According to this report over 58% of viewers find your videos via YouTube search and related videos. 

Most people don’t have a content problem on YouTube, it’s easy nowadays to create videos for YouTube.

The most common problem is having a distribution problem wherein your YouTube channel and videos are not getting enough views and subscribers.

So the immediate question here is how can you get more views and traffic via YouTube search and related videos?

VidIQ has tons of analytics and listening tools like the channel audit tool that allows you to manage vital info in one place. It has the ability to manage multiple channels (so you can easily switch on other channels that you may or may not own – client channels).

You can start optimizing your tags in as little as 10 minutes. And the Video Boost feature helps you find the most relevant keywords with EASE.

Watch this VidIQ tutorial

But before I share all the goodies behind vidIQ, why is it even important to start optimizing your YouTube channel and videos?

If you’d like to learn the secrets and strategies behind YouTube’s growth algorithm, then please continue reading…

Is YouTube important for increasing sales and conversions?

According to vidIQ, 61% of Gen C have taken action after watching ads for a product or service on YouTube. 

That’s HUGE! 6 out of 10 visitors who watched your YouTube video or ads would most likely convert (take action).

So let’s quickly talk about this video marketing tool, vidIQ. I’ve tried to search more information about the history and founders of this tool and this is what I’ve found.

Who is the founder of VidIQ?

VidIQ was founded by Rob Sandie and Todd Troxell, the folks behind viddler. Just like many tech startups, they moved to the Bay Area (San Francisco) to build their company and online business. 

They were initially focused on distribution of videos in different devices, but then transitioned to vidIQ which provides a layer of analytics, listening tools to help content creators and YouTubers understand how they can get more views and build their following on YouTube.

What is VidIQ?

VidIQ bridges the gap and the missing link behind a successful YouTube brand with its smart tools, YouTube SEO features, and channel management options. 

Here’s interesting news about vidIQ and how it’s trying to solve the distribution problem we are facing today. 

VidIQ was able to raise $800,000+ from a serial funding from investors including Mark Cuban (read more about it here) which makes it one of the investor-backed startup media companies back in 2013. 

Now let’s dive right in and learn more about the PROS and CONS of vidIQ.

Make sure to also watch my vidIQ video tutorial to view an actual demo on how I’m using this YouTube SEO tool.

Pros or Advantages of using vidIQ

• Has access to FREE Chrome and Firefox Extension
• Helps Discover Trending and Viral Videos
• Have a Competitive Advantage Over Your Competitors
• Grow Your Organic Reach
• Manage Your YouTube Channel with Ease
• Build Brand Awareness and Improve Recall

Pros #1 – Free Chrome and Firefox extension.

VidiQ and Tubebuddy (both video marketing tools) have FREE browser extensions (in Chrome and Firefox) that you can install without paying for anything.

While the FREE Browser extensions would allow you to test some features of vidIQ, it’s limited in terms of the best functionality available for growing your YouTube channel.

Still, there’s no harm in installing it and trying it for free. When you see the value of it and if you’re ready. to upgrade, you can do that in just a few clicks. 

Check out the pricing page here and find the best deals on vidIQ. Will talk more about the pricing plans and options available below.

You might be wondering if you can use Tube buddy and vidIQ at the same time? The short answer is YES, but some features will not work. For example, when I enabled vidIQ browser extensions, the tags from Tube buddy stopped working. 

Pick two browser instances with different accounts if you want to use Tube buddy and vidIQ at the same computer. You can easily do this by creating a NEW user on Google Chrome.

PRO #2 – Helps Discover Trending and Viral Videos

As I’ve mentioned above, almost half of traffic to your YouTube videos would be coming from YouTube search or related videos. 

Finding out which videos and topics are trending will help you identify what type of content to create next. Model from what’s already working and you’ll eliminate a lot of guesswork. 

There is a trending feature that allows you briefly to check the latest trends. 

