Tips on building an online audience through marketing and video optimization.
[Music Playing]
Once you get your videos online, it’s time to reach your audience. Here are a few useful tips and tricks on how to do it.
[Music Playing]
The first tip that will increase the size of your audience would be a demand or call to action. What this means is that you want to give your audience a purpose – what’s their goal? If you want them to subscribe, tell them to; or, if you would like them to visit your website, tell them to go there. This gives them a response and now you’re building upon your community.
[Music Playing]
I think one of the first things that you want to consider is what the key terms that you’re using. A lot of times, people use the word keywords. It’s a little bit of a misnomer because one thinks that that’s just one word and a key term is actually several words combined. For example, if you’re a wedding videographer, you’d wanna use the key term wedding videographer, which would be competing against every other wedding videographer in the country. You’re better off actually going for the term wedding videographer plus the name of your city, and then, all of a sudden, it goes from big league into minor league and you’re more likely to succeed, provided that you’re not living in Los Angeles or Chicago, of course.
[Music Playing]
Next up is the issue of content. What are your videos about? Are they worth watching? How much content do you have? And if I’m searching for the answers, do your videos provide them? What do you have to offer that no one else does? These are all questions that if you can answer, you will stand out and people will subscribe to your videos.
Your videos should be the best on that topic and the content should be maximized to the best of your ability. Viewers should leave feeling satisfied.
[Music Playing]
What you’d do is you’d look at the words that relate to your video or relate to your business and you’d try and think about your customer and what types of words that person might use when they’re searching on the internet. So, you have to think about your customer first and think about what they might be searching for. Then, what you’d do is you’d go into a – there’s various different services out there. One is called Word Tracker. Another one’s Keyword Discovery. They both have free versions and they also have versions that you can pay for that will actually list the frequency with which people actually search for those keywords. There’s also another free service out there, SEO Book, which actually combines some of that information and you can look in there and see how frequently people are searching for various different types of key terms. Make sure that you put them in the title of your video and in the description of your video. Now, those are the two key places to put them.
Now, if you’re doing it in a YouTube situation, then, really, all you have to work with is the title and the content description and then you’ve got some title tags that you can put in there. If it’s a video on your own site, you can actually write about your video and make sure that it’s in the title of the video, make sure that it’s on the headers above paragraphs, and then within the paragraphs as well, that exact key term repeating itself.
One of the things that you have to get good at, when you’re putting that keyword in there is writing copy that isn’t just including the keyword in an awkward fashion. Ideally, it actually is going to sell your product as well and that’s a talent that is used by keyword copywriters, and if you can be a good keyword copywriter and actually sell your product, as well as include the keywords at the same time, then that’s what you’re going for.
[Music Playing]
You should also be sure that you are very linkable. Where do I go from more content and why? You’re giving people something for free on YouTube. If they have gone this far, there’s a good chance they might want more, so direct them. Where should they go?
[Music Playing]
I would say that the first thing I would is open up a Google ad words account. Not just so that you can put up ads using ad words, but because when you open up a Google ad words account, you get access to things like analytics, so you can take a little piece of code and you can put it in your website and you can actually see how many people are visiting your website. Google Optimizer, so you can actually set it up so that people can go and they can click on the link to your website and they can actually see different pages that you’ve organized and they can see like version A and version B and version C, and then, after a while, at running Google Optimizer, later on, you can look and you can see which pages were the most successful at achieving the result that you were going for, whether it’s collecting an email address, getting somebody to place an order for your video, getting somebody to make a comment about your video. All of those things become possible when you’re using Google Optimizer on your own site. Now, of course, YouTube, you can’t change that. But, it is a good tool to have. Also, when I was talking about the issue of being able to look at keywords and finding out how frequently people are looking for them, there’s actually a part within Google in the keyword tool where you can actually type in that keyword and they’ll give you an estimate on how many times they think people are searching for that keyword on Google. Basically, you open up an account and it’s paper click and you write up an ad. You’ve got 25 characters in the top line, then 35 characters, then 35 characters, just to be technical about it, and you write up an ad, hopefully compelling them to go ahead and click on that ad and – that is related to your business. And you bid on keywords that people enter into the search engines. And so, when they enter in those keywords, if your bid is high enough and your page is relevant enough, then your ad will show.
And so, let’s say if you’re a wedding videographer in Chicago. You would bid on the keyword wedding videographer Chicago or wedding videographer. And if you were just bidding on wedding videographer, you’d actually – you could geo target it so that it’s only showing up in Chicago. So, you can use wedding videographer Chicago or wedding producer, wedding video producer or possibly, even if you had a business where you were doing online ads, you could say online ad producer Chicago. Whatever it is, you basically look at the keywords that are relevant to your business, the keywords that your customers might put into a computer when they are searching for you, and you bid on those, and then your ad will pop up and it’ll send ‘em right to the webpage that you send them to.
[Music Playing]
On top of all that, you have to be consistent. There is no point to subscribing to someone’s video channel if they never add any new content. It’s the same for watching your favorite TV shows. You are given a time to watch every week and it’s up to you to show up and get on your couch just in time. It’s up to the networks to provide the new content consistently every week to keep you coming back. YouTube fans are no different. Give them consistent, good, original content and maybe they’ll give you their time.
[Music Playing]
Well, that’s one of the things that you can use if you open an ad words account, you can actually put an analytics code into all of your webpages. And, by doing that, you can actually see people as they’re coming to your webpages, where they’re coming from, and you can even actually add what’s called UTM tracking codes, which allow for you to be able to tag additional information onto like – let’s say you put a banner out there, you can actually put a special tag on there that labels that banner as being part of that particular website or coming from that source, and then every time somebody clicks on it, then you can go into a add content in the analytics profile and actually look and see where people are coming from. So, it’s a very useful tool to be able to use analytics and to be able to add those codes in there.
[Music Playing]
Once again, you need a call to action. You need to take part in the community. You need to be linkable. You need to have good content and you need to be consistent. That’s the best way to reach your audience online.
[Music Playing]
[End of Audio]
