28 youtube shorts hacks that feel illegal to know (how to optimise yt shorts to get views)

there are 28 YouTube shorts hacks that feel illegal to know hack number one one of the best ways to get more views on your shorts is to increase the amount of watch time each of your shorts gets and a sneaky way to do that is to try and loop your shorts in other words try to record the end of your short and the beginning of your short in a way that they transition seamlessly so instead of swiping down after watching your short your viewer might accidentally watch another half of your short which can result in

audience retention graphs that are actually over 100 and that's really really good for example do not touch want to lose all of your fingers possible thumbs and keep your thumb on the Suva it'd be smart to tell your friends do not touch a katana until you watch this video hack number three you might notice a lot of the big shorts out there all have captions or subtitles baked in and the reason they do this is it tends to increase watch time which as we talked about is a very very good thing promise adding captions takes

time and that's where this legendary little app comes into play Not only is this a super powerful editor that will actually let you edit your shorts on your phone but it's got a super neat and very accurate feature that'll allow you to add these subtitles automatically the next tip if you have a short that you're sure is extremely good quality and that you think should be getting a lot more views than it is something you can do to re-kick starter is actually delete it and then repost it a few weeks or months later often YouTube

will then retest the video and assuming you were just unlucky the first time around on the second upload you might go viral next tip try and leverage successful formats for example check out this channel look at the titles of all these different shorts three useful torbjorn techs three useful Cassidy texts three useful reinhardts three useful Soldier attacks see the pattern and when you've found something that works this is so much easier than trying to brainstorm and come up with new fresh shots every single time you create one this next one is super ninja so we

all know that on platforms like Tick Tock having trending music in your video can actually help you get more views but did you know the same can apply on YouTube and let me show you how basically on your YouTube homepage you can just click on the little Compass icon and go to trending in trending you want to then click on music and you'll see all the latest trending music and music videos tend to get more views than any other type of video on the platform now why should you as a short Square to care about

this well if you click into a music video say this one and you click on more to the description if you scroll down you can actually see that in the descriptions of music videos you can often see shorts that are remixing that video in other words if you use this music as background music in your short there's a chance you'll shop in the description of that official music video and that can lead to a crap ton of views especially if you're early all you have to do is navigate to the music video on your phone

then click on this remix button and then you want to click on use sound here follow the prompts that music will be in your background and again if you're early enough you'll shop in the description of the official music video and get a crap ton of views the next tip if you have a highly successful short use the SQL strategy you can literally reuse the exact same title and create a new short that is different from the original one but that would be accurately represented by that title now you've got to be careful repeating this

too frequently because your audience might get bored or YouTube might see you as spamming but as you can see with this channel for example it can work really well this next one's really interesting so when me and my students did a bunch of testing across a bunch of different shots we found that shorts that make people angry actually perform better than those that don't which makes sense because as we know I'm evoking emotion from your viewers generally helps your video to perform and anger is a pretty strong form of emotion however going out there and

just blatantly doing things that make people hate you might get you a bunch of views at least based on our testing but it's probably not a good thing to do however what you can do is if you have unpopular opinions that you think a lot of people might disagree with but that you truly believe in and the other people if you share your perspective might genuinely respect those types of videos for some reason and our testing do really well next tip respond to every single comment you get there are two reasons for this one when

you add a response that actually adds an additional comment to that short AKA if you get 10 comments and you respond to all 10 of them all of a sudden you're short now has 20 comments which is more engagement which is a good thing and secondly if you respond to a comment sometimes that commenter will come back to that video and respond to your response which is even more commenting engagement next tip for a short to do really well we've found that the topic that short is going to be created around needs to be trending

an easy way to get a rough idea of what's trending is to type in Google Trends and go to this website then enter a search term broadly related to your Niche let's say gaming change this drop down from your country to worldwide change from the past 12 months to the past seven days and then change web search to YouTube search and then if you scroll down here in related queries and related topics you'll see different breakout topics that are currently trending within this particular sphere now if you find something related to your Niche that you

think you could create a short about go for it next tip don't spoil your shorts in your title unless you're short is about something so outrageous that even if people knew what it was they would have to kind of see it to believe it try not to spoil your short in your title because then there's no reason for your viewers to actually watch your shot instead you could change this tile to something more like this that is highly related promise or value proposition of why they should watch this short but doesn't fully give away exactly

