YouTube for Musicians: 9 Tips to Boost Your Online Visibility

Let's start at the beginning: the importance of channel customization. The home tab of your channel is the entrance to the world of your creation. It’s crucial that you make a strong first impression on your viewers (and potential followers) when they land on it.

Customizing your YouTube channel helps maintain your brand's presence and enhances its visibility and professionalism across the whole platform.

These are some key elements to have on your YouTube channel:

• A name that corresponds to your project name (no "OFFICIAL" or pseudo-"VEVO")

• An icon or logo that makes it easy to identify your project on YouTube

• An image (banner) related to your brand

• A description (short bio) that summarises what visitors can expect to see on your channel (the type of videos, frequency of posting, a short history of the project, etc.)

• External links to your artist page, streaming platforms, social media channels, and any other relevant destinations.

• A presentation video about your channel: This is the so-called channel trailer—a video that appears at the top of your home tab and starts playing automatically for anyone who visits the page.

• YouTube Playlists: these are sections on your home tab that let you organize your content into topic categories, making it easier for viewers to navigate through your channel.

We’ve already highlighted the importance of external linking, but let’s expand on this a bit more. Whether on your channel or in your videos, it's essential to connect everything to your artist website (a priority) as well as to your social networks and streaming profiles.

Essentially, the number and variety of links you select on both your home tab and in the videos should reflect your intended message or goal for the channel. For musicians, this is usually to encourage visitors to listen to their music on selected streaming platforms (or ideally to save it in their library), to purchase it in music shops, and/or to join an email list to stay up-to-date about their music.

An effective linking network shortens the path that your fans must take to reach what they're looking for, thus keeping them happy. And a happy fan is a good fan.

If you do not have a website or artist page, then simply redirect them to your social media channels, like Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook, or your artist profiles on streaming platforms (Spotify, Deezer, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, etc.).

An effective way to drive fans to multiple essential destinations is to include a smartlink. A smartlink is a single, shareable URL that guides your fans to various landing pages and offerings. It makes it easier for viewers and followers to see all available destinations at once and ensures that each user finds the right content. This ultimately helps optimize traffic and maximize conversions.

The title is the first thing your audience notices in your videos, meaning it needs to be as engaging as possible to catch your target audience's attention. At the same time, your titles can significantly influence your videos’ ranking in search results.

Therefore, you must ensure that your title is clear, concise, video-friendly, and most importantly, keyword-focused. Keywords are the backbone of video SEO (also known as VSEO) and help the YouTube algorithm understand what the video is about, when to display it, and who to recommend it to.

In fact, keywords are so powerful that it is recommended that you use the ones you want to rank for during your videos (or in your voice-over). Reportedly, this will help optimize the video’s visibility once published. If you’re unsure about what keywords to choose for your videos, opt for keyword research tools, including Google Keyword Planner, KWFinder, Answer the Public, or WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool.

In addition to using the right keyword, make sure that your title is not too long! Sources vary on the ideal length for a video title, but it’s generally recommended to keep it around 50-70 characters.

The video description offers information and links to all your social media profiles, shops, albums, and other relevant content. You can also include a subscription link that encourages viewers to automatically subscribe to your channel. To do this, simply copy your channel URL and add "? Sub_confirmation=1" at the end — for example, https://www.youtube.com/user/iMusicianTV/?sub_confirmation=1. When users click on the link, they will be directed to your channel’s home tab, where a subscription confirmation pop-up will appear.

Links aside, remember to keep the first lines of the description as a summary or commentary on the video for two reasons: to establish that vital first contact with your fans and to improve SEO. Also, include any essential information that you feel may prompt users to watch the video.

And while we're discussing SEO, it's important to remember that video tags also matter. Since YouTube is still considered the second-largest search engine in the world after Google, the best way to maximize your potential is to add relevant and popular keywords to your channel and video tags that will appear in search results. Keep in mind, however, that the more tags you use, the less each one is weighted, so focus on just a few.

Thumbnails serve as the visual entry point for your viewers. Along with the title and possibly a snippet of your description—when searching a topic and your video appears—a thumbnail is the first thing viewers notice in your video. It's said that the thumbnail can greatly influence whether a viewer clicks and watches a video and can even affect the YouTube algorithm.

A well-designed thumbnail can potentially increase your click-through rate, which then tells YouTube’s algorithm that your video is engaging and relevant, making it more likely to be recommended to others.

Now, this doesn’t mean you should spend hours carefully designing your thumbnails or pay a fortune to have a professional designer do it for you. Thumbnails give you an opportunity to inject even more of your personality into your work and create something that will perfectly match your video.

