Did you know that last year YouTube had over 1 TRILLION views last year? That’s 140 views for every single person on earth. In terms of time-spent, each month the media Goliath users watch over 3 billion hours of YouTube entertainment. Want to get on that gravy train?
First off, well done on recognizing YouTube as a valuable tool for internet marketers. If you have videos on YouTube already then you are ahead of the game, the next step is to market the hell out of them. I’ve got great news for you, as an internet marketers you likely already have most of the skills needed to promote the videos to a large, and eager, audience: SEO skills. If you can blog; you can YouTube.
So, let’s put your SEO and blog-promotion knowledge-base to work in promoting your YouTube content:
Step 1: Add a Title and Description
Just like you add a title and description to webpages and blog posts, you need an attention-grabbing title and teasing description for your YouTube videos. Use the same keywords that you have found effective with your internet marketing analytics tool and incorporate them into your title and description.
As always, keep your titles to a simple key sentence, like “How To Deworm your Dog”, and your description 2 or 3 laymen-word based sentence. Any longer than this and your title and description will be truncated by Google. Remember though, without adding a website/blog link or CTA into your description you won’t be generating any traffic or leads for your site.
Step 2: Tag It like a Runaway Pet
Your most-powerful tool in you YouTube arsenal is your tags. Once again use your most effective keywords, using both short- and long-tail keywords. For an extra boost research which tags are most-effective on YouTube specifically, because using these will help get your video listed under YouTube’s popular “related video” section (which provides huge view numbers). If you use highly-effective tags for your posts you increase the videos’ chances of becoming viral.
Step 3: Stimulate Key Viewership
In order to get prime real estate on YouTube you need to build page views, because when YouTube decides which videos to recommend to its viewers it uses a formula that combines total page views overall with the amount of views in the last 24-48 hours. This might make it sound difficult to build and maintain momentum, but you will find that once built the viewership will maintain growth on its own.
In order to build up your page views treat each YouTube video with its own mini-marketing campaign. Do this one at a time, not in batches, so that you build views on one page instead of spreading those views across many (remember: big numbers count for a lot).
For each mini-marketing campaign promote your video across a variety of places to get a big spike in traffic (which will lead to an even bigger spike in traffic thanks to YouTube’s internal promotion):
- Embed the video on your social media accounts (yours and any and all related groups), and don’t forget to ask your viewers to please click on the link and share the video—because they will.
- Embed the video on your blog
- Guest post on popular blogs in your vertical and embed the video
- Embed it on your landing page (this can be temporary, doesn’t have to be permanent, and you can cycle each of your new YouTube videos in)
- Email marketing blasts, “Check out our awesome video on How To…”
- Post in forums that allow video embedding
The most important part of YouTube marketing is to combine it with all your other marketing efforts, which you have hopefully have built a strong following on. As we said above, don’t overload your audience with multiple videos. Give each video the time it deserves (and needs) with as many inbound links as possible.
Step 4: Monitor and Tweak Performance with YouTube Analytics
You already use Google Analytics so using YouTube Analytics will be a piece of cake. The tools are almost identical and can tell you vital information about how your video is performing. You can use this information to tweak your mini-marketing campaign and on future YouTube video promotion.
Step 5: Get Ratings and Comments
This isn’t really a step on its own as it is integrated into step 3′s promotion but it is so critical that we thought it deserved its own mention. YouTube highly values its ratings and comments system, and uses this to calculate the overall success of a video—without it they won’t be likely to recommend your video to their users. Videos with more comments and ‘thumbs up’ ratings will help grow the video. So when spreading the content across the platforms on the bulleted list above, ask your audience to leave comments and to give it the ‘thumbs up’. This is especially effective with social media marketing campaigns.
Remember, asking for comments and ratings is the best way to get them, and trust us, your audience won’t mind—especially if they enjoy and appreciate the valuable content you have provided.
For more internet marketing tips n’ tricks click here.
Robin Wilding is a professionally trained Canadian journalist striving to bring journalistic-era intergity to online media. She has a second degree in Political Science--with a focus on International Relations and the developing world. Currently Robin is a contributor to several technology publications, including Brajeshwar.com, SocialTechnologyReview.com, HostingIndustryWatch.com, AnimationCareerReview.com and CompareBusinessProducts.com. She also works for several web developers; and does ghost writing for several high level executives within the technology sector. Robin's work is showcased in her portfolio: http://shownd.com/robinwilding
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