Tags are descriptive keywords that help YouTube to understand, rank, and position your videos. They also help people to find your content and broaden your reach. For example, your video could appear in the “Up next” section because of its tag metadata.

YouTube limits tags to roughly 400 to 500 characters including spaces (it’s 500 on Creator Studio Classic). Most creators keep adding terms until they see a notification that reads, “Your tags exceed the allowed character count.” When you exceed the limit, you won’t be able to save your edits until you reduce your character count.

Many YouTubers understand the importance of appearing on the first page of search results. Page-one click-through rates (CTRs) are higher than any other page (many people don’t navigate past page-one for search results. Do you?). Naturally, being on the first page increases a video’s visibility and discoverability.

To consistently rank high in search results requires an understanding of video and search engine optimization techniques. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of influencing the online visibility of a website or web page in a search engine’s unpaid results, which is also referred to as “natural,” “organic,” and “earned” results. At a high level, YouTube SEO is divided into two parts, i.e., pre and post publishing factors.

Promoting your videos on Facebook could very well be worthwhile, and you’ll be able to track your results with Google Analytics (GA). Google Analytics is a free web service that provides statistics for website management and performance. If you’re new to Google Analytics, I recommend taking Google’s official course for beginners. I use Google Analytics daily to review my website’s performance. I find the mobile app to be more user-friendly than the web app, but both are useful.

Google Analytics tracks many data points including traffic source, user location, device, language, browser, time on page, and more. Regarding traffic sources, GA monitors six channels, i.e., organic, direct, referral, social, email, and paid. For instance, if someone clicks through to your video from Facebook, GA will attribute the visit to social. Learn more about traffic sources.

How a person makes money on YouTube depends if he or she is a “YouTuber” or a casual user of the platform. YouTubers are highly active on YouTube and typically produce and appear in their videos. Also, they dedicate most of their working hours to creating and promoting their content. Casual users, like me, upload videos periodically. For example, I upload videos once or twice monthly (to grow my online brand, reach a different audience and drive traffic to my website). Also, YouTube is not their primary focus or source of income.

YouTubers take different approaches to monetize their channels and videos. To monetize your content, you must own all the necessary rights to commercially use all visuals and audio elements, whether they belong to you or someone else.