Make creating your thumbnails easier by drafting a template with a specific style, font, and elements to keep your presence more consistent and on-brand across your channel. Remember that by default, YouTube generates a thumbnail from a screenshot taken from your video; however, these screenshots are usually quite random and blurry, making this option highly unsuitable for your videos.

YOU decide what appears on your videos. It’s not just the links you can add to your home tab and in the video descriptions that influence the viewer's journey. YouTube offers elements you can embed directly in your videos to encourage people to subscribe, visit your website, or purchase your music in a non-intrusive way.

YouTube has developed cards that let you engage your audience simply and effectively. These can be placed at the end of your video and usually include your artist picture or brand logo along with a subscription button, video recommendations for what to watch next, or a button to access an entire playlist.

You can also add CTA buttons throughout your videos. These overlays can appear at key moments to guide viewers toward actions like subscribing, visiting a website, or buying music.

Remember to use playlists to categorize different videos, improve your SEO, and make navigation easier for your fans. Keep individual playlists concise and easy to understand, and avoid overly complicated topics or playlist titles.

IMPORTANT: Enable the Series Playlist option—this will allow you to mark your playlist as an official set of videos that should be watched together. When someone is viewing a video in a series playlist, other videos in that playlist will be featured or recommended.

It is no secret that short-form videos dominate created content across all platforms–whether it’s TikTok, Instagram and Facebook Reels, or YouTube Shorts. That’s because these videos are typically long enough to entertain people used to endless scrolling through streams of videos on their phones, yet short enough to hold their attention. Simply put, they tap into the addictive nature of scrolling and consuming content without much thought. YouTube Shorts alone garners billions of views daily!

For you, as a musician aiming to increase visibility, YouTube Shorts can be a powerful tool to grow your presence on the platform. They help you expand your reach, enhance the algorithm (which favors Shorts and makes them more discoverable), and encourage music discovery both on and off YouTube.

You can use Shorts to give fans quick glimpses into your creative process or your latest song production, show some behind-the-scenes moments from your latest concert, make dance trend videos, share your thoughts on recent developments in the music industry (why not?!), or simply create unique, short videos that showcase your music in interesting ways. You can also convert your long-form content into bite-sized Shorts to simplify your video production and further boost your visibility!

A mistake many independent artists make is thinking that they must limit themselves to their own songs on YouTube. In fact, if you do this, you'll gain very little visibility since most people searching for the name of your musical project already know you.

A great way to grow your fanbase is to make covers of popular songs in your own style of music, which then appear in search results associated with the artist or songs in question.

Of course, it’s not as simple as just making a cover and posting it on your channel. Since creating covers involves other artists' songs, issues related to copyrights and licensing come into play. Posting a cover song without permission from the artist or rights-holders can result in copyright claims, removal of the video, or even channel strikes.

Keep in mind that to legally upload cover songs, you usually need to obtain a license from the copyright owners of the music. You will generally need a synchronization (sync) license and a mechanical license.

YouTube provides all its users with channel analytics to track the performance and growth of each video they upload and the overall success of their channel. It would, therefore, be a shame not to take advantage of these tools to identify what works and what doesn't on your channel.

YouTube channel analytics offer a wealth of metrics you can explore and evaluate to gain a clearer picture of your channel's performance. They are organized across four tabs: channel overview, content, audience, and trends. There, you can learn about the number of views, viewing time, user locations, and audience engagement (such as likes, subscriptions, comments, shares, and favorites). You can also see the number of viewers by format (long-form videos or Shorts) and how viewers typically discover your content.

By comparing the metrics of your videos, you can quickly identify which content offers the best return on your investment and determine what to remove from your channel or avoid creating in the future.

Unfortunately, creating a strong presence on YouTube cannot simply be reduced to a checklist of things to do. It requires, above all, the right attitude:

• Be patient and persistent: building your fanbase on the platform doesn't happen overnight, in a week, or even in one to three months. Creating buzz is always possible, but the goal, in the long run, is to develop a strong community and not just a fragile house of cards that can collapse in a few days.

• Remember that YouTube is a social platform: expect interaction, especially through comments and private messages. Responding to fans quickly after releasing a new video shows you appreciate them and encourages them to return.

• Publish new content on a regular basis: You'll have a significantly higher chance of retaining your audience if you post new videos on your channel frequently, ideally once a week or every other week. As we've seen, there's no need to publish an official clip every time; you can just release a less polished but more original video.

• Collaborate with other artists and YouTubers: This not only helps you grow your network but also quickly boosts your subscribers through someone else's fan base. It's important to carefully consider who you want to collaborate with, as well as how and why you want to do it.