How do I get Shorts viewers to watch my long-form, beyond the related-video link?

Short answer

Most people who watch Shorts never leave the Shorts feed. The link helps a little, but not much. The better use of Shorts is to test which topics people care about, then make your long video about the winner.

So do two things. First, make the handoff as easy as it can be: say the long video's title out loud, pin the link, put both in one playlist. Second, and more important, treat every Short as a poll. Three Shorts a week on three topics tells you within days which long video is worth making.

Why the related-video link sends so few people

YouTube shows Shorts and long videos to different audiences. The Shorts feed is built for people who want to keep swiping, and YouTube optimises it for that. A Short with 100,000 views usually sends only a few hundred people to the long video it links to. The link is not broken. It is just competing with a swipe, and the swipe wins almost every time.

What a Short does very well is tell you, fast, what people want to see. A long video takes days to make and weeks to read. A Short takes an hour and gives you a result in two days. That is the trade to make: use the format that is cheap and fast to learn from, then spend the expensive format on what you learned.

What to do, step by step

1. Make a 20-second Short that shows the finished piece next to the failed piece. In pottery, that is a good bowl beside a collapsed bowl. The contrast is the hook. Whatever your niche, show the result and the mistake in the same frame.
2. Say the exact name of your long video out loud. Spoken names work better than on-screen text. People skim the screen on Shorts but they do hear the audio.
3. Pin a comment with the link to the long video. Use the related-video link too. Neither will send a flood, but together they give an interested viewer a clear next step.
4. Post three Shorts in one week, each about a different piece. A bowl, a mug, a plate. Three topics, same format, same week, so the comparison is fair.
5. Whichever Short gets the most views, make your next long video about that topic. This is the real payoff. The Short has already proved that people want the topic, before you spend a week filming it.
6. Put the Short and the long video in the same playlist, and post a community post the same day. Playlists keep the two formats next to each other, and a community post reaches the subscribers who do watch long videos.

What the example shows: two small pottery channels

Two small pottery channels, with 2,000 and 4,200 subscribers, got 8 to 14 times their usual views with videos about beginner mistakes. Riley Madsen's "Stop Throwing Bowls Like a Beginner" did 13.8 times the channel's normal. From Wheel to Meal's "7 Bowl Wheel-Throwing Tips for Beginners" did 7.7 times. Beginners are the people who search and click.

That tells you what the Short should be. A Short showing a collapsed bowl, with the line "the mistake that ruined my last five bowls happens at minute three", sends those beginners straight to the full video. It names the mistake, it names the long video, and it gives the viewer a reason the Short alone cannot satisfy.

Two more pottery channels winning on beginner mistakes

The same pull on 7 September 2026 found two more small pottery channels overperforming with the beginner-plus-mistake promise.

Janna Selina, with 1,060 subscribers, got 6,400 views on "The #1 Mistake Potters Make with Handles", 9.5 times normal. How-To Pottery & Crafts, with 1,930 subscribers, got 13,000 views on "EASY Pottery for Beginners to SELL!", 12.3 times normal. Four pottery channels, all under 4,200 subscribers, all beating their normal by 7 to 14 times on a beginner promise. That is the topic family to test as Shorts first: one Short per mistake, and the long video goes to the winner.

How to pick the three topics to test

Do not guess. Search your niche in OutlierKit with "for beginners" added, and look at which videos on small channels beat their normal views by the most. Those are topics with proven pull among people who do not yet know the channel. Take the top three and make one Short about each. The post on getting views without depending on recommendations explains why beginner topics travel so well, and the content gap method shows how to find beginner questions nobody has answered yet.

If you are deciding between long-form and Shorts as a whole channel strategy, the TikTok-to-YouTube growth strategy covers the short-form-first path, and the growth strategy pillar covers the long-form system this method feeds.

Words used on this page

Related-video link

The link a Short can carry to one long video, shown as a button in the Shorts player.

Shorts feed

The vertical, swipe-to-next feed where Shorts are watched. It is a different surface from the home page and search.

Outlier multiplier

A video's views divided by what its channel usually gets. 13.8x means the video did 13.8 times the channel's normal.