Turn Your YouTube Channel Into a Growth Machine

July 30, 2016

I’m going to hand over the process we’ve been using to kill it on YouTube.

This process taps into 3 key aspects of getting more views on YouTube videos:

1. Getting more views from Google Search
   
2. Getting more views from YouTube Search
   
3. Getting more views from YouTube suggested videos (“Up Next”)

Please watch the video above or the accordions below to dive deeper into this process.

STEP BY STEP PROCESS

Links Mentioned in Video

• VidIQ – YouTube competitive research and spy tool
  
• Analytics URL builder – helps you “tag” Google Analytics URLs for better tracking and insights
  
• Keywords Everywhere – easy keyword research from within Google search
  
• Complete Guide to YouTube SEO – a previous post I wrote about the specifics of ranking videos in Google search

Video Notes

• Blogging is getting saturated – video is a way to break through the noise and get attention.
  
• YouTube is 2nd most used search engine in the world AND you can build a subscriber base that gets push notifications when you publish videos.
  
• There’s a HUGE traffic potential (and it’s recurring, evergreen).
  
• We generate almost all of our leads from YouTube (and Facebook) videos.
  
• Our eCommerce store gets sales from the YouTube videos.
  
• YouTube is a HIGH authority property, meaning you can get videos to rank easily is Google search. You can use that to highlight good reviews or bury bad ones.
  
• A lot of people think “video views” is a fluff KPI…It’s NOT. It’s insanely cheap, targeted TV advertising.
  
• DO NOT miss out on the opportunity to get your brand / face in front of millions of engaged, TARGETED people.
  
• YouTube can attack multiple parts of your marketing funnel.
  
• When done properly, you can jam videos down every part of your funnel.
  
• Get big boy equipment – camera, microphone, screencasting. The quality of your videos is important
  
• Invest in graphics or video editing – I hired a freelancer for $ 5/hour, he’s awesome
  
• Keep it to the point! Your videos should be as long as they need to be
  
• Have a plan!!! Understand how query types trigger video heavy results (how to, reviews, etc)
  
• Don’t sell – put value out there through your best tips

Funnel model for how we manage WEBRIS.

Funnel model for how we manage Laces Out.

Video Transcript

00:00 Speaker 1: This isn’t some fluff webinar with a sales pitch at the end. This is all about giving you a process to get more out of your YouTube marketing efforts. And if you stick around till the end, I promise you, I promise you it’s gonna change the way that you view the platform in the way that you execute your strategies. So, let’s just get right into it. In this webinar, I’m gonna outline three key opportunities to get your videos more exposure on YouTube. Number one is in Google organic search. So, if somebody’s searching for how to braid your hair, I’m gonna show you how to get your videos to show up here. Number two is within YouTube search. So, again, YouTube is actually the second most used search engine behind Google. I’m gonna show you how to get your videos to rank within YouTube search as well. And finally, what I think is the most underrated is within YouTube Suggest or the Up Next videos over here in the right. I’m gonna show you how you can jack the authority of other videos to get yours here. And when you put all these three things together, it’s really gonna explode what you’re doing on YouTube and really drive a lot more views and traffic.

01:00 S1: In this webinar, I’m gonna show you how to capture all three. But before I do that and really talk about the strategic how, let’s just talk about the why really quickly because I think that marketers just do not really fully appreciate the power of YouTube, and I wanna cover that really quickly. And a lot of it is because I truly believe that blogging is on its way out. You’ve probably heard me here before, but everyone and their friggin’ mom is blogging and writing about the complete guide to something now, and it’s just annoying. It’s just saturated. And there’s no personality behind blogging. You can put a picture on your blog post, but at the end of the day it’s probably a ghost writer or you’re jacking ideas. It’s difficult to really connect with your audience through blogging anymore, and video is a great way to break through that, and not only connect with your audience, but break through all the rest of the noise.

