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The Best Advice This YouTube Expert Gives Creators to Get to 1 Million Views While great content plays a role, there are other factors to keep in mind.

By Carlos Gil

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

If you've ever looked for tips on growing your YouTube channel or researched video marketing, it's likely you've come across Derral Eves at some point or time.

Based in southern Utah, Eves is one of the world's top YouTube and online video marketing experts. His top clients have included Red Bull, NBC, ABC, Adobe Software, American Enterprise Institute and many more. Notably, he was an executive producer on several viral video campaigns, including Squatty Potty's ice cream pooping unicorn ad, which won the "Ad of the Year" award at the 2015 Webbys.

Between Eves's own YouTube channel, which currently has over 491,000 subscribers, and those of his clients, he has gained a combined 32 billion views on YouTube to date.

For most entrepreneurs, YouTube can be a challenging medium to figure out. While the content itself plays a large role in driving views to one's channel, video titles, descriptions and tags -- which act like SEO keywords -- also factor into the equation of gaining views and subscribers.

Recently, I had the chance to catch up with Eves and ask for his best tips for content creators getting started on YouTube, or ones like myself who have been on for years and are still trying to figure it out.

As you'll notice in the video above, within the first few seconds Eves and I are laughing out loud. This was initially a blooper that I kept in the final cut at Eves's recommendation, which is a tactic to hook your audience within the first few seconds.

Per Eves, if your audience isn't hooked within the first few seconds of a video, they will not stick around to watch the middle or get to the end of it – or any others in your collection.

Watch more videos from Carlos Gil on his YouTube channel here.

Carlos Gil

Author of The End of Marketing

Carlos Gil is the author of The End of Marketing: Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media and AI, an international keynote speaker, and award-winning digital storyteller with over a decade of experience leading social media strategy for global brands including LinkedIn.

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