Schedule For The Week Of 10/27/14-11/2/14

This weekend I went crazy and recorded 8 videos to post for the week of 10/27/14-11/2/14.

This is the most videos I've had in a week in a long time. It's a mix of CS:GO gameplays and random Android gameplays!

Monday (12:00 pm EST) - CS:GO Gameplay EP10 Pro-90 And McLovin

Tuesday (12:00 pm EST)- Goat Simulator HD Android Gameplay
Wednesday (12:00 pm EST) - CS:GO Gameplay EP11 Spooky Or Spiky?
Thursday (12:00 pm EST)- Fury HD Android Gameplay
Friday (12:00 pm EST) - CS:GO Gameplay EP12 Solo Queue Amazingness!

Saturday(12:00 pm EST)- CS:GO Gameplay EP13 Mirage Solo Queue

Sunday(12:00 pm EST)- CS:GO Simple Highlights & Duet HD Android Gameplay

16-0 CS:GO Match

I was playing competitive with randoms and this happened!

Two of their teammates left halfway through, and another guy was trying to get kicked...

Are Custom YouTube Thumbnails Really THAT Important?

Are custom YouTube thumbnails really that important?

Nine out of ten YouTubers would answer with a resounding yes, and I mostly agree with them.

However, none of them explain why good-looking thumbnails increase the ranking of your videos, or in some cases- why they don't help the rankings at all.

First of all, let's talk about why custom thumbnails can actually increase your rank. It's not like once you add a custom thumbnail, the YouTube ranking system will go "BOOM" and increase your rank right away.

What the custom thumbnails are actually there for is for drawing in more viewers who are truly interested in your video and for increasing watchtime.

Watchtime is key for ranking your video. A long time ago, YouTube changed the ranking system so watchtime would be the most important thing for increasing your video's rank. In fact, almost everything you do to increase your rank is an attempt to increase watchtime. (Yes, even improving tags and descriptions. At least in part)

So ultimately the goal of a custom thumbnail is to show what your video is all about, to get more viewers that will watch your video for a longer time, and stand out from other videos that appear on the search page.

If you had to choose between two videos with the same title with one of them having a well-made custom thumbnail, and the other having a random thumbnail. Which one would you watch? I'm guessing the better looking one. (Unless your video is the one with the random thumbnail ;) )

Someone who has incredibly well made thumbnails is PewDiePie. His thumbnails are eye-catching, usually have a face with an interesting expression, and they draw people in. And I mean.... He has over 30,000,000 subscribers so he must be doing something right! Right? Let's look at his most recent uploads and see if he makes custom thumbnails for every single one of his videos. Oh! Yes! He does! Anyway...

So what makes a good thumbnail?

It has to be interesting, shouldn't have a lot of text, and should let the viewer know what your video will be about.

Gone are the days of people putting sexual content in the thumbnails just for the sake of getting a view. Now if you get many clicks, but your watchtime is incredible low, YouTube will count that against you.

Should you really make custom thumbnails for every single one of your videos? At this point, I try to do it for every single one of my videos if I can. Even something simple like picking a good-looking frame from your video, screenshotting it, and putting the episode number and the game name on there goes a long way.

As an example, let's look at the thumbnails for the search term "Evil within gameplay". As you can see, five out of the six top videos have a custom thumbnail, and the video that doesn't have one is Bethesda's first gameplay video so they don't need a custom thumbnail. Which video would you rather click if you didn't know the titles or the people who created it?

 Personally I really like the second one because the red really jumps out at me, and the last one looks very nice also.

All of these are simple and well-made and make me want to watch these videos!

To answer the question asked in the title of this post- yes, custom thumbnails are definitely very important, if you know how to make them properly, and you realize why they are important.

Schedule For The Week Of 10/20/14-10/26/14

This is my uploading schedule for the week of 10/20/14-10/26/14.

I played numerous CS:GO matches, but I wasn't able to record all of them due to technical difficulties, thus you are left with these videos! I will probably post an AVA video and something else.

