Put Out Videos!
This is the simple answer to this question.
Put out video content
The more the merrier, at least from all the people I’ve seen talking about being successful on YouTube, they all have many videos.
There are some people who have a few videos and somehow got lucky as their video went viral. Now, the likelihood that such a video was useful for these people to make any money is very unlikely. Having some viral videos is great for your statistics, but you remember watching viral videos before, what do you remember about them? They were funny or about an incredible event caught on tape. Did you immediately subscribe? Do you know the name of the poster? Was it even the original poster? Yeah…
What does work, however, is to have more and more videos on your account. They will get viewed assuming they have content worth learning about. There are ways to make good videos and I’ll talk about a few of them here. You do not need to break the bank either nor hire a team of people and generate highly professional videos.
Actually, one important point of videos on YouTube is that they are made by people like you and I. If you want to watch a Hollywood movie, you probably won’t go on YouTube. I think you’re more likely to find good movies on systems like YouTube Red (okay this is still on YouTube, but it’s not the same as the main purpose of YouTube!), Netflix, or Hulu.
As I talk about further down this page, this is how you can build rapport with your audience. Something really important. Being natural and truthful is going to give you results that you would not get with a 100% professional looking video. That does not mean you should not also create good looking videos. Maybe your market requires such (i.e. finance related.) Or you are working for a company which is large enough to require such.
What kind of numbers are we talking about?
I’ve seen many different people talking about doing a daily YouTube video. If you have the means to do that many videos, great. But remember that for good videos to come out you need content that people are going to be interested to look at. That’s not always easy to come up with more content on a daily basis!
In most cases, though, I’ve seen YouTubers create about one video a week. That should be roughly the minimum you want to go with to succeed quickly with YouTube. I’m sure it won’t be easy to keep up at first. Once you get used to it, though, you’ll notice that it’s not that hard. This means about 50 views a year.
Be Patient!
Don’t get your hopes up too quickly. Even the best YouTubers didn’t get hundreds of thousands of visitors and subscribers in a few days. There are ways to accelerate your ascension. One of them I just talked about: make sure to constantly add new videos.
Some of my points here are about making your YouTube channel grow faster. For example, you should ask your viewers to subscribe and like (or even dislike) your videos.
Read on for more tricks…
I mention below that you should build rapport with your audience. This includes building your subscriber list. Having more subscribers means that your videos are of interest to many people and it increases your credibility. At that point, you can ask people for more, such as following your links to your website.
What do I Need in a YouTube Video?
There are two main things that are required in your YouTube videos. Interestingly enough, both of those are what has been done in Hollywood movies for years now:
(a) Make Sure to Have a Hook
For the past 30 years or so, you often see a few exciting scenes at the beginning of a movie. For action movies, these scenes are likely a thrilling action such as a thief stealing a bank, a spy jumping on a site and exploding a couple things. For more romantic movies, it could be an enticing scene that happens later in the movie. Then the movie starts with “Three Days Earlier”.
These sort of things are there to hook you up to the movie so you are more likely to watch it till the end.
In a YouTube video, you could tell people about what effect the content you have in this video is going to have on their website or for their business. For example, for a fitness video, doing a certain exercise will give you bigger biceps. The video hook should show those biceps (yours, right?) and tell the user, hey, wants those too? Watch to see how I did it, it’s easy!
(b) Include Real Content
People have a thirst for content. Don’t just tell them: look what you can do, now give me $97 and I’ll show you how. Just that and they’ll leave and not come back. Ever.
This is just like this blog. If I were just asking you to pay me the net worth of this content before showing it to you, you probably would run away and never come back.
Now… if you expand on how to do what your hook is talking about, you will make friends and they will eventually comment, share with their friends on social media and your videos are going to be watched more and more.
