RSS feedI was showing a customer of mine some video examples to demonstrate how easy it is to produce videos these days. I had made a point that it is all about the message and no longer about being a professional video producer. While we were surfing YouTube, I was shocked to see how many people make videos without paying attention to detail.
When you run a business and you are uploading videos to YouTube (and other video directories) there are a few things you have to get right. Here are some of my findings. If you follow these simple suggestions you will be ahead of a large group of video publishers.
The first thing I want to mention is a real no-brainer, and yet so many ignore it. I am talking about your profile on your video channel as YouTube calls it. Make sure that you upload a picture and fill out the details, including links to your other virtual real estate.
By not taking the time to do this, you are sending a message to prospects that you don’t take your business serious. After all, you are not even taking the time to communicate with them what your web presence entails and where they can find you, besides your YouTube account.
When you upload your videos make sure to fill out all the fields. This may not be required, but it is critical if you want to succeed online. For example, oftentimes the title field will be prefilled with the name of your video. It will look something like this: myuploadedvideo.mp4. Again, you are broadcasting to your prospects that you are not paying attention to detail. Take your time to come up with a catching title. This will not only impress your prospects, it will also drive more traffic to your video.
The same holds true for the description field. Make sure you enter a description, starting with the link to where ever you want your prospect to go next. It is important to start out with the link, since the full text may only be visible when your prospect clicks on the description.(Gavin Mountford just pointed out in the comments that I had not stressed the fact that you should always put “http://www.” in front of every link in your description. He is correct, by leaving the obvious first part out, your link is not clickable. )
Tags are also very important. Leaving the tag field blank makes it very difficult for viewers to find your video. There is an important technique that you can use to boost your views through the tags that you choose, but that is a topic for another post. For now, suffice it to say that you should always at a minimum enter some keywords in this fields.
A word of caution for you, when you upload your videos from a smart phone or flip camera. Oftentimes these devices will enter text like “Uploaded with a flip camera as the description. If you don’t change this it again looks negligent on your part.
I have gotten into the habit of downloading my videos from my flip camera to my computer, and to use TubeMogul for distribution to several video directories to prevent this exact thing from happening.
I hope this helps you. Next week I will give you some tips to improve the traffic to your website using videos, but for now I would love to hear your comments about your use of videos. Are you paying attention to all these details? Are you using a routine that we can all learn from? Please let us know what your experiences are.