Understanding what the trends are what the market demands would help you create content and videos that people are more likely to respond to.

PRO #3 – Huge advantage over other competitors

YouTube stats and analytics are limited and will usually not give you the best metrics that matters.With vidIQ, you can reveal metrics that matter the most like Engagements, Twitter, Brand mentions, what is the best time to upload on YouTube, competitor audits and more.

PRO #4 – Monitor your vidIQ store

The vidIQ Score can help judge the likeliness that your video would be promoted on search, relevant videos and more!

PRO #5 – Grow Your Organic Reach

When you start using vidIQ, it will help you optimize your Video.

PRO #6 – Build brand awareness and boost recall

Advertising can’t buy you love the path from Paid to Earned and Owned begins here. Build a loyal following of fans, drive word of mouth, partner with influencers, and maximize brand affinity with organic audience development.

PRO #7 – Understand Video Analytics

Have you ever tried at looking or even trying to find what the YouTube analytics mean and you’re more confused than ever before?

With the vidIQ Video Analytics and Stats, checking your video content stats is as easy as opening up a dashboard. 

It shows you the most important YouTube stats that you want. VidIQ has a scorecard that is split into 5 categories: Overview of your videos, social engagements, SEO, Video Analytics and Tags.

The goal of vidIQ is to help you make the right decisions like what are the top trending videos in your niche, what tags you should be using, and how users are interacting with your videos. 

PRO #8 – Embed Video (nature)

Would you like to know if there are sites and blogs that embeds your videos and drive traffic to your YouTube videos? vidIQ analytics provides for a way to help you measure that. 

For my own metrics, I’ve noticed that my own domain and blog has the highest number of embedded videos. That makes total sense because I want my videos to be shown on my own blog so that more people can view and watch it.

PRO #9 – Thumbnail Editor

Do you want to know what are some ways to generate a higher CTR on your YouTube videos? You’ll want to use a catchy and eye-popping call to action.

That’s where the vidIQ thumbnail editor comes in. You can quickly and easily create your own YouTube thumbnails with ease. No need for Adobe Photoshop or other graphic editing tools to make one for you.

Cons or Disadvantages of using vidIQ

• Can be quite confusing at first
• No training on Youtube video creation or other tutorials
• Can be expensive

How To Do Video Marketing

If you’re not doing any type of video marketing to grow your online business, you’re probably missing out on free traffic and ways to build trust with your readers.

VidIQ makes video marketing simple and free. Yes, there’s a Free plan for newbies. It’s limited, but you can still do tag management, inline keywords and more (check out some features available here)

Managing and growing your YouTube channel can be time-consuming and confusing. But YouTube Video Content optimization with vidIQ is as simple as following the suggestions from the vidIQ browser extension.

Here’s one example of how to do video marketing with vidIQ. First is to search for your targeted keyword using the search box inside YouTube or by using the Keyword Tool in vidIQ.

The Keyword Tool is an awesome tool to find stats and related keywords to your targeted term. Take note of the search volume, daily views, views per hour (VPH) as well as the competition level. 

There are only a few video marketing tools like vidIQ that provides the level of Data analysis for YouTube creators. These set of features are not available in Creator Studio. 

Some vidIQ features like tagging, keyword research, etc are available in tools like Tube Buddy (you can check out my Tube Buddy review here).

Is vidIQ essential to growing your YouTube channel? I’d like to think of it this way. Does a carpenter need a hammer to complete his work? Yes. That’s how I view vidIQ or Tube Buddy, it’s essential to growing a YouTube channel faster and easier.

How To Do Find Popular Videos Within Your Niche

Have you ever tried finding the most popular videos in your niche? If you’ve tried doing it using YouTube’s regular search, then you most likely miss on a lot of popular videos.

Because vidIQ uses filters and data that can be segmented in many ways, you can dial in to specific niches and even specific channels or strength of that channel.

