3 YouTube & Video Marketing Tricks You Should Not Miss

Everybody’s making videos, but who really knows how to marketing them? For the answer to that question, I’m passing this topic over to a guest author.

The last time this special guest posted here, his post about keys to writing a press release for SEO and page rank landed in the top social media posts of the first quarter of 2010. In the course of working on some Instant E-Training video projects together, I asked Bob Tripathi if he’d like to guest post again. Lucky for us, he decided to share three YouTube and video marketing tricks he picked up in an interview with Greg Jarboe, a co-founder of SEO-PR.

Thanks for reading. After you read this post, please answer this question in the comment box: How do you use video in your PR efforts?

3 YouTube & Video Marketing Tricks You Should Not Miss

by Bob Tripathi

YouTube has changed the video landscape with user generated video content and as a result grown so fast that it prompted Google to pay $1.5 billion to acquire the company.

According to ComScore, in March YouTube drove about 143.2 Million unique viewers with an average user spending 275 minutes watching videos on YouTube.

If YouTube were a search engine then it would be the second biggest search engine after Google.

On YouTube, a video can go viral almost instantaneously, if optimized correctly, and generate huge amount of video views. So I met up with Greg Jarboe, Author of “YouTube & Video Marketing: An Hour a Day” and trainer for our upcoming Social Media for Business training workshop to get his insights on optimizing video.

Based on my conversation with Greg Jarboe here are my top 3 takeaways:

1. Embed Video in a press release

Greg narrated the story of Journalist Jill Carroll of Christian Science Monitor who was held hostage in Iraq and was going to do an 11 part series about her experience.

While promoting this 11 part series for Christian Science Monitor they came across some video outtakes of Jill Carroll’s interview video with ABC News. While going through the footage, Greg and team came up with the idea of embedding the video in a press release to give people a feel of what was coming.

Two things they did were:

1) They hosted the video on YouTube and

2) embedded the video in the press release.

Turns out Greg and team were stunned at the number of views their video got on YouTube and the buzz generated through the combination of video and press release.

The point is lot of us are announcing news through press releases almost regularly but not leveraging video. I would say if you can create a press release then you can also create a video.

2. Do Keyword Research on YouTube and not on Google

[I love this one! – editor]

Search engines play a huge role in driving quality traffic that converts. This is due to the fact that search is mainly used when the customer is closer to the purchase decision mindset. As a result, optimizing text in a document or the text surrounding the video can be huge.

On YouTube that means optimizing video title, description, and inserting the right type of keywords as tags.

A common fallacy for search and social marketers is to go straight to the Google keyword tool and use the same keywords that they would use for optimizing non YouTube related content. Instead, Greg suggests using the YouTube keyword tool. This way you get keyword intelligence based on what people are searching for on YouTube.com and not on Google.com

3. Share your video on social media

Besides optimizing your video by using right keywords in tags, description, and title, your video will rank higher in YouTube results if you have a high number of video views and ratings.

This, in YouTube’s eyes, is the popularity factor and one good way to kick start this process is sharing the video with the group you are already popular with. That would be your Facebook friends, Twitter followers, LinkedIn contacts, and so on. This way your video starts getting some traction with video views and with proper optimization as described above hopefully it will start ranking higher on YouTube.

Here is the video of my full conversation with Greg Jarboe about YouTube and video marketing:

Bob Tripathi is the Founder & CEO of Internet Marketing Training company Instantetraining.com providers of online certification workshop and online training video. Prior to founding Instantetraining.com, Bob spent number of years working at companies like Sears, Discover Financial championing in-house SEO, PPC, and Social Media initiatives. With over 10 years of digital marketing experience, Bob has worked with businesses of all sizes helping them generate revenues and drive double digit growth through internet marketing. Bob is a regular speaker at industry conferences and is also co-founder of SEMPO Chicago Working Group.

Image copyright Barbara Rozgonyi from the 2011 CES collection. If you’re wondering about the camera shown here, you can watch this YouTube video about video cameras for skateboarders.