September 23, 2009

How To Pimp Your YouTube Channel and Other Miscellaneous Advice

This may seem like shameless self-promotion, but if you read all the way to the bottom of this post, you'll benefit in ways that you wouldn't imagine. Besides, I figure that you'd want to know how to pimp your YouTube channel and get other miscellaneous advice. I could always blog about this topic, but the details have just been dished out in three videos and a podcast.

Let's start with the interview that Mike McDonald of WebProNews did with me at SES San Jose 2009. (Actually, the video starts by itself, but don't let that throw you.) The video is entitled, Finding Marketing Value in YouTube.

With people being increasingly drawn to video content, everyone is trying to capitalize on video sharing sites such as YouTube. I told McDonald, however, there is one problem: it isn't always easy.

YouTube is known for funny videos of cats or children. While these videos may go viral, they will likely only produce a one-time audience. In other words, these kids and cats may not to do the same thing again, which means there would be no reason for viewers to return to that channel for more content.

To be successful on YouTube, users cannot simply upload a single video. Statistics show that in an average minute, 24 hours of video has been uploaded to YouTube. As a result of this large amount of competition, I tell McDonald that users should create a series of "compelling content" in order to bring viewers back continually.

Users have to have a reason for wanting to come back to a particular YouTube channel and it is up to the content providers to produce that desire. Is your YouTube channel creating that appeal?

Now, I should provide equal time for other views.

Over at ReelSEO, Mark R Robertson interviewed me at SES San Jose 2009 about Leveraging the Power of YouTube for Search Marketing. I told him, "One of the most important trends in search is YouTube. It is the second most popular search engine on the planet."

But I suggested a two-pronged approach:

1. Optimize your video so that it can be found in searches 2. Involve yourself in the community, which helps breed the sharing aspects of YouTube.

I then told a story about Monty Python. I interviewed Monty Python's producer about their YouTube efforts. The producer originally just went looking for a way to help keep pirated copies of Monty Python's work from being uploaded all over the place. So they created their own channel and began posting their work themselves -- in a higher quality.

As an afterthought, they put a click-to-buy link at the bottom of the video so that users could click and be taken straight to Amazon to purchase DVDs. A funny thing happened when they did that: sales went up a staggering 23,000%.

The point of the story, obviously, is that although YouTube is not thought of as a direct-response marketing platform, as it continues to evolve, it's turning into a direct-response marketing solution faster than people may realize.

But wait! There's more! Check out the YouTube video below. Mike Grehan, Senior Vice President of content for Search Engine Watch, ClickZ, and Search Engine Strategies, says my new book "won't help you find the answer to life, the universe and everthing in it, but I guarantee it will help you get your videos found on YouTube, Google and other sites. So, read this book. It will change your life. You'll become more wealthy, more attractive to the opposite sex."

Mike Grehan, SVP for SEW, ClickZ and SES on YouTube Marketing: An Hour A Day

If you find this hard to believe, then check out the podcast on DishyMix.

This all started when Susan Bratton saw me dashing through the San Francisco Airport, with a new copy of my book, "YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour A Day."

Bratton says, it "is another one of those Wiley tomes that plunges all the way to detail hell on every aspect of using web video for marketing. This book is a must-read that will get you up to date on the constant changes YouTube is putting into place so marketers and Google can milk this phenomenon for everything it's worth."

The random encounter at SFO got me invited on DishyMix, where Bratton has just posted her interview of me. It's entitled, Episode 117: Greg Jarboe: Pimp My YouTube Channel, 6-Steps to SEO PR and Roosevelt's Arena.

According to Bratton, "Start making video and let Greg tell you how to produce it, research the keywords and optimize your video so you can get found, watched and loved."

She adds, "And in case you still want to get those press releases out there, Greg gives us his updated, freshly reformulated 6-Step Process for Optimizing Press Releases for the News Services."