Weekend- Soldier Front 2 Gameplay EP50 Back To A Noob!
Monday (12:00 pm EST) - Speedrunners Gameplay EP3 Yet Another Speedrunners Tournament!
Wednesday (12:00 pm EST) - CS:GO Gameplay EP8 They Surrendered!
Thursday (12:00 pm EST)- CS:GO Easy Competition Highlights
Friday (12:00 pm EST) - Hitman Absolution Gameplay EP11 Death Factory (Silent Assassin)

How To Pick YouTube Keywords Using VideoLC

What do you do to pick keywords for your YouTube video?

Do you put random words? Use the YouTube Search Check? Use VidIQ to check your competitors keywords? 

I use all of the above strategies, but another tool that I found out not long ago is called VideoLC. 

It is a paid service, but they have a very general 30 day trial that I'm using right now to rank my videos, find the best time to post my videos, and see whether my videos are going up in rank or not.

You can greatly improve your channel without buying any licenses! The 30 day trial is more than enough to do all of the things I describe below!

It's an incredibly versatile tool, and in the 30 days that you get the free trial for, there are loads of things you can do to improve your channel. (I' m considering buying the cheapest monthly subscription when I have a steady income)

How To Pick Keywords
If you've read my blog before, you'll know that I like to utilize the YouTube Search Check to see which keywords are low competition and post videos based on that keyword.
VideoLC greatly simplifies your job of keyword searching.

All you have to do is go to the search rank button and then click on the Rank Boost button.
We're not using it for boosting your rank just yet, that's the next section, but we will be using their rank boosting tool for keyword researching.

When you're there, click on the Add A Rank Boost button, and you'll be taken to a page that looks like the one to the right except your fields will be empty.

Since you're not actually trying to improve the rank of your video, you can choose whatever video you want. Don't worry, this won't affect your video whatsoever.

There's a box where you can enter search terms that "you want to target", but we'll be using it to see what kind of competition a keyword has.

For this example I will be using keywords actually related to my video, but you can research any keyword you want.

What happens after you enter your keyword is pretty self-explanatory, but here are some simple details on it.

 As you can see, trying to rank my video for the tag "soldier front 2" would be nearly impossible unless you're already a very successful channel.'

That keyword has very high competition, so that's not something you'd want to focus on.

The tag "soldier front 2 gameplay" has much lower competition, and it's much easier to rank for it.

 And the tag "sf2 gameplay" isn't bad either!

How would you use this?
When looking for a game to record, you can visit this website and see if you have any chance in ranking high for the game you're about to play.

For example, let's say you want to play one of the Indie games shown below found on the Desura website.

You could put in the game names with gameplay at the end of them and see how high the competition is.

Looking at the above results, it looks like playing the game called So Many Me is a terrible idea if you're trying to get some views from YouTube search.
Playing Pall seems like a pretty good option, and playing The Scarecrow Man is a fairly good idea!

How To Find The Best Time To Post Your Videos
I've often heard people ask how to determine the best time for posting your videos, and it is quite hard to do it all by yourself.
However, VideoLC does all of the heavy lifting for you and all you have to do is click a button and view the amazing results!

Just go to the Channel menu and click on Best Time To Upload.


You'll get a message about your best time for uploading, (Mine is on Sunday between 12 and 1) and below that you will find numerous details about your engagement based on the day of the week.

Most of my engagement seems to happen on Sundays, which is why this app told me that my best bet is publishing my video on a Sunday!

Now you could analyze it all yourself, or write your own program to do it for you, but I prefer not reinventing the wheel if what I want is already out there.

Check How Your Videos' Rank Is Changing
You can also use VideoLC to track the changes in your videos' rankings.
The only disadvantage to this feature is that it only tracks videos in the top 50 for a certain keyword, so if your video isn't already ranked fairly high, you're out of luck!

