Upload housekeeping: playlist, category, language, caption file

Every upload has a handful of settings that are boring, fast, and quietly important: the playlist, the category, the language, the caption file. None is exciting and none takes more than a few seconds, which is exactly why they get skipped. Then the small cost shows up later, when a video never got added to the playlist that would have fed it views, and nobody noticed for a month.

This is the unglamorous plumbing of a good upload. It does not win you the click, but missing it leaves small amounts of reach on the table on every video, and small amounts on every video add up across a channel. Ninety seconds of housekeeping protects all of it.

The 90-second checklist

1. 1
   Playlist. Add the video to the right playlist, or make one. Playlists feed binge-watching and give your video another place to be found.
2. 2
   Category. Set it correctly. It helps YouTube understand who to show the video to and what to associate it with.
3. 3
   Language. Set the video and caption language. It powers auto-translation and helps the right region find you.
4. 4
   Caption file. Upload your corrected captions if you made a file: choose fixed captions over the auto-track, which does the job badly on its own.

Playlists do more than tidy your channel

Of the four, the playlist earns real attention. A playlist keeps a viewer moving from one of your videos to the next automatically, which is the session behaviour YouTube rewards, and it creates a second surface, the playlist itself, that can rank and be recommended, much as end screens and cards do within a single video. Putting each new video into the right playlist, and building playlists around themes people binge, is a quiet growth lever most small channels ignore.

The other three are more about not leaking reach than gaining it. Wrong or missing category, language and captions each shave a little potential audience off a video. Setting them right is cheap insurance that the video reaches everyone it could.

Make it part of the same routine

Because these settings are the same shape every upload, they belong in your standard pre-publish pass. Run them in the same order each time, and they stop being four things to remember and become one quick habit. The goal, as with every unglamorous job in the run, is to make the easily-skipped thing automatic so it actually happens.

Where Chewbr fits

Do the housekeeping is step 32 of the 47, near the end of the Package phase, and it now takes the tags field in with it. It groups the small settings into one deliberate step so they get done together, rather than scattered and half-forgotten across the upload screen.

Keep reading

One quick check belongs on that list: the 30-second disclosure self-check. With everything filled in, decide when it goes out: scheduling the upload.