01:52 S1: Video is just a lot more memorable. People retain that information a lot more. So it’s just a great opportunity. And on top of that, YouTube gives you just the tools to explode growth quickly because you can get subscribers. It’s basically like a social network in itself, right? The difference is between Facebook and YouTube video is that Facebook video is timely. It’s right now. It’s happening on your newsfeed. It’s going viral. YouTube, it’s almost the opposite. You get more views as time goes on, and like I said, you can build a following on here. And every time that you post a video, it will send a notification, a push notification to people’s Google profile letting them know. So, you’re effectively building an e-mail list the more subscribers that you get and the more content that you create. So things just really start to hockey stick up until the right over time.

02:36 S1: There is a huge traffic potential from YouTube, and it’s recurring, and everybody, like I said, it’s a hockey stick effect with YouTube. It’s just like SEO. You get more traffic as time goes on and the more and better content that you create. And honestly, internally, we generate almost all of our leads from YouTube and really Facebook video. But I’d say 99% of our clients right now, they come from video. It’s just really impactful. It’s really powerful. Here’s a screenshot from our Google Analytics account for the last couple of months. You can see we’ve got well over 2000 visits from YouTube, and this is only links that we’ve tagged, and I’ll talk about this a little bit later. These are campaign videos, all organic traffic, and I’ve tagged them so I know which video is driving this traffic. And you can see here, not just the numbers but the conversion rate. And the conversion rate for our sales videos, too. This is just a transcript video that’s really bringing the average down. But look at 10%, this is a contact form conversion rate. 10% conversion rate, 11%, 12% conversion rate, 8%. It’s crazy. It’s crazy the amount of leads and the quality of the traffic too that you can get from YouTube. It’s really, really powerful, way more than blog traffic, I’m telling you.

03:43 S1: And our ecommerce store, we get sales from YouTube. And I’m gonna talk about that. I’m actually gonna break down both channels for you, our B2B SEO channel and our ecommerce store that sells shoelaces. I’m gonna show you what we’re doing. It’s also a great opportunity to quickly clean up your online reputation. I get a lot of inquiries about helping people fix bad reviews and stuff like that, and I always tell them like, “Man, just get on YouTube and start building branded videos.” You can see here, Ryan Stewart is my full name by the way, but there’s also an NFL player, there’s a really famous musician. It’s just very competitive for my name. Over time, I’ve SEO’d these other properties. But I started with just this branded video of me in a speaking engagement and I was able to rank it for my name out of nowhere within a week. And this is really key, again, this is kind of a vanity play. But if you wanna rank more branded stuff and other stuff too, that I’m gonna talk about, like reviews for your business, testimonials, stuff like that it’s very, very powerful. We’ll talk about that in just one second.

04:40 S1: And finally, a lot of people think that video views is a fluff KPI. Video views does not drive revenue. It’s not sales. It’s not that important. It’s not. This has been like a harping point for me recently is that I just do not think that people really understand the time that we’re living in. Fifty, 20 years ago, getting a TV advertisement, and still to this day, trying to get on TV is a ridiculously cost ineffective endeavor. We’re talking millions of dollars to get your video in front of people, and the audience is a guess, at best. You don’t really know who’s watching the Super Bowl. You have an idea, but you don’t know. Digital has changed things, and video allows you to reach whoever you want, and I’m talking about with whatever message that you want. TV advertising at a fraction of the cost, and you know exactly who you’re reaching, especially when you’re on Facebook.

05:32 S1: Video views is not a fluff KPI. I actually hired somebody full time to manage my Facebook ads and I told him I don’t care about leads, I don’t care about traffic, I don’t care about clicks. What I care about is engaged video views. I wanna know how many people are watching them the first time around, and then when we hit them again, how many people are watching it more. I wanna continuously build depth with my audience through video. It’s incredibly powerful. By far, the most powerful thing that I’ve done for my business is stop focusing on leads and start focusing on spreading a wide net in building engagement. It’s not fluff. Video is the real deal and it is absolutely the future of marketing, and it’s gonna be here much sooner than you think.