If you only want to find popular videos from channels that have 0–1000 subscribers, you can do that with vidIQ. I’m not even sure if you can do that search on the default YouTube search box.

You might be wondering what you should be doing next with the popular videos that you find? The main idea here is to create something similar and better than these popular videos. 

When you piggyback from these popular videos, you’ll have more chances of showing up on related searches (when you’ve tagged your videos properly). 

Once you’ve identified these popular videos, check each video and check out the tags they use. Use these tags to optimize your own videos properly.

VidIQ can also suggest related tags in various languages so that your videos could be optimized for international campaigns as well. 

You can easily sort the different columns so you could dial in what you are looking for.

How To Grow Your Audience On YouTube

YouTube has grown exponentially these past few months, and there’s no denying that the pandemic has probably been a huge factor for that. 

That’s a good opportunity because there’re tons of ways that people can now get started with growing their YouTube audience. 

If you want to know if you’ve chosen a niche and industry that is worth going after, you should at least find 5 competitors that are doing well on YouTube. If it’s less than 5 then that industry or niche might be too small or it hasn’t been discovered yet (very seldom).

Also look for competitors with great YouTube views to subscribers ratio. If they have YouTube videos that has 100,000 views but only 5,000 subscribers then they have a 20x YouTube views to ratio. The higher the better it is for gauging the quality of a particular YouTube channel.

Video Optimization

One of the biggest problems faced by media companies is its inability to optimize videos for digital. They’ve been a powerhouse in traditional forms of advertising but with the new digital age, they’ll have to look at other methods. One of these methods is using YouTube optimization tools like vidIQ.

VidIQ has a scorecard which is actually a video optimization checklist that identifies what actions have been taken by user, like what cards and end screens are available. 

If you want to get quick insights and important stats about your own videos and your competitor’s videos, the Scorecard is a powerful tool. 

What’s powerful about this tool is that you can also get an overall score based on different information about your subscribers, your videos, etc. You can also see social engagements within your vidIQ account, found about the tags that are used (both for your own videos and for competitor videos). 

Finally, you’ll be able to improve your score and look at historical data as well.

Actionable Tips and various Valuable Tactics

One of the biggest problems faced by media companies is its inability to optimize videos for digital. They’ve been a powerhouse in traditional forms of advertising but with the new digital age, they’ll have to look at other methods. One of these methods is using YouTube optimization tools like vidIQ.

VidIQ has a scorecard which is actually a video optimization checklist that identifies what actions have been taken by user, like what cards and end screens are available. 

If you want to get quick insights and important stats about your own videos and your competitor’s videos, the Scorecard is a powerful tool. 

What’s powerful about this tool is that you can also get an overall score based on different information about your subscribers, your videos, etc. You can also see social engagements within your vidIQ account, found about the tags that are used (both for your own videos and for competitor videos). 

Finally, you’ll be able to improve your score and look at historical data as well.

In this article, I’ll also share some actionable tips that you can implement right away when you start using vidIQ. 

If you’re looking for more training and tutorials on vidIQ, make sure you’ve subscribed to my YouTube channel. VidIQ has also provided wonderful training courses to help grow your YouTube channel. They contain real-life examples that came from the experiences of vidIQ experts.

For beginner’s, this is a valuable piece of information and tool that can help alleviate your chances to grow your YouTube channel faster than ever before.

For advanced marketers, you’ll be able to identify areas that you might have missed and take advantages of the insights that your competitors are using to grow their channels.

Here’s one actionable tip right now using vidIQ. Check the VPH or views per hour of the top, trending videos in your niche and competitors.

Create a video that is similar to that video. Don’t copy, but format your title, description and even your content to similarly talk about the same video that is getting lots of views per hour.

When you’ve done it correctly, the YouTube algorithm will start ranking you to the top of the YouTube results or start showing your videos as relevant videos on the search sidebar.

