Looking at Video on the Web with Ken McCarthy

YouTube…it’s not the only free video hosting site in the world, but it definitely has the highest profile.

Everyone from Chevrolet to Warner Brothers to Paris Hilton is in the game.

What’s the appeal of YouTube to these big bucks promoters? Are there any guerilla-type YouTube "secrets" us little guys can use to get more promotional bang from the service?

Yes there are…

First, if by some chance you don’t know YouTube, here’s the story in a nutshell:

It’s a free video hosting service with lots of social networking features built in.  Users upload videos and share them with friends, family and fellow YouTubers.

One thing led to another (right place, right time, with the right stuff) and now they serve over 100,000,000 videos a day with 65,000 new videos uploaded daily. Critical mass with a capital "C."  Google needed to be a winner in this space and unable to develop their own, they wrote a check (or moved some stock) and became YouTube’s parent.

YouTube had two massive advantages over everyone else in the free video hosting space:

1. Superior hosting and faster video uploading time
2. Superior social networking tools

That’s the story.

So how do we use this thing?

Three ways:

* Free video hosting

* New viewers from engineering traffic spikes

* Leverage the community

1. Free video hosting

Yes, your videos will have the YouTube logo on them but free is an awfully good price and if your video is promotional, there’s a chance that new prospects might stumble over it.  I’ve put up videos with no promotion at all and just from my tagging gotten a steady – albeit small – amount of  gimme traffic.

2. Get new viewers by engineering traffic spikes

The YouTube system is sensitive to traffic surges. YouTube is not just a passive collection of videos.

It categorizes videos by type and then acknowledges them as: 1) most viewed, 2) top rated, 3) most discussed, and 4) most favorited over the following time periods: 1) today, 2) this week, 3) this month, and 4) all time.

So what?

Here’s what…

If you can make it to the top twenty of any of these categories, you appear on Page One of that category. Top twelve puts you on the page and above-the-fold.

This means people who are browsing through say, the most viewed music videos of the day, will see you your video listed first of the 65,000 videos uploaded each day and the millions the service alread hosts.

Exposure means more clicks which means more exposure which means more clicks and so on.

As with search engine ranking being on Page One of a category is everything, and being above-the-fold is even better.

So how do you pull it off?

If you’ve got a big enough mailing list, you’ve got exactly what you need to win the game.

For most categories, 2,500 visitors or more in the first 24 hours after posting is enough to get you on Page One. 

To get most viewed of the day, speed is everthing. As soon as you get confirmation that your video is up, the race is on. You’ve got 24 hours to get as many members of your list to click on the video link as you can.

If you have a responsive list of 7,000 or more, you can put winners on the most viewed video of the day  list practically at will. How long will 2,500 be the magic number? Who knows, but that’s what it is now. Sometimes it takes a lot more. Sometimes a lot less.

There are other categories within reach too: highest rated, most discussed, and most favorited. Just ask your list members to give your video a high rating, post a comment and add the video to their "favorites" list and presto: you’re a YouTube star – for a day.

But alas,  it’s only for the day. When midnight strikes (metaphorically speaking), your turn back into a pumpkin… actually not quite. You now get to compete for the "Best of the Week": most viewed of the week, most discussed, etc.

It’s a bigger challenge, but still doable. For example, 10,000+ visitors over a week is enough to get you on Page One above-the fold of many categories and again, if you’ve got the list, this is very doable.

Sometimes though "most viewed" is just too high a mountain to climb. That’s where "highested rated" and some of the other user interactive categories kick in.  If you have good raport with your list members, your video is worthwhile and you ask them to get behind your video, they will.

3. The third  way to generate views on YouTube is to become a community member and take advantage of all the tools associated with that.

It can get pretty involved, but it’s one of the secret sbehind the folks who get 100,000 visits and more for bizarre monologues, stupid pet tricks, and other common YouTube fare.

Probably the most streamlined approach tto leverage the social aspect of YouTube is find the folks in the category you want to succeed in who have built of subscribers to their channels. (Yes, you too can have your own YouTube channel.) Introduce yourself and your video to them. They may chose to help spread the word.

There’s probably a lot more to the social networking aspects of YouTube that can lead to even more views, but realistically, they look very time-consuming it me and I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.

But here’s the bottom line: 

Even if you’re not Paris Hilton, Warner Brothers or Chevrolet (which pays big bucks for advertising to
drive traffic to its YouTube videos), you can be on the most viewed of the day page, Page One in almost any category you want – if your list is big and responsive enough.

Notice how in Internet marketing, whatever the topic, it always comes back to the list.

Anybody have any insights, experience or tricks of the trade to share about YouTube traffic?

Ken

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