To do this, go into the Search Rank menu and click on Ranking Report.
If it's your first time going here, you'll have to choose the keywords for this tool to check for, and you'll have to wait a couple days for it to see whether your rankings are changing or not.

Thank you for reading and I hope this post was useful to you!
You can click below to subscribe to my newsletter if you would like to get case-studies and tips like these delivered straight to your inbox!

Schedule For The Week Of 10/13/14-10/19/14

This is my uploading schedule for the week of 10/13/14-10/19/14.

This week is incredibly busy for me, but I was able to record some CS:GO, Trove Beta, and even some Android gameplay! I hope you guys enjoy!

Weekend- Chick Can Fly HD Android Gameplay
Monday (12:00 pm EST) - CS:GO Gameplay EP5 900 Subs And Doge!
Tuesday (12:00 pm EST) - Trove Beta Gameplay EP1 Tutorial (Minecraft+Cube World!)
Wednesday (12:00 pm EST) - CSGO Gameplay EP6 Failing With Andrasd And McLovin
Friday (12:00 pm EST) - CSGO Gameplay EP7 Competitive With Andrasd And McLovin

Twitter VS Reddit For Blog Views

As some of you might know, a couple days ago I posted a huge list of the Top 50 Websites Every YouTube Gaming Channel Needs To Know.

You can check that post out here!

My post received over 1,000 views in 24 hours, and it's still getting quite a lot daily views!

Prior to posting my blog, I did some follow for follow Twitter stuff with gaming channels, and I found an amazing subreddit for YouTubers with gaming channels that didn't seem that amazing at the time.

Once the blog post was live, I shared it with over 300 gaming channels on twitter, hoping that they might retweet it and I'd get loads of views.
I also posted it in the /letsplay subreddit, hoping to get a couple dozen views from there.

What happened next absolutely blew me away.

I got a whole 3 views from Twitter within 48 hours of publishing the post, and 753 Reddit views within the same time-frame. (The stats are not exact because... Well I'm not sure.)

As you can see in the picture below, my post actually got 1067 views up to this point, and I'm guessing a majority of them were from Reddit.

This completely changed my perspective on what I thought I knew about getting views to my posts. I thought that the Twitter gamers would be incredibly interested in these websites, but my tweet probably got lost in the thousands of other tweets their followers posted that day.

On Reddit however, I got 10 upvotes within a couple minutes which maxed out at 40-something upvotes after a day. This crazy number of votes allowed me to stay at the top of the Hot category for nearly a day and a half, and if I optimized my Reddit posting time a little bit more, and engaged with the people in the subreddit a little more before I made my post, I think I could've stayed at the top of the page for at least 3 or more days.

This just shows you that you should test and retest everything. Even if you think you know what's going to happen.

Obviously for my next huge post, I'll be focusing hard on Reddit and trying to climb to the top of the Hot list and stay there for a couple days. I'll still try to get some Twitter views, but I don't know how I'm going to do that yet.

As always, thank you for reading! If you have any ideas for what I should write about, or you have questions or comments about this, please comment on this post!

Schedule For The Week Of 10/6/14-10/12/14

This is my uploading schedule for the week of 10/6/14-10/12/14.

I finally got a working microphone adapter which means that I don't have to go through the tedious process of recording the audio through my phone and then somehow getting it on my computer.
This means that I'll be able to record more videos in the same amount of time which is already noticeable with the amount of videos going up this week!

I also figured out how to record the screen of my Galaxy S4 with no lag at high quality, so I might be recording some new Android games gameplay soon!

Anyway, here is my schedule:

Monday (12:30 pm EST) - Soldier Front 2 Gameplay EP49 Working Adapter Is Here!
Wednesday (12:30 pm EST) - CS:GO Gameplay EP3 Deathmatch Fails
Thursday (12:30 pm EST) - Hitman Absolution Gameplay EP10 End Of The Road & Dexter Industries
Friday (12:30 pm EST) - CS:GO Gameplay EP4 AK Practice

Top 50 Most Useful Websites For A YouTube Gaming Channel (And Not Just Gaming!)

