Getting onto the “Most Viewed” page
Now that a video is ready to go, how the hell is it going to attract 100,000 viewers?
The core concept of video marketing on YouTube is to harness the power of the site’s traffic. Here’s the idea:
something like 80 million videos are watched each day on YouTube, and a significant number of those views come from people
clicking the “Videos” tab at the top. The goal is to get a video on that Videos page, which lists the Daily Most
Viewed videos.
If we succeed, the video will no longer be a single needle in the haystack of 10,000 new videos per day. It will be one
of the twenty videos on the Most Viewed page, which means that we can grab 1/20th of the clicks on that page! And the higher
up on the page our video is, the more views we are going to get.
So how do we get the first 50,000 views we need to get our videos onto the Most Viewed list?
Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds
a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.
Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kick starting the conversations by setting
up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming,
but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.
MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We
take advantage of this.
Facebook: Share, share, share. We’ve taken Dave McClure’s advice and built a sizeable presence on Facebook, so sharing a video with our entire friends list can have a real impact. Other
ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends,
or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
Email lists: Send the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list (and the recipients’ willingness
to receive links to YouTube videos), this can be a very effective strategy.
Friends: Make sure everyone we know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least
share it on Facebook.
Each video has a shelf life of 48 hours before it’s moved from the Daily Most Viewed list to the Weekly Most Viewed
list, so it’s important that this happens quickly. As I mentioned before, when done right, this is a tremendously successful
strategy.
Strategic Tagging: Leading viewers down the rabbit hole
This is one of my favorite strategies and one that I think we invented. YouTube allows you to tag your videos with keywords
that make your videos show up in relevant searches. For the first week that our video is online, we don’t use keyword
tags to optimize the video for searches on YouTube. Instead, we’ve discovered that you can use tags to control the videos
that show up in the Related Videos box.
I like to think about it as leading viewers down the rabbit hole. The idea here is to make it as easy as possible for viewers
to engage with all your content, rather than jumping away to “related” content that actually has nothing to do
with your brand/startup.
So how do we strategically tag? We choose three or four unique tags and use only these tags for all of the videos we post.
I’m not talking about obscure tags; I’m talking about unique tags, tags that are not used by any other YouTube
videos. Done correctly, this will allow us to have full control over the videos that show up as “Related Videos.”
When views start trailing off after a few days to a week, it’s time to add some more generic tags, tags that draw
out the long tail of a video as it starts to appear in search results on YouTube and Google.
For more from: Dan Ackerman Greenberg
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