Clearly, YouTube has become much more than a video sharing service. It’s the #2 search engine in the world with over 2 billion video views happening PER DAY. And, it’s also a social community that allows you to build a strong network of fans promoting you across the Internet. YouTube is here to stay and can be a powerful tool in your online marketing.
Sure, much of these 2 Billion views are “viral” dancing cats and such things, but increasingly, small businesses of all kinds are using YouTube in their marketing to directly increase sales. A fun example is the now semi-famous Will It Blend campaign from Blendtec, which increased product sales 700%, 5 X the companies old record.
The campaign educates while entertaining, using clever lab coat humor to ask a funny question: what can’t you put in this powerful blender? The Blendtec YouTube channel now boasts 170M video views and 40K channel subscribers. If you have not seen one of these, here is the Will It Blend iphone video. Note: do not try this at home (the black smoke from a pulverized iphone is most certainly toxic.)
Introducing vSEO – Video Search Engine Optimization
One of my online marketing mentors is YouTube “Queen” Julie Perry, who introduced me recently to a whole new subset of SEO, called vSEO, a study of what it takes to get your video to the top of the search engines. See Julie Perrys recent article at Fastcompany.com blog site: How to Make YouTube Part of Your Social Media Marketing.
YouTube Video Optimization = Content + SEO + Community
Julie also introduced me to a great vSEO resource: reelseo.com (clever name eh?) According to ReelSEO founder Mark Robertson, it’s not just about tags and text anymore. The basic methods may still work for very long-tail keyword queries, but for more competitive keyword phrases, you now need to:
1) create quality, compelling video content
2) publish using SEO best practices, and
3) engage with the community, both within as well as outside of YouTube.
How to Optimize and Market YouTube Videos – Presentation
In Mark’s presentation slides below, you will see in detail:
- Making the case for online video and for YouTube in particular
- How to publish and optimize YouTube videos (the gist of which starts on slide 8. )
- YouTube ranking factors and things to consider
- Promoting and marketing YouTube videos
- Driving conversions with YouTube videos
- Customizing YouTube embed