10 things you should NEVER do after uploading a YouTube video

What I'm about to teach you in this video, you can't learn anywhere else. If you look this stuff up on YouTube or ChatGpt, it's going to give you the wrong answers. In fact, that's exactly why I made this video. And by the way, guys, this is coming from someone who actually has successful YouTube channels. For instance, my main channel has made over $1.5 million in revenue, and that's just from AdSense alone. Right? So, I'm not one of those YouTube gurus that teaches YouTube, and that's all they do. They've never actually had a successful channel outside of teaching people how to make a successful channel, which is like 95% of the gurus. You see, my brother who just started on YouTube watched some of these videos on what you should do right after uploading a video. And one of them said that you should mark player for education. So, you should say yes to player for education. And that is terrible advice for 99% of channels. But unfortunately, my brother Mark Yes. and his AdSense immediately went down. Why? Because Player for Education is only for educational content that's designed to be shown in the classroom. And so therefore, it has a lot less ads than normal content. And so when you enable player for education, your AdSense money is going to be significantly less. And that's actually the first thing that you should absolutely never do after uploading a video is enable player for education unless you're a channel that's literally designed to be shown in the classroom. But this is the kind of thing where if you ask AI or maybe just ask somebody who doesn't know a lot about YouTube, aka most of the people who make YouTube content, unfortunately, they might actually tell you that you should do it. And that would be terrible advice that would tank the views and the AdSense money that you would get from your channel. Now, the second thing that I've seen my clients do all the time that's a huge mistake is marking your content as made for kids or marking it as not sure. You see, when you upload a YouTube video, you have three different options. made for kids, not made for kids, and not sure. So, you absolutely should mark not made for kids unless your content is specifically made for kids, like Blippy, Coco Melon, or Miss Rachel, those channels are specifically made for kids. But if YouTube sees that you marked your content made for kids and there's anything even remotely controversial in your content, there's a good chance that your channel is going to get nuked. So, under no circumstances should you mark made for kids or even not sure because YouTube cannot risk another ad apocalypse. And they will eliminate your channel without thinking twice. Or they might just shadowban you, which is arguably worse. Quick break. If you're struggling to grow your YouTube channel, you're spending a lot of time making videos and it feels like your hard work isn't going anywhere. I actually have a free live workshop this Tuesday at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time via Zoom. You can check this out down in the description and the pin comment below. And during this live workshop, I myself will be going over how you can grow your YouTube channel while spending less time working on your videos. You'll get to meet me and you get to ask me questions directly. And it's completely free. And this is the only time we'll be going over these YouTube secrets just during this live training. So, you won't be able to get this anywhere else. And it's a one-time event. And for this one time only, I will be giving away my viral idea generator GPT for free at the workshop. Now, this is trained on thousands of hours of my own video, me working with clients, my course, my philosophy, and I actually charge my corporate clients thousands of dollars for this software. And honestly, I can't believe I'm giving this away for free because my most popular video that got 5 million views is actually an AI generated idea. So, if that sounds interesting to you, sign up for the live workshop down in the description and the pin comment below, and you'll learn exactly how to do this. Look forward to seeing you there. All right, the next one, and this is advice I hear all the time from so-called YouTube gurus, and it's terrible advice, and that is doing thumbnail AB tests below like 30 to 100,000 subscribers. This is the dumbest thing you could possibly do if you're a small YouTuber. So, if you didn't know, YouTube has this function and various different YouTube tools like TubeBuddy also have this function where you can AB test the thumbnails, meaning you can have two different thumbnails and you can basically make them compete against each other to see which one gets the most clicks. Now, this is something where you need a massive amount of impressions if you want your data to be statistically significant. And the only way you're going to get tons of impressions is if you actually get a video that takes off and your channel starts to get a lot of views. So, if you do an AB test on a brand new channel, chances are that first video you upload, when you put the two thumbnails against each other, it's not going to get enough impressions for literally months. And the truth is that is optimization. There's a difference between what you do when you first start on YouTube versus what you do when you're actually getting traction on YouTube. Those two things are completely different, right? When you're first starting on YouTube, you need to figure out what your niche is. You need to figure out what your format is, right? Right? You're going to make how-to videos, listicicals, case studies, etc. You also need to figure out what video ideas resonate with your audience. And that is a whole process. And I call this the evolution method, where you basically just test out a bunch of different things to see what works for you and your channel. But if you start spending a bunch of time AB testing thumbnails, that's going to take away from what actually matters, which is consistently uploading videos and testing out different ideas for your channel. Like I cannot stress how bad of an idea AB testing thumbnails when you first start your channel is. Like it it is going to be the death of your channel. That is the kind of thing that does not matter when you first start. The only