How to Create a YouTube Playlist + Best Practices for Maximum Views

Do You Know How To Create A YouTube Playlist For Your Channel?

YouTube playlists help people find more videos that are related to the first video they watched from their original search query. 

They’re a great way to boost your video views and provide bingeable value to your audience. 

So today, we’re going to show you how to create a YouTube playlist.

And in the process, we’re going to share tips on how to optimize it for YouTube SEO to get more views. Let’s dive in!

What Is A YouTube Playlist?

Google, which owns YouTube, says:

“A playlist is a collection of videos. Anybody can make playlists and share them, and friends can add videos to your playlist.”

So, as a business owner, it’s important to think about how your audience is using playlists personally, in addition to how you will use them professionally. 

YouTube playlists are usually used to group like-topics together such as “a study playlist” full of music videos that have songs that help a person study. 

Or another example is if somebody is trying to learn how to plant a garden for the first time.

They might save all the videos they find that they want to watch on that into a Garden playlist.

Understanding how your target audience thinks about problems and solutions as it relates to what you offer…

…will help you understand how to create a YouTube playlist and organize it (and what topics to make videos around). 

How To Create A YouTube Playlist

Step 1: You’ll want to make sure you’re logged into your business’s YouTube account. Then click Playlists over to the left.

Once you start making playlists, you’ll see them on this page.

But if you’ve never made one, your page will most likely be empty apart from the default “Watch later” that YouTube gives to everyone.

Now if you want to know how to start a YouTube channel like ours…

…then be sure to read our tutorial for that next.

Step 2: Click the New Playlist button, and enter a title for your playlist.

You want the title to make it obvious as to what your playlist is about while also including relevant keywords. 

For example, for a lot of our playlists, instead of just saying “Twitter” or “Instagram”…

…we call them “Twitter Marketing” and “Instagram Marketing”.

This is because:

1. that’s more specific and accurate, and
2. those phrases have a high search volume on YouTube. 

Step 3: From there, you can set your visibility to Public, Private, or Unlisted. 

Public means exactly what it sounds like- everyone can see your playlist. 

Private means only yourself and those you invite to view the video can view it. Note that they must have their own YouTube accounts.

Also, it won’t appear in the YouTube search results, and the people you invite cannot invite other people of their own to view the video.

Even if they send them the URL, it won’t work unless the account viewing the video has been invited by you.

Unlisted means your video will not come up in search results or on your channel either.

But if someone does happen to get ahold of the video URL, they can see and share the video with others. 

You’ll normally want to set your playlist to Public, but for the sake of this tutorial, we’re going to select Private and click Create. 

Step 4: You’ll then want to hit the editing pencil to edit your playlist. 

Now, you can see when we did that, YouTube took us out of our company account and into this personal YouTube account view.

It gave us a red error bar saying the playlist does not exist. 

Because remember, we set it to private.

So we’re going to click this profile icon, click switch account to get back to LYFE Marketing, and then it will show us the playlist.

If you decide you want to change the title, you can always do that by clicking the editing pencil next to the title. 

You’ll then want to click the editing pencil next to the description text box to add one that is 5000 characters max. 

Now, transparently, most people don’t read these.

But it usually helps your YouTube SEO if you add in a bunch of keywords that are relevant to the topic of your playlist. 

And by YouTube SEO, we mean your playlist is more likely to be recommended to viewers organically by the algorithm…

…if it is optimized for a handful of highly-searched keywords.

Speaking of optimizing your YouTube videos, if you need help with that, then check out our YouTube SEO services after this.

Click Save once you’ve got your description the way you want it. 

Step 5: If you hit the 3 dots, you can start adding videos to your playlist. These videos can be from other channels or your own. 

If you’re wanting to boost your own views and channel subscribers…

…we’d recommend making playlists of your own content organized by category to create bingeable material that keeps viewers on your channel. 

You can also add collaborators to your playlist here, adjust your playlist settings, or delete it altogether.

And once you’ve got videos in your playlist, it gives you the option to add all the videos from this playlist into another one that you have.

To add a collaborator, just share the link it gives you there with that person.

Step 6: In your playlist settings, you can allow the option for viewers to embed your playlist or not.

You can have it add new videos to the top of the playlist automatically, or not, and you can set it as an official series or not.

If you hit the shuffle button, it will automatically start playing your videos.

And you can see that once we clicked back to another page, it kept the video playing in the corner. 

This is because the video was clicked on from a playlist. Individual videos don’t follow the viewer around and continue to play like this.

So this is another small thing about playlists that helps your video views.

Step 7: Another quick way you can add videos to your playlist once you’ve got it created is to go to the Videos tab on your channel.

And then, click the 3 dots under any given video, click Save to playlist, then click any playlists you want to add the video to, and it will do so in real-time. 

You can add the same video to multiple playlists.

And you can just uncheck them if you want to undo your action and remove the video from the playlist.

Step 8: You can then click the Playlist tab to view your playlists from the public’s perspective on your channel.

So those are the steps on how to create a YouTube playlist! If you want to see the full tutorial, watch the video at the top of this post.

Now before we wrap up, we want to leave you with a couple of CTAs to think about as you go create your playlists.

But first here’s a quick reminder to check out our new social media ads training course once you’re done reading this post.

Things To Remember As You Create YouTube Playlists

1. Think about the things your audience would be searching for on YouTube.

Note that these things should relate to your product or service, and then make playlists for those topics. 

You can confirm the search volume for any keywords you’re thinking of by using paid tools like Keywordtool.io…

…to ensure that it is actually being searched a lot and get any other relevant keyword ideas.

2. Audit your playlists every few months or so.

This is for you to see if it makes sense to create a new playlist based on the recent videos you’ve put out. 

Maybe your audience has started searching for new or different topics that you need to re-organize your playlists around. 

Go through your playlists every so often to ensure they’re still relevant to your audience, and to make the best of your YouTube marketing.

And if you’re interested in learning more about YouTube marketing strategies, here’s the perfect post for you.

And that wraps up everything for this post!

We hope you now know how to create a YouTube playlist for your channel. If you need more help with this, don’t hesitate to contact us today!

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