Google is showing more and more YouTube videos in their search results. YouTube gets approximately 25 million unique visitors every single week. If you learn how to capitalize on the power of online videos, you’ll get a lot of exposure for your business.
How to Create a Video that People Will Watch and Tell their Friends About
Creating a great video is 80% of the battle. Great content with a weak seeding strategy has better chances to go viral than poor content promoted really hard. In fact, over 50% of the time videos go viral, it happens by accident. So, create a video that people want to watch and tell all their friends about it.
DON’T MAKE IT COMMERCIAL!
If you sell moisturizing creams, don’t create a video on your products; create one about “10 Ways You Can Make Your Skin 15 Years Younger in 6 Weeks” or something like that. Share great tips, make it funny or controversial. Do whatever it takes to get attention, but don’t use the video to sell anything.
How to Give Your Videos Maximum Exposure on YouTube
The first step is to upload the video to YouTube. Create an account, upload your videos and customize your channel. Put your website URL in your profile so people can visit your site easily.
After you’ve uploaded your videos, there are two things that you should to do to give them more exposure. First, find the 20 most watched videos on the same topic your video is about, and then post your video as a video response to all these. Some will require the video owner to approve this action but sometimes the video owners auto-approve all the video response requests.
The second thing you should do is create a playlist with the 20 videos mentioned above and give it a name that contains the keywords people would enter to search for that topic. Also, use the “tags” and the “description” fields to enter additional keywords.
These two things will greatly improve your video views and your chances of success.
How to Drive People from YouTube to Your Website
At the end of the video, include a call to action to visit your site. Be careful; the way you handle this will determine the failure or success of your campaign. If you show people a video on “10 Ways You Can Make Your Skin 15 Years Younger in 6 Weeks,” don’t invite them to go to your store and buy your products. People will feel like your only intention was to sell them something, which is probably true, but you need people to bond with you before they buy your stuff.
This is the approach you should take instead: “Visit www.site.com/9-tips to Watch a Video Featuring Another 9 Advanced Tips to Make Your Skin Look Even Younger (We Can Guarantee that Tip #14 Will Change Your Life Forever).”
Now, this is a call to action that people will respond to. It creates curiosity and invites you to get more tips. If people thought that the first video was amazing, they are very likely to watch the second one.
Include the same call to action in the video description box. If you put “http://” at the beginning of your URL, YouTube will make it a clickable link. That way, people don’t have to type your web address into their browsers.
How to Convert Browsers Into Paying Customers
So, people are visiting your site, now what? In this case, there are two things that you should do. First, make sure that the landing page people arrive on has the website navigation menu in it. That way, people might be curious and browse around your website. They might even buy something after their first visit.
But that’s not very likely to happen and for that reason there is a second thing you should do: create a box below the video asking people to enter their names and email addresses to get the complete series of videos on skin care absolutely free. If people enjoyed your first two videos, chances are they will want to watch the rest of the series.
Now you have their contact information and you can send them more videos, articles and tips. Make sure that you don’t email them too often. You want to bond without being annoying. You can tell them about your products once in a while, but make sure that your emails are 98% information and only 2% sales pitch.
If your products are great and so is the information you share, most people will buy from you sooner or later.
Sometimes you can even tease people a little bit and show them an incomplete video so they have to watch the next one in order to find out how the previous video ended. TV shows do this all the time.
Summary
Create an AMAZING video, give it exposure on YouTube, invite people to your site, ask them to sign up for more great content and deliver the content you promised. Follow the formula above and you’ll see great results.
Eager for more? Check out Zeke’s series "Getting Social Smarts" and his three podcasts below for more great online marketing information and tips!
- 6 Steps to Succeeding in Social Media
- Twitter for Business Explained
- Facebook’s Got Its Business Game-Face On