time you should even consider AB testing thumbnails is when you're above like 30 to 100k subscribers. Like when you first start on YouTube, you should just be trying out a bunch of different types of content, a bunch of different ideas, sometimes even in different niches, and then just seeing what sticks, seeing what works for you, your audience, and what you can actually monetize as well. So, do not waste your time AB testing thumbnails. Okay. Next one that you should never do is sharing your video with family and friends. Never do this unless your family and friends just happen to be similar to your target demographic, right? So, if you share your video with family and friends, it's going to show your video to more people that are like your family and friends. And unless your family and friends is literally the exact target demographic of the type of person that you want to attract, then it's not going to turn out well because you're going to attract a bunch of people to your content that aren't actually interested in your content. That is going to send a signal to the YouTube algorithm that your content is lowquality and then therefore they're not going to promote your content. And on that same note, don't buy fake views. Don't buy fake subscribers. You know, no matter how real the service tries to make it seem like they'll always say, "Oh, these are real views, real subscribers." Yeah, maybe they are even. If they are actually real, which 99% of the time they aren't, they're probably just being paid to be interested in your content. And again, because of that, YouTube is going to show that content to similar people, which is probably going to be like someone who lives in India or something. And chances are that's not going to be your target demographic. So do not do this guys. The next one is don't publish right away. So either put the videos on unlisted or private. And this is so that the YouTube algorithm has time to process the video and make sure that it's not spam or scammy or stuff like that. And this is especially important when you are uploading from a newer channel, right? Because if you think about it, there's literally like AI programs out there that can just mass upload spammy content onto YouTube. And so, of course, YouTube does not trust smaller or newer channels as much as they trust older, more wellestablished channels. And so, they're going to have AI and their systems crawl or read the content to make sure that it isn't spammy or scammy. And it usually takes approximately 24 to 48 hours to do that with a brand new channel. So once YouTube determines that you actually uploaded a highquality video that isn't AI slop, it's going to be much more likely to recommend your content. All right, the sixth thing to never do is to delete a video. Never ever under any circumstances delete a video. And I'm going to show you exactly why. This video right here ended up getting 1.6 million views. And in the first day, let's let's look at like the first day, it's like it got 25 views. second day or four days in, 500 views. 13 days in, 597 views. It was totally dead. Even let's see, 171 days in, only 4,800 views. But then look what happened. Like half a year in, it hockey stickked. It started getting views like crazy and it grew to over a million views and it's still getting views to this day. So never ever delete videos, right? I've seen people do this so many times. This absolutely blows my mind. I've seen so many of my clients do this where they'll upload a video, it doesn't do that well, they get embarrassed, and they decided to delete it. Okay, I could show you example after example after example from my channel and my client's channels of videos that didn't do that well right off the bat that ended up doing really well down the line. So, never ever delete a video, especially if it doesn't do that well right off the bat. So, here are some examples. I'm just going to pop these thumbnails on the screen of videos that didn't do all that well when I first uploaded them that ended up doing insanely well later on down the line. So, yeah, I've seen gurus actually give this advice before. You know, oh, if the video doesn't do that well when you first upload it, delete it. Terrible advice. All right, the next thing you should never do is manually deleting comments or even arguing with comments. It's a complete waste of time. So, instead, let the comment section fight with each other. I've had people that are like, "Hey, I don't like it when people leave rude comments on my videos. It makes me look bad. It's bad for my brand." Well, the thing is is if you just leave those comments alone, the comments, like other people, especially if you're actually making good content, other people are going to start arguing with the people who leave negative comments. I've seen this time and time again. And what does that do? It increases your engagement on your video. And what does that do? Sends signals to the algorithm that you have a highquality video. Right? So, some of my most popular videos. For instance, the most useless degrees is one of the most popular videos on my channel. That video was super controversial. There were so many people that left super nasty comments about me in the comment section. And then what happened? Other people defended me and they started kind of like arguing and debating each other. And what did that do? It boosted the video like crazy and I got millions and millions of views. So, most of the time it's really a massive waste of time to delete comments in the first place. But if you are going to kind of police your comment section, what you should really do is just do it automatically. So basically what you do is you'd go to settings and then you'd go to upload defaults and then you'd go to advanced settings. Then you scroll down to the bottom and you basically just say moderation basic. So that is going to delete super nasty comments automatically. But comments that are just, you know, a little bit negative, it's going to keep those on. And then you can also go to the community moderation tab, scroll to the bottom, and you can add blocked words. So, I don't personally do this. Like I said, I don't really care that much if people comment, but you can add words like, you know, that are very inflammatory like scammer or something like that. People like accusing you