Statistics say that people, on average, watch 16 hours of video monthly, and that nearly everyone who spends money online is video viewer. So you’ve decided to dive into it and to try to increase your sales: you’ve created your YouTube channel with lots of videos, but now you’re stuck on the point that should have launched your videos into the sphere of viral: there are no visitors. No visitors means no conversions, so you have to do something fast. Lucky for you, there are a few things you can do to attract viewers at no cost.

#1 Network Within YouTube

People tend to forget that YouTube is a community, and not only a place to watch videos. It’s a social network, so behave like it: network with others! Make friends, send them private messages, comment on their videos – people need to know about you, and what better way to introduce yourself than to compliment others on their videos. Look up the videos within your niche, rate them and leave comments (just like you’d do with blog posts, meaning only relevant comments and no spam); if your comments are good, chances are that other people who watch that video will check your profile too, and maybe subscribe to your channel.

#2 Get Subscribers

Increase the number of your subscribers by inserting “subscribe now” link in your videos. You can put the link where ever you like: at the end of the video, throughout, at the beginning, or in the description. Why is it important to have subscribers? Well, every time you publish a new video, they will be alerted via email, and if you make a fantastic one, it will spread organically in no time. Having YouTube subscribers is priceless, and should be seriously considered as part of a long term strategy.

#3 Use Your Website Or Blog

Make a post on your blog that is relevant to your video and embed the video, so you can enjoy double benefit: by promoting your blog post, your video will get more views.

#4 Optimize Your Videos

Your goal is to become known not only to YouTube community, but to others as well, so optimizing for search engines is really important. Title should be catchy, but also to include your keywords, so choose wisely. Include your main keyword in your description too, along with the links to where the video is posted on your blog (and you want them to visit your blog afterwards). Additional tip: rename the video file before you upload it, so that it also includes your keyword.

Pro tip: to make your video even more search engine friendly, add transcription of your own. This is a powerful way of telling YouTube and Google what your video is about, so it will be ranked for its actual content (and not what YouTube thinks your video is about), which will send more people you way, especially since people rarely use this option.

Remember to also optimize your video for YouTube users, who search through the tags. Since you’re adding the tags manually, make sure that they’re relevant to your video, and don’t be afraid to use ten or fifteen of them.

#5 Share Your Videos On Other Social Networks

Good videos are loved on social networks, and that’s where you should promote them. Videos on Facebook have great click through rate; successful videos can get you up to 10,000 views from Digg, and up to 100,000 from StumbleUpon visitors over a few weeks. Make use of any account you have, ask your friends to share and tweet your video to their following, which should start a chain of sharing if it’s good enough.

Try it. Promote your video, give it a chance to get thousands views and to be shared further. Of course, you can just pay for the views, but that’s just not it, is it?

Jeff Bales is an Internet marketing consultant and content writer for Serije.

Related articles
Tags: , , , , , , ,