Making our Youtube Videos VIRAL
Sean Moynahan
1. Identify your keywords. This refers to the popular search terms or "keyword phrases" within your niche. Use Google's keyword tool to see how many searches a word or phrase is getting each month in Google. Experiment with different keywords, and if you're a local-business owner, try using your own city's name in the phrase.
Identify as many as 30 targeted keywords and phrases that are getting more than 3,000 local views per month from your ideal customers.
2. Create your video around your keywords. Now that you've identified popular keywords and phrases, create videos around these topics. Keep your videos short, simple and full of personality -- no longer than two or three minutes with only one major point to communicate. This can not only make it easier for you to create them, but it also makes them more appealing for your audience to watch.
Make sure your video is relevant to the prospective keyword. If you have a list of 10 keyword phrases, make 10 videos.
3. Upload and optimize. After uploading your video, add your keyword phrase to the title as well as the description and the tags fields. This tells YouTube exactly what your latest video is all about. Additionally, consider uploading a transcript of your video. This gives YouTube even more data about your video and should improve your rankings considerably.
To see lasting results on YouTube, be consistent. The more you upload targeted videos inspired by your keyword searches, the more you'll get your videos in front of your audience on a consistent basis.
1. Create engaging content.
The best thing you can do to optimize search engine results is to produce video content that is informative, helpful and engaging. When you release videos that help people solve problems or entertain them, you increase the likelihood that viewers will want to share your videos with others.
As your videos are shared more, not only will your rankings within the search engine results increase, including both the traditional Google, Bing and Yahoo and YouTube's internal search results, increase, but you'll also earn more backlinks pointing at your video content and your website.
2. Incorporate relevant keywords into your videos.
Because search engines often display video clips along with text pages, your videos will show up in the results more often if you incorporate target keywords into your videos.
Consider incorporating target keywords in as many of the following locations on the video upload page as make sense for your particular video clip:
To increase the likelihood that viewers will click through from your video to your site, consider listing your full URL as the first line of your video description. This will ensure that it's both clickable and is displayed above the "show more" tag, which cuts off most of your description on the video clip viewing page.
3. Share your clips on many video sites.
Sure, your videos can pick up plenty of views when optimized correctly for YouTube. But YouTube isn't the only game in town.
To increase the total number of video backlinks pointing to your site and improve overall exposure for your video content, consider submitting to any of the following video directories as well:
| • Vimeo • Viddler • BuzzNet • Yahoo! Video |
• TubeSurf • BrightCove • Google Video |
Submitting your video clips to these sites will require a little extra effort to create accounts and set up your videos for each one. But because the sites each have a substantial number of users, your efforts will ideally be rewarded with more traffic.
4. Take advantage of YouTube's analytics tools.
YouTube offers rich analytics tools that allow you to determine how well your current videos are performing and uncover potential opportunities to create appealing new videos. Remember: The more people who watch and engage with your videos, the more likely they are to be featured in the YouTube search results pages and to be shared as a "recommended result" when other videos are displayed.
Specifically, a few of the things you'll want to pay attention to include:
5. Make a call-to-action in your videos.
When creating video content to share on YouTube and other video directories, be sure to optimize your clips with a call-to-action. Because YouTube seems to reward channels that have more subscribers, for example, you could incorporate the message, "Subscribe now for more great content!" into your videos.
Implementing any or all of these strategies can help videos perform better in searches and, ideally, expand your business's audience.
Sean Moynahan
Google's video publishing powerhouse YouTuberecently unveiled a major upgrade to its video analytics predecessor YouTube Insight. The new system,YouTube Analytics, features a much-improved dashboard that's easy to navigate and understand.
Beyond aesthetics, YouTube Analytics also includes a cache of new tools that allows you to have a deeper understanding of who's watching your videos, what viewer demographic associations are and which topics viewers watch most. Here's a look at some of the most useful features that can help you tailor your business videos and offer a more engaging video channel:
Detailed viewer data: Among the new features is the ability to split off viewer data from engagement data and drill into each of these categories to generate insights into viewer "Likes" and "Dislikes" across all videos in your channel.
In addition to providing viewer stats, demographics and abandonment rates, the new program comes with data on how users are accessing content and which channels deliver the most engaged viewers. It also offers a host of engagement metrics that can help video owners understand the social side of their viewer data -- specifically, what viewers think about each of the videos in your channel. This can help you decide which videos to promote, which new videos to create and what content to scrap.
Related: Seven Tips for Marketing a Business with Video
Audience retention reports: For each video in your channel, you're now able to see exactly where viewers start to lose interest in your videos. With this information, you can learn more about the attention span of your audience, as well as what specific types of content they prefer.
How to use the data: Ask yourself the following questions to get a feel for how to use the information found in the new Youtube Analytics program to make decisions about your current and future business video choices:
1. Take a look at your Top 10 Videos, as displayed in the new Youtube Analytics dashboard. Do you notice any trends throughout these videos? Do they cover similar topics or run about the same length? Extrapolating from this information should give you a good idea of what type of video to launch next.
2. Next, look at your top Traffic Sources. Which sites send you the most visitors? Can you use the other tools within the Youtube Analytics dashboard to learn more about the visitors from each source? Even if you have one source that sends the bulk of your traffic, keep an eye out for other sources that send highly engaged visitors and beef up your promotional efforts on these sites.
3. Finally, look at your Audience Retention reports. How long, on average, are viewers sticking around during and after your videos? If they aren't making it through your content or seem to lose interest quickly, get a handle on what they're looking for to provide future video content that's more engaging.