Okay, so if you’re new to video marketing and want to get to the top of Google and start attracting loads of traffic back to your website, then this is an essential checklist for you. If you only implement half of what I teach you here, you’ll probably still do very well.
1) Do some keyword research for your niche. Either go to Google Keyword Analyzer or Wordtracker and find out what keywords and phrases are going to produce you high levels of traffic, plus are not extremely competitive. It’s all about the long tail here – search longtail to find out more.
2) Once you’ve got 10 keywords that you want to rank for and will be profitable, then get interviewed by someone (anyone), asking you questions with these keywords and key phrases within the question. Ask and answer all 10 questions in one take (making sure you get lighting and audio recorded to a reasonable standard – flip camera quality is fine).
3) Once you’ve got the interview file, break it into 10 different files where you answer each question. Make sure each video file is saved in the keywords you’re optimizing.
4) Add in your url (website name) into the video (easy done using something like iMovie or MovieMaker). Your videos will be distributed around the web over time by others and if you’ve got your URL in, they’ll always know where to find out more.
5) When you’re editing the video, at the end, have you saying or have a still screen asking people to rate, comment, like and share your video. We’ll come on to this later.
6) Sign up to TubeMogul and others such as HeySpread and get those videos out there! You should be able to sign up to 15-20 different video sharing sites such as YouTube and DailyMotion etc. Think about your keywords in your title, description and tags. Make sure you include them and also add in your url (with http://) in the description part of the video as this will mean it’ll turn into a link back to your website (it is a nofollow link for all your SEO junkies!). Another point, make sure you add the word “video” into your title – it’ll show up on Google quicker as Google will recognise it as a video.
On a side note, Google cannot read video just yet (it’s doing it’s best), so it has to go on your text your have with your videos (title, description and tags).
7) You can always repurpose the video and turn it into audio and transcribe it too for more traffic around the web. PixelPipe is great for this. If you backlink to a video all the better as Google loves this! We’ll touch on this more shortly.
Once you’ve got your videos up, check back every day or so to see how they’re performing on Google’s first page. If you see a YouTube video come up, now’s the time to take action. Get your community to comment, rate, share and like your top ranking video as much as possible. If you ask people to interact on more than one video, they won’t. Instead, work out which video Google has liked the most and then get all your mates, friends and online community to interact on that video specifically. (BTW – the reason I go for YouTube videos over others is that Google owns YouTube and I can imagine they will be future proof, Google might change some rules, but it’ll keep YouTube in the loop whereas other video hosting sites may not be so lucky). Make sure if someone comments, you thank them and maybe even personally via Facebook – being kind is cool and it’ll build your community even further.
9) If you don’t have a community here is a clever tactic. Go and find all the big competitors you have in YouTube for your niche. Look at their comments and see the people there. Connect with the people that comment and build relationships with them. Comment on their videos and soon enough they’ll start commenting on yours, especially when you are giving amazing content and they’ve subscribed to you.
10) Get active on twitter and Facebook plus other social media sites and post your best video there and ask for people to comment and share.
11) If you have a blog, make sure you get your video embedded there and transcribe the video underneath and also have a link back to your video. Again, the link itself should have the keywords inserted. Never do autoplay (1, because it’s not cool, but also does not count as a view).
12) I have a large database and will every now and again ask them to go to my YouTube video to rate, comment and interact. It does wonders for your video.
13) Write articles about the same topic on EzineArticles and link back to the video.
14) If you are lucky, you’ll get an awesome thumbnail for your video. On YouTube, you get a choice of 3. The best thing is to choose one where you’re mid speech of pointing somewhere. The reason being is that there is almost an energy we see on the video that needs to be let free. For example, if we can see someone is opening up a box but we cannot see inside just yet, we are bound to press play. You see how that works? Think about what is most clickable for a viewer. The worst would be to have a screen shot of a boring presentation slide. I’m not watching!
15) Something that has been a relatively new introduction from YouTube is annotations. This is where a link will pop up in the video that will link somewhere else in YouTube. This is great for viewer retention, but also all the video that I have annotated have ranked more highly. This is probably due to Google considering annotations as a good thing.
16) Keep adding awesome content on a regular basis to your YouTube channel as this will show Google and YouTube that you are here to stay and are always
17) IMPORTANT STEP FOR FUTURE PROOFING YOUR VIDEO: Go to many dofollow sites (search this on Google) and when you find relevant places, add a backlink to your video. Google will recognize this and rank your video much higher. This will blow the competition out of the water if you get a few of these going.
18) It’s a good thing to give people incentives to engage with your videos. Make them leave comments and if they do, what will you do for them?
19) Remember video works much like SEO – you want relevant keywords and phrases, back links, an active community and regular content. The great thing is that it’s 50 times easier to get on the first page of Google with video than traditional text. Staying there is the real goal.