06:07 S1: So, let me get off my soapbox for a second. Oh, I just wanted to show you this, too. A lot of people call me arrogant because I have my face all over my YouTube channel and that’s 100% on purpose. I want you to see my face everywhere because people associate things much easier with a face as opposed to a brand name. Brand name, WEBRIS, that means nothing to you, but when you see somebody’s face over and over and over again, it’s easily recognizable and it’s a much faster way to brand something. That’s why personal brands are so important right now. But anyway, let’s talk about the funnel because, again, just playing off that awareness, video views, traffic, a lot of people think that the only thing you can use YouTube for is to get more awareness.

06:45 S1: So, again, this is a standard marketing funnel. This is awareness traffic up top or viral traffic. Interest is in the top-mid discovery traffic, desire, consideration traffic, and then action or customer traffic. So, if you’re smart and you follow the strategy that I’m gonna lay out here, you can actually hit all four stages of the funnel on YouTube. It’s incredibly powerful but you have to know how to generate the right topic ideas and optimize it the right way and, again, I’m gonna show you all of that in my process. First, let’s take a split-level look here at our two YouTube channels. I have one for our SEO agency called WEBRIS, that’s B2B, very high retainer SEO. My other one is Laces Out, we sell shoelaces. They’re six bucks, so you couldn’t really have two more opposites, so it’s good. I’m gonna walk you through this stage of the funnel with how we’re doing it for our two channels.

07:33 S1: First, over here on the left-hand side, I’ve got a video that I did, “Should We Be Advertising in Pokemon Go?” This is viral traffic. This is something where I can reach a much broader audience by tapping into the Pokemon Go virality. And again, by creating the video as opposed to doing a blog where we’re competing against very high sites, this video can get very high-level exposure and I can promote it in much more effective places. This is how you tap into the top of the funnel viral traffic, by creating this high-level one step up. We do advertising. We probably wouldn’t even do Pokemon Go advertising for clients, but this isn’t to get clients. This is to build awareness, this is to go viral, this is to reach as many people as possible. On the Laces Out side, again, same kind of thing. We don’t sell Jordans’, but we sell laces for Jordans them. So, there’s that kind of crosswalk and also people aren’t really interested in shoelaces but they’re interested in Jordans.

08:25 S1: So we put together some very high-level almost like BuzzFeed viral-type content that hits the top of the funnel that we can reach a very wide audience, and really start to get people into our funnel. After that, on the WEBRIS side, I’ve got this video here, “How to Get More Organic Traffic Right Now.” This is again, a little bit more viral. It’s case study driven, so it actually performed very, very well, but this is how we start getting people interested. This is definitely more topically focused because we’re walking you through a service that we provide, but it’s at a much more viral level. There’s a lot of people searching for organic traffic. Everyone who has a website, they’re in the funnel, but again, we’re targeting a much higher audience, so this is not necessarily at the bottom of the funnel. This is top-mid to just start getting people interested and more reach with our content for that audience.

09:11 S1: On the other side, we’ve got “How to Lace Your Jordan 1.” Again, this is very high-level content, but we’re starting to talk about shoelaces and getting a little bit further down the funnel, more towards purchase relevancy. On the WEBRIS side for desire, I put together a process where it opened up the books and showed people how we ran our SEO process. Again, this is when people are more interested in our service, they realize that we run an SEO agency. They realize that’s a service that we provide and now I can open it up and provide some more value and show them how we did that. This video performed very well, too, and this is actually a sales video for us. You can kind of mask it by adding value, which I’ll talk about in a second.

09:48 S1: On the other side, we’ve got a product here. This is our gold-tipped white rope laces. This is much further down the funnel. This is just showing them on a sneaker, but again, there’s a lot of people searching for this gold-tipped white lace that I actually wanna rank it for this term in Google search. This would be down the funnel more desire and consideration to purchase because people are actually searching for this. That’s on the Laces Out side. Then for customers and actions, basically, this is mostly for software-type companies. If you’re MOZ or SEMrush, you can do videos about how to better use your tools, how to do keyword research, how to do link audit, stuff like that. For us, we use a private YouTube channel to communicate with our clients. I’m very very busy. My calendar fills up very quickly so as opposed to having a meeting, I like to do videos where I’m walking them through documents, and it helps clear up my e-mail.

