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YouTube, great isn’t it – more cat videos than you can watch in a lifetime!

However, it’s also a great source of information AND a really powerful way to reach web users who prefer to watch videos rather than read stuff. Imagine you want to learn how to fly fish. Just go to google and search “learn how to fly fish” for example, and Google shows you that there are 135 million results and the top is dominated by YouTube videos .

Getting Started

Making videos has never been easier with great quality cameras in our phones, our tablets, our digital cameras – the list of devices goes on.

Before you start recording, however, you need to make sure that your video has a purpose. Then you need to make a short list of keywords that are relevant.

As you record your video and add your commentary you need to make sure that you use these words and phrases from your list.

For the video accompanying this blog I’ve concentrated on “optimising your video”, “making your video easy to find” and “SEO for YouTube”

Watch your video, does it look OK? Does it sound OK? If you are happy then you’re ready to move to the next step.

Uploading your video to YouTube

Once you’ve recorded your video and checked to make sure that you are happy with it the next step is to upload it to YouTube. Now you need to make the video easy to find and and make it easy for Google to understand what it’s about so that your video stands a chance of appearing in Google results, not just in YouTube search.

Next on the “to-do list” is to do is give your video a name that includes the types of words that people might be using when searching – so for the video that goes with this blog I’ve called the video “How to optimise your YouTube video”

Then you need a description so that YouTube can understand what the video is about.

Finally you need to add captions, in other words translate your speech in to text so that watchers don’t have to turn their speakers up or plug their headphones in. YouTube will automatically create the captions but you need to check that their speech t text translation has translated accurately and if there are errors you can go in and correct them.

Vimeo.com

Although powerful, YouTube has a number of annoying traits – not least
1/ The ability to show “People who watched this video also watched……”
2/ The ability to place annoying adverts on your video – ads which might come from your competition if you’re not careful.

So, before you embed your video in your website or share through your Social Media channels and email campaigns get on over to https://vimeo.com and set up a free account.

Vimeo is a “YouTube for professionals” and doesn’t take Ads and won’t recommend similar videos so your viewers wont get dragged away down the YouTube rabbit warren and forget where they started.

As a professional video platform it is mainly funded by subscription accounts but the free account should be more than adequate for your use.

Use the Vimeo embedding tools to add your video to your website, your blog, any email marketing that you conduct and your social media

And that’s it. If you have any problems with recording your video, optimising your video or anything else to do with your digital marketing then just give me a call on 01793 238020 for a free, obligation free, chat or drop me an email to andy@enterprise-oms.co.uk