Getting onto the “Most Viewed” page

Now that your video is ready to go, how the video going to attract viewers?

The core concept of video marketing is to harness the power of the site’s traffic. Here’s the idea: something like 80 million videos are watched each day on YouTube, and a significant number of those views come from people clicking the “Videos” tab at the top. The goal is to get a video on that "Videos" page, which lists the "Daily Most Viewed" videos.

So how do you get the first 50,000 views needed to get our videos onto the Most Viewed list?

• Blogs : Reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and pay to post our embedded videos or work out some sort of agreement with them. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.
• Forums : Start new threads and embed the videos.  if we get enough people working on generating posts and threads, it can have a tremendous effect.
• MySpace : Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages.
• Facebook : Share, share, share. Sharing a video with your entire friends list can have a real impact. Other ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends, or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
• Email lists : Send the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list (and the recipients’ willingness to receive links to YouTube videos), this can be a very effective strategy.
• Friends : Make sure everyone we know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.

Each video has a shelf life before it’s moved from the Daily Most Viewed list to the Weekly Most Viewed list, so it’s important that this happens quickly. As I mentioned before, when done right, this is a tremendously successful strategy.