uh of scamming or whatever with absolutely no evidence. Again, I don't really care that much. I let people comment whatever. If someone is super aggressive, sometimes we'll like hide them or whatever. But yeah, if you really want to, you can uh put some blocked words there. I'll even have a list of blocked words pop up on the screen and you can just like literally copy and paste those if you'd like. So yeah, it's really just a total waste of time to delete comments. I mean, it's good for you, right? Engagement is good and a lot of the time the more controversial a video is, the better it does, you know, within reason. You don't want to get actually banned from the platform, but generally speaking, like controversial videos that get people to kind of argue with each other in the comment section is a good thing. And if people disagree with you and it prompts them to argue in the comment section, that is a good thing. Why would you delete it? All right. Next thing is to not watch your own video. Watch it and watch it on two different screens. You want to watch it on a tiny screen and a huge screen. You want to watch it on your phone because that's the second most viewed medium. And you also want to watch it on your TV because as of Q1 2025, that is the most viewed medium for YouTube, right? So, you want to watch it really small and really big. And I cannot tell you how many people mess up on this. Sometimes my own editors mess up on this and I have to remind them like if people are watching it on their phone, you need to make sure that you zoom in enough to where people can read everything and they can clearly see everything on the screen. But at the same time, you also want to make it look really good on a TV. Just as an example, I remember I was watching a particular content creator on a TV for the first time and I was watching it at my brother's house and my brother's wife made the comment that his hair looks really greasy. Now, this content creator, I'd never noticed that because before I would just watch him on the phone and, you know, you couldn't really notice his hair, right? It's just like it's he's really small on the phone, but I did notice that when you were watching it on the TV, his hair actually did look kind of greasy, right? And so, this is a content creator that, you know, it's not a huge deal, but little stuff like that, you can really improve your content just by watching it on your phone, watching it on the TV, and you'll see why it looks good in both of those different places. And you want to make it look good in both of those different places. And then the next thing you don't want to do is worry about the time that you upload all that much. Just upload at a consistent time and pick a time that's convenient for you. Okay? That's the most important thing. Upload at a consistent time. So if you want to upload at 3 p.m., just always upload your videos at 3 p.m. because people will come to expect you to upload around that time. And then also just upload at a time that's convenient for you. So if it's convenient for you to upload in the morning, upload in the morning. If it's convenient for you to upload at night, then upload at night. Now, there's a few types of channels where there are exceptions. For instance, if you are doing a news style channel, you pretty much want to upload right away, right? You don't want to wait until like the next day in the morning to upload your content because it's news. It's happening right now. People want to know about it right away. But generally speaking, don't worry too much about this. Just upload consistently at the same time and on the same days. Now, the next thing is don't add too many affiliate links or links in general initially because YouTube will flag this, right? If you add too many links to your description, YouTube is going to think it's too sketchy. It's going to think that you're sending too many people off of the platform. And in some cases, it actually crawls the links and reads them. And if it thinks a website that you're, you know, promoting with your links is a little bit sketchy, then it might actually shadowban you or might send you less traffic, etc., etc. So, don't mess around with this too much. A safe option is to just have one link in every video. Again, especially when you first start. Now, once you have a big channel, it doesn't matter nearly as much, but when you first start, just have one link in every video. And by the way, by having one link, you're actually going to get more people to click that one link. So, just have one link in every video. Maybe tell people to get on your email list, like some sort of lead magnet or tell people to like book a call with you or send them straight to your landing page so they can buy your product. And the next thing is never use identical descriptions unless it's a legal disclaimer at the bottom. So, you'll notice that I have a legal disclaimer at the bottom of my description in every single video and it is identical. However, if I write stuff in my videos, it's going to be different for every single video. I'm not just going to write the same thing for every video. I'm going to talk about the video itself. And it's really easy to do this. You can literally just get AI to do it. For instance, you could just upload the transcript of your video and then get AI to summarize that transcript in an SEOfriendly way. And that'll be a great way to get extra views over time. Now, by the way, remember my client Shawn, who I helped scale from $10 to $30,000 a month all the way up to over $500,000 a month. Well, he was actually making a few of the mistakes in this video. And you would be surprised how many people make these mistakes and it really holds them back from getting success. So, if you want us to look at your channel and actually do a strategy call telling you what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong, making a plan to actually get to the place that you want to be and figuring out if we're a good fit to work together, then go ahead and book that call down below. Don't waste years of time trying to figure it out on your own. Just book a call and talk to actual experts. And if you want to check out a case study video that I did breaking down exactly how we were able to get Shawn his incredible results, then you can check that out by clicking right here.