There’s a little-known feature on YouTube that lets you promote your live streaming event across all of your videos on YouTube to potentially get all the traffic your other videos are getting and funnel them towards your live event before it happens and while it happens. Let me show you how to set that up and do exactly that.
So I’ve created a new live event right here, it just went through. And I’ve got this one coming up here next week. 22 tips from 20 YouTube creators. And once you’ve created it here under Live Streaming and Events, I’m gonna show you under the Advanced tab where it’s at. So you click on here under the advanced, you scroll down here, and here’s this Promotions section right here. Check this box, Promote through featured content when the event is live. So this will show you that when this is checked. The event will be featured across all your channel videos when the event is live and set to public, which is pretty cool. But you can also promote it on your channel when the event is live, an hour before, 12 hours, a day, two days, or even a week before the scheduled time.
And what it looks like on your channel is exactly what you would see under Featured Content. Now I don’t have a featured video or playlist right now that would pop out on my videos. Let me just do a recent video just for now for the sake of this. If you already do have a video here, then you will get an error when you’re setting up the live event saying, hey, we can’t feature your live event because you already have featured content. So you do need to come and remove this before you set that up under the Advanced tab for the live streaming event. So that then replaces this. Let me show you what it looks like.
So this is just a video that I’m watching on my channel, and here it is. It pops up right here. So YouTube Red is here, Final Notice, that’s the video I’m highlighting. And this is exactly– when you go live in your channel, this is what it will look like. This little thing right here across all videos on your channel whenever you go live. And then it’ll disappear like that.
Now one note to keep in mind is that unfortunately, this does not work on any videos that already have interactive cards on them. I don’t know why that is the case, but it’s not a bug. It’s something that YouTube intentionally built in because they even list it as a feature on their help page about this featured content. Which personally, to me, that’s kind of a downer, because I do use cards on every single video. But it is a great way, maybe on your older content that don’t have cards on it or something like that, for you to drive traffic to your live event.
Of course, another great way to notify people when you go live is just to build like your own text messaging list, which is what I have done thanks to the people over at txtsignal.com. They’re not sponsoring this or anything, that’s just who I use. Join my text messaging list. Just text the word VCLIVE to 94033. And the only time I ever send a mass text message to that list is a little bit before I go live on my YouTube channel, so that anyone who’s available and wants to can quickly hop in and be a part of it.
So hopefully those ideas are helpful for you. I would love to hear from you in the comments below. How do you promote your live streaming events after you plan them and leading up to it to get as much traction and engagement there as possible. I would love to hear from you and learn from you in the comments below. And the rest of you, learn from each other. Read the comments. You will learn a lot from those people there, like I always do.