How to market your YouTube Video

 

It is only reasonable that when you invest a great deal of time, effort and no small measure of inspiration in creating on point YouTube videos to promote your business that you spend a good portion of that time, effort and inspiration on marketing the video to ensure its influence spreads far and wide and that you have the best chance of forging new leads.

Your first port of call is likely to be social media and that can certainly be a great start – and there are examples of businesses who make it work for them as their principal method. It is likely though, for many small businesses, that it will largely involve preaching to the converted in that your followers will see the video, but few others. If you can get enough engagement and receive enough shares then you could enjoy some stellar success, but marketing videos via social media can be hard graft when you are competing with the giants of industry.

One simple technique that should not be ignored is email. There are many ways that you can incorporate your YouTube videos into your email newsletters, but arguably the simplest and most effective is using merge tag to allow you to embed video screenshots into your email. These screenshots will send anyone who clicks on them directly to the original video. Simple, but effective.

If you can spare the time, becoming a guest contributor to another blog will be able to use the platform not only to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise but also to draw attention to your own YouTube channel or videos. On a slight tangent do not neglect the impact of positive local press. You should get in touch with local newspapers and their editors and see if you can arrange some sort of collaboration. Once in place you can subtly market your videos, perhaps using their own social channels as well. Of course, it should go without saying that you should promote every one of your YouTube videos well via your own blog. It is imperative that you come up with catchy and relevant headlines to encourage the greatest number of clicks. You can also come up with some competitions on your website and social media that require subscription to your YouTube channel in order to enter.

Perhaps one of the most neglected jobs that simply must be done even before you begin to market and promote YouTube videos involves the correct and enticing set-up of the YouTube channel itself. It is imperative that your channel is set up displaying all of the information, branding and resources necessary. You should make it easy to navigate and a pleasure to use as well as:

• Creating unique and relevant channel artwork
• Designating appropriate featured videos for subscribed and unsubscribed viewers alike
• Putting together video playlists to organize all the different types of videos you produce, so that those interested in a particular arm of your business can easily filter what is relevant to them.

Citations and Web2 Properties

 Using Web 2 properties and citations can help you get your website indexed quicker. Using tools such as Google search console or Bing webmaster tools that allow you to submit a sitemap are great but setting up some web 2 sites where you can link to the important pages on your site is an additional step I would recommend.

I personally like to create web 2 sites, such as this one you are reading, as it allows me to create what I would call mini blogs where I can write about topics around my main site and then link to the pages I want to push. These could be my main pages or new blog posts.

I also like to use these sites to link to other properties such as my social sites and any backlinks I might be able to get. 

Getting a backlink on a relevant directory is great but if the category page your link is on isn't indexed by the search engines then it is useless. Adding a link to it from a page that is already indexed can help the search engines to find that page and index it.

Here are some of the backlinks I have managed to get.

Skillshare is all about creating a great profile and sharing your information.  

Pbase allows you to create a profile and share photos and stories.

Business directories are a great place to list your business and get visits and a backlink. This is Cultrix on the same directory.

Ello lets you create a profile and share your latest blog posts.

SYOB or Start your own business allows you to list your business and sponsor a local page.

SEO is a Complex Topic

 SEO is a complex topic or are we just overcomplicating it?

When you find out that Google looks at over 200 factors to decide on where to rank a web page you could be forgiven if you think that this is too complicated to take on yourself.

However when we break down each of these factors not many of them are that complicated. We are going to go through all 200 plus factors but here are some of the most important ones:

Meta tags

You should all know what meta tags are. But if not they are simply tags that tell the search engines what the page is all about. There are 3 tags; title, keywords and description. Keywords isn't used anymore because people used it to stuff keywords in there hoping they would rank high for all the keywords so you can ignore that one. The title tag is probably the most important one as it directly helps you move up the rankings for keywords to enter into it. The description tag doesn't directly help with rankings however if you write a good description of what the page is about then this could entice someone to click on your listing which over time will help rankings because the search engines will see that you are getting a good click through rate.

Content

Content has always and will always be important. Without good content it is extremely difficult to get your page ranked high on search engines these days anyway. Focus on quality but also quantity. Search engines like in depth articles.

Internal Link Structure

Having a good menu system will help both users navigate quickly to the product or service they are looking for. Search engines will also use the links in the menu to work out which pages they see as being important. 

Backlinks

Search engines and in particular Google use backlinks to work how much authority a site has. So if a website has 5 low quality backlinks it is likely to have a low domain authority whereas a site with 50 quality backlinks is highly likely to have a good domain authority. Sites with a high domain authority will find it easier to rank high in the search engines that low authority sites.