If you like those DishyMix episodes where the guest delivers how-to advice in painstaking detail, then this is the show is for you. According to DishyMix, it is "packed with great tips, insider short cuts and a level set on the world of online video marketing, banana-milkshake fueled Jarboe works his buns off for you."

I know, I know, even I would take these comments with a grain of salt.

So, if McDonald's video, Robertson's video, Grehan's video and Bratton's podcast still don't provide you with enough details about video optimization, then you have options.

You can attend today's Online Publicity Workshop at Market Motive. It starts at noon Eastern, 9 a.m. Pacific and is entitled, YouTube & Video Marketing.

No, this isn't duplicate content. I will explore the world of online video, including what it takes to be successful and how to use some of the lesser known tools to prepare and track an online video marketing campaign.

Or, can also attend SES Chicago 2009. On Day 1, Monday, Dec. 7, I'll be speaking at a session entitled, "YouTube & Video Optimization."

Online video marketing is crucial in today's marketplace. More than 158 million Americans watched an average of 8.3 hours of online video during July 2009. That's more viewers than the 151.6 million Americans who watched Super Bowl XLIII, which reached the largest television audience in U.S. history.

My solo presentation will provide you "with proven, practical guidelines for developing and implementing video marketing for your organization." At least, that's what the SES Chicago website says.

And if you register by this Friday, Sept. 25, you can save up to $600 with the Early Bird Rate. See, it does pay to read all the way to the bottom of these posts.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 7:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

January 5, 2008

China Limits Video, Audio Podcasts To State Run Sites

The Chinese government will restrict all video and audio content on sites starting next month, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

"From next month, only state websites will be allowed to carry film or radio programs, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) said," they reported.

In an effort to control video sharing programs, the government makes the operator remove uploaded content.

"The new rules will put many private video providers in China out of business as only websites fully or for the most part in state ownership will be allowed to offer films and other audiovisual products.

It remained immediately unclear, what consequences the regulations would have for international providers such as YouTube, who operate their servers outside China, or the popular China-based Tudou.com website. YouTube has been repeatedly blocked in China in recent months," SMH noted.

With 150 million internet users, China will soon surpass the US as the largest online market. But with the tight restrictions imposed by the government it will be hard for many to develop normal marketing. Though no doubt many will try. How they do will be watched closely.

Posted by Frank Watson at 11:14 PM | Permalink

December 5, 2007

Podcast & Audio Search

Preparation was the name of the game at today's Search Engine Strategies Chicago “Podcast & Audio Search” session presented by Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit and Daron Babin of Webmaster Radio, and moderated by Danny Sullivan. The importance of preparing your show's structure, establishing your software, your production process (whether or not that will involve a production studio), your broadcast frequency, and how the whole idea of this marketing tactic fits into your overall search marketing and brand marketing strategies.

Amanda's presentation focused on the rundown on how to establish yourself as a podcaster if it's the right direction for your overall online marketing efforts.

She broke down the benefits of podcasting from the perspective of the marketing strategies for brand marketers and search marketers. Brand marketers can make use of the direct communication channel it creates to the consumer, the engagement through emotional connection, for search marketers, it's another (very optimizable) channel through which you can gain a larger presence in the search engines, and, physically speaking, more real estate on search results within the new universal search formats. They're easily indexed by engines, but there are difficulties measuring effectiveness. It augments your site content, but you have less control over ownership as it can find a home all across the web. This makes it important, Danny noted, to orient your listeners to who you are, whom you're speaking for, and what your show is about (be sure to brand your ‘cast!).

Don't jump right in, though, says Amanda. It's important to ask yourself, before you get started, what strategy fits your ability to fulfill a schedule or, in a more general sense, to match with your image. Will your podcast be an occasion-based one-off? Will you have a series? It's important to make a commitment to your model and to openly frame your ‘cast by that strategy. Some important tips about thinking ahead to position your show: research your name and establish it; distinguish between your episodes and be sure you know what your keywords are in your space for optimization of your tags and, if you decide to abstract rather than publish a transcript, the abstract description. Develop a long-range strategy for how audio fits with marketing and search efforts, and the whole process will fit more easily with your overall SEM and SEO efforts.

