Imagine releasing your song to an audience of several-hundred million, and minutes after you post it’s gone viral. New fans from across the globe are sharing your song, introducing your creation to more and more people. You could become a star without leaving the comfort of your home studio. Understanding product promotion in the digital age is a great way to increase your exposure to the world.
That’s the potential power of YouTube. According to YouTube, more than 800 million users visit the video-sharing site each month, and more than four billion videos are viewed daily. Even more amazing? Seven hundred YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute, a percentage of those being videos by musicians.
While your potential audience is massive, so is your competition. More than 60 hours of video are uploaded every day, which is equivalent to more than 176,000 full-length Hollywood movies each week. Independent musicians also have to account for competition from big labels paying to promote videos, and vying for your potential audiences’ attention.
YouTube success hinges on optimizing your video to maximize the chances that the right people will see and share your work. You didn’t create an amazing video of your newest song just so no one would see it, right? You need to get your music video seen, and we can show you how to do that!
Here are a few quick and easy tips to help you maximize your video’s exposure by optimizing your video for YouTube. This will work on music videos, your artist interviews, or any other type of video you will make.
Keywords Are The Key
YouTube optimization is a lot like search engine optimization – both rely heavily on relevant keywords to serve up the best content for searchers. Choosing relevant keywords is the most important step in optimizing your video for YouTube, and can mean the difference between 15 views and 15 hundred views.
There are four steps for optimizing your YouTube video with keywords.
- Find Relevant Keywords.
Review keywords on videos similar to yours, especially those with a high number of views, which will give you an idea what kind of keywords bring viewers to a certain video. Search for the keywords you might use to find your own YouTube video to determine if the search results are what you expected – you might have a different idea of keyword relevancy than your potential audience! Steer clear of adding irrelevant – yet popular – keywords to your videos. Irrelevant keywords might help your YouTube search results, but it’s not likely users will actually watch it. For a broader keyword picture, check out the YouTube keyword tool. It’s a free service that lets you see the most popular keywords based on language and country. - Getting Your Title Right.
Start by optimizing your video title. Think of a newspaper or magazine. What type of headline are you drawn to reading? Choose titles that are descriptive, catchy and clear. You have 100 characters, including the spaces between words. Focus on the keywords you discovered in step one. - Choosing A Category For Your Music Video.
Choose a category for your video. Search for videos similar to yours or browse the categories you believe would be the best fit for your own video. Think about using a less popular (but still as relevant) category so your video has a better chance of being seen. - Description And Tags.
Add your description and tags. Your description should be as detailed as possible and include the ever-important keywords related to your video. You can include details like your location, genre, instruments or even the background of your song. You have approximately 800 words in your description, so use them wisely! Your tags, which have a 120-character limit, should also reflect your keywords.
All of these things will help your video be more relevant to any related search terms. This will help your target audience (And potential fans) find you a lot easier.
Settings To Set Your YouTube Video Apart
Keyword relevancy is only the first step to optimizing your YouTube video. YouTube also gives musicians a variety of further settings that can better help you optimize your video…
When you upload your video, you should always check the broadcasting and sharing options to make sure your optimized YouTube video will appear in searches. Privacy should be set to “public”; comments, comment voting, video responses and ratings should all be allowed so your audience can engage with you; and video embedding should be permitted. That way, when someone wants to share your video on their blog or article, they can embed your optimized video right from the YouTube website. People sharing your music video on their blog can only mean more exposure, so make sure your share settings are in order.About The Author
Steven Payne is enthusiastic about all things to do with marketing promotions. While he isn’t busy with his day job, he shares his marketing knowledge with those in need. In this case, it just happens to be you cool musicians.
Another way to boost youtube views is social media. My method is tumblr and what I do is follow people that listen to my genre, and they’ll follow back. I’ll collect followers and when I reach the thousands, I start promoting my youtube videos then if it’s good, people will share it and you’ll have free promoters.
The bonus is that they’ll even like or share it on other social media sites.
But remember that content is king for this.
Thanks for sharing your experience Leslie.