10:37 S1: That’s how we use YouTube on a non-marketing level but to manage clients is very powerful for that, too. And then on the other side, “How to Criss-Cross Your Laces.” So, after somebody’s purchased a pair of laces, how can we still ad value to that customer? And that’s by showing them how to lace their shoes with what we just sold them. That’s all four stages of the funnel. Again, these are two completely opposite businesses here so you can see how it’s widely applicable to anyone, really no excuses.

11:02 S1: That’s all good and great, though, but honestly the success truly comes down to what you create in the value with your videos. Let’s just go through some quick tips on how to create better YouTube videos. Number one, get big boy equipment. I used to use an iPhone and I’ve seen a lot of videos talking about how that’s cool but if you’re serious about this, dude, you gotta step up your game. I went out and I bought a Nikon 3200. It’s a DLS… DSLR, I don’t even know what it is, but it was about 300 bucks and now the talking head videos that I do are a hundred times better and I got a new lens, a 50mm lens. Get a microphone, get a camera, or if you’re gonna do screen casting like this, make sure that you’re using the right tools. I just use QuickTime and I just record the screen. The files are a little bit bigger but the quality is very important. I see people using these crap screen caster things and you can’t even read what’s on the screen. It’s very annoying. So, make sure that the quality is high because production value goes a very, very long way to keeping your audience engaged and retained within the video.

12:00 S1: After that, please invest in graphics or video editing. I have a video freelancer that I use. He’s 5 bucks an hour, he’s amazing, he does all sorts of different stuff. Your videos can’t look like crap, man. It’s really annoying when I see these really low production quality videos or people with no custom icons. You’re building a brand. This video is a lot for branding. You need to make sure that you’re presenting yourself in the right way. Invest in creative. Please invest in creative, it goes a very long way.

12:26 S1: This is huge for me. This is a webinar, so this is gonna be a little bit, 20 to 30 minute video, but please get to the point. I really hate watching videos myself and I know my audience does too, where somebody gets on and gives a five-minute long-winded intro about who they, and what they do, and the service they… Like, “Shut up, man, get to the goddamn point!” You know what I mean? Like, “We are busy as hell, okay? Get to the point!” It shouldn’t necessarily affect the length. A lot of people say that video length is a ranking factor in Google. I don’t see it that way. You should be creating videos for as long as they need to be. You should not be trying to punch out an hour of video because it ranks better when it really should be five minutes or even 30 minutes.

13:04 S1: This is huge, too. Have a plan. Don’t just start creating videos about all these random different topics. Do some research. Understand how query types trigger different results. So if you wanna rank something in video… Sorry. [chuckle] If you wanna rank something in Google search, you have to understand, if videos are even eligible to rank for that, so take the keywords that you wanna create the video about and Google it. And understand that if no videos are ranking, it’s gonna be very hard to punch that up. So, number one is look up here at the tab. If this video’s tab is closer to the left, that means that video is more important. More people are looking for videos. Sometimes this won’t even be up here, so make sure to pay attention to where this is. And then, of course, just look at if there’s video’s ranking, very much so ‘how to’ keywords, reviews, things like that. They just rank much better in terms of Google because ‘how to.’

13:55 S1: Think about it. If you wanna watch how to tie laces or if you wanna find out how to tie laces, do you wanna read a step-by-step checklist on a blog post, or do you wanna watch somebody do it in a minute? I know that you wanna watch somebody and Google knows that, too. So, they’re very intelligent about how they rank different content based on keywords so make sure you do the research and understand how, what you’re creating, where it’s ultimately gonna live. It’s very important.

