How to effectively use: YouTube and video advertising for your business

Transcription

1 How to effectively use: YouTube and video advertising for your business

2 Contents Youtube and video advertising for your business... 1 Why use video?... 3 Youtube vs Vimeo... 4 Setting up a Youtube account... 5 Creating a Youtube channel... 6 Equipment to use to create the video... 7 Software to edit the video... 8 Keywording your Video for improved SEO... 9 How to optimise SEO on the video title and description and keywording Uploading your video to Youtube How to promote your video How to embed a video onto your website or blog Checking your statistics YouTube player change.17 P a g e 2

3 Why use video? Videos are the future. A video is likely to engage your potential customer for more than 10 seconds on your website, and within 10 seconds of viewing your website. Videos hook the viewer. YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine on the internet seconds of video or moving images are a fast track to engaging the viewer. Also, videos that are placed on a web page build a good ranking on the search engines, reduce the bounce rate of your website and increase the time spent on your website. P a g e 3

4 vs YouTube vs. Vimeo Currently, there are two main options to be recommended for hosting free videos on the internet. YouTube offers easy uploading, lots of traffic and advertising potential, good key working, excellent chances of being indexed in Google s search listings and the benefits of creating a homepage or channel to showcase your videos. Social media integration, especially regarding likes, comments P a g e 4

5 and sharing is excellent. Not to mention YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, second only to Google. Sometimes, however, the quality of playback for YouTube videos is not excellent, especially if your viewers have poor Internet connections. Vimeo offers excellent video playback quality much better than YouTube, the ability to download videos, subscriber only homepages, pass worded videos and a good range of social media connectivity and sharing tools. However, the traffic on the vimeo platform is nowhere near as high as YouTube. Integration and indexing on Google is inferior to YouTube. This article might help you decide which platform is better for your business: Setting up a YouTube account Setting up a YouTube account is quite easy. The sign up procedures do change from time to time with each Google and YouTube update, so to view the current procedure, click here. You first need to ensure you have a Google account, since Google and YouTube are now fully integrated. P a g e 5

6 For specific advice on setting up and customising a YouTube account for business use, click here. Creating a YouTube channel Once you have finished creating your YouTube account, you might consider setting up a homepage or Channel which people can subscribe to, receive updates for and comment on. For further details, click here. To create a specifically brand based channel, there are extra options available for more information, click here. P a g e 6

7 Equipment to use to create the video It is not necessary to have hugely expensive digital video equipment to make an effective short film for your business. It is essential however, to plan your shots and have a very good idea what the viewer will see. Every scene will need to be storyboarded. The major flaws with cheap short film productions are wobbly scenes, amateurish zoom effects, motion blur and tunnelling of sound. A Steadicam Merlin P a g e 7

8 There are some simple remedies to avoid these pitfalls. Firstly, use a solid tripod to mount the camera, DSLR or video camera. If you want to move with the camera, invest in a Steadicam Merlin to ensure all your footage is smooth. Secondly, to avoid amateurish zoom effects, don t use the zoom on the camera. If you do require the footage to zoom in, use a pan effect when editing on the computer, for example in Avid Pro, Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas. Better still, avoid any zooms. Thirdly, to avoid motion blur on DSLRs, cameras, and cheap camcorders, don t move the camera from side to side. Stop the shot, move the camera, and start another shot. Edit the footage together on the computer. Lastly, tunnelling is when the soundtrack and particularly voices sound like they are being heard through a tunnel. It happens when the microphone is too far away from the source of the sound. To avoid this, use a professional boom mic on a handheld boom, or record the sound separately using a digital recorder and sync it when editing on your computer, or more simply still, avoid any sound altogether, and add a music soundtrack later on. (There is a facility to add license free music in YouTube). Software to edit the video Avid Pro, Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas are recommended to edit videos and save videos in file formats suitable for YouTube or Vimeo. These packages are capable of encoding the videos with metadata, keywords about your niche, your contact details, your location, your website, your copyright details, and any other information you might want to include. They can also optimise the videos for smoother playback over the internet, even when the connection speed is poor. P a g e 8

