Publicize Your YouTube Video

Your first step in publicizing your YouTube channel should be to post comments on related YouTube videos. You may attract some followers this way. But be careful. It’s probably not cool to post snarky comments on competitors’ videos. Consider including URLs in comments on related videos and even creating video responses. And don’t disable commenting on your channel. See the post on Dealing with Negatives for reasons why you don’t want to limit dissent.

Next, embed your YouTube videos on your Website and on your blogs. This makes them do double duty, and will attract viewers to your channel. There’s a bit more on embedding below.

Take a look at your competition and see how they are tagging their videos. Tag your videos the same way. This way, when their video is over, and YouTube displays other videos to view next, your video is likely to come up, as in the following figure

Figure 1 — Suggested Videos Areas on YouTube Page

Subscribe to other channels. Just like following people on Twitter gets you your own followers, subscribing to other YouTube channels will get subscribers for your channel.

YouTube has an active social networking community. Invite your friends, and extend friend invitations to kindred souls. Friend the most popular channels in your field. Thank subscribers for subscribing by posting comments on their channels. Engage members of the various categories of channels, especially the Reporters channel. Participate in the community and you’ll attract subscribers.

You should create a special landing page on your Website for each of your videos. This page should be tailored for visitors who have arrived from YouTube, perhaps by addressing them directly — “Welcome YouTube viewer! Here’s more information on <the subject of the video>.” Be sure to include links to your other relevant videos and to actions the visitors can take on your site. Put buttons for the most important actions right on the landing page.

Creating landing pages is way better than dumping YouTube visitors right onto your main page — never do this — or even to an appropriate generic internal page. Take the time to customize your experience and embrace your YouTube community.

Depending on the video, up to 70 percent of people may view your YouTube videos from other sites, such as sites with embedded players, blogs, search engines, and the like, and thus many people will find your video by doing a search, either on YouTube or on Google or other search engine. Consequently, you need to search-engine-optimize your videos.