Help People Find Your Videos

First, you'll want to make sure your video has good metadata–a descriptive title, a description, a category, and tags–which will help it get discovered on the site. You can fine-tune your metadata in your video's detail page.

Upload Better Video Quality

If you're interested in improving the quality of future videos, read the tips on video settings and formats and HQ (high quality) videos in our Help Center:

Automatically Share Your Uploads With Friends and Family

Now you can automatically share your uploads (and other activities) to your profile on Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader viaAutoShare. Once you've opted in, AutoShare will send an update to the selected services when your uploaded video goes live.

Promote Your Video

When you're ready, you can actively promote your video by sharing it via email, embedding it on your blog or using the Promoted Videosystem to purchase placement on high-traffic pages. While you're at it, you might also want to make sure your channel reflects your personality, just like your videos do, by customizing your channel.

Understand Your Video's Views

One tool you definitely won't want to live without is Insight; it gives you information about who's watching your videos, where they're from, and more. This information can help you tailor your videos just for your audience; that might mean using annotations to add subtitles so your fans in Japan can understand what you're saying, or getting a detailed breakdown of where your views are coming from. (Please note that in general it takes a day to start to see traffic data for your newly uploaded video on Insight.)

So dive on in, and if you ever need a hand, go to the Help Center or get help from other YouTube users at the YouTube Community Help Forums.

– The YouTube Team