9 If you do not have access to the software packages above, there is an official YouTube guide to how to prepare your video for YouTube upload. Key wording your Video for improved SEO Key wording and filling in the metadata on videos to be uploaded to YouTube is important. Although none of this data is visible to the user, Google s search indexer will notice it, and its inclusion will boost the video s SEO and ranking both for the video page, and any website page that the video is embedded into. There are various useful and free tools which can aid you in finding effective keywords to ensure your videos are SEO optimised and receive good referral search engine traffic. P a g e 9

10 The Google keyword tool can be found if you click here. And the Google traffic estimator can be found if you click here. The keyword tool will give you an indication as to which keywords are more effective to produce search engine results, the traffic estimator will give you an idea of which keywords will result in traffic for advertising. P a g e 10

11 For a comprehensive guide on how to make best use of these tools, see this video click here. How to optimise SEO on the video title and description and key wording. Once uploaded, you also need to add an SEO friendly title, and keyword the description for the video on the YouTube site. Further details can be found if you click here. This section of the upload process also allows you to set up automatic sharing of your video content to your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Doing so not only means an automatic update to your followers and subscribers, but also near instant Google search indexing. Regarding key wording, I would recommend using the YOAST method. Ensure your niche target keyword(s) feature in the video Title (i.e. the file you uploaded), the video page title on YouTube, the (meta) description (which must read well in grammatically correct sentences), the metakeywords, the page url (which is not possible with YouTube, but is if you create a custom short link more details here) and the content. Since the content is a video, it s not possible to insert keywords into the content in YouTube, but if you have added metadata to the video in your editing application, as described previously, then this counts as content data. If you have all these areas key worded, and some traffic, your video should rank very highly for your target keyword. P a g e 11

12 Uploading your video to YouTube For a complete and up to date guide on the current procedure to upload a video to YouTube, click here. P a g e 12

13 For a guide on how to optimise your video once uploaded, including adding text and annotations, click here. How to promote your video Purpose is key to consider when promoting a video. Is the purpose to attract visitors to your website, promote your brand, increase awareness, or sell a product? If the answer is yes, it is probably best to embed the video on your website, blog or Facebook page and use these sites as the platform to play the video from. If the purpose is to try and make the video go viral and attract a lot of comments and shares it s probably best to direct the traffic to the social media, and push visitors from your website towards YouTube, and similarly on Facebook, suggest users share and like the video and comment on the video via YouTube. How to embed a video onto your website or blog. It is possible to embed, i.e. insert into a webpage, your video directly into your company website or blog so that the video will play in that location, rather than from the YouTube page. For full details on how to embed your YouTube videos, click here. P a g e 13

14 It is also possible to embed an entire YouTube channel i.e. all your videos onto a single page of your website or company blog. For further details, click here. P a g e 14

15 Checking your statistics To see the reach, influence and ROI of your YouTube campaign, there is an insights package. For more details and instructions on how to use the latest version of the insights package, click here. P a g e 15

16 To achieve best results from the insights pages, it is best to connect all your social media accounts. Full details on how to achieve this can be found click here. P a g e 16

17 YouTube Player Changes There have been a few minor layout changes to the YouTube player, with the interest of making it cleaner and brighter. The changes include: Captions can now be turned on/off using a toggle To turn annotations on or off or change the size of the player, click the gear icon To go into full screen mode, click the icon in the bottom right of the player Connect your Channel with a Google+ Page YouTube creators have the option to connect their channel with a Google+ page. Connecting with Google+ will allow you to access some advantageous features for your channel. Understanding all of your options is important. When you connect a channel with Google+, the channel will have a shared name and avatar with Google+, so make the right choice. A couple quick notes before starting: If you already have a corresponding Google+ page that you d like to connect with your channel, make sure you ve added your channel s Google account as a manager of that page. If you don t already have a Google+ page you d like to connect with, no worries. The linking process will allow you to easily create a new one. Credits: Text by Zoe Olsberg Jason Sander & Tom Tolkien P a g e 17