If you are also writing a post on your blog (you should), then the video and the blog content should pretty much be a one to one equivalent. In most cases, the video is going to make it a lot faster for people to get your content, but it makes it harder to remember too. I remember a lot better when I read and even better when I take notes. Just watching videos all day does not let me register everything I see in these videos. It’s just going too fast. Plus if it’s just a dude talking (which would often be the case for our type of videos), it’s not going to be as good as a Hollywood movie with strong images (a woman crying, a person falling off a cliff, a huge explosion…)
How to Increase the Ranking of your Videos?
Here is an interesting trick to know about YouTube. The Ranking of pages in Google Search tends to decrease over time, but not that much. For Videos on YouTube, you have a similar effect. Videos that make it big within the first 24h of being posted on YouTube have a much greater chance of performing well for a long time.
So, whenever you post a new video you want to talk about it to your contacts as soon as possible. If you have such an audience, maybe you could even let them know multiple times to increase your chances that they click on your YouTube link.
This means you want to send a message to your email list and publish your video on all your social media accounts, such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.
Note that Social Media services prefer to get a full copy of your video rather than a link to YouTube. Trust me. A video you upload directly on Facebook is likely to be viewed some 20× more than a video which you added as a link to YouTube. I tested and I can tell that’s what happens. Facebook won’t tell you, but they’d rather promote content that they own (They don’t exactly own your content, but they do clearly tell you, when you sign up, that they will do as they please with it once uploaded on their servers. At least until you delete it or close your account.)
In your emails, you want to put a picture of your video with a Play button on top. I even tried with GIF images. It doesn’t work in all email clients (some clients will not playback the GIF—for this reason, you must make sure that the first image looks good,) but for those where it works, it’s like seeing a bit of the video without having to click on the link. If you put the first 30 frames or so (about half a second) it can load pretty quickly and show a bit if not all of your hook.
If you can and think it’s worth it, you could even put some advertising out for the video to be viewed by random people. However, from what I understand, this is not very good. That is, it’s more likely that people won’t watch your video. Again, it will depend on what the video is about. For certain markets, this will work like a charm… so one way is for you to give it a try once you have the funds and see what happens.
Again, get as many views within 24h so your video ranks higher. That way it will appear in more search results. This means it will get more views and more views translate in more subscribers and more people who are likely to follow your links to your website where you can further give more content and get people to click on your affiliate links. Leads are your lifeblood.
The Full Transcript
Yeah… Writing the full transcript can take forever, especially for pretty long videos. But…
The MOZ website does that for each one of their videos which are 15 to 20 min. long. They have one page per video and each video is fully transcribed on that page. Plus they have pictures of what they are talking about. This means a lot of content for their website and a video to bring people to their website. Note that the video on YouTube also has a resume of the transcript. That way the YouTube search capability has all the information necessary to return good results and get your video in front of more well-targeted people.
Note that to make it easier for you to do the transcription, you can go to the control caption that YouTube generates automatically. It’s then a matter of correcting it for when it misunderstood you. This is very similar to having a speech recognition software on your computer. You can then copy and paste that content to your blog and put a resume in your video’s description with a link to the full version on your blog.
Could I Build Rapport?
Yes. This is actually the primary way I use YouTube. I build a bond between my viewers and I. I make them comfortable so they are interested in listening to more video content and come on my blog to read my content here and move forward with my products or services and eventually follow one of my affiliate links.
Trying to get someone to click on a link and enter their email address or send you money immediately is a much harder sell than if you can first tell them much about yourself, allow them to communicate with you through comments, answer their question in your next video, etc. You see, all humans act on impulse. However, you are less likely to do it if you talk with a stranger than a friend. Once you have a bond with someone and that someone tells you to do something, you much more likely to listen and proceed.
Some people call this branding. I don’t like that word as much when talking about a person because to my point of view a brand is more like a big company with 1,000+ employees constantly using advertising in magazines and on television and other similar mediums. Actually, in general, large companies won’t find YouTube as useful for branding.
