No matter what kind of video you put on YouTube, whether you're marketing your business or becoming the next Tron Guy, you want the biggest audience possible, right? That means you want the most views. Now, you can pay to promote your video, or you can experiment with keywords and descriptive text and hope that viewers will be directed to your video. But there is also a fairly simple, and free, adjustment that you can make to your video that will usually increase its viewership tenfold. You can add a transcript.

Transcripts in YouTube are referred to as Captions and Subtitles. When you're viewing your finished movie, you can press the Captions and Subtitles link to upload a caption file. Now, you may think that you need expensive software in order to create captions for your video. The truth is that all you need is a text editor and a little bit of time. First, create a plain text file. Then, type in the numbers 00:00:00.00, and press enter to move to the next line. Next, watch your video in a program with a timer, such as Quicktime Player or Windows Media Player. Find where the first spoken words begin, and type the time into the text file. The organization is like this: Hours:Minutes:Seconds.Frames, so if your movie player says that your first spoken words are five seconds in, you'll type 00:00:05.00. Then press enter to move to the next line, and type the spoken words into the text file. Play your video until this set of spoken words are finished, and then record where they end on the next line. For example, if your spoken words end five seconds after they began, you would type in 00:00:10.00.

You can continue this process for the entire video, and especially if your video is on the short side, it won't take very long. You can then upload the file into YouTube and your viewers will have the option of turning on the subtitles that you've created. What this also does is adds relevancy to your search terms. Viewers searching for content will now be able to search through not only your keywords and your description, but also through your transcript as well. Not only does this provide a diversity of search terms, which increases the number of times your video appears in searches, but it also allows viewers searching for your kind of content to find it easier.