14:16 S1: Finally, do not sell. [chuckle] People do not care about the service that you provide until you provide them enough value to get them interested. People are using YouTube for information. They’re looking to learn. They’re looking to be entertained. Do not come on here with some explainer videos and just start hawking products. It just doesn’t work like that. You’ve gotta figure out a way to put out value for your audience. And I know that sounds cliche, but you have to understand who your audience is and what they’re using YouTube for. And that should tell you everything that you know about the type of video that you need to create.

14:48 S1: So it could just be talking head videos where you’re just giving tips, like if you’re a makeup artist, something like that. If you’re doing heavy B2B stuff like this, these screen shares provide it really well. I don’t have to put my face on here. So understand what is working in your niche and understand how you can do that at scale. I know I just talked a lot. I get long-winded about stuff like that. Let me, again, get off my soapbox here and let’s get into the process. Let’s talk about the step-by-step process for how you can get more views on your YouTube videos. I’m gonna just assume that your videos are created. I’m not gonna talk about the creation process. If it is, here’s what to do.

15:25 S1: Step one, you wanna optimize your raw videos naming file before uploading. So, you’ll have your video on your desktop. Just right click on it and go to rename and it’ll pop this up. I use a Mac, you can see here, you can enter keywords for the tags. You can enter keywords and the name extension. You can add comments where you can put comments and keyword comments in here, too. Just name the video with your keywords if you wanna rank for “How to Tie Your Shoelaces,” make it “How to Tie Your Shoelaces.” Very straightforward, same thing up here. It’s very important to name your file with the right keywords before uploading it. After that, uploading it. The title in YouTube is very, very, very important. And now, we wanna be very mindful because we wanna appeal to all three. That’s Google search, YouTube search and Suggested Videos. Here’s how to do that wisely.

16:10 S1: Number one, let’s talk about structuring you for organic search. This is gonna be based on the search engine keyword. You should be doing keyword research in Google here. There’s a plugin, I’ll give you the link, too. It’s on my blog. So, if we wanna rank for “How to Lace Your Jordans,” we need to do the keyword research to understand what these other titles are, what’s the ranking for it, and we wanna factor that in to when we’re creating the title. That’s number one if we wanna understand how our title will rank in Google search.

16:36 S1: Number two, we wanna find similar videos in YouTube with a lot of views in title jacks. Here’s one I got from Brian Dean. He had this video here, “How to Get More Organic Traffic FAST.” It’s got a ton of video views on it. I saw him publish it and I was actually… I didn’t steal it from him. I did a very similar video but I said, “Man, this video is taking off.” Let me name it so I can match his title and then what happens here is then when people are watching this video, and if I’ve gotten enough engagement on mine, then I can show up here in the ‘Up Next’ because the titles are very similar. They’re very related. So, we wanna combine the Google search factor and we wanna combine the Related Videos factor into one title.

17:13 S1: And then finally, make it appealing. Use all the characters and spaces that you’re given. I see people use like two-word titles. It’s like, what the fuck is that? [chuckle] What am I looking at here? Use all of the characters available. I think you can get up to a hundred on YouTube. So, use them all, be descriptive, and get people to click. Next is we don’t wanna skip the description field. You’re given the ability to write, I think, 5,000 characters. What I like to do is I like to put a summary of the video. It doesn’t have to be that long. I like to put in between 100 to 150 words and use the keywords in here. I mean, just write what the video is about obviously, but use the keywords, some keyword stuff and then put links in here. This is really important.

17:55 S1: Number one, I always create a blog post alongside of my video. I’ll always give people a reason to click, to come to my website. So, I’ll put the show notes. Like with this video, you’re gonna see a link underneath this YouTube video that says, “Hey, get the show notes. Get the download, the step-by-step checklist. I wanna get you to my website.” What I do is I build the link here, and I’m gonna show you in just one second. And then also underneath here, a link to all. If there’s somebody else in the video, I’ll link to their stuff. And I have this. I just copy and paste this, so you can connect with us on other places to cross-pollinate your accounts. If you’re getting a video that does 20,000 views, you wanna get people to your website, you wanna get people to your Facebook page. So, make sure you link to all your social stuff down here, too. Let’s talk about this really quickly. As you can see this is here is a link shortener.