Making YouTube videos is absolutely amazing, but it can get quite hard at times, and if you're a gaming channel on YouTube, you have even more competition than others.

You have to keep your viewers happy, deliver quality content, make sure you're not breaking any copyright laws, and find music and images for your videos, all while making sure your content is better than the content of all the other gaming channels out there.

This list will help you simplify that job and make you life as a YouTuber much easier!

There are 5 sections total, each with 10 websites:

• Top 10
• Free Music
• Free Photos
• Cheap Games
• Other Usefulness

There's even a bonus section at the end!

1-10. Top 10

1. How to monetize gaming videos legally. This is probably one of the most useful posts on the internet for a YouTube who records video games, because it shows you which companies allow you to monetize their gameplay and which ones don't.(http://www.wholetsplay.com/wiki/doku.php)


2. SocialBlade. A very useful tool for analyzing yours, and your competitors' channels. (http://www.socialblade.com/)

3. vidIQ Vision. One of the most useful tools ever for analyzing your competitors tags, social engagement, watchtime, and other numerous statistics about their videos so you can beat them. (http://vidiq.com/apps/vision/)

4. YouTubeGaming Forum. The biggest forum for YouTube Gamers out there. You can share your videos here to get some backlinks and views from other games on YouTube. You can also get feedback on your channel, videos, or talk about life. (http://youtubegaming.com/forum/)

5. AlphaBetaGamer. An incredibly useful website that summarizes all of the latest free alpha and beta games and tells you if there are any key giveaways happening for those games. Great place to find free games to record! (http://www.alphabetagamer.com/)

6. Sumo Paint. An absolutely amazing online alternative to Photoshop. If you don't have Photoshop and you don't want to use GIMP, you can use this online website to create your thumbnails! (http://www.sumopaint.com/app/)

7. Desura. Why do I have Desura on here? Simply because you can find new IndieGames on here and record them for YouTube before most of the people hear about them. You can be a YouTube hipster and record it first. That way you'll stay on top of the search results later on! (http://www.desura.com/)

8. Coursera. Why am I putting an educational website on here you ask? In my opinion educating yourself is the most important thing to do no matter what your hobbies or jobs are. Even if you learn things not related to YouTube, you might make the weirdest connections between what you learned and YouTube or your job which will help you become much more successful. (https://www.coursera.org/)


9. Twitter. Yes, twitter is on here. Why? Simply because it's a great way to get some more clicks to your video, and YouTube likes if your video is shared on Twitter, so you should share some of yours! Just don't share every single video you have because then your twitter newsfeed would be full of junk. (https://twitter.com/BeatDaBest)


10. Fiverr. If you don't want to create your own thumbnails, caption your own videos, or you want backlinks to your video you can order services on here for only $5! (https://www.fiverr.com)

11-20. Free Music

11. Audionatix. My favorite website for free music for YouTube videos. All of the songs are there are free to download and use commercially, and there are loads of songs so you don't have to repeat them! (http://audionautix.com/)

12. BFXR. This isn't a free music website, but it's a free sound effect website. You can use it to make random sound effects for your video. I haven't used it myself yet, but if you want to spice your videos up a bit, you can use it. (http://www.bfxr.net/)

13. Newgrounds Audio. Newgrounds has plenty of free music that you can use in your videos. However, most of the songs are free with non-commercial use if you give attribution to the artist. If you want to use it commercially, you should probably talk to the artist. (http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/)

14. Free Music Archive. Not all of their songs are free for commercial, video use, but you can use their search function to find songs that allow for commercial use. At the time of writing there's over 4465 songs on there. That's pretty good, right? (http://freemusicarchive.org/curator/video)

15. YouTube Audio Library. Even though a lot of the songs on here are overused, with a couple minutes of searching you could find a new song. They also have a couple of high quality sound effects if you need them! (https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/)

