Most people spend more time watching videos online than reading blogs, so if you want to succeed as a blogger you can dramatically increase the size of your audience by recruiting people from YouTube. Effective YouTube marketing doesn’t look much like marketing on the television, however. Here are some of the most powerful methods that do work.
Talk to People Who Matter: The authority of the people around you rubs off onto you. Set up interviews with influential people in your niche. This is a strategy that takes a lot of time and possibly a decent amount of money, but the work is well worth the investment. Interviews are more fun to watch than monologues, and they give your site a much more professional image. They also keep the content fresh. Consider editing the interview so that only the most entertaining and helpful content remains.
Connect the Video With Your Site: Videos are great for keeping people interested in your site, but they can also be a great source of new traffic. Be sure to link back to your blog from your YouTube profile, and include your URL at the end of video.
Encourage Sharing: Enable automatic sharing for your videos. This option is available in your YouTube profile’s “Account Settings” under the “Activity Sharing” option. From here you can choose which social networks to include, making it easy for your audience to share the content. Facebook and Twitter are highly recommended.
Choose an Unavoidable Headline: At the very least, do some basic keyword research into your industry before writing a title. Include a keyword that is popular among searchers in your niche and faces relatively low competition. The headline should also spark curiosity, interest, and humor. The ideal headline is almost impossible to resist clicking on.
Include an Enticing, Optimized Description: Place a link back to your blog at the beginning of the description or most of the viewers probably won’t be able to find your site. The description should be enticing and to the point. It should also include plenty of keywords related to your niche.
Use the Keyword Tags: Include the relevant keywords in the tag section before submitting a video. It’s often much easier for a video to get found on YouTube than for an article to be found on a typical search engine, so keyword optimization is especially helpful.
Think Like a Viewer: If you were surfing videos on YouTube, would you like this video and want to share it with your friends? If not, you’ve done something wrong. Don’t blame your budget for this either. There are plenty of viral videos on the web that cost nothing more than the price of a camera, computer, and Internet connection. Encourage creativity by looking for connections between typically unrelated subjects. Do something that hasn’t been done before. Appeal to universal human desires and emotions, and take your time.
Connect With Your Audience: Your work doesn’t stop once you’ve attracted massive viewership. YouTube is not just a theater, it’s a conference. Read and respond to comments. Some of the most common or most popular comments may even deserve a response in the form of a new video. Make the experience truly interactive for your audience and they will become more loyal than you thought possible.
Maintain a Brand Identity: All of this talk about the importance of your audience can give some people the wrong impression. They can end up taking on a “me too” attitude that starts to put off visitors. Your audience will be diverse and it is impossible for you to agree with and impress all of them all of the time.
Think about what your audience likes, as well as what you feel comfortable with and enjoy doing. Being responsive to your audience while maintaining the confidence to occasionally disagree is a better long term strategy. Dishonesty doesn’t pay off in social media, and YouTube is no exception.
For the same reason, your comments and videos should share a consistent tone. Polite comments don’t go well with hilarious videos, for example.
Jeffrey Gross has been blogging since 2007 & contributing on many websites since that time. He is a professional internet marketing and blogging consultant. Currently, he is participating in New York city condominiums project.