18:38 S1: Basically, what I do for all YouTube videos, and you really should too, is what’s called, “Tag Your Links.” So if you’re using Google Analytics, what you need to do, this is a free plugin that I’ll give you. It’s on the blog. Again, the links are on the blog. And basically, what you do is you put the URL on your website here. Let’s say that this video that I’m making now, I’m gonna host it on my website. I’m gonna put that URL here. After that, I’m gonna put some source here, so it’s gonna be YouTube, medium is YouTube. And then I tag it with this individual in the brackets here, so I know what video it is. And then I just get the link shortener down here, and I paste it on the video ’cause then what happens is when somebody watches that video and clicks on it, and comes to my website, I can now see exactly which video it is.

19:17 S1: So you could see here, this is the YouTube more organic traffic one. It’s coming from that video. And I know exactly how many visits, I know exactly how long they’re on the site, and I know that 8% of that traffic is converting into leads for me. So it’s very, very important to tag your links. Otherwise, it’s all just gonna show… All your traffic will show up on YouTube, and you don’t know which video is driving the most for your business. So this is really important to tag all of your links, so you can track it throughout the flow of your website, very important.

19:43 S1: Process continued here. Number four is leverage playlist for all videos. So you’ll also have the ability after you write the description to add it to a playlist. It’s really important. Playlists are like category pages on a website. They add additional relevancy to your videos, and they help with the ranking process. Make sure to dress up your channel page and playlist. Make sure that your playlist are named properly, that they’re organized with the right videos, that the videos within it knot back to the playlist. You don’t wanna just put random things in a playlist. They should all trickle down. And you wanna try and add as many videos as possible, relevant videos as possible on this playlist because again, it helps create authority and relevance throughout your channel, throughout your playlist. You can also click in your playlist, and you can add a description. Make sure you do that. Make sure everything is organized. Make sure the naming conventions are similar. Make sure that everything is just clean. It’s very similar to SEO, so it’s just important to make sure that your playlists are optimized as well.

20:37 S1: I don’t have any screenshots for this, but channel authority, relevancy, subscribers and social shares matter. Channel authority comes from a lot of different things. It comes from engagement. It comes from subscribers. Relevancy, it’s very similar to SEO. Basically, subscribers and the more video views you get, the more powerful your channel becomes, and the more you’re gonna rank. It is important to get subscribers. They kind of just come on their own. If you’re creating a content, I promise you it sounds cliche again. But I promise you, subscribers come when you create good stuff consistently. Again, this is just more of a snowballing effect. If you’re focusing on creating good stuff and promoting it the right way, which I’m gonna talk about in a second, your channel will grow organically. And it’s a very powerful thing.

21:19 S1: Tags are also very important. A lot of people get confused. Tags are for internal YouTube rankings. Tags will not affect your external Google rankings. That’s really important because we wanna focus our tags, hyperfocus our tags on relevancy for other videos. Remember how I showed you how I titled jacked? You do the same thing with tags, but even more so. There’s a plugin called vidIQ. It’s free. What you can do is look at your competitor’s videos here, and you can see everything that they’ve tagged it with. What happens is this video, “How to Lace Jordans 1” has gotten 210,000 views. This is a very popular video. I wanna try and steal some authority from that by leveraging the tags that they use so I can look at things like, “How to Lace Air Jordan 1s.” And I wanna make sure that I include all of these things in my video so that way, I can show up in the suggested videos and rank in YouTube search.

