Having used YouTube with some success for a while now, I’ve picked up a good number of tools and tips that help videos get seen and ranked well.

Once you reach a certain point, the videos you upload can have a viral effect, where the views just keep coming. By adding a link in the video description, you can create a little flow of constant traffic to the site of your choosing.

I mentioned on way to use YouTube in my previous post (using Fiverr to get views) but I’m still testing this. The tips mentioned below are the fundamentals that have worked for me for a long time. They also work for a lot of other people on YouTube and many of those people have built businesses off the back of the knowledge I’m going to share with you here.

So, without further ado, here are my 10 top tips for video marketing using YouTube:

1. Keywords: You may have heard of the Google Keyword Tool. It’s an awesome resource for researching the words that people are typing into Google to find things in your niche. Here’s the surprising thing… YouTube has it’s own keyword tool! You can find it at https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool. You can use it to find out what people are searching for on YouTube and in what volumes. But it gets better… You can also use it to find all the keywords that the most successful videos are using, then use them yourself! So, go and find the top videos in your niche and run the address through YouTube’s keyword tool. Then add them to your own videos. It might just be genius!
2. Building links to your videos will help them to be ranked higher, thus getting them more views. You can do this in a number of ways, including linking to the video from a blog post (or just embedding it), or by simply linking to it from your Twitter or Facebook profile.
3. Add tags to your videos that match your chosen keywords. If you don’t have them, you can use the keyword tool above to find them. Don’t leave these out when you’re uploading. Take the time during the upload process to find the right tags for your video clip, as it will pay off in a big way once it’s live and ready to watch.
4. Authority tags – This is a strategy that I came up with after seeing it work in the Internet Marketing niche. Basically it involves finding the names of the top people within that niche. Ideally they will have videos on YouTube too, but it’s not essential. Then, when it comes to putting in the tags for your video, use their names as tags. For example, one tag I could use in my marketing videos could be ‘Mark Anastasi’, another could be ‘Neil Asher’ and so on. It doesn’t matter that your video isn’t about them or that it doesn’t feature them. You’re talking on a subject that they are experts in, so people interested in their videos will also be interested in yours and vice versa. You can effectively piggy-back on their notoriety and have your videos appear in searches done about them. This works no matter what niche you’re and doesn’t just apply to internet marketing. If you’re in the cookery niche, you could use names of chefs like Alain Ducasse, Gordon Ramsay or Joel Robuchon. In the soccer niche, David Beckham, Eric Cantona and Ronaldinho. You get the picture.
5. Post video responses to some of the most discussed videos in your niche. This technique basically allows you to siphon off a little of the traffic from the most popular videos and send it to your video and in turn, to your website. You can post a video response with ease and it’s still very under-used as a method of getting views. I’ve started doing this on videos in my niche and it’s amazing how easy it is and how it only takes a relatively small amount of effort to add to the conversation, provide value and get people going to your videos in return.
6. Write a good video description. It may never get read by the majority of people watching that video, but it will be seen and recognised by Google. If it’s written clearly and contains the same keywords as your title, then you’ll see your Google ranking rise and that video will start to feature in the rankings. Remember, Google owns YouTube, so it’s very interested in good video content that provides info to specific areas. Use it to your advantage and take the time to write at least 100 words to explain what they video is about. Again, make sure this description contains keywords as part of full sentences.
7. Get some leverage. This tip isn’t purely about YouTube but I’m including it here as I think you’ll find it helpful to your overall video marketing strategy. There is a service called TubeMogul which enables you to upload your video to their servers and then have it syndicated to all the major video sites. This means that you only have to do the upload once and get it sent to places like Viddler and MetaCafe as well as YouTube to get your video seen by more people for the same amount of work. What’s more, it’s free to sign up. Gotta love leverage!
8. Create videos that answer the top questions in your niche. This could be either in the form of a PowerPoint presentation captured using things like CamStudio or Camtasia, or a ‘straight-to-camera’ style video where you just point the camera at yourself and talk. You could answer questions from viewers, or if you’re just starting out, answer questions that keep occuring in forums in your niche. You could then post that video on that forum and become an instant authority and fountain of knowledge.
9. You can actually save yourself a lot of hard work and use leverage again to get loads of traffic using other people’s videos. Let’s face it – there’s a lot of crap on YouTube. Cats playing pianos, toddlers laughing and idiots getting hit in the nuts. Fun if you have an office job (and not much in the way of a life) but largely pointless. However, a lot of these videos get some major views. If you can find an offer that ties into these videos (for example, a piano course on Clickbank for the cat video) then you can contact the owner of the video and offer them a small amount of money to place a link in the video. You need to find videos that have a rising number of views and that don’t have a video link in the description already. Then send the person who posted the video a message saying that you want to sponsor the video. As a more advanced approach, you can also offer to buy the whole channel (if they have lots of videos all getting rising numbers of views). This is a simple and fast way of getting a sharp rise in traffic.
10. How to avoid a big mistake. This should probably have been at the beginning as it’s an early step in the process. Once you’ve made and edited the video (before you  upload it to YouTube) make sure that the file name of the video is your primary keyword. If you’re making a video about working out your abs for example, then make sure the file name reflects that with something like ‘Flat-Abs-Fast.mp4′. YouTube looks at these names to find other related videos. Not doing this results in your videos appearing alongside loads of random videos about a massive variety of subjects. By targetting the video file name to your keywords, you tell YouTube to target the search and the related videos module much more specifically.

So, there you have it, my mini-guide to making the most of your YouTube videos and gaining leverage using this awesome resource. Making money online is pretty straightforward as long as you take what you learn and apply it. The tips given above all work and work well, so apply them until they work for you, then keep going!

Leave me a comment and let me know if you have any more YouTube tips that help you make money.

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