How To Get More Views and Subscribers on Youtube

vidIQ helps you acquire the tools and knowledge needed to grow your audience faster on YouTube and beyond. Learn More

In this article, I’ll also share some actionable tips that you can implement right away when you start using vidIQ. 

If you’re looking for more training and tutorials on vidIQ, make sure you’ve subscribed to my YouTube channel. VidIQ has also provided wonderful training courses to help grow your YouTube channel. They contain real-life examples that came from the experiences of vidIQ experts.

For beginner’s, this is a valuable piece of information and tool that can help alleviate your chances to grow your YouTube channel faster than ever before.

For advanced marketers, you’ll be able to identify areas that you might have missed and take advantages of the insights that your competitors are using to grow their channels.

Here’s one actionable tip right now using vidIQ. Check the VPH or views per hour of the top, trending videos in your niche and competitors.

Create a video that is similar to that video. Don’t copy, but format your title, description and even your content to similarly talk about the same video that is getting lots of views per hour.

When you’ve done it correctly, the YouTube algorithm will start ranking you to the top of the YouTube results or start showing your videos as relevant videos on the search sidebar.

How To Setup Your YouTube channel for success

If you haven’t created your YouTube channel yet, here’s how to set it up properly for more success. The first step is to use your google or Gmail account to create your first YouTube Brand channel here.

It’s important to create a Brand Channel instead of a Personal channel, especially if your goal is to use it for your business. Here’s an overview about the differences on these types of channels.

Once you’ve created your first YouTube brand channel, complete all the settings and details including your YouTube banner image, YouTube channel keywords, etc.

After preparing your YouTube channel, it’s now time to upload your very first video.

How To Do Keyword Research for Video Creators

You might be wondering what keywords should you use and target for your YouTube videos? The answer lies in keyword research. Unfortunately, the official keyword research tool for YouTube has been removed. 

Right now, vidIQ and Tube Buddy are the only tools that I use and recommend doing keyword research for YouTube. I strongly recommend that you use these tools when doing keyword research as using other tools like Google Keyword Planner can yield different results and competition metrics that can skew and misled you when doing your research.

What I like most about vidIQ and Tube Buddy as keyword research tools is that they provide an easy way to gauge the level of competition for a particular keyword. 

This is important because if I knew I’m targeting a highly competitive keyword, I would have very little chance of getting views and organic traffic from it because my videos wouldn’t rank in YouTube search.

VidIQ SEO tools includes keyword research, tag research, competitor keyword research, inline keyword search, tag management and bulk editing tools (mostly available on paying customers). If you’re a FREE vidIQ user, you can still take advantage of some of these features.

These tools can help you with increasing your chances to show up on related videos and searches, and on showing up higher on the YouTube search results. 

While the tag management and research capabilities helps you find and manage important keywords with high search volume. Thus, it’s important that when doing any type of YouTube keyword research, you must ensure that you are using tools like vidIQ or Tube buddy.

Video Analytics and vidIQ

Have you ever wanted to have a single dashboard that shows you how your YouTube channel is doing?  There’s a VidIQ dashboard and analytics for that. 

In just one glance, you can easily see how many subscribers, comments and views you are getting on your YouTube channel.

You can easily segment where your YouTube views are coming from. Are they coming from search, suggested video, embeds, etc). In my opinion, it is much user-friendlier than YouTube’s analytics tools.

Both Tube buddy and vidIQ metric analysis and tools for analyzing insights are easy to use and understand. And whether you’re a new YouTuber or a veteran YouTuber, you’ll find this feature very useful and a time saver.

Creating videos on YouTube is easy. The difficult part in getting more views to your YouTube videos without paying for any ads is to have it optimized for YouTube’s algorithm.

When done properly, you can increase your YouTube views and start getting attention to your videos. The more attention and views to your videos, the higher your chances of increasing your YouTube subscribers.

