How to Set Up Your Free Video Marketing Channel at YouTube

Hello and welcome to this video brought to you by Aliarts Website Marketing. This video is an introduction to online video marketing with YouTube, how to create your Director’s channel, Uploading Video & YouTube Features.

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Can’t watch video? Here is a transcript of the audio.

So let’s head on over to YouTube and get your Director’s account up and running.

Let’s click on the sign up tab to enter your details.

Now, before you sign up, have a think about the username you wish to be known by. Later on in the series you will learn about posting responses to other people’s videos in the promoting your videos tutorial. You will be making comments on other users videos to get traffic to your own videos. You want the username to be memorable and meaningful when users see it alongside your comment.

YouTube and several of the other video sites allow you to use up to 16 characters for your user and channel name. You may be tempted to use your business name, but this may not mean much if no-one is aware of your business when they see it. For example, our latest project here at Aliarts Website Marketing is ‘Project 100 Free Websites,’ for which we registered the domain name FreeWebsiteDesign.co.nz. For the channel we created to promote this website, I used freewebsitedesignnz for my user name. You may wish to use an aspect of your business that will really catch attention when it is read in a comment or as a subscriber to another channel.

Confirm your e-mail address and you are away.

Now you can log in to your account and start to play around with some of the settings in here. If you click on the account link up here, this will bring up all the options for your channel. This is quite fun to play around with, and very easy to work out.

Here are a few pointers however.

One important thing to do is to select the Director Channel under ‘Edit Channel,’ and ‘Channel Type.’ This lets other users know to expect more videos from you, and also gives you a few more options within your channel settings.

Now is your chance to personalise your channel. You are able to choose different colours and add a photo of yourself. It’s very easy to make it your own, and give others a sense of who you are. The more of yourself you put into it the more of a relationship you will establish with future subscribers.

Click on the Channel Design Link here to do this.

Here, you can click on your Settings tab, and then you are able to add a Title for your page and Tabs to help you get found. You are able to change themes and colours by clicking on this tab, and you can show advanced options to set a background picture to your YouTube channel. This could perhaps be your company logo or a picture of your business.

I find the default layout cluttered, so I remove everything extraneous under Modules that isn’t totally necessary to promote my channel. I also move things round to even everything up by clicking on these arrows here.

YouTube and many of the other video sites allow you to add a clickable hyperlink right into your profile. When someone is viewing your channel they can go directly to your website. To enable this feature on YouTube, click on ‘Profile Setup’ here. Once you are on this page you can enter more information about you and your business, and also your website URL.

Now it’s time to upload your first video. Under your ‘Account’ drop down tab, choose ‘Videos, Favourites and Playlists.’ YouTube accepts most types of videos to be uploaded. Basically the better the video that you upload to YouTube, the higher the quality will be. Then choose ‘New’ and ‘Video Upload.’ Select a video to upload by browsing to where it is on your computer.

Now, if you have ever tried to write a sales letter or advertisement of any kind, you understand the importance of a good headline. A headline grabs the reader’s attention and declares in just a few words what your content is all about, just as we’ve discussed with the content at your website. This also shows up in the search engine listings, and because YouTube is so popular, this can happen in a matter of hours after you upload a video. Visitors will then click straight through to your video, and through to your website via your clickable link, as we will soon discuss. When you see you video show up in a matter of hours on page one of Google and stay there for your targeted key phrase, things get very exciting. The first time this happens =to you, you will know what I mean.

YouTube allows you to use up to 60 characters (including spaces) for your headline. This translates to about 8-10 words on average, although you should try to limit your headline to a maximum of 8 words whenever possible, and stick to one topic.

The first step to writing a good headline is to make sure you have the keyword phrase you are targeting contained within the headline. The keyword phrase should also appear in the description multiple times and in the tags at least once.

Your video description expands upon your headline and gives people a better idea of what your video is all about. It also provides somewhere for you to pack more keywords for the search engines to pick up, much like at your website.

Always start your description with your full URL, starting with http://, so it will appear as a clickable link.

The next thing you need to think about are your tags. Tags are the keywords that help your video get ranked in the search results. These function much like the tags that appear at your website.

As previously discussed, you can perform keyword research using your favorite keyword research tool (like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool) or you can copy the tags of videos that are already popular. Copying the tags of other videos is obviously the easiest solution.

YouTube has set up a system whereby videos with related tags are displayed at the end of each video as well as in the “Related Videos” section located next to the bottom right of each video. So if you’re in weight loss, and a person is watching a video about “weight loss protein shakes” and your video is also using the tag “weight loss protein shakes,” your video might be featured in and around that same video.

The trick to copying tags is finding videos within your market that are very popular and growing rapidly in popularity. To find these videos, type in your main keyword into YouTube’s search bar and hit ‘search.’ Once the videos are displayed, chose sort by “View Count” and then uploaded “This Month.”

This way you are easily able to scroll through and find rising videos that pertain to your business that have had a massive amount of views in the last month, then copy the tags they have used. As discussed in the introduction to video marketing video, this is a great way to piggyback on the popularity of other rising videos in your market, inflating your view count, and getting all important comments and ratings on your videos. Not to mention the traffic they provide.

Once you have your channel up and running and your videos uploaded, YouTube provide you with important statistics and data on what is happening with your videos. If you head into ‘My Account / Insight: Statistics and Data,’ you can find out a variety of information about your videos. You can see the views here – How many views are my videos getting?, The Demographics – Who is watching the videos in this channel?, The Popularity – How popular are my videos relative to those of other uploaders?, and you can also Download these reports for your channel in an excel format.

The stats I find most fascinating, and it’s the same with mine and my clients websites is what keywords visitors are using to find my videos. You can see a list of your videos here, and if you click in to view the stats of an individual video, you can then click on Discovery here in the sidebar.

You are then served with with the stats for how are people finding this video. I can see here that 66% of people are finding my video through a search of YouTube. If you click on the YouTube search, you are shown exactly which searches your potential customers used to find your video. This is powerful information, as it shows you whether or not your keyword optimisation is working, and you are being found for the phrases you wish to be. This is good news for me, as even though these videos have been very recently uploaded, they are starting to do the trick, and to bring me the laser targeted traffic I am after.

There is also a plethora of information here in this menu which you should feel free to browse and take in at any time. It is a great feeling when you start to see a campaign working, and you are receiving traffic from all the right places, in the demographics you were looking for. Especially as you can start a video marketing campaign for so little money. But, more on how to do this in upcoming videos.

So that wraps up our introduction to creating your Director’s channel, Uploading Video & the many YouTube Features. As usual, if any of this is unclear, or you need to go through it with me, please feel free to let me know on any of the numbers at www.FreeWebsiteDesign.co.nz, or Aliarts.co.nz.

Thanks again, and I’m looking forward to seeing you in the next video in the series.

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