Releasing all videos simultaneously

Once people are watching a video, how do you keep them engaged and bring them back to a website?

Most of the time bloggers/vloggers will say: “We’re going to release one every few days so that viewers look forward to each video.”

This is the wrong way to think about YouTube marketing. If you have multiple videos, you should post all of them at once. If someone sees the first video and is so intrigued that they want to watch more, why would they make them wait until we post the next one? You should give them everything up front. If a user wants to watch all five of our videos right now, there’s a much better chance that we’ll be able to persuade them to click through to our website. You don’t make them wait after seeing the first video, because they’re never going to see the next four.

Using this strategy, we give our most interested viewers the chance to fully engage with a campaign without compromising the opportunity to individually release and market each consecutive video.

Commenting: A conversation with yourself

Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video. You get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitely have a lot of fun with this). Everyone loves a good, heated discussion in the comments section – especially if the comments are related to a brand/startup.

Don’t be afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, you could just delete their comment. You can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.

A heated comment thread (done well) will engage viewers and will drive traffic back to our sites.

Thumbnail Optimization

If a video is sitting on the Most Viewed page with 19 other videos, a compelling video thumbnail is the single best strategy to maximize the number of clicks the video gets.

YouTube provides three choices for a video’s thumbnail, one of which is grabbed from the exact middle of the video. As you edit our videos, make sure that the frame at the very middle is interesting. It’s no surprise that videos with thumbnails of half naked women get hundreds of thousands of views. Not to say that this is the best strategy, but you get the idea. Two rules of thumb: the thumbnail should be clear (suggesting high video quality) and ideally it should have a face or at least a person in it.

When you feel particularly creative, you optimize all three thumbnails then change the thumbnail every few hours. This is definitely an underused strategy, but it’s an interesting way to keep a video fresh once it’s on the Most Viewed list.

Title Optimization

Once a video is on the Most Viewed page, what can be done to maximize views?

It seems obvious, but people see hundreds of videos on YouTube, and the title and thumbnail are an easy way for video publishers to actively persuade someone to click on a video. Titles can be changed a limitless number of times, so we sometimes have a catchy (and somewhat misleading) title for the first few days, then later switch to something more relevant to the brand. Recently, I’ve noticed a trend towards titling videos with the phrases “exclusive,” “behind the scenes,” and “leaked video.” With this method, you can definitely generate views since many users randomly click videos just based on the title.

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.