Organic Video Promotion: How to Ensure Your Video Gets Found

In case you haven’t noticed, the internet is huge. Literally everybody is online, and just about everybody watches video. That’s why video marketing is so attractive. But with so much traffic, and so much competition, posting your video online is just the start of the process. If you want your video to get found — and actually seen — you’ll need a serious strategy.

If you want your video found, here are the secrets to organic video promotion.

1. Post it on YouTube

Step one isn’t a secret at all. It’s the go-to spot for posting video. You’ve probably heard that YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine on the internet, so you know you have to be there. But with all that competition, your video still won’t get found unless you start doing things to make it stand out. So here is the rest of the strategy.

2. Optimize it for YouTube search

You can start standing out from some of the YouTube traffic by optimizing your video. There are tricks to get found when people type in the YouTube search box, and it starts by optimizing your video for the same kinds of keywords you’d use to get found on the web itself.

Target a keyword phrase in your title, and then be sure to repeat it in the following places:

• First 100 words of the description
  
• The video timeline
  
• Final paragraph of the video timeline
  
• Tags

You should also select a category for the video that’s related to your keyword phrase, use a custom thumbnail, add the video to a YouTube playlist of your other videos, and link it with annotations that also use that keyword phrase. Adding closed captions and uploading a transcript that contains your target keywords will also help in YouTube search.

3. Post it on other social networks — all of them

The next step should also seem fairly obvious, but you’d be surprised how often people post YouTube links (or embedded videos) on other social networks. Don’t do it! Use the native video players on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, and any other place you want to be found. Those networks almost always show native videos more often, and with eye-catching autoplay, so why not take advantage of it? The great thing about video is that you can make as many copies as you want, so post a new one in each place. And if you want to get really fancy (and strategic), post a shorter, teaser video that links back to the video on your own website, instead.

4. Post it on your blog

Business blogs are the foot soldiers in your war to win-over the internet (or something like that). There’s got to be a decent metaphor in there, because blogs are the best tool (maybe I should consider calling them heavy artillery) to win the battle over every important keyword. Each new blog is an opportunity to rank (get found) for another keyword phrase, and since video tends to perform better than other content online, adding the video to your blog should be a no-brainer.

5. Optimize it for search engines

Just like any other blog, though, you need to optimize it for search. Otherwise, it’s just another lonely page on your website. Follow HubSpot’s best practices for blog SEO by including your keyword phrase in all of these places:

1. Blog title
   
2. Page title and URL
   
3. Meta description
   
4. Alt-text for images
   
5. Body of the text and headers

6. Transcribe the video

This is the one trick that people often miss. And if you really think about it, it isn’t just a trick. It’s actually really helpful. Transcribe your video, including the keyword phrase, to help in search. After all, without that road map, search engines don’t know what’s actually in your video. But it helps your visitors, as well. What would you rather see on the page, a single video box with a play button, or a video accompanied by a helpful script to see what’s in it? Your eyes can scan the page in a few seconds to see what’s on it, and what’s relevant. And if you’re interested, you’re more likely to watch the whole video than somebody who’s just blindly clicking the play button.

Consider the transcript your “teaser” to get the viewer to actually watch your video. Although in this case, it isn’t teasing them at all, it’s actually really helpful.

(35)