22:14 S1: You can see here, this is another example. Tim Solo works for Atrust. It’s a software company in the SEO space. And I had him on to do an interview to talk about a case study. And I wanted to rank for his name, number one. And I wanted to rank for this on-page SEO Atrust case study because this went viral. It was getting a lot of press coverage, so I wanted my video to be associated with that coverage. So what I did, as you can see the tags here, is I’m all focused on on-page SEO case study, Atrust, Tim Solo, using a lot of these branded terms. I’m not going after things like, “how to do on-page SEO” because that’s not what I wanna get this for. That’s too competitive. I’m focusing on these little micro-spaces that I can attack. And then I can leverage his name, I can leverage all the other videos that he’s on. So, if he’s on another video, my video can show up on the side just because of the name association. So it’s really powerful, and the more Tim markets himself, the more this video is gonna come up with it. So, tags are really, really important for internal YouTube rankings, not for Google. Don’t try and jam in keywords in there. It’s not how it works.

23:12 S1: So after you’ve done that, you can go ahead and publish your video. And no, no, no, my friend. We are not done. In fact, we’ve got a lot more work to do because video engagement is, I think, it’s the most important thing on YouTube in terms of getting more views. It’s kind of ironic. You have to get views to your video to get more views. There’s a lot of other factors, obviously, and we’ve just covered them, the on-page stuff or the in-video stuff that you can do. But I think that the most important thing you can do is get engaged to video views, shares, comments, likes, all sorts of those positive signals for your video that tells YouTube that, “Hey, this video is good. People like it.” It uses that as a signal to show it to more people. So, you need to get as many quality views on the video as possible, so I’m gonna walk you through the process that I use to really hack this.

24:03 S1: Number is one Quora threads. Quora is a question and answer site that I think is probably the most undervalued when it comes to traffic and YouTube is really a perfect fit because people are asking for questions and you can really make YouTube videos or leverage YouTube videos to help you answer the question. Here’s one that I did. There’s a question on Quora about canonical tags. I happened to have a video about what a canonical tag is and you can see here, I’ve just posted a link to the video and this on itself has gotten almost 3,000 views, and I mean, look at it. This video is about to hit 6,000 views. That right there in itself is continuously driving quality traffic because this post is evergreen. It’s continuously dumping quality views onto this video and helping it rank higher, and this video has performed very well for me over time.

24:51 S1: Another one is, Google Communities. [chuckle] A lot of people think Google Plus is dead. It is. I never use it but communities are awesome, and basically all you can do, because Google owns Google Plus and YouTube, I think that there is an added bonus to being active on Google Plus for your YouTube videos because it sends a lot of positive signals that you’re getting good engagement, you’re promoting it through Google’s networks. Basically, all I do is I find relevant communities or Google Plus groups, and I go and I just dump it. [chuckle] And I add a couple of things here and then I’ll just go down and I’ll plus one a bunch of other posts, do some comments to drive attraction back to this post, and I’ll get between 20 and 50 views. That’s not a lot but it’s good, and you get these social signals, which are YouTube SEO ranking factors as well, so a lot of good things come from Google Plus.

25:38 S1: After that, if this is possible, it’s not always possible, but I like to add videos to blog posts. Because what that does, specifically, like for this video, I’m actually gonna take this video and I’m gonna embed it on an old post that I have about YouTube SEO, that does about 10,000 visits from search engines a month on my blog. So if I put this video on there, people are gonna watch that video and it’s gonna drive engagement and views to my videos, and it’s gonna leverage and add more value to that old post as well. Also, what I like to do is create blog posts out of my videos, and embed the video on my blog, so when I publish that blog post, my blog readers are watching the video, and it’s driving views and engagement through the embedded video on my site. Very powerful stuff.

26:23 S1: Another thing that I like to do is sharing it on social media. Obviously, if you don’t have a big account, what I like to do is some outreach. I’ll talk to some friends and colleagues in the space and we’ll do like a share-for-share thing, where we can both get exposure on our videos by leveraging each other’s audiences. Twitter works very well, Facebook, you can find these people on Slack, within Facebook groups, Google Plus communities. It’s not really hard. You just gotta put in the legwork to find other people with a similar social following that would be interested in your content and then just send them an e-mail, and just ask if they wanna do a promotional exchange. It works very well.

26:57 S1: Finally, this is my number one. The first thing I always do is send my video directly to my e-mail list. I have about 6,000 people and growing pretty quickly, so I’m able to get a couple of hundred really good video views right away. And I firmly believe that’s probably the number one promotional reason why I’ve been able to get much more views and engagement on my videos over the long-term because I get that instant blast of very, very high quality video views that just gives the video a kick in the ass right of the get go, and sends a lot of these quality signals to YouTube that, “Hey, this is a really good video. Let’s start showing it to other people and see how they take it too.”

27:35 S1: Finally, after you do that, it shouldn’t take too long. I actually have a VA that helps me promote all that stuff. It’s about getting links and embeds of your video. If you’re not familiar with SEO, a link is when another website or a blog talks about your website or blog and links to you. These are the most important ranking factors in traditional SEO, and it’s also very important because Google owns YouTube and they use a very similar algorithm when ranking stuff. And also, if you’re trying to rank in Google search, it’s the same SEO algorithm. These links are important, and we gotta try and kinda hack other ways to get websites to link to your YouTube video. It’s really key to really punch your video up for those big search terms and SEO because that’s really when you start to have a lot of success, is when you’re ranking high in Google for high search terms.

28:22 S1: What you can do is leverage the authority of YouTube and use that as a spam filter. This is very grey hat. Just kind of a brief history about SEO is that, link building is also the number one reasons why websites get penalized by Google, because it’s technically spamming the algorithms. If you have a lower authority site and you’re building low quality links, your website can get punished. But since YouTube is a very very high authority, very high trust website, you can play on that by building lower quality links to your video because it filters it out because the domain is so high. You can just get old school. Web 2.0s, blog comments, forums, PBNs work really well, and this works really much better if you’ve gotten real engagement to the video. ‘Cause if you’ve gotten real engagement to the video, you’ve shown YouTube that, “Hey, this is a good video. It’s quality. People are watching it.” Even though these link signals are low quality, they might be real because this is a really good video.

29:18 S1: Again, use the authority of YouTube and then use the engagement factor from your video to filter out the spam even more. If you’re not familiar with Fiverr, there’s a ton of different low cost linking gigs that you can get on here. I would not build these to your website, but YouTube videos and other high authority properties are fine because honestly, if you get a YouTube video ripped down, it is what it is. You just move on. You didn’t really lose any business because of it. You can use Fiverr. I wouldn’t recommend them for anything else but Fiverr for YouTube videos.

29:48 S1: But white hat links really do kill it. This is an example. I wrote a guest post for StartupBros, very, very good website, and I was able to embed my video at the bottom of the post. And this is the one that I ranked my name for and this ranked within a day [chuckle] after doing that. So, white hat links, if you can do guest posting, sponsored posts, it works really well to build links to your videos. They rank very, very fast.

30:13 S1: Another thing that works really well is by taking your guest post, I mean, sorry, taking your YouTube video and turning it into a guest post. I could take this video here and do like a eight-step process to get more views on your video. And just do a written version of it, and then ask the blog to embed the video or just link back to the video for the full version. It’s easy, it doesn’t take long. You can hire a freelance writer to hack it up and write it for you, and it works really really well. So, links are very important and if you really wanna get to the next step, you’ve gotta get ’em done. I know it’s confusing if you’re not familiar with SEO, and I’ve got a ton of other content on link building. I’m not gonna get too much into it here because I’ve already run over, but links are important and you should really learn about how to hack. Getting people to link to your content just all across the web, it’s incredibly powerful.

31:01 S1: “That’s it.” As Mureek would say and if you’re not, I’m gonna leave you a link to this video too because I’m sure some of you haven’t seen this. It’s fucking hilarious and you need to check it out. That’s it. Again, my name is Ryan Stewart. My Twitter is ryanwashere and our Facebook page is Hello WEBRIS. Please like, please share, please subscribe, and I will see you guys in the next video. Take care y’all.

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