by Founded in February 2005, YouTube is today the biggest video-sharing website online. According to Comscore, nearly 12 billion YouTube videos were viewed by users in the United States in February 2010, and, according to YouTube itself, around twenty hours of video are uploaded every minute via browsers, e-mail, and mobile devices. As a business wanting to market yourself using video, YouTube therefore represents huge potential exposure for your brand. This, together with the fact that the site is free, means that for many businesses YouTube is their primary channel for uploading and sharing video.
Another major advantage of YouTube is that because it is a Google property (Google bought it in 2006), its video content is integrated within regular Google search results. Therefore, videos uploaded to YouTube also receive exposure on Google search results to users searching keywords related to the video content. Especially if you have a new blog or website and are still building up search result visibility, YouTube can be an excellent supplemental tool for gaining search traffic until your site builds up its own credibility to improve its rankings. When thinking about using YouTube marketing for your business, keep in mind two main key success factors:-
1. The content should resonate with your target audience.
2. Your target audience should easily be able to find your content on YouTube.
Besides uploading your videos with the right supplemental information and in the appropriate category, the best way to connect with your audience is to be active within the YouTube community. Being active can mean making friends with other users, sharing your video with them, and building up subscriptions to other users whose video content relates to yours. By engaging with the right target market, they will watch your video and fulfill the call to action you have in mind, such as visiting your website or buying your product or service. Overall, as long as you have the right strategy and the right type of content, YouTube can be a highly efficient, cost-effective way of generating targeted traffic and gaining brand exposure.
Along with other media types like images and audio, Google’s search results today pull in video content, sourced largely from YouTube. What this means is that if you take the time to optimize your video properly, it will be highly visible in search results, which will result in a good amount of extra traffic being driven to your videos. Besides making your video visible on Google’s search results, optimizing your videos ensures that you’re visible on internal YouTube search results. The search function on YouTube is the main way people find content on the site, so it’s important to make your video page thematically relevant to the keywords people are entering in searches to find your content. Follow these steps to make sure your YouTube content is visible in Google’s search results:-
1. Research Keywords. Using a resource like Google’s keyword tool can help you identify keywords your target market is using to find your content. The keywords you select should be general enough to attract a good amount of traffic while still being specific enough to attract targeted traffic.
2. Include them on your video page. Once you’ve identified one or two main keywords for your video, include them in your video title. For example, if your researched keywords are Internet Marketing and Make Money Online, your title could “Internet Marketing Seminar on How to Make Money Online.” Next, add these keywords into your description, but remember to keep it readable to a human visitor. Finally, add the keywords to your tag field. Note that both your title and tags fields can be a maximum of 120 characters long, while your description can be a maximum of 5,000 characters.
3. Generate views. YouTube ranks videos not only by on-page relevance but also using factors like views, shares, ratings, comments, and the number of subscribers – in other words, the more popular a video is, the higher it will rank. For this reason, sharing your video and participating in the YouTube community is a key part of ranking both in internal search results and on Google’s search results.
Beyond just creating good content that appeals to your target audience, your video content should capitalize on people viewing it by creating a call to action that keeps them engaged with your brand. This call to action should encourage your viewers to perform a specific action that you define – whether it’s to leave a comment, share the video with others, view more videos that you’ve created, or visit your website. youtube comment likes
