You may already do this one properly. That is to say, do them fast. Spending tons of time researching each tag is a waste and there are already tools that let YouTube video creators optimize this process very quickly, in just a few seconds each day. Tools like VidIQ, TubeBuddy and many more methods exist, including simply copying and pasting tags from popular videos in the same niche.

As much as I love optimizing things for search (after all, I do SEO stuff), doing that on YT is decreasingly important. What’s gaining importance instead? EMOTIONAL APPEAL. Because people have feelings and they are not algorithms … people increasingly view 1) what’s on the Home Page, 2) what YouTube Recommends to them and 3) what’s in their Notifications stream. Less and less people actually search for specific things because once they’ve subbed to dozens or hundreds of channels they already have their daily appetite of stuff to see, so getting in their Recommended list and on their Home Page is the best way to reach them, especially if they don’t already sub to our content.

It’s a waste of time trying to make content with the purpose of going viral. Stats show that channels that do better over time don’t even have any viral videos (excepting extreme outliers of course which are so large that practically every video they publish has some virality to it). Tiny channels, small and mid sized channels do best by just pounding out videos that get better in quality over time, and reach more people over time.

It’s not something tiny channels should be bothered to chase unless a sponsor wants to spend big bags to help a channel grow significantly. Then again, if the opportunity arises, there is no reason to ignore it. That said, most small channels (ie: those under 1,000 Subscribers and with less than 4,000 hours of viewing time in the past 12 months on long form videos and live streams, and much higher numbers on YouTube Shorts) don’t even monetize their content yet, and many are not really interested in chasing advertising dollars to promote lame products and services. So that’s not even really relevant to them, as they don’t do sponsorship stuff yet.