ryan.taft | Atlanta Business Video

5 Tips for Optimizing Your YouTube Videos

Have you created a YouTube Channel for your business yet? Did you add a link to your website or small business blog in the description section of your YouTube video? YouTube has become an amazing marketing channel for small businesses. Not only can you host your small business videos on YouTube for free, but YouTube now offers an active community of video viewers (many of whom may be prospects for your small business), and even video optimization tools for small business owners. This post is going to walk you through 5 ways that you can optimize your small business videos on YouTube.

Online tools like YouTube, coupled with decreasing costs of video recording devices, have really opened the door for small business owners to use video to promote your business. With that said, simply creating interesting videos on a regular basis doesn’t guarantee success. There are things you can do once videos have been created to position your videos for success. Follow the 5 tips for optimizing your YouTube videos below, and you’ll see better results:

Create a YouTube Channel: Having a YouTube Channel for your small business is critical if you plan to use video on a regular basis. You can customize the design of your channel so the feel of the YouTube Channel resembles your brand elements. You can add every new video to our Channel and then promote your channel to customers and prospects. They can visit your Channel and see an archive of all the videos you’ve produced over time. It’s your own little piece of online real estate on YouTube.
Add Keywords to your YouTube Video Title & Description: As you may know, using your keywords in your online content is critical for SEO. Just like you would add your keywords on your website & blog articles, you should be using keywords in your YouTube Video titles & descriptions. By infusing your keywords into those areas, you will attract more quality viewers.
Link Your Small Business Website in the Video Description: When writing a description for your YouTube video, be sure to add a link to either your small business website or blog up front. As you may have seen when searching for videos on YouTube, only the first few characters within the description show. You want to give yourself the best chance of driving traffic to your website or blog, and having your link up front in the description helps.
Add Captions to Your YouTube Videos: YouTube now allows you to create captions throughout your video. It’s a really easy process (for more information, just Google “Create captions in YouTube”). As the video runs, there may be areas where more explanation is needed, or call outs are warranted. YouTube Captions allow you to take your YouTube videos to the next level.
Select the Appropriate Thumbnail Image: Another big factor in converting potential traffic to viewers of your YouTube video is the thumbnail that you choose. YouTube allows you to select any scene that you’d like from your video and make it your thumbnail. Having a thumbnail that captures the essence of your video will deliver more quality traffic to your YouTube video.

If you follow each of these 5 steps when creating a new YouTube video for your business, you will see an uptick in traffic. There are other ways to optimize your YouTube videos, but these 5 things are pretty high on the list. Remember, once you do post a new video that you can then promote YouTube videos through Twitter. Twitter is a great tool for driving traffic to your YouTube videos.

Do you have any other tips to add to our list? Leave a comment below.

Promote Small Business Videos through Twitter

In one of our latest blog articles, we wrote about using video to promote your business because video costs have come down tremendously over the past few years, and producing marketing videos is now available to even the smallest business owners. What today’s post is all about is promoting those videos once they have been created.

There are two parts to a successful content marketing strategy, the first is creating the content & optimizing it. The second part is just as critical, and that is getting your content in front of your target audience. One of the best ways to reach & connect with your target audience, build relationships, and promote your content, is through Twitter. Twitter is an amazing tool when it’s leveraged properly.

When you’re just getting started on Twitter, it’s imperative to build your Twitter foundation before you just start tweeting. If you don’t take time to build out your Twitter profile before you start following folks, it may be that when they come to your profile and don’t see any activity, they will NOT follow you back. So, you want to build your Twitter profile, then start following people. As you begin actively using Twitter for business, you may want to look into a Twitter Management tool like TweetDeck, as TweetDeck allows you to manage your Twitter account much more efficiently than Twitter.com.

Once you have a solid Twitter profile for your small business, you can now use it to start promoting your new videos. Whenever you produce a new video and host it on your YouTube Channel, you can then go onto Twitter and send out the link to the video. A great way to do this is to take the title of your video, say it’s “Use Twitter to Promote Your Small Business Videos”, your link to the video, and possibly even a hashtag or two. A hashtag is any word preceded by the “#” sign, so hashtags look like #TwitterVideo or #Video4Biz. You can then use your title, link, and hashtags to construct your tweet. Your tweet may look like this: Use Twitter to Promote Your Small Business Videos: http://YourVideoURL.com #Video4Biz

Using Twitter to get your video content in front of your target audience is a great way to drive traffic to your video, as well as, provide value to your followers. By continually producing video content, and being active on social media tools like Twitter, you can begin to build strong online relationships with your target audience. These online relationships will eventually lead to increased sales as long as you’re able to move those folks through your “sales funnel”, which is a blog post for another time. Be sure to get active on Twitter so that you can use it to promote your small business marketing videos!

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