what it is and still requires them to actually watch the short next tip a bunch of YouTubers including Mr Beast did a huge amount of experimenting something they found is having a bright video intro performs better than and having a dark one and this is especially important in shorts where someone can move on to a new video with a simple flick of a finger so if the footage you're using at the beginning of your shorts is very dark and there's really no way around that very least to try and make it brighter or add brighter

elements to it maybe like text or if you do have full control over this just make sure your scene is realistic yet still light and bright next tip if you don't like the idea of using trending music in your videos from earlier you can find a ton of copyright free music to use in your videos using the YouTube audio library so in YouTube Studio go to YouTube audio library you'll find a crap ton of songs in here you can play them by clicking on this little icon to find out which ones you like when you

find one you like you can hover over it click on this download button that will give you the track which you can then use an editing program on your desktop and add that music to your short or you can send it to your mobile device and use an editing app like cap cut to add it to your short there next hack so you can actually optimize your shorts far more than you might expect based on the short upload process on mobile so once you create a short you can actually see go to your YouTube channel

on desktop find your short in the list of videos then if you hover over and click on this pencil icon it'll take you to the short and you can actually edit a bunch of things here firstly you can add a description and this is important because the algorithm actually looks at your description to help get an idea of what your shop might be about if you scroll down here to more advanced settings and for some of you there might be a button here that you have to click to access the advanced settings but if you

scroll down here there are a bunch of other things you can do as well for example you can add your short to a playlist you can add tags to your short for your long form videos adding tags doesn't really do much but I don't think there's been much testing on shorts as to whether or not it does much so I I mean given it's here I'd recommend you add your tags in there's no harm that could come of it if you scroll down here further to category you can actually click on this drop down here

and select what category your short fits into which again is going to give YouTube more information about your short so hopefully it can push it to the right people another thing is you can also add hashtags to shorts which means if someone goes to that hashtag and clicks on it that I'll actually see a list of all the shorts that have been tagged with that so if someone has that hashtag in their short and one of their viewers clicks on it and you also have that same hashtag in the description of your short your short

might show up here and have the chance to get more views it's a bit of a double-edged sword though and that leads to our next tip which is you want the benefit of being seen in the hashtag shelf so when viewers from other shorts or videos click on that hashtag your content shows up but you don't want your viewers clicking away from your videos and going to that shelf because then they might go and find other people's videos and you don't want that you want them on your videos so when you're adding hashtags add them

to the very bottom of your description so it's as unlikely as possible that your viewers will actually click on those hashtags speaking of adding hashtags I've seen a lot of people throw out these random numbers like oh you can only add three hashtags to your shots oh you can only add 15 hashtags if we actually look at what YouTube have to say about this they say if a video or playlist has more than 60 hashtags they'll ignore each hashtag on that content and over tagging may result in the removal of the video or from uploads

or search now I've been testing adding 59 hashtags to a bunch of shorts and videos and as long as those hashtags are very related to the video topic it doesn't seem to be classified as overtagging because I haven't had any issues with content being removed or not showing up in search so at least at this stage in my mind there's no reason why not to do that next you can actually schedule your shorts instead of posting them right away so when you're creating a short on your phone instead of uploading it as public upload it

as unlisted then you can come to YouTube Studio go to the content tab again and in this little drop down you can change it from unlisted to scheduled and then you can pick the time and date that you want your short to actually go live what time and date should you be uploading your shorts well that's the next hack in YouTube Studio come down to this tab go to analytics then go to audience then scroll down until you see this little bar here and basically the lighter purple these bars are the more of your viewers

are online so for me for example in this case I can to the Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday are quite good times for me because at all these times I have one two three four five bars at the lightest color purple and I can also see the times my viewers are most active are usually between 2 am and 6 a.m my time and so if I'm uploading shorts I'm probably going to want to schedule them to go live at about 1am so by the time the majority of my viewers come online my shirt is

up there and there's there's a chance it'll be served to them next tip another really useful thing you can do here in YouTube studio is again if you go to your short and then hover over it and click on this analytics icon and then come across to reach and scroll down you'll see this little graph here and this will actually show you where it is your shorts are getting their views from so ironically this short is actually not getting the majority of its views from the YouTube shorts feed it's getting the majority of its views

from browse features you can see here 45 and something you might find is your shorts might not be getting views from the shorts feed either they might be getting views from Channel Pages browse or even search and if you see a lot of your shorts getting views from a search another interesting thing you can do is come down even further on the right hand side here you can actually see what Search terms your viewers are entering into YouTube before they click on your short so for example in this case I might want to create a

drinking the m m potion at 3am short because 2.2 percent of my viewers search that in before clicking on my short but if you are getting the majority of your views from your shorts from YouTube search and you find any interesting Search terms in here you might want to create individual shorts for those Search terms now in the case of this particular shot I'm viewing you can see that it got 45 percent of its views from browse meaning that people actually had to click on this shot before they viewed it unlike it on your YouTube

short showing up in the short shelf where they just scroll straight directly to it and so it can be beneficial to add a custom thumbnail to your short to maximize your click-through rate as much as possible and the way you can do that is Again by going to your studio clicking on the pencil icon and scroll down here and normally in this section here you'll see a little option that'll allow you to click on and upload a thumbnail to your short unfortunately I can't do this for this particular shot because I've already uploaded a thumbnail

apparently but you guys probably won't have that issue the next shorts hack requires us to go back to the analytics of an individual short you're going to stay on overview scroll all the way down to the bottom and here you'll see a graph that represents how long your viewers are watching for and when they click off come in here figure out what points in the video your viewers are clicking off the short try to work out why it is that point triggering them to click off the short and then just don't do that thing for

future shorts the way you see where viewers are cleaning off your short by using this graph is to look for dips and declines in the graph for example if I had a graph that looked like this I'd probably want to figure out what happened at this point and not do that again because as you can see it caused me to lose a bunch of viewers next tip though is you might not want to do all of this stuff we just talked about from your desktop maybe you create edit and upload everything directly on your phone

and the cool thing is now you can actually access a lot of these more advanced features I just talked about on your phone all you have to do is Click over here and go to your library assuming you're signed in then click on your videos that'll take you to your videos and then to get a lot of the options we've just been over you can click on these three dots and you can click on edit you can see that let's just open up our description add things to playlists add tags and a bunch of that

good stuff the next tip because shots are so easy to upload there are a crap ton of people creating them and because they're a crap ton of people creating them stay standing out and being unique is an even bigger Factor if you want your shorts to go viral and so having some sort of X Factor something specific that people can recognize and remember you by can be of great importance next tip you should research other short form content platforms to get ideas for what styles and formats are working scroll through Tick Tock scroll through Instagram

reels figure out what kinds of videos what styles of titles what types of intros are working for those guys and then you can often take those principles apply them to your own shorts with your own kind of Spin and that often does way better than trying to guess at what your audience might want next next hack earlier we talked about how important retaining your viewers and maximizing your watch time is if you want your short to be promoted by YouTube and one of the most simple things you can do to improve your attention is to

make your short more stimulating by adding more patent interrupts in other words changing up the scene or introducing new elements or cutting to a new piece of footage frequently now many of the best shorts on the platforms introduce some sort of pattern interrupt every two to three seconds assuming of course you haven't just got one piece of footage that is incredibly engaging on its own but as a rough rule of thumb if nothing new has kind of happened visually in your shot for at least seven seconds that's a problem next hack so a lot of

you guys want to repurpose your existing videos into YouTube shorts the problem with this is that having an engaging intro and hook is incredibly important for a short and if you're just taking a segment out of the middle of your video and repurposing it as a short chances are the intro to that segment doesn't really grab people like a hook shirt so a sneaky way to get around that is to just record a very short hook kind of summarizing your short and kind of grabbing viewers and then just add it on to the beginning of

your repurposed clip if you're really lazy I've even seen creators use an AI voice to intro the beginning of their repurpose clip for example my first wall bang lineup on the new valorant map lastly some of you guys are creating YouTube shorts content not because you want to become shorts creators but because you want to promote your long-form content so if we don't take into account the amount of time it would take to create this content and we just look objectively at what is the best type of content to create to promote your long form

content and how do you do it basically what you want to do is whatever your long form content is condense it down into a video that is less than 60 seconds and that might sound hard but basically you're just creating a mini version or a highlights reel of your video and posting it as a short and then at the end of that short you can have a little call to action telling people to check out the link in the comments if they want to see the full video then you want to add a comment with

a link to the full video to your short and pin it so it's the first thing people see when they click on the comments section but if you want to learn more ways to convert shorts viewers into long form viewers check out the video on screen in I talked to a guy who's done a ton of experimenting with this and has a shorts promotion method that has allowed him to turn long form pieces of content that were 10 out of 10s into one out of tens in just a few days check it out