A lot of clients will ask how to get views on their YouTube videos and typically when we look at the channels and videos we see a couple of common mistakes.

Five Common Mistakes

• They don’t embed their videos on their website. If you are already getting traffic to a particular blog, consider doing a quick video about it and embedding it on the blