Everybody wants to be famous on YouTube, but many believe you just need to upload a video to YouTube, sit back and wait for the thousands of views to roll in. The reality is that there is so much content being uploaded to YouTube everyday, over 48 hours of content is uploaded every minute to be precise, you need to spend some time promoting your content.
If you promote your video content effectively you will be rewarded with getting a share of the three billions page views each day and your video being shown in the universal results on Google. If you have a marketing budget to spend then you now have the ability to purchase “promoted video” placements allowing your video to be shown in YouTube results where it wouldn’t naturally appear or if it sits lower down the results. But if you want to achieve greater exposure naturally, just follow the simple steps below.
What to do first
First thing is to optimise your video for a specific keyword or topic. Do this by including the words in the Title of your video and near the beginning of the description, this will help you rank higher in the YouTube results and help get your video listed in the Google search results. Make sure you insert a 3-8 tightly related words using the tagging feature. Adding dozens of words will not get you anywhere and create a poor user reputation.
First impressions count
Choose an enticing image for the thumbnail, this will intrigue users to view more and find out what the video is about. If you can also find a frame for your thumbnail that is quite visual and attention grabbing this will help your video stand out in the results. Once you’ve chosen a thumbnail image to make your result more clickable, you’ll need to keep a user’s short attention span. The first ten seconds of your video needs to be highly engaging and watchers tend to drop out after 40 seconds so keep it short.
Don’t stop there
YouTube likes active users. Here are some tips on how to get the most from it and get increased exposure:
- Create a Channel and upload at least one video every two weeks, ideally you’ll add two a week
- Create topic based playlists for your related videos
- Create playlists on your channel of other’s videos
- Make friends by using the search box to find similar video to yours. Search by upload date to target the most active users. You can only make a limited number of friend requests each day to prevent spamming.
- Get your video favourited by asking viewers to favourite your video using the annotation tool. High Definition videos tend to be favourited more
- Reply to comments on your video. Ask users to rate and share the video if they like it
- Comment, rate and share other’s videos
- Link to your video from your Facebook, Twitter and website
- Find related websites and ask webmasters if they would like to embed your video for free
YouTube is a very social website, most users share a video and many watch it with someone else. Interact with the community and publish your own high quality content. As with SEO for any website, you need to optimise your videos and get links and favourites to your video to help boost it’s visibility in the YouTube search results. And if Google likes your video you’ll show in the universal search results within just 30 minutes.
We used many of these techniques with our digital marketing videos.
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