16. FreeSound. They have loads of completely free sound effects on their website. The only catch? You have to register which takes a couple seconds of your time... (https://www.freesound.org)

17. FreeStockMusic. Great free music for any type of video you can think of. You do need to register to download it, but it's definitely worth it! (http://www.freestockmusic.com/)

18. Incompetech. You can find numerous great tracks here that were composed by Kevin McLeod. They're completely free to use and download, but you have to give him credit for it either in the video or the description. (http://incompetech.com/)

19. DanoSongs. Another composer's site. He also allows his songs to be used anywhere if you give him the credit in the description or your video. (http://www.danosongs.com/)

20. PublicDomain4U. This website has all of the songs that have the copyright expired, so if you're looking for oldies but goodies this is the site for you! (http://publicdomain4u.com/) 

21-30. Free Photos

21. Free Digital Photos. This is my number one choice for when I need photos for my thumbnails or blog. It's not the best one out there because it only lets you download small sized images (400*267) pixels for free and you have to pay for the other ones. However, it's perfect for my uses. (http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/)

22. Unsplash. 10 completely free to use, breathtaking images every 10 days. What's not to love? (https://unsplash.com/)

23. SnapWireSnaps. Same as above, except there are 7 images uploaded every 7 days. (http://snapwiresnaps.tumblr.com/)

24. Getrefe. More free, public domain pictures. They were all taken using cellphones, but there are some amazing ones on there. (http://getrefe.tumblr.com/)

25. Picjumbo. Loads of free images with numerous categories. Perfect for creating that amazing-looking thumbnail! (http://picjumbo.com/)

26. Superfamous. A Los-Angeles based studio of a Dutch photographer. All of the photos there are free to use, but you need to give him credit. (http://superfamous.com/)

27. Life Of Pix. More public domain images. (http://www.lifeofpix.com/)

28. LittleVisuals. This one is a bit different from all the others because you actually have to sign up with your email, and they send you 7 free images every 7 days. Definitely worth it if you're a free image hoarder. (http://littlevisuals.co/)

29. Gratisography. Pictures captured by Ryan McGuire that are free of any copyright restrictions. Use them however you want! (http://www.gratisography.com/)

30. Splitshire. A blogger who is offering all of the pictures on the blog for free to use however you want. (http://splitshire.com/)

31-40. Cheap Games

31. Cheapshark. Technically, I could simply put this website here and not put anything else because this website collects the price data from the best game-stores online and checks which ones have the best deal. Definitely a must have if you're looking for cheap games. (http://www.cheapshark.com/)

32. Origin Free Games. Origin has a program called On The House where they post one or two games a month completely for free and if you download them during that time period you have those games forever! (https://www.origin.com/)

33. Green Man Gaming/Hot Deals. One of the websites Cheapshark checks for deals. If you want to do it manually you can go to their Hot Deals page! (http://www.greenmangaming.com/hot-deals/)

34. The Humble Bundle. Nowhere on the internet will you find a better deal for as many amazing games as they have on there. (Unless you pirate them) You pay as much as you want, and in many cases you can get 6-10 huge games for only $10 bucks or less. They also have Mobile and IndieGame bundles. (https://www.humblebundle.com/)

35. Steam Sales. If you're willing to wait for the Summer or Winter sale, or if a game you want appears on the Steam midweek madness page, you could get it for cheap! (http://store.steampowered.com/)

36. GOG. Another one of the stores on the Cheapshark list, but you can check them out to see if there's any other deals that aren't listed. (http://www.gog.com/)

37. GetGames. Same as above. They also have a hot deals page that you can check out! (http://www.getgamesgo.com/)

38. Reddit/SteamSwap. Did you know that you can trade games with people if you have a game on Steam that you don't like? Well now you know! (http://www.reddit.com/r/steamswap/)

39. Amazon. Amazon has some great deals on PC games sometimes. The only disadvantage is that the deals only apply to the physical copies of the game. (http://www.amazon.com/computer-video-games-hardware-accessories)

