In this article, I’m going to give you our top three apps that will help you get more views on YouTube. 

The very first one is going to help you rank higher, the second is going to help you get more clicks on your videos, and the third will help to drive traffic to your videos from places like Facebook and Twitter. 

#1 YouTube App – Tube Buddy

The first app, Tube Buddy, is largely considered to be an essential, must-have tool among the top YouTubers around. Every single creator that we’ve talked to that has a large and growing channel has used this tool to get an advantage over their competition. 

Tube Buddy gives you many tools to help you grow and to manage your channel but when it specifically comes down to ranking higher and getting more views and more subscribers, it helps to do this in three primary ways: 

1. Best keyword research data for YouTube
2. It will help you spy on your competition
3. Allow you to split-test your thumbnails

The keyword research data will not only show you the keyword search volume, but it will give you a good idea of how competitive the keyword is on YouTube. It will show you so many competing videos that exist for that keyword, give you a weighted keyword score based on your specific channel’s performance, and it will also give you related keywords that you might want to try to consider as well. 

For example, if we search for “how to get monetized on YouTube”, we see that it has 11,200 searches per month. It’s fairly competitive and the overall score is a 10 out of 100, which is pretty poor. 

If we click to see the weighted score for our specific channel, the overall score goes down to 3 out of 100. And I can see that would be competing against 427,000 other videos. 

But on the right-hand side here, there are a bunch of other related keywords that I can check out.  

So if I click, How To Get Monetized on YouTube Fast… it looks much more promising. The overall weighted score for our channel is now a 67 out of 100, which is way better. The search volume is still decent and we would be competing against a lot fewer videos.

The second thing Tube Buddy does is help you spy on your competition. It’s going to help you see what tags they’re using in the videos and this is important because, if you want to rank for the same things that they’re ranking for, you will want to use the same tags that they’re using. This is also a great way to find new keywords that you might not have thought of yet. 

Not only does it show you what their tags are, but it’ll show you how high they rank for those tags which is even more important! 

For example, if we see that someone is using a tag but they’re not ranking for that tag, then it might not be at a tag that we want to use if we are going to create a similar video. 

Tube Buddy also lets you easily copy their tags so you don’t even have to manually type out the entire tag, which is a huge time saver. 

The third thing that Tube Buddy does is let you split-test your thumbnails, arguably the most valuable feature. It shows you which thumbnail is going to give you a better click-through rate. 

It is a well-known fact among top YouTubers that your thumbnail is really one of the biggest factors in getting people on your video to watch it so having a great thumbnail that converts well is key to your video’s success. 

This has been one of the secret weapons that have allowed us to continually increase our click-through rate and gradually increase our views on our videos over time. 

Most people just upload a custom thumbnail and never look back and this is a huge mistake that can keep your channel small and struggling. If you go back and you update your thumbnails on old videos to get a better click-through-rate, you will be able to get a lot more clicks and views on those videos within your channel. 

These are just three of the most important things that Tube Buddy does. It’s got dozens of other features that will help you manage and grow your YouTube channel, but if you want to check it out, they have a free plan so there’s no risk in taking a look. You can check TubeBuddy out here. 

#2 – Thumbnail Creator – Canva

App number two is the best free thumbnail creator around: Canva. 

Increasing your click-through rate should be one of your top priorities if you want to grow your channel and the two things that can drive your click-through rate are your title and your thumbnail. 

Creating a great-looking thumbnail is absolutely critical in this process and Canva is a tool that will help you do that for free. 

Canva does have a paid plan but it’s not necessary as you can do most of the things you need on the free plan. We’ve used the free plan for years before finally upgrading. It lets you easily create stylish thumbnails for your videos in mere minutes and it comes with preloaded fonts, stickers, shapes, backgrounds, and templates that you can use. 

As we loved Canva as a free thumbnail creating platform, the one thing that makes it worth paying for is the ability to automatically remove the background in your photos. 

If you’re paying the subscription fee to get this feature, then we recommend PicMonkey instead. It’s similar to Canva but for the same price, you will get better features that will make your thumbnails pop even more. 

If you want free, then go with Canva, if you’re willing to pay a little bit of money, then go with PicMonkey. 

#3 – If This, Then That

App number three is going to help you drive traffic and get more views on your videos from places like Facebook and Twitter: IFTTT (If This Then That). This is another free app that helps you automate activities on social media. 

With IFTTT, you can set it up so that when you upload a video to YouTube it will automatically create a post on your Facebook page with a link to that video. You can also set it up to publish a tweet on Twitter with a link to your video. 

You can even integrate it with sites like WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr to generate even more traffic and to get backlinks to your video and your YouTube channel! The great thing about this is that you set it up once and it will run automatically every single time that you publish a new video on YouTube. 

An alternative to IFTTT that you can do even more with is Zapier. Zapier also has a free plan but has some pay plans as well. If all you want to do with it is post your YouTube videos to Facebook and Twitter then your free plan will do just fine… but if you want to do other things with it, you may find yourself quickly upgrading to a paid plan. 

We prefer to automate as much as we can with IFTTT and then anything that IFTTT can’t do, we use Zapier for. If you’re thinking about upgrading to a paid-plan with Zapier then you may want to consider a cheaper option called Automate.io which is similar to Zapier but it has fewer apps that it integrates with. 

Now, if you want to learn more about the YouTube algorithm and how to get it to promote your videos, then you want to watch this video next because we’re going to walk you through how to do just that. I’ll see you there!