Three Keys to Successful YouTube Marketing

YouTube is accessed by millions of users every day making it one of the greatest places for you to advertise your products, website or services to a new audience. However, it may not be that simple to have an effective marketing strategy because there are an astronomical amount of videos available for people to choose from. How do you set yourself apart from the video crowd? Below are three important tips to conduct marketing successfully on YouTube.

Use Meaningful Keywords

When you create a channel don’t simply use your name and birthday like john1985. Choose a name relevant to your niche and make sure you include low competition keywords in it. For instance, if you sell dental products, instead of the username mentioned above, write something like HealthyTeethDaily.

When you sign up, you will see that the title of the channel is the same as your username. Change it to something that contains important keywords toward your niche. This will make the ‘Title’ of your YouTube page far more SEO friendly, making it more likely for your content to be found by search engines as well as YouTube search.

Pay really close attention to what keywords you include in the tags of the videos that you upload. It’s strongly recommended to use keyword research tools in order to pick the low competition ones that will generate good traffic. A good tool for this is the  Google Keyword Tool.

Customize Your Channel

YouTube provides its members with the ability to customize their channels including custom backgrounds and the ability to include a link to your website. The benefits to the link are obvious, but the benefits to the background may not be so aparent. There’s a lot of space for you to use for advertising and branding of your page, so use it wisely! Make your YouTube visitors interested in what you’re selling and provide them with an easy method to learn more about you and your company.

Upload Valuable Videos and Link Them Together

YouTube can be considered a content site. The only difference is that you’re watching videos instead of reading text. So, the true cliché “Content is king” applies here too.

You can give the video a controversial title because this will also attract people, but don’t disappoint them with useless content. Make sure the video really is controversial and not just one that claims to be of value.

Try to keep them short because there are few users willing to watch more than 3 minutes. You can divide the subject in more parts that are linked together through annotations. You can also include here messages like “Subscribe now” and links to the subscribe page or to your channel.

Anyway, sometimes, it’s better to use long videos. For example, in the case of working-out related videos, people usually want full workout routines and it’s annoying to go from one three minute video to another. Check out some popular clips in your niche that have thousands of views and see what they did.

In your videos don’t exaggerate with promoting your products. Make your videos sound natural and you will get a far bigger response rate. Keep uploading good videos periodically and you will gain your viewers’ trust gaining more views, more subscribers and eventually more sales.

Daniel Ruyter co-founded the online marketing agency Alpha Tree Marketing, a firm that specializes in social media marketing including YouTube campaign consulting.