Imagine you being in your late teens having goals and ambitions like normal teenagers do (I’m not saying older people do not have ambitions). Imagine yourself wanting to become a successful actor a dancer practicing in your living room every single day.

Would you be able to get to your goals without showcasing your talent to the world? Would you be able become a popular actor or a dancer without finding a stage to perform. Being a recluse never does any good, right?

The same is the case with businesses wanting to tell their brand story to the world out there.

Even 50 years back when small business owners used to manufacture products at home, they use go door-to-door to tell their prospective customers about their products.

Times changed and businesses started using TV and radio to tell their story to their prospective customers.

Now times have changed even further and video marketing has taken center stage.

There are multiple platforms where you can distribute your video content. And if you fail to promote your videos effectively across all these platforms, your story will remain untold and you will lose out to your competitors.

Let’s look at some of the effective strategies for distributing your video content across platforms. We will do this in a four part series covering the various platforms. This a part one of the series where we cover how you can publish on Youtube – the largest video hosting platform and get results from it organically.

Uploading Your Video On YouTube – Organic Promotion

YouTube is one of the most popular channel for promoting your video content. It has a huge audience and the platform is owned by Google so it would naturally help you get your content to rank better.

Let’s start by understanding how you can upload a video on YouTube:

Steps:

1. Sign-in to the YouTube channel and click the ‘Upload’ button in the top right.
2. Select the video from your computer to be uploaded. (Bonus: Don’t forget to change the video file-name before uploading since Search engines also give your file name some SEO value. Also Google prefers high-quality video so try uploading your video in 1920×1080 dimensions)
3. Select the Title, Description, Video Tags, and Thumbnails etc. (There are some rules and SEO best practices to follow for each of these elements)

Optimizing your video for search

58% of YouTube viewers discover a video because of Search and Related videos.

Whatever title, description, and tags you enter for your video will be converted by YouTube into HTML elements of the video view page and cached by Google. It’s therefore critical for you to properly tag your videos for your target key phrases in order to rank in YouTube’s search results.

So optimizing your video for search should definitely be a part of your marketing strategy.

Here are some tips on how you should optimize the meta content of your videos:

Title:

The title is the most crucial SEO factor in your video after the video thumbnail.

• Your video title should include your focus keyword preferably in the beginning. A title with keywords in the beginning tends to rank better in the search rankings.

Eg. 7 Video Marketing Tips To Improve Your ROI.

Video Marketing – How To Improve Your ROI From Videos?

• The title should not be more than 70 characters long including spaces. Though YT allows up-to 100 characters but only a limited amount of text can be shown in the search results so anything longer than 70 characters will be truncated.
• Include the word ‘video’ in your title (if relevant) because it drastically improves your video page’s relevance in Google Search (Not YouTube) while searcher is looking for video content on the similar topic.
• Your video title should be written in the ‘Title Case’ (first letter capital of each word). It helps improve the readability and makes your title stand out.

Test: Which one of these titles are you most likely to click on?

> 7 VIDEO MARKETING TIPS TO IMPROVE THE ROI

> 7 Video Marketing Tips To Improve Your ROI

> 7 video marketing tips to improve the roi

• Your title should exactly tell viewers what they are going to watch. A misleading title will make your viewers leave immediately after playing the video, disliking or negative comments.
• Newspaper like headlines, curiosity, a start with odd numbers, exclamations, top lists and questions make best video titles.

Bonus Tips:

• Use the YT autocomplete feature to come-up with better titles and tags for your video.

• You can also use HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator to generate compelling video titles. Though this tool is specifically to generate blog topics but you can also use it come up with great video titles as well. Or at least get some inspiration for the great video titles.

Description:

Along with your viewers, a good description is the main source to let search engines know – what your video is all about?

You would have seen a few lines of text that appear under the search title – that is a rich snippet provided by your video description.

Best Practices:

• It should be a short story (or Video Synopsis) not more than 1000 words long, written in your brand’s tone and message.
• Your description should tell viewers about your value proposition / why they should watch your video / what benefit are they going to get after watching your video?
• Use your target keyword in the description at least 1-2 times, at least once in the first 100 words.
• Though YouTube allows 5000 characters long description but first few sentences really count, since it’s the only part that is pulled by the search engines as metadata to show in the search results.
• 157 characters (about 22 words) is the idle length to show the most crucial information since anything else will be hidden under ‘Show More’ option in the description and would not be shown in the search results either.
• Don’t miss this opportunity to include your brand name, a link sending viewers to your landing page and showcasing the value of your video within first 157 characters in your description.

Idea: Use Google’s Link Shortner to shorten your LP link if it’s too big.

• Include your channel subscription link and the social pages links in the description.
• The link included in the description is a no-follow link so the SEO link juice will not be passed on but it still has a lot of value to guide your viewers in the right direction.
• If your video is more than 2 minutes long or includes multiple sections then consider adding time code in the description and YT will automatically convert them to clickable links which then goes right to that time in the video when clicked.
• Use ‘Upload Defaults’ feature to save time. This auto fills the video optimizations info while uploading a video. Common info like channel subscription link, social links, common video tags etc. can be set as upload defaults. (Go to Video Manager > Upload Defaults in the Channel Options in left)

Bonus Tips:

1. The title and description of your video should look natural and not a bunch of keywords stuffed together with an objective to achieve the higher rankings. Remember, the ‘relevance’ and ‘user experience’ are two super important factors in SEO and keyword stuffing completely spoils both.
2. A good practice to check if your title is compelling or not, is to ask yourself ‘Whether I would click if someone shares the same title with me?’

The tips above will help you to publish your video on YouTube the right way. The tactics will help you to get your video content get discovered by your target audience more effectively. In our part two of the video distribution strategy, I will show you how you can get more traction on your video content with the help of paid ad campaigns on YouTube.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions pertaining to part one, please feel free to add them in the comment section below.

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