When you’re just starting out, it’s important to pay attention to metrics like your likes-to-dislikes ratio. What videos are getting more attention and likes. What videos are getting good comments, respond to those comments, and create new video based on what people are resonating with and looking for.

YouTube Comments Management

When you’re just starting out, managing YouTube comments will seem to be easy. But when you start receiving dozens of comments each day, it can be quite painstaking and time-consuming. VidIQ can help you with that. VidIQ has a comment management feature that can help you identify your most valuable comments and respond to it accordingly.

Channel Audit Tool

One of my most favorite features in vidIQ, the channel audit tool can give you a lot of information on how to optimize your YouTube channel to help you get more views and subscribers.

The Best Time To Post

Do you want to know when is the best time to publish your New YouTube videos? This little-known tool and feature in vidIQ does provide that information for you.

It analyzes the best time that your videos are watched by your subscribers and analyzes that into an easy to digest information. 

You can then use this information to publish your future videos at the recommended time.

Top Playlist

YouTube individual video stats are almost available in any YouTube metrics tools, but nothing on playlists. But vidIQ provides a robust Playlist analytics and metrics tool to help you identify your best playlists.

Trend Alert

Do you want to know the latest and trending or breakout videos about a particular topic or niche? You can easily do that with the trend alert on vidIQ. 

You can easily setup notifications on views per hour and be notified by email whenever this happens. You’ll receive email alerts that tracks trending topics (daily, weekly or even monthly). 

Are you interested to find out what videos are trending and getting viral on your Competitor’s channels? You can easily do that with the trend alert tool inside vidIQ.

I strongly recommend trying this feature and subscribe to at least the vidIQ boost plan so that you can track more trend alerts and competitors.

Embed URLs

One of the great ways to drive traffic to your YouTube videos is to embed them on your blogs and websites (You need to have your videos set to PUBLIC or UNLISTED) in order to be embedded on other websites. 

For most of my videos, I’ve embedded them to my site and have generated additional traffic and views to my YouTube videos. 

If you also notice that other websites are embedding your videos, then you might want to check it out and if there’s an opportunity to boost that exposure then that’s another opportunity for you to grow your channel.

Video Description

If you think that editing your YouTube video descriptions can be time-consuming and tedious, you are correct. But not with vidIQ. You can edit video descriptions easily within vidIQ and you can also do bulk editing. 

Conversion Rates

Improving conversion rates is usually one of the most important ways to increase your leads and revenue online without generating additional traffic . 

VidIQ offers a lot of opportunities to boost engagement, improve watch time, increase channel likes and share.  One of the best ways to improve your conversion rates, is by simply improving your Click Through Rates. And CTR percentages can be improved with better thumbnail designs and better headlines.

Additional and Extra Features

VidIQ has tons of extra features that are not available on other tools like Tube Buddy. One of my favorite features is it’s VPH metric or views per hour metric. It’s a valuable source of information on what videos are currently trending and getting viral.

vidIQ Chrome and Firefox Browser Extensions

This is only for Chrome Extension and Firefox browser users. You can now download and install as one of your extensions, the vidIQ Chrome/Firefox extension.

It’s a handy feature that allows ANYONE to take advantage of vidIQ features when researching for videos and channels inside YouTube.

The extensions are FREE, but in order to take advantage of the Premium features in the extensions, you’ll need to subscribe to at least one of the Paid plans (preferably the Boost plan)

Bulk processing and SEO optimization

Starting with the Boost Plan of VidIQ, you’ll get access to Bulk SEO optimizations, a feature that will come in handy if you want to edit multiple videos at once to improve your SEO.

vidIQ Affiliate Program

Yes, vidIQ has an affiliate program. I’m an affiliate of vidIQ. Thanks for your support.

Customer Support

Different subscription plans will provide different customer support options. For the Boost+ subscriber, you’ll also get monthly coaching calls, Analytics Deep Dive and Personalized Tips and Tricks. 