40. G2A Games. Another one of my favorites. It has incredibly cheap prices on almost all games out there. However, most of the games you buy from other gamers, so make sure that they have a high rating and over 100 sales. (https://www.g2a.com)

41-50+. Other Usefulness

41. SteamAlerts. If you're trying to buy a specific game on sale from Steam, this is a must have. Choose your game, put in your email and set the maximum price you're willing to pay and it will send you and email once the game drops below that price! (http://steamalerts.com/)

42. GameLengths. If you're planning on recording a single player game, it might be useful to know how long it will take you to complete the game. That's where this website comes into play! It's user submitted play-times though so your mileage may vary. (http://www.gamelengths.com/#)

43. VideoLC. A really cool website that determines the best time for you to publish your videos based on the engagement that you got on your previous videos and much more. You can get a free trial for 30 days, but it's quite expensive if you want to keep using it. Free trial it is! (https://www.videolc.com)

44. IGN. I like to visit IGN from time to time to figure out what's going on in the game world. (http://www.ign.com/)

45. YouTube Creator Academy. Creator Academy is a course offered by YouTube for improving your channel. Some of the stuff on there is quite basic, but some of the tips they offer are quite useful, so give it a go! (http://www.youtube.com/yt/creators/education.html)

46. Advanced SEO Tactics To Drive More Traffic To Your Videos & Website. I know... I know... This isn't a website. It is however an incredibly useful blog post by one of my favorite SEO guys on the internet named Brian Dean (author of Backlinko). Definitely worth checking out if you want to make your channel better! (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2340726/5-Advanced-YouTube-SEO-Tactics-to-Drive-More-Traffic-to-Your-Videos-Website)

47. Ahrefs. You can use Ahrefs to check which websites are creating backlinks to your videos! (https://ahrefs.com/)

48. Backlinko. The blog of one of my favorite SEO experts: Brian Dean. Even though most of his articles are focused on website SEO, you can apply most of the concepts to YouTube videos. (http://backlinko.com/)

49. Market Samurai. This is a program that I use to find good keywords and improve my SEO. It's quite expensive though, so if you don't have a website it might not be worth it. (http://www.marketsamurai.com)

50. BeatDaBest. Did you really think I wouldn't put my website on here? You're crazy! ;) This is obviously my go-to website for improving my YouTube channel and it should be yours too! (www.beatdabest.com)

51. Reddit Let's Play. Another great place to go to if you need some help with improving your channel or you just want to talk to someone like-minded. (http://www.reddit.com/r/letsplay)

52. GamerclipsTV. Another website kind of like YouTube Gaming, except this one looks and feels better. Very useful for getting your videos to rank higher! (http://gamerclips.tv/)

53. Goo.gl. Having big, long, ugly links in the description isn't too pleasing, so you can use goo.gl links to make them shorter and see how many people are clicking on them. Be careful because some people don't trust goo.gl or bit.ly links! (goo.gl)

Bonus Website You Can't Miss (Just Kidding, These Are Completely Useless!)

54. Become A Famous YouTube Gamer. If you follow these steps you're guaranteed to get 1,000,000 subscribers on your first day of YouTubing! (http://www.wikihow.com/Become-a-Famous-YouTube-Gamer)

55. OMFGDOGS. Um... Yeah. (http://www.omfgdogs.com/)

56. Falling Falling. It's constantly falling!!! Or is it? (http://www.fallingfalling.com/)

57. Staggering Beauty. Have you ever wanted to shake a black sausage until it turns into a rainbow sausage that flickers? Now you can! WARNING: Contains Flashing Images. (http://www.staggeringbeauty.com/)

58. Eelslap. If something just isn't working you can always slap this guy with an eel! Results may vary. (http://eelslap.com/)

P.S. Some of these are from: http://www.theuselessweb.com/

Thank you for reading! I hope you found this list useful!