This week I chatted with a guy who’s made a bunch of videos for YouTube but didn’t know exactly how to use them:
Let’s start with the optimization steps:
1. When loading videos up to YouTube, make sure you first save the video on your computer as “yourkeyword.mpeg” or whatever format it is in.
2. Then put your keyword in the Headline – but still find a way to make it enticing.
3. Then put your url first in the description linking back to the page you want them to go.
4. Then copy and paste the keyword title into the written description part right after that.
Now, there are 2,000 characters available in the description – use as many of them as you can to describe your video – making sure your keyword is in there. And then send the video link to a friend and ask them to include a comment using your keyword. That should optimize the listing as much as you can do alone.
Next YouTube looks for social relevance when it comes to the video. That means the number of views, the number of comments and the number of times it is embedded elsewhere. Here you might need a strategy.
One way to embed the video is with the “embed code” underneath the video. That’s how most people do it. They copy and paste the code right into their html.
Here’s another, more exciting way! With the WordPress Plugin TubePress, you can load up a playlist of videos. So if you put all your “above ground gardening” videos in a playlist called “gardening”, Tubepress will display those on the page in a nice visual matrix.
All we did there was create a playlist on YouTube and copied the “playlist ID” into the TubePress plugin. Voila! it’s done. You could do the same thing for sure.
Check out this video:
Watch the whole thing and see what they do at the end. Imagine doing that with businesses that share the same target audience or subject matter. In fact, if you’ve got some friends in the music business who have videos – you could help promote each other with a Choose Your Own Adventure style linking campaign. That could be a lot of fun.
Another way to use the videos is to have someone transcribe them, and turn them into short e-books, or blog posts or articles. You could even take a series of videos, transcribe them and turn them into a home study course, complete guide or subscription site. All good stuff for video.
“BONUS TIP: Upload the transcription as a closed captioned file and your video will be available to the deaf community”.
Don’t forget to put them on Dailymotion.com, Revver.com, GoogleVideo and any other video sites you can find.