YouTube Marketing: Optimize It For More Traffic Part 1
In this series we will be focusing on video marketing… actually optimizing videos in particular (more specifically for YouTube since they are the king of video sharing sites), since this is an area that generally gets forgotten by most marketers.
In this series, I will be using both video and/or articles for these tutorials, and my hope is that some of it may help you in getting more exposure and ultimately traffic to your videos.
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Note: Some of the material written for this and subsequent tutorials on video marketing are taken from one of my reports, that were until now, only available through a paid subscription.
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We focus first and foremost on YouTube because Google emphasizes their videos in the universal search engine as a thumbnail, which means you get better visibility and potentially higher click through rates. This means that if you play your cards right you may get some decent rankings in the search engines and potentially drive some decent traffic to your site.
The great thing about using video as part of your marketing strategy is that you can often start receiving traffic within minutes of submitting your video to YouTube (provided you did the appropriate amount of research before creating and publishing your video).
One of the more frequent questions (and complaints) I’ve gotten from people wanting to market using video is:
“I don’t have any money or equipment… so, how do I make a video”.
I know you’re probably asking yourself: “How the hell am I going to create the content?” or better yet, “I don’t have any money, how am I going to produce it?”
Well, first off, you’re not going to need any professional equipment… all you need is either a way to create videos using screen shots or pictures (using something like Windows Movie Maker or iMovie on the mac); OR create some ghetto videos using your digital camcorder that’s capable of capturing video (which most digital cameras do these days) OR a camcorder… or better yet, if you have some cash – invest in a Flip Video thingamajig (it’s a tiny video camera that captures up to 60 minutes of video… and has a built-in USB connector so you can plug it into your computer). By the way, you absolutely DO NOT have to use a camera or be in front of the camera if you don’t want to…
If you want to create screen capture videos (actually showing people how to do something on your computer screen), you can use CamStudio (which is free) or Camtasia for the PC (they have a 30-day free trial of their software so I recommend you actually download and use it); or iShowU or ScreenFlow (which is a new software) for the Mac.
Comments
You are indeed right about the power of video marketing using YouTube. If Google knew the power of YouTube and bought it for the incredible amount that they did, everyone ought to leverage on that POWER. When you said – “The great thing about using video as part of your marketing strategy is that you can often start receiving traffic within minutes of submitting your video to YouTube” you are ABSOLUTELY right! Thanks for sharing.
I think I will try this ghetto style. With my blackberry storm I can shoot the video and email it directly to youtube.
This has been very interesting and it was very informative.
I’ve been looking at downloading videos from YouTube, it seems that YouTube and many other social network sites have changed their code in order to prevent certain sites from allowing you to download video content from them; most annoying, is there a foolproof alternative? Anyway, excellent blog post, I found it very insightful.
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