Utilizing these tips will help your video strategy on YouTube
Online publishers and content marketers have been turning more towards video in 2011, as more consumers are busy watching video content online.
This year has already seen a record number of video watchers, as nearly 179 million people watched online video content in June alone.
Publishers with a slew of content are starting to get it; people online enjoy video content, so if you want to reach these new audiences, it’s necessary to offer some form of video content.
In an article published last Monday at the Mequoda Daily, I discussed seven types of videos that are being used by online businesses. Now it’s time to compile a list of best practices for online video.
These best practices all stem from the notion that you will be putting your content on YouTube. For any content marketer or online publisher who isn’t uploading content to YouTube, I must ask “why?”
Not uploading video content to YouTube is like writing content without search engine optimization in mind; it greatly detracts from the amount of eyes exposed to your content organically. If you’re going to take the time to produce, record, edit and distribute video content, you need to take the necessary steps and put the content onto YouTube, the world’s premier video search engine.
Without further adieu, let’s get into some best practices for uploading video content onto YouTube.
[text_ad]
Five YouTube Best Practices
#1. Keyword Rich Titles. Just like written search engine optimization, if you add keywords into your titles, you will have an easier chance of being found when users are searching the related terms.
#2. Use Keywords in Tags. As you likely do in your blogs, YouTube allows you to add tags. When doing so, enter all the keywords relevant to your video content.
#3. Always include links back to relevant articles and content. This strategy helps bring your audience members more content, and can show that you produce content for multiple platforms. For instance, let’s say you created a how-to video on landing page optimization. You could add in links back to your blog, which is filled with articles on best practices for landing page optimization. You could also link directly to free reports you have on the subject, so that your audience members can get more information, and you can receive the interested person’s email address for future correspondence.
#4. Use YouTube’s annotations feature. As YouTube puts it, YouTube Annotations is a “way for you to add interactive commentary to your videos”. According to its website, YouTube Annotations can be used to:
-Add background information about the video
-Create stories with multiple possibilities where the user chooses the next scene
-Link to additional related YouTube videos, channels or search results within a video
#5. Check your stats. Like all online analytics, you will want to see how your content is performing. If one video is experiencing a lot more attention and driving more traffic back to your website, you will want to focus on creating similar videos more often.
Are you utilizing these best practices for YouTube? Or are you further behind in using video to market than you had originally thought? If that’s the case, join Patrick Hughes, Mequoda Group’s New Media Producer, for our Web Video 101 for Publishers webinar on August 23rd.
During this live 90-minute program, you will learn the types of video formats that work the best for publishers, the best equipment that won’t break your budget and best practices for creating and tracking video content. Learn more now.
