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by Ann Konishcheva

Сontent Marketing Specialist

Popularity, both digital and offline, always means hard and consistent work. For example, successfully promoting digital content is often not a set of random measures but a sequential algorithm of actions its creators need to take. That's why you, as a channel owner, should be concerned with both creative and “packaging” work.

In particular, your content promotion strategy should be comprehensive, and just recording and uploading new videos to the YouTube platform won’t be enough. You will also have to ensure that all your videos are properly ordered to make navigating them easier for your users. To do this, you must create playlists containing videos on the same topic. This article will tell you about these playlists and how to make them.

What Is A YouTube Playlist?

Let’s start with the definition. In a nutshell, a YouTube playlist is a list of videos that share a common theme. They will be posted on the main page of your YouTube channel. You can also find them in the Playlists tab. Organizing your content into categories using playlists is a great practice to help your viewers see the right content faster when they hit your channel in a targeted manner.

Why Create Playlists on YouTube

We can distinguish the five reasons you must make a playlist on YouTube. They are listed below.

Improves discoverability

Organizing your content into categories will help your viewers quickly find videos on the desired topic. This way, they won't have to dig into your feed, wasting time on it. It means they are less likely to leave your channel without finding anything.

Increases engagement

When everything in your channel is attractive, from the quality of the content (at least, it should be relevant) to the visual design, it stimulates your audience to engage in your YouTube activity with greater interest and desire. 

Improves YouTube SEO

Properly structuring and sorting videos improves your SEO within and in search engines outside of the YouTube platform. Thus, you can improve your organic search rates thanks to the creation of YouTube playlists.

Longer watch times

If your videos are organized into playlists, you can link to a specific playlist using cards right in the video. In this way, you expand the context of each new video, and you can also link to previously published videos that relate to a specific topic. If all this works according to the script, an individual viewer's time on the channel can increase several times.

Give viewers exactly what they need

By making it easier to navigate through your channel content, you help your viewers find precisely what they are looking for rather than what has the same topic. Thus, creating playlists indirectly affects the view duration of your videos in a positive context.

How to Create A New YouTube Playlist

While it's best to create playlists when you create a channel, or at least before you have dozens of videos, the steps to create are the same.

  1. Open YouTube Creator Studio. Here, in the top-right corner, click CREATE New playlist. After that, you will see a new window with settings for the newly created playlist.
  2. Come up with a playlist title that describes its topic. You will also need to specify the visibility settings on Youtube. There are three of them: you can give access to its videos to all users, share them with specific groups of users, or only with those with a link to a particular playlist. To share a playlist on YouTube through a link, you will have to copy the desired URL from your browser when you visit the playlist page and make sure that you did it with the link to the playlist and not to a specific video (evidence of this is the presence of the “playlist” word in the URL you copied).
  3. After that, you must click the "Create" button. 
  4. To view the created playlists, go to the left-side menu, the Content section, and the Playlists tab. There you can make changes to playlists: come up with a new title and description, set visibility, add and remove videos from the playlist, create links, edit videos, turn them into a podcast, or delete them at all.
  5. To add a video to a playlist on YouTube, you should go to the Content section and the Playlists tab. Then choose the necessary playlists and click on the Videos icon near it, and then in a new window, click ADD VIDEOS button. You’ll see a pop-up window where you can add existing videos from your channel or upload a new one. And finally, you can include a video in a playlist directly from this video page by selecting Add to Playlist below the video.

Conclusion

Now you know how to create a YouTube playlist and why you need it. In particular, with correctly-created playlists, you can promote your content more effectively than ever and help your audience find the videos they need as quickly as possible. And, of course, you shouldn’t forget that a beautifully designed channel is part of your digital image, so ordering videos by topic can also affect the overall impression of your viewers about you.

As an additional bonus, if the content on your channel is organized into playlists, it becomes even easier to utilize Gyre for initiating continuous streams. Simply drag and drop the required video files. Give it a try for free.