I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired of people selling the most basic YouTube "tricks" as the newest secret to unlimited traffic and money.

Well, I should stop buying video-marketing products, obviously, but since I'm working on one of my own, I need to do the market-research, right? ;)

YouTube Basics

So, here are the basics. Note that I assume you know how to create an account and upload videos (yes, I've seen instructions on this sold as special marketing "secrets").

• Profile
  Upload a picture, add some bio information, put in a call to action for people to go visit your site. An empty profile is off-putting, so fill it with some life. Also, do a little bit of customization for your channel page and start the discussion by posting the first message to the board (something like "comments and questions are always welcome" or "let me know what you think" or "let me know how I can help you [achieve niche-specific goal]").
• Tags
  YouTube has a search function and it displays related videos for every clip you watch. Since it cannot analyze the video content, it needs to rely on tags and descriptions to decide what videos to list. Add in as many relevant tags as are allowed for each of your videos. Notice the emphasis, there? Yes, they have to be relevant, otherwise your just misleading the viewers. And here's the big "secret" trick: Find a very popular video in your niche and copy it's tags. This makes it likely that your video will show up in the related listings.
• Descriptions
  Same thing applies to the descriptions: YT relies on them heavily for it's listings. So, make long descriptions and fill them with many relevant long-tail keywords related to the subject of your video. Again, not the emphasis. Some marketing geniuses on YT keyword-stuff their descriptions old-skool SEO style. They tend not to get many views and if enough people think it's a good idea to do this, it will become an annoyance, be noticed by the powers that be and everyone involved will burn.
• Branding
  Make sure that you brand all of your videos. If you have an editing software that allows you to do so, add a watermark to the videos (logo or URL). Even if not, make sure to mention your brand or website at the beginning and end of the video.
  Important: Make it unobtrusive! Don't plaster your URL all across the screen to the detriment of anthing being shown in the actual video. Don't "casually" mention your website two dozen times in a five minute video. For example, for my RQR videos, I say "I'm Shane from RichQuickReview.com" in the introduction and the end of every video. I don't make a long affair out of it, because the point is that if you watch my videos regularly, you'll hear it hundreds of times. It won't be annoying because it's over so quickly, but it has a branding effect.
• Thumbnail
  YT gives you the choice between three thumbnails for your video, more or less randomly selected from the clip. Don't sweat over this, just check to see the three options for every video and pick the best/most descriptive/most conspicuous one. When in doubt, pick one that shows your face or a picture of a face/person. People like people.

Ok, that's the basics, off the top of my head. Believe me, some people will have you pay good money for the info above plus some fluff.

I'll add more stuff here if I come up with more ideas.

Cheers,
Shane

video, youtube, marketing, tags, description, branding

Last updated 752 days ago by ShaneRQR