot of people like that. We can do this to make more money. If you already have a side hustle or a small business or if you're already crushing it on YouTube, we can help you crush it 10 times more. We've worked with people like that as well. I mean, I literally can show clients at each level. People that we've gotten from zero to over 10K, zero to like over 30K, uh, from like 1K per month all the way up to 185K per month, from around 30K per month, all the way up to over 500K per month. So, literally at every single level, and it works for everyone in every situation. With that being said, we are only working with three to five people and they have to be people who are very serious, right? People who are dedicated to making this work. So, if you think you're that type of person, go ahead and apply down the description and the pin comment below and you can be part of our group of 35 that we help. So, see you there. Have a good one. Now, additionally, another thing I do on my channel is I enable all monetization options and I also add midroll ads every 90 to 120 seconds. Now, YouTube has been kind of messing around with this recently. Um, so actually what you see on your end might not even be the same as what I see on my end because sometimes I'll look in my client's YouTube studio and it actually looks different in their studio than what it looks in my studio. So, they've been kind of AB testing and messing around with this. But basically, you need to add a lot of ads to your videos and you should definitely enable all options including midroll ads. Now, the exception would be, let's just say you're doing like, I don't know, like a music video or something like that. you probably don't want to interrupt the music video with midroll ads, but just about every other type of content, you absolutely want to enable midroll ads. And you can either have it automatically do it or you can manually put the midroll ads every 90 to 120 seconds. Now, if you place the midroll ad and then it says for whatever reason there's like a little red check mark and it says don't do this, then you want to delete that midroll ad and try to place it somewhere else until there's no red check mark. But yeah, enabling all monetization options and also adding midroll ads is going to significantly boost your AdSense revenue. And this is going to be good for YouTube, right? Because they're going to make more money. And so when they make more money, they're going to promote your videos more. So this is actually a dirty little secret of the YouTube algorithm. And this is something I've actually talked about in other videos. If YouTube is making more money from your videos, they're going to be more likely to promote your videos more. And I've actually AB tested. I've literally split tested keywords that are very similar, but for some reason, companies pay more in cost per click for one keyword over another. And what do you know? The keyword that gets more money is the one that YouTube promotes more. So, just as an example, I split tested college degrees versus college majors years ago. And college degrees got way more views. Why? Because companies were running more ads to college degrees versus college majors, even though in the context of the video, it was the exact same thing, right? So, YouTube absolutely does send more traffic to videos that make more money. Duh. They're a big company and they want to make more money. Of course, they do that. So, yeah, enable monetization options because when YouTube makes more money from your videos, they're going to be more likely to show your videos to more people. It's just that simple. So, when you're uploading, just have all monetization options enabled and just put as many ads as you can. So, like I said before, I work with a bunch of different clients and I've helped them properly monetize their channel. I've helped them get way more views, pick the right niche, and just streamlined their content creation process so that their channel works for them and they don't have to work for their channel. Sean, for instance, was one channel that I completely overhauled and helped. He was spending way too much time, only able to post one video every 1 to two weeks, and he was stuck making $10 to $30,000 a month. And we scaled him all the way up to over $500,000 a month. And you can check out an interview in a case study I did with Sean where we broke down everything we did to scale his channel to that level by clicking right here.