Unlike Tube Buddy, vidIQ also has community support that can help you answer questions and issues that you might have. It mainly communicates with customers via priority email and chat.

One of the most common questions raised by people like you who are interested in trying VidIQ is if it’s a safe tool to use? The quick answer is that it is entirely safe. It has YouTube certification approved, which means that this tool is compliant.

Quick Stats

Time is money. So for me, any time that is saved is valuable. And VidIQ helps me save a lot of time when it comes to analyzing data because of its quick stats tool. This tool has an easy way to show like/dislike ratio (important in determining what your audience wants). 

VidIQ also has subscriber counts in the comments, toolbar quick stats and my favorite: views per hour stats (which tells me which videos are getting a lot of attention lately.

vidIQ vs Tube Buddy – Which is a Better Video Marketing Tool?

Ultimately, it all comes down to what you will be using. If you don’t use these tools, then it would just be a waste of time. 

And they both have similarities as well as differences. I personally prefer the look and feel of Tube Buddy, but I LOVE the features and  simplicity of use of VidIQ. That’s just me, you’ll have to try both and find out which one is best for you.

Pricing Plans and Packages (Discount, Coupon Codes)

According to vidIQ, on average (results may vary), channels who uses vidIQ get 2x moew views in the first 7 days on newly updated videos… And if you’re just starting out on your YouTube channel, that’s definitely something that is very valuable.

The good thing about vidIQ is that you can scale as needed and as you grow. You should always have at least the FREE vidIQ account (sign up for free here).

Then the next plan is the PRO plan which starts at $7.50/month. The PRO plan allows for optimizing 1 channel, track 6 competitors, 1 trend alerts, with email and chat support from the vidIQ team.

The Boost plan allows to track 20 competitors, have SEO title and description recommendations, inline tag recommendations, and access to vidIQ keyword engine (40-200 videos per month).

Get started with a FREE vidIQ account today!

Free Version of VidIQ

Here’s what you can expect in the FREE version of VidIQ. 

You can use the Chrome and Firefox extensions with a FREE vidIQ account. It will give you data on the Video Scorecard and Live Stats Bar.

You can still find keyword recommendations based on trending Google searches with the free version. 

Even with the free version, you’ll have access to valuable information that can help you get more views for your YouTube videos as you continue to improve your video rankings amongst various competitors in your niche.

If you’re wondering about Tube Buddy, it also has a free version with similar features that are Free. I prefer vidIQ’s free version as it seems to provide more access to important information.

When you’re ready to upgrade you can choose from any of the PAID plans below.

PRO Plan (starting at $7.50/month)

This plan starts at $7.50/month which is ridiculously cheap when it comes to the features that it provides. It allows you to track more competitors (now 6), update YouTube description campaigns, use the Keyword Research tool, do Historical analytics, find Top tweets for videos and look at the Top Trending Videos (super valuable information).

When comparing views, you have two additional capabilities not available in the FREE plan. You can start comparing views for Any video and Any Playlist.

As with any other PAID plan, you can CANCEL anytime. Try the vidIQ PRO Plan today!

Boost and Boost+ Plan

If you want the best features of VidIQ to help you grow your YouTube channel faster than ever before, consider these two paid plans, which are somewhat similar.

The Boost Plan starts at $39/month and allows for up to 20 competitors to be tracked. It has all the features and perks in the PRO plan plus it now has acces to SEO title and description recommendations, inline tag recommendations, and video archival.

You can also start comparing views for ANY channel, this channel average and competitors average.

The Boost and Boost+ plans boasts access to the Bulk SEO optimizations feature, Dedicated SEO analytics, and Channel wide tags analysis. 

The biggest difference in the Boost+ plan is the Monthly Coaching Call, Analytics Deep Dive and the Personalized tips and tricks. It’s the perfect plan for those who wants a more hand-holding approach to improving their YouTube views with vidIQ.

Frequently asked questions about VidIQ