People love YouTube. From latest entertainment news to interviews gone bad, from silly wedding videos to fashion trend, people watch all types of videos on YouTube for millions of reasons. It is the default place customers are looking for videos online, so you will want to be there too.
In industry terms, YouTube is the 800-lb gorilla of online videos. According to recent comScore research, YouTube ranks #2 in terms of search engines. This means that it is second only to Google and outranks Yahoo, Bing and all other search engines. That is HUGE!
YouTube is owned by Google (that should tell you something) and its videos can be seen on YouTube.com or within search engine results or on websites that have embedded the YouTube videos on their sites so their visitors can watch them.
In terms of driving traffic from YouTube to your online store, there are several ways:
1. Create a YouTube Channel – A channel is your own mini-broadcast network online. Pretty cool concept!Here are some examples of retailers’ YouTube Channels – you can see there is a wide variety of video quality and approach.
Some basic elements of a YouTube Channel include site URL, description, links to your other social media sites (like Facebook, Twitter), links to other YouTube Channels, subscribe button, playlists, META information, tags and more.
2. Create viral videos – one of the keys to success when marketing your products or services on YouTube is the viral or pass-along factor. Will viewers who watch your video pass it along to their friends making the video spread like wildfire?
Videos go “viral” for a variety of reasons – they are shocking, funny, candid, weird, mesmerizing and more. But there is common element for all viral videos – they are NOT boring! Avoid boring videos at all costs.
To help make your videos go viral, make sure to spread the word – embed your YouTube videos on your online store and don’t forget to ask your customers to tell others about the video via email, social bookmarking (Digg, Technorati, etc.) or social networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).
3. Add your URL to your actual videos – you can create awareness for your online store’s URL plus you can get users to type in the URL directly into their Internet browser’s address bar – bypassing the search engines all together and going direct to your online store avoiding any distracting ads from competitor sites!
4. Optimize Video Pages for Search Engine Optimization
Whenever you upload a new video, YouTube will create a page to host it and like any other page online, you have the opportunity to optimize it for the search engines to get ranked well.
Google and other search engines LOVE to index videos high on result pages. It is part of what has been called “Universal Search”, which is a way of saying that the search engines, especially Google, will produce search results from a variety of resources such as video, news, local search, product lists and more. It is no longer that easy to find a list of ten text-only search engine results within Google.com.
To optimize a video page for the search engines, make sure to
- Title the video properly
- Tag the page with the best keywords
- Write a keyword rich description
- Share the video with others
- Get inbound links to the video page
I have seen many times how easy it is to get a YouTube video indexed on the first page of results within days, even hours. By getting additional real estate on search engine results, you have a better chance to attract more traffic and keep your competitors off the first page!
VIDEO MARKETING BEYOND YOUTUBE:
According to a Sysomos.com survey released October 2009, YouTube captures almost 82% of the video market. So, there are other players out there.
Although YouTube is the BIG DOG of online video, there are plenty of other players in the video space as you can see above. And many of these video sharing sites are well indexed in the search engines giving you more real estate in the search engine results. Plus, keep an eye on videos on iTunes to gain market share overtime!
SUPER VIDEO SYNDICATION TIP:
Now, there is a great online service to help you syndicate your videos EASILY. You can upload your video once and then send it out to the most popular video sites at once. The service is called TubeMogul and it can save you a ton of time!
Plus, TubeMogul is free (they do have premium services too) and you will get plenty of analytics for your videos such as audience drop-off (to see when viewers tend to stop watching the videos), audience geography, syndication tracking and more.
Here’s to your online (vide0) success,
David
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