A simple guide to setting up and growing your YouTube presence

A simple guide to setting up and growing your YouTube presence

YouTube is a social media channel that often gets overlooked by marketers, but with its huge following it offers some excellent opportunities to get your message out there. If you haven’t got a channel, or you simply never use the one you own, now’s the time to start. Here are some top tips to get you up and running.

  1. Identify your goals

As with any form of marketing – be it SEO marketing, print or social – the first step is to identify what you want to achieve from your YouTube channel. Perhaps you want to use it for reputation management by boosting your rankings and going after the featured snippet spots. Or maybe you’re planning to use it to boost conversions by creating product videos. Whatever your goal, make sure it permeates everything you do with the channel.

  1. Create a content calendar

Whether you simply incorporate YouTube into your overall content calendar or create a bespoke one, the content you populate your channel with will require careful planning. Research the keywords you want to target and questions that are asked around your product or service. Then create content around seasonal events and estimate the resources you’ll need from production and promotion of each piece.

  1. Get into production

Embarking on video production is often the most challenging and intimidating part of the process, especially if your budget is limited. There are several animation tools available at low costs such as Animatron and iMovie (free to Mac users) which can help you create quality videos. Otherwise, consider affordable ways to outsource production – reach out to bloggers in your niche for help, for example.

  1. Do the peripheral work

Creating a successful YouTube channel isn’t just about uploading the video and walking away. As with SEO marketing, it requires some time and effort. Start by giving the piece an appropriate title and description (around 300-500 characters) as well as ample tags. Then, supply a clickable table of contents so viewers can skip to the relevant part of your video. This improves the view count for later parts of the video, encouraging YouTube to see it as a high-quality one.

Next, embed the video into your site and share it on your other social media pages. But switch off the auto-play to ensure your metrics aren’t skewed by people just passing through who have no desire to watch.

Finally, you can pop a bit of money behind the video to promote it on your social channels and encourage awareness of your product.

  1. Monitor performance

The final, crucial part of YouTube success is to monitor the performance of your videos. This means you can create more of the content that is popular and scrap the ideas that didn’t work. Use YouTube Analytics or Topvisor to help you see how the video is being consumed.

Like any SEO services, YouTube is a slow burner that requires time and patience to become successful. If you don’t have the time to spend on your channel or you’re not sure where to start, contact us to find out about our SEO marketing services that will help you build your YouTube presence.

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