Even if a viewer on YouTube stays until the very end of your video, one of the biggest concerns is that they’ll be whisked away to a competitor’s channel by one of the related video thumbnails that pop up at the end of videos or that appear along the right hand side of the page.

Today, we’re going to look at a couple of different ways of combatting that with the help of Brandon Lucero, who has come up with the “Stay With Me Technique.”

Part 1: Beating YouTube to the Punch

When you add your own thumbnails to the end of your video, it supersedes YouTube’s thumbnails and can help keep customers clicking on your videos instead of other business’ videos.

Step 1: Add Several Seconds to the End of Your Video  

Add at least 20 seconds to the end of your video after you’ve given your call to actions to the viewer and give it either a black background or some other type of relevant background. Some people give their videos up to an extra minute, but 20 to 30 seconds is probably best.

Step 2: Add Thumbnails of Your Other Videos Onto the Background

Put thumbnails of your other YouTube videos on the background. If you don’t yet have four thumbnails, you can put your calls to action (subscribe, like, purchase) in some of the squares.

Step 3: Annotate and Link the Thumbnails

Export your video, upload it to YouTube and then add annotations to the thumbnails (little descriptions of them) and link them to the videos they represent. Make sure to set the links to open the videos in the current page rather than a new page.

By adding your own thumbnails, you’re “beating YouTube to the punch” when it comes to recommending videos to viewers by showing them yours before they see any of YouTube’s recommended videos (which might include your competitors). Note that once the video is done playing, YouTube’s recommended video thumbnails will still show up afterward. You’re just trying to get people to click on one of your other videos before it gets to the end. 

Obviously, this only works if you have more than one video, so if you’re just getting started or you currently only have a single video on YouTube, get creating more content!

Part 2: Use Your Channel to Your Advantage

The second part to the Stay With Me Technique is to effectively tag your videos to keep all of them grouped together nicely and showing up on the right side of the screen when people are watching your videos.

Step 1: Tag Your Videos Correctly

While you’re uploading your video to YouTube, you have the opportunity to give it any relevant tags. You should obviously use any descriptive tag you can think of that relates to the content and any geographical tags if relevant.

Step 2: Make Your Channel Name a Tag

But, you should also tag your video with the name of your own YouTube channel. None of your competitors are likely to be using your channel name as a tag, so it will almost certainly be exclusive to you. YouTube will see that all of your videos share this one common tag and no other videos have it, so it will conclude that all your videos must be related to each other and cause them to show up the related video feed to the right of the screen.

If you’re making videos for a particular region, use the town/city name, the county name, the zip code, any descriptors for what the video is about and your YouTube channel name.

(If you wanna be sneaky, use your competitors’ YouTube channel names as tags for your video.)

While these are all fabulous suggestions, the first rule of video marketing is always to have stellar content. Fortunately, you’re in the right place for that. Click here to use our price estimation calculator to see approximately how much a killer animated explainer video from WizMotions will cost. (You don’t even need to talk to anyone!)