Whenever one of your viewers posts a comment, especially one that warrants an answer, do answer! Each answer your write will strengthen the bond between you and all your viewers. It shows that you care and this is exactly the rapport you want. Do it methodically and you will get leads from YouTube.
Video Duration
This is an important aspect of a video. In many cases, videos are short because the attention span of an individual is about two minutes.
The following five minutes see a constant decrease from about 70% attention to only 50%.
Interestingly enough, you have another plateau for the following seven minutes. So videos up to about 15 minutes are likely going to be watched in full by 50% of your viewers.
Around 15 min. the number of people watching/listening decreases again at a constant rate of about 1% more people who will drop out per minute.
So whatever the type of video (unless you’re creating an actual theatrical movie), you should try to keep them around 15 min. Longer videos should be reserved for tutorials. If you are up for it, longer videos can be a narrative type of video. However, remember that quite often longer videos take much longer for you to implement.
Note that applies to your affiliate blog. I write my blog to teach you and others (because you’re going to share my posts with your friends, right?) how to create good and useful content with all the necessary details so you don’t feel like something’s missing. And of course, if you were looking for something and you did not find it in my existing post, I want you to write a comment below to ask for further information. I am not unlikely to enhance my post to give you that little extra.
Links
Note that you can include links in your YouTube video description back to your blog. These have the usual nofollow but they are still good links.
Please don’t plaster 20 links in each video. It won’t help. Two or three is the maximum I would suggest you have, one per person you mention if you have a deal with them.
Keywords
Obviously, if you have a proper transcript and resume of your video, you should have all the necessary keywords in your description.
However, if you’re not looking into having the entire transcript, you at least want to have all your important keywords. Make sure to re-read your description and check for all of your keywords before publishing. Updates can take a little time and we do not know how long it takes for the search capability to update all of its tables.
Would Selling Products Work With YouTube Videos?
Yes. Although I’m sure it only works with certain types of products or services and not others. For sure, if you want to make a killing with it, you probably want products that sell for a pretty large amount of money such as products around $1,000 or more. It’s simple to see that you only need 10 buyers a month with such a video to make $10,000.
Remember, though, that as an affiliate you only make a percentage on the sale. Maybe 5%, so $10,000 x 5% = $500. It’s still substantial, but it will work a lot better if you can have your own product instead of one as an affiliate.
However, making people interested in your website and what you have to offer there is very similar to selling specific products on your videos. These videos will get you long-term results and you should also be able to create content which is evergreen.
What about Getting Sponsors?
Yes. There are many YouTubers and also people on Instagram or Pinterest who like to create videos to sponsor a product or another and apparently they are doing well.
Two things of importance for them: they need a very large number of views on each one of their videos. That means in the hundreds of thousands. Without that, the sponsor money is going to be so little that it would definitely not be worth the trouble (if it even ever happens.)
Frankly, think about it… I’m a business making $10 million a month. Why would I bother paying someone $1,000 to get less than 1,000 views on sponsored content?
Advertising Income
One thing that many talk about, in regard to YouTube, is making some money by placing some ads on your videos. You can always do that, just make sure it’s not the annoying type if at all possible. However, remember that your content should smoothly get through to your users and a 5 min. ad in the middle is really not a good idea.
Also, unless you have some 1 million views per month, it is not likely to be worth the trouble. One million views are hard to achieve, so don’t hope for reaching such heights any time soon.
IMPORTANT NOTE: About this one, YouTube changed the rules in 2017 and only people with a minimum number of views and subscribers can have ads on their videos. Until then, you won’t even be able to do anything about that. At the time of writing it was 10,000 views and a minimum of 1,000 subscribers.
My Conclusion
So far, I don’t have a following on YouTube I can really talk of. However, I have already seen a huge difference between when I was just putting a few videos and when I started putting videos regularly.
Soon I will put one video per post I have here. Imagine… you would not have to read me, instead, you could watch the video really quick.