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Ten tips for optimizing YouTube videos and channels

#33 | 4:59 |

Status Update

Wednesday February 16, 2011

You have a video you know people want to see. How do you hook them and make them click the play button? Jay Goldman shares his

top ten tips for getting YouTube plays

and offers practical advice on how you can put them to work right now to drive your viewership on YouTube and, by extension, beyond.

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Show Notes

Interesting YouTube Facts:
- There are 24 hours worth of video uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day.
- YouTube is the second largest search engine by volume.

Tips for optimizing YouTube videos

Tip 1 - Keep it short!
People don't come to watch YouTube long, drawn out videos. 30 seconds is the golden length... which can be tough to attain. Ensure your videos are no longer than three minutes.

Tip 2 - Focus on the content
Make something that's easy to remix and riff on. Failing that, riff on someone else's popular video. Do not make an outright ad though; no one wants to come see an ad. Try to offer a surprise to anyone that commits to watching your video.

Tip 3 - Use your title like a hook
Ask a question or provoke controversy; anything you can do to set your video apart from the crowd will help. If you know HTML, use an extension like Firebug for Firefox to mock up a page, test your title and see how it'll look in the YouTube listings. Adjust accordingly.

Tip 4 - Use tags effectively
When you're tagging your videos, choose carefully. One idea is to make some unique tags that only appear on your own videos and put them on a couple of videos which in turn drives the related content sidebar; this lets you seed the related content sidebar.
After you've gotten some decent viewer numbers, change the tags so that your videos will relate to other popular videos on YouTube, further driving numbers.

Tip 5 - Make a video response
Select a popular video and make your vid a "response." Make sure the response that you're proposing is actually relevant. You can only choose one video to respond to; shop your vid around and see where you get the most traffic.

Tip 6 - Use TubeMogul's OneLoad service
TubeMogul lets you syndicate your videos to multiple video hosting services and offers some tracking tools to boot.

Tip 7 - Use the medium to maximum advantage
Create links between videos with annotations; you can create a simple story arc or even a Choose Your Own Adventure type experience. If you're really ambitious, you could even do something like Patrick Boivin's Street Fighter videos or Tagged: