It cant be bad to boost your traffic can it? Weather it's black hat depends on what the 3 steps are.

These are the three steps...

From my experience of ranking several videos in 2013, the only 2 factors that really matter are:

On-page - Keyword in title and description. Must appear at least 4 times in 500 words since Google can't "see" the video.

Off-page - Backlinks

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I've ranked a video on the front page of both Google as well as Youtube by boosting it with Views/Likes.
Getting Views sure goes a long way in helping the video rank better.

As said above, on-page optimization works good for Yahoo Video optimization.. the more activity you would make in off-page optimization the more benefit you would get too.. but consider relevancy too.

As far as ranking in Google:

1 - Target low to medium competition.

2 - Optimize everything. Exact keywords in the filename, keywords in your description, tags, etc.

3 - Get the videos to about a thousand views with some likes. (I usually aim for about 20 or so.)

4 - Backlink the video. I've found that it really doesn't take much as a properly optimized YT video tends to rank pretty well naturally. And I've also found that some of the more "questionable" tactics seem to actually work, if you're going that route.

Yes, boosting a video with views plus the channel with subscribers work like charm.