She laid out a 4-step piece in a comprehensive podcasting strategy: optimization of the sound file and the id3 tags, optimization of the web page, creation and validation of feeds, and the submission and monitoring of your distribution on the back end.

I'll just give a brief run-down of some of her best tips on podcast optimization and relevant site optimization, as the creation/validation and submission/monitoring processes really work best with the sorts of graphical aids she had on screen (Mike Yanke runs through the list with a little more detail): From a top-line perspective of audio file optimization (though Amanda recommends going into depth in your use of tags, such as capitalizing on the embedded files tag), the most important aspects are the usual suspects like assigning your title, artist, track name, etc., and optimize these to the extent that is feasible (“pdkstmktg03243” could read “podcast-marketing-03243”). Beyond the file itself, however, the on-page optimization for your site's listing of the episodes is very important—some tactics include creating optimized landing pages for each episode, a full directory page with appropriate anchor text linking to your episodes' pages, and providing some kind of abstract or transcript can be effective ways of optimizing the landing pages for the engines (transcription services are the best route unless you've got more time than you know what to do with).

Daron went more into the makeup of the podcasting medium and a few broadcasting strategies, but he agreed strongly with Amanda about planning ahead for your podcast strategy: he advised to take every aspect seriously, such as not going with any free podcast hosting services. Make sure you've got a hosting deal set up, because if you mean to distribute the content efficiently to an engaged audience, you can't have sluggish downloads or hiccups in service. “All it takes is one blogger, just one [linking in to you], and they'll melt your account” on your server. Both Darren and Amanda were strongly in favor of preparing for this “worst-case” scenario by reserving extra bandwidth, either on an external host or through some deal with your current provider.

He reinforced the importance of traditional on-page SEO for your podcast, but with new twists unique to the podcast medium, such as optimizing for podcast directories, especially iTunes. In iTunes, there are ways to control how your podcast is presented in the store: for starters, use the iTunes store links to promote the feed through iTunes on your page—iTunes appreciates the linkback and the traffic, and this can help your podcast's rankings in the store. For the wider selection of podcasting directories, be sure to optimize (with applicable terms!) your feed description—and, of course, subsequently your episode titles & tags etc.—in whatever you've chosen as its primary home. This will help listeners find your feed more readily.

As far as targeting your podcast to an audience, you should be very much aware of who the people you're reaching out to are: podcasting is extremely vertically-oriented, so you can really use this as a channel to define your company in your market, but you need to remain aware of who the people in your market are. So of course you want to develop your presence and image online, but does this actually help you? Of course, this means that the people who are listening to your feed are likely to be very much engaged with the topics you're addressing; so be careful what you say—if you have enough content out there and you start to rank, you want only what you want people to hear and see to be available on this channel that can allow you so much control over your image, but none over where that image will crop up.

Daron also put a lot of emphasis on measurement and both he and Amanda talked about stragegies for controlling costs in order to make this as viable a medium for building brand-awareness as possible. Towards the end of his presentation, Daron touched on the uses of statistics, not just as a bean-counting of listenership size and engagement, but as a tool for knowing, podcast to podcast, which had the most appeal to the engines by virtue of optimization and then, when these optimized podcasts landed in front of the eyes of a web searcher or subscriber, which of them invited the most listener engagement—this is a great tactic we've seen success with ourselves, and it can tell you a lot about the matchup between 1)the content you're pushing, 2)the optimized terms in your space, and 3)the mindset of your potential audience.

