YouTube is such an incredibly popular platform for many reasons. Who wouldn’t want to try their hand at it? While making a YouTube channel is easy, finding an audience can be hard. Successfully connecting with people who want to watch the content that you’re creating is not an easy feat.
Luckily, there are plenty of tools you can use that will make the process a lot easier. Here are four of the best you can get for free, entirely within your Chrome browser.
1. TubeBuddy
First on this list comes TubeBuddy, the number one rated extension for YouTube creators. This Google Chrome extension integrates completely into YouTube itself, which means you’ll only notice it when you want to be using it.
But what does TubeBuddy do exactly? TubeBuddy provides you with a range of different web and productivity tools to help your videos perform better than they would otherwise do.
For example, TubeBuddy has an in-depth suite of tools catered around tag, title, and description optimization. These features include weighting for your specific channel's typical traffic, current search results, competition, and optimization.
All these features come together to help you create titles for your videos that are known to perform well. This completely takes the guesswork out of this aspect of content creation.
TubeBuddy also contains a set of processing tools. These tools can help you create better thumbnails from templates and in bulk if you so need. When thumbnails are as important as they are, this can help a lot, and help save time as well.
There are also an impressive number of analytics and advanced testing tools to help you ascertain what content will pop. You can run tests based on projections of data before you upload, and adjust the minutiae of your video to make sure it does as well as it possibly can.
2. Keywords Everywhere
Next up on this list comes Keywords Everywhere, a Chrome extension which gathers data on keywords across a huge range of websites.
Keywords Everywhere gathers information across Google, YouTube, Amazon, and loads of other big-name websites. Here the focus is on YouTube first and foremost, but there may still be use for cross-promotion if you’re clever with it.
This lets you track a tremendous amount of information from all of these websites for you to use. For instance, Keywords Everywhere shows you the top 5000 keywords for all pages and websites on Google. It also shows trends, related keywords, what people search for, and more.
With YouTube, it’s a slightly different story. Keywords Everywhere lets you check video insights, tags, search insights, and search engine result metrics.
All this together lets you know exactly what type of content people are looking for at any given time. As such, you can make sure that the content that you’re making lines up with what people are watching.
Keywords Everywhere also provides paid options for those of you who find the extension particularly worthwhile. Monthly search volume, cost-per-click analysis, competition and trending data, and more are all available. Though not for free, like the rest of the features are.
3. Social Blade
If you’re looking to track how your YouTube account is doing in comparison to others, then Social Blade is the best way to do just that.
Social Blade is an analytics tool for both YouTube and TwitchTV. It gathers a humongous amount of information about YouTube channels such as the number of subscribers, viewers, and more.
It then breaks this information down into ranks based on other users in the system. Higher ranks meaner better channel growth and subscriber counts, with lower ranks being the opposite.
The extension itself allows you to access any channel, including your own, at the click of a button. From the extension, it will immediately pull up all the relevant information about the channel that you’re looking at.
This means that you can figure out how well or poorly a channel is doing with just a glance. If you need some inspiration for the direction you want to go, this can help you make sure you’re following a channel which works.
Furthermore, Social Blade features an integrated Social Blade box to the right of any video you’re watching on YouTube. This means you can get these important statistics, no matter what you’re watching.
4. vidIQ Vision for YouTube
Finally, we have vidIQ Vision for YouTube. vidIQ Vision is more than just an extension that can help you to optimize your YouTube content. It also helps you to learn and understand just how YouTube works so that you can make the most of it.
Information such as how YouTube chooses its related videos, how videos YouTube ranks videos when you search them, how YouTube chooses what videos to recommend. All of this and more are part of this Chrome extension.
vidIQ Vision also helps you to produce better videos. Every YouTube video is ranked by vidIQ Vision and given a vidIQ Score based off of various factors. This score predicts how likely the video is to appear in searches, related videos, and more.
vidIQ Vision also lets you track how quickly yours or other videos are growing, what competitors are doing to rank highly, and expands on YouTube underlying analytics.
If you’re trying to grow your channel specifically, vidIQ Vision can also help you there. vidIQ Vision offers a channel audit tool, which quickly shows you how your content is performing so that you can see what is working and what isn’t at a glance.
This lets you adjust the course of your content creation whenever you want. There are more features that vidIQ Vision can provide, but they require you to pay for a more premium plan.
These features include ways to boost your videos SEO quickly and easily, as well as personalized coaching for those of you who are really serious.
How You Make Your Videos Isn’t the Only Factor
This list of Chrome extensions which can help you to seriously grow your YouTube channel has hopefully given you some ideas on how you might begin or expand a channel.
But how you make and market your videos are separate things. It’s not enough to make the right type of content if the tools you use are letting you down. That’s why it’s important to make the most of the space and tools that you have.