James
If you’re one of thousands of business owners with a website, you know how invaluable quality traffic is to your page. It’s in your best interest to know the best methods of traffic diversion, which will help lead to increase in revenue. One of these tools at your disposal is YouTube.
YouTube is internet’s largest video hosting platform. And, believe it or not, it’s also the second largest search engine – only behind Google. With such popularity, it can serve as a incredible marketing tool if used properly.
Creators from all around the globe have turned to YouTube as the digital frontier of creativity and a potential revenue source. From young kids sharing their daily vlogs, to entrepreneurs marketing their latest creations, this video hosting site is versatile and a formidable social media platform.
You are probably looking to jump into the YouTube scene to enjoy the benefits it offers. With a properly implemented YouTube strategy, you can use it to channel online users to your website.
Quality YouTube profile along with video uploads put your audience on the fast-track through the awareness stage of the marketing funnel. As a result, they will better understand your business and be more inclined to purchase your product.
Look out for these things when optimizing your YouTube profile and content. It’s will be a surefire way to generate additional online traffic to your website.
YouTube Name Relates With Your Website
‘Branding 101’ – consistency throughout, which includes the name. Making sure that the name carries over across all channels is detrimental to branding efforts and in generating online traffic. This may sound like a no-brainer, but you would be surprised how many businesses fail to understand this basic principle.
When you create your YouTube profile, make sure that the profile name matches up to your business. There should be no confusion when trying to associate the account to your company. If and when your audience comes across your YouTube page, they will get to know the company that is behind the content.
Be Thorough With Your YouTube Profile
Your YouTube account allows for quite extensive customization as well as fields for any relevant information. Make sure that you take time to fill out the information and be thorough with this process. After all, it’s an additional social media channel that directs users to your primary website.
- Profile picture should be a company logo, or it could be a professional picture of yourself. Avoid uploading selfies or irrelevant images. Again, this is going back to the branding elements of consistency. Images used should relate back to your business.
- Channel art, or banners should be customized as well. Stick to images that depict your work environment or the product you produce / sell. You can also keep it simple and upload generic color banners but make sure it coincides with your branding. The size of the image should be around 2500×1440, any bigger and you risk of cropping parts of the image.
- Channel description should be filled out. Inform the audience of what the channel contents are, and how they relate with your business. Include a short summary and all the ways you are capable of helping your viewers.
- Links. You are able to include a few web links to other online pages. Add your web page, any blogs you use or social media profiles. It’s in your best interest to make sure all links are included. We are talking about driving traffic to your web page, so this will help accomplish that objective.
Get creative with your profile and make it shine. This could potentially be the first impression of your business to some YouTube users.
Tell Viewers What to Do
Telling the audience what to do is proven to work. Utilizing a call-to-action – whether it’s in your videos or elsewhere on your profile – is proven to generate additional engagement.
When creating videos, don’t hesitate to suggest the viewers to take action, hence the “call-to-action”. This can typically be done in the beginning of the video and you can reiterate the message at the end as well.
I also suggest you include a call-to-action of some sort in the video description.
Call-to-actions may include –
- If you like the video, press the “like” button;
- Tell me what you think of the video in the comment section below;
- Subscribe to my channel for more great video content;
- Follow me on social media, links will be provided in the description below;
- Check out my website for cool products that can help you;
- Don’t forget to share the video with your friends.
Those are just a few examples of call-to-action that you can implement in your videos. They sound sincere, and help coax the viewer into going through with an action they wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.
Take Advantage of Topics That Work
Avoid overthinking video topics too much. More often than not, what has worked in the past can be reintroduced again just as successfully – if not more so. You can either repurpose some of your older content, or consider using similar topics that have worked for other companies.
Repurposing
Let’s face it, not everything you create is going to be seen. That’s just a fact of content creation and it can actually work in your favor. You may circumvent the time consuming brainstorming process and jump straight to content creation. Reintroduce older content that performed well with your audience in a video format on your YouTube profile.
Walk-troughs and various guides work incredibly well in a video format. If you had written them before, they have the potential to be made into a quality video. You can even create a mini video seminar breaking down those hard-to-digest blog posts or eBooks you had posted months ago.
The repurposed videos can also supplement your future blogs and other social media posts.
What Worked For Others
Be on the lookout for video content that is published by similar businesses. Observe what they do right and what they do wrong and learn from their mistakes. YouTube is home to thousands of videos and you’re bound to find some that overlap with your potential topics.
See the view count, read the video description and evaluate the audience perception in the comment section. The gathered information will help you sculpt more effective video content strategy moving forward.
Make Use of Video Descriptions
In the beginning of this post, I informed you that YouTube is the worlds second biggest search engine. Much like Google or Bing, YouTube search results are impacted by keywords. Those keywords should be found in the title as well as the video description box.
Description of the video is a lot like the meta description of your website or your blog. It’s a brief description of the video and it also helps search engines find the right videos based on included keywords.
Exposure is the name of the game here. If people cannot find your videos, then your YouTube video content may as well not exist.
Take some time to include links in the video description too. They can direct the viewer to additional information that supports your video content and of course your other online platforms. We are here to direct traffic to your website, so make it easy for your audience to find it. We don’t want people getting lost on the internet, it can be a scary place.
Appropriately Categorize and Tag Videos
Much like keywords in search engines, categories and tags help YouTube segregate the videos based on the content. Anyone searching for a specific video, will be guided there based on the search criteria matching up to the selected categories and tags.
You will notice the selected video categories in the video description.
Be very careful when categorizing your video content. If you make a mistake there, you can lose out on video exposure and in turn, limit the traffic flow to your web page.
Promote Your Channel
Any content you submit on the YouTube account should be promoted whenever possible. Your profile can grow much more effectively if you promote the newly created videos across all your channels.
The more places your content can be found, the more chances it has to be seen. By not sharing your videos on other platforms, you’re automatically dismissing anyone who doesn’t use YouTube. Embedding videos and sharing links on all platforms gives you the the best exposure which leads to…you guessed it – increased web page traffic and more effective content marketing.
Influencers
For some, the process of developing and nurturing a YouTube account may be too tedious. That’s totally okay and there is no reason to panic. You can still utilize YouTube to your advantage – well maybe not YouTube itself, but the people operating on the platform.
What I am talking about here are influencers. Bring on some influencers to do the heavy YouTube lifting for you.
Influencers are individuals who have already built up a sizeable social media following. Their audience enjoy the work that they create and tune it whenever new content is published. You can leverage their existing audience to your advantage.
Find the influencer that best suits the niche you’re in and targets the ideal audience. You can circumvent the entire YouTube process and have influencers do the marketing on your behalf. Of course, you will need to compensate them for their efforts.
Influencers are there to promote you – they link your business to thousands of potential consumers. Within the video content they create, not only do they talk about your company, but show-case the goods you offer.
It’s been proven that for every $1 spent on influencer marketing, businesses get more than $6 in return. Obviously this method is worth considering if you want to garner additional publicity for your enterprise.
Irakli
