Google And YouTube Are Your Friends
A while back in October 2006, Google bought Youtube for some crazy amount of money ($1.6b billion) to increase their share in the online Video revolution. Today, YouTube is now the second biggest search engine in the world, as it pushed Yahoo out of that position some months ago. Knowing Google and YouTube are one and the same, I can show you how to begin using YouTube to drive targeted traffic to your blog, and how if done correctly, you can begin to get on that coveted page one of Google for your keyphrase.
Just in the last few months, there have been some huge changes in the way Google and YouTube have began talking to each other(search engine integration), and from a marketers point of view, this is exciting times and a chance to get a bigger part of your target audience. I’ll be sharing more on that side of things in a later post, and today, I just want to get back to some basics about getting an actual video up on YouTube so people will be encouraged back to your blog or website. We must crawl before we can walk after all.
Why Have a Video On YouTube
Loads of reasons to put up a clip on YouTube, just jump on the site and have a look. Music Video Clips, Parody, wannabe rock stars, TV reruns, clips of your kids to show the Grandparents, learning how to use a piece of software, you name it, it is on YouTube. For affiliate marketers though, it is an effective strategy and generally very low cost in order to get traffic back to their affiliate offer. Not just any traffic either, targeted traffic who want to spend money.
With the style of your video that you use, it could be a screen capture like I often use, that shows how to use a particular piece of software, or it could be a video of you doing a review, and just sitting there talking about your offer. It could be any number of video techniques, and it is not too important just now what works best, as the important thing is to just get your videos up on YouTube, and then you can refine and tweak later.
Using YouTube to drive targeted traffic to your blog is actually quite simple, and just remember that YouTube is a search engine, so you will have to apply SEO strategies where you can on the page, in order to be noticed by the Search engines, and Google in Particular. Done a Google search lately and noticed that there always seems to be a YouTube video in about position four or five on page one of the results? Well, you can get there too if you know what you are doing, and it is not as difficult as you may think. Of course, if you are chasing a competitive keyword, then the task becomes quite difficult. Think long tail keywords in the YouTube description area, and you are on the right track.
Google being Google however, is all about relevancy, so the more YouTube hits you are getting, you will be rewarded in the SERP’s. We are getting ahead of ourselves here though, so I best get back to basics again.
When you have produced/bought/legally borrowed a clip, then you will need to brand it with your URL, and now you can add annotations from within your YouTube account. Don’t over do these things either, as it looks very spammy and unprofessional if you go over the top here, and viewers will click away from your video. Get a clip that goes for a couple of minutes, and have it leaving the viewer wanting more and also make sure it adds value to their lives aw well.
YouTube SEO Strategies
Above all have a call to action (CTA) that encourages them to click that link that you put at the start of that description box. Speaking of that description box, this is a great place to make use of SEO and you can slip in your keywords and phrases here. You will get traffic, so try and ensure that as much of that traffic will click that link back to your blog or affiliate offer.
So there we have the absolute basics of how to begin using YouTube to drive targeted traffic to your blog. It is targeted because these people have either searched on YouTube or Google for the particular keyphrase you are using, and this traffic wants a solution to their problem, and that is where you come in. If you have not already done so, go and sign up with YouTube (you can now do so with your Google account) and have a play with the settings and how it all works. Do a search for whatever keywords and phrases that you would like for yourself to be ranked for, and watch and learn what they have done. It’s not hard, although it is fun, so give it a go.
