YOU TUBE

If you're looking to increase your online visibility, build trust, and convert prospects into customers, then online video and YouTube marketing need to be part of your online marketing activity.

Why is YouTube so important? Today we enjoy faster connection speeds, unlimited hosting, and a video camera in every pocket or purse. That makes creating and sharing videos incredibly easy and affordable.

In addition, videos often appear on the first page of search results, and even when they don't, people often go directly to YouTube to conduct a search. In fact, YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world behind Google, which owns it.

YouTube also gives us advanced annotation tools that allow us to create clickable calls to action within our videos to encourage engagement and subscriptions. With promoted videos you can even create links that take viewers to your website or other web property.

But let's start with the basics. How do you create videos that help build your business?

• Start with a keyword analysis. Since search and online visibility are such a big benefit of YouTube, make sure you're using the same words your ideal customer is using.
• Create compelling videos. Most of us will never create a "viral" video with millions of views because we don't own a piano-playing cat or a sneezing baby panda, but thankfully those aren't required for success. In fact, most of us couldn't handle a million new customers all at once, anyway. "Now serving 3,424,022. No? Now serving 3,424,023. Please, everyone, form a straight line. No pushing."
• Instead, you should create content that addresses your audience's needs.
• Your goal should be to create videos that are helpful, valuable and compelling to your prospects and clients. If you can blog about it, you can create a video about it. Your video content may consist of how-to's, answers to frequently asked questions, expert interviews, screen video captures, slide shows and more.
• Work your keywords into your video. There are four obvious places to use your keywords in each video:
• Title: Just like your blog posts, make sure the title of your video includes your keywords. Twice is nice.
• Description: Don't scrimp here! Too many people ignore the description, or just write a one-sentence description. Feel free to write a blog-post length description, working in your keyword phrase(s) multiple times.
• Tags: Make sure you use your keywords and variation of those keywords in the tags section.
• Narrative: YouTube is listening! YouTube takes your audio and creates an automatic transcript and uses this as part of their algorithm. So bake those keywords into the narrative as well.
• Include calls-to-action. Want people to take an action at the end of your video? Tell them what to do. "For more ideas on pet costumes visit our website at embarrassyourcat.com."
• You can also include a clickable link in your description. Best practice is to start your description with the URL you want to drive traffic to and make sure you include the http://…otherwise the link won't work.