Did you know that YouTube is officially considered the second largest search engine? People go to YouTube now to pretty much search for anything because why read it when you can watch it? That’s the old lizard brain syndrome, the easiest way out typically taken by most people which makes YouTube the greatest thing for most of your content because video is probably one of the easiest ways to explain things in addition to motion graphics, titling, and anything you can put in there along with the audio to make the visual learners digest your information in an easier format.
So one of my top content mediums for really establishing your online footprint is video. Not many people do it because not many people have the resources to do it and it is actually easier than you think nowadays. There are so many pieces of software and different types of videos that you can make out there where you actually don’t even need to film anything in the traditional sense. So an example of this is just a simple photo slideshow. Take some of the best photos of your company and put them into any number of stock templates or have your own custom template created and make a few different videos. I really suggest go out and making a video for each service or product that you offer. The powerful thing about this is you can easily rank those videos globally for those big keywords and it is a lot easier than you think because there is a lot less competition. For example when you go to Google and you do a search typically you will see tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of results for that keyword but if you do that same search on YouTube you may only see a thousand or a couple of hundred search results so there is a huge, huge, opportunity there to jump ahead in the pack and really siphon some of that traffic from YouTube back to your site.
Now video is a great medium to get people to know, like, and trust you and this is extremely important in any marketing campaign. These are the reasons that people buy from you. The reason people buy your products. They really want to know, like, and trust you. They want to see what you are all about, see what your product is all about, and in the online world it is really tough to get any better sense of what a product actually is or how it looks and feels and seeing it in a video because you can’t obviously touch it through the internet. This is as close as it gets and really it opens some great opportunities to leverage some of the content that is already created out there. So like I said you can create a video slideshow and another really easy way is to film yourself. People don’t realize that they have an HD camera in their hand most of the times. A lot of iPhones have some amazing; at least the newer iPhones have amazing recording quality and it is really tough to tell the difference between an iPhone and a DSLR camera. As long as you put it on a tripod and have great lighting. Give that a shot and check out some video slide shows. There’s also some really fun animations that you can get done that will explain processes. It uses motion graphics and some really cool effects you can do and you can outsource all of this to people who are experts in things like Adobe After Effects, Apple Motion, and a lot of your 3D Mac types of 3D rendering and animation software. You can outsource this to another country and get it done for a couple of hundred bucks. Get a couple minutes of video that is I would say comparable to a lot of Google’s motion graphics commercials or any other type of explanation video or sales letter video that you have seen out there. That’s one of the things we do at Marketing Technologists. We story board and script videos like this. We will also put the whole thing together for you and we have a great resource of some of the top motion graphics artists out there, editors, filmers, and we even do traditional HD filming, interviews, and all that kind of stuff. I would recommend going out there, creating a video for each service and product you have, and get it ranking and start seeing that traffic come in.
I’m sure you are saying great, this all sounds great. I would love to have videos promoting my products but that is only half the battle. Once you create them and once you distribute them how do you get them ranking above all the other ones that are already out there? Well there are a number of factors that go into this and you know I will link to some additional articles at the bottom of this post that will have some more in depth strategies for doing this but really it comes down to a few factors and that is obviously the keyword that you use in the titling and description. It is also the tags that you put on the video, and recently I noticed Google starting to hide the tags because people I believe were copying tags from related videos they wanted to compete against and it was kind of throwing the whole game off but there are tags you can put in the videos but really what Google likes to see with this is interaction. They want to see comments. They want to see people liking it. They want to see people posting it onto other mediums, blogs, and other sites and sharing it around social media and the like.
So that’s great. How do you influence that action? Well you can obviously send it out to your followers, to your subscribers, to your fans and get them to like it but what if you are brand new? How do you kind of instigate that if you don’t have any fans or don’t have an audience base? Well there are a number of strategies. I mentioned in a previous article/recording that you can use micro-sourcing services like microworkers.com or you can go pay people per like. There are also sources like Fiverr.com where you can go and buy views. Now be very careful with this because I have heard of accounts getting banned for people buying views so definitely look at the created feedback. Don’t go overboard. I would only suggest maybe trickling a few on there just to get the video humming and ranking. You can do the same thing with comments instead of asking people to comment on it and to like it as well.
There are a number of services out there that you can search and get people to do this. Another value add that benefit can bring to your business especially a local business is you can geo-target your videos and what this does if you go and take a read through the Google Places maps listings article you can…if you go back and read through the Google Places listings optimization article that I put together you have a general idea of how geo-targeting kind of works and how Google scrapes your address. Well you can put longitude and latitude into the advanced details of your video as well as your address into the description and it will count as a citation and a really powerful citation from YouTube as well for your business and help promote that. You can also put it on your Google Places page and then there are gosh a few dozen really high authority video sharing sites out there that you can also distribute your video to. Now these won’t get a lot of views or traffic but what they do get you is a backlink back to your website which ranks. Helps your website rank higher in the search engines. It will probably refer a little bit of traffic to you but really distribute as much as you can and get that interaction flowing to help it start to rank and then start building backlinks to it and that will slowly get it to start ticking up the search results in YouTube.
Now if this sounds like a lot of work putting together the video, promoting it, getting interaction and everything else that goes along with the distribution of the video then definitely come check out our video marketing services as marketingtechnologist.com. We can do it all for you actually from story-boarding to the actual distribution and promotion and SEO of your video to get traffic flowing in. So check out our packages. Again, my name is Blair with Marketing Technologists and feel free to leave a comment below. As always visit our Facebook page and join the conversation.