This was an information-packed session from two podcasting experts, and if you haven't heard them on air, be sure to visit Amanda Watlington on Weekly Insight and Daron Babin on WebMasterRadio.fm.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 11:18 PM | Permalink

October 22, 2007

Kim Krause Berg Podcast, Usability and SEO

Recently I had the pleasure of doing a podcast with Kim Krause Berg. It was a great chat, primarily focused on usability issues with web sites.

It reminded me though of the strong link between usability and SEO. For example, clear easy to use navigation is one of the things we talked about during the podcast. This is also something that helps the flow of page rank through a site from an SEO perspective.

For example, one problem I have seen with web sites is that publish some content on a regular basis (daily, weekly, or monthly), and when they first publish it, the articles are linked to from the home page (for reference, we will call this first group of articles "Batch 1". Then the next batch comes out, and the Batch 1 content moves to a location one click from the home page. So far not a big deal.

However, when the batch after that comes out, Batch 1 now gets pushed yet another click from the home page. In fact, over time the content gets pushed further and further down. When Batch 21 comes out Batch 1 is 20 clicks from the home page.

This is bad usability because no user will ever find that content. It's also bad SEO, because no crawler is going to go down that many clicks from the home page to find that content. The same holds true for many other aspects of usability.

In addition, usability addresses that other major concern of web site owners - conversion. For many web site owners, it just might be easier to double their conversion than doubling their traffic - yet the both bring the same benefits to the bottom line performance of the web site.

Posted by at 10:51 AM | Permalink

March 7, 2007

Podcast with Jim Sterne

Jim Sterne is one of the most well known names in the world of analytics, and recently I sat down with him and did a Podcast. In this Podcast, Jim talks about the basics of analytics, and provides a great overview of how you can use web analytics to expand the business of your web site.

For example, he helps us understand the key role that analyst plays in the process. Getting a bunch of numbers is not likely to help your business at all. But having someone work on the analytics software that knows how to extract and use the key performance indicators (KPIs) will. This is at the heart of good analytics.

Finding the things you want to measure, and understanding how the data you get can help you improve your business. There is no one formula for doing this - each web site is different. But once you have this down, the analytics software will become one of your best friends.

Posted by at 3:35 PM | Permalink

February 14, 2007

Avinash Kaushik Talks About Competitive Intelligence Tools

Last Friday I had a chance to put together a podcast with Avinash Kaushik. Avinash is the publisher of the Occam's Razor blog, a highly respected blog in the web analytics space. He is also the director of web analytics for a Fortune 500 company. Last but not least, Avinash will release in May his first analytics book, Web Analytics, An Hour A Day.

We talk about lots of great search and analytics tools in our discussion. For example, I really like the MSN search funnels tool that allows you to see what people search on before they search on your keyword.

Another great tool we discussed was the MSN keyword forecasting tool that allows you to forecast future search traffic on your critical keywords. One of the neat features of this tool is the way it adjusts for seasonal search volumes. As a result it provides a great way to forecast the coming months for your web business.

Posted by at 1:42 PM | Permalink

December 1, 2006

SEW on "The Alternative" Webmaster Radio Show with Jim Hedger

Apologies! With everything else going on in the last few days, I didn't get a chance to post that I did an interview with Jim Hedger for Webmaster Radio that aired earlier today. Listen to the mp3 of The Alternative episode, where I talk about some of the future plans for SEW.

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski at 8:48 PM | Permalink

September 1, 2006

Search Engine Roundtable Starts Podcast: The Search Pulse

This is a self-promotional post but I wanted to let you know that I will be launching a new search podcast named The Search Pulse. The show is run in conjunction with WebmasterRadio.FM, much like the Daily SearchCast, but only once per week, on Tuesdays at 5PM (EST). The show will recap the most discussed and important topics within the search marketing community and have expert opinion and commentary from Ben Pfeiffer and Chris Boggs. The persona of the show will be a lot like Bill O'Reilly's show but only on search. It should be one hour of deep discussion with controversy, disagreement and fun on the topics that interest search marketers the most. More details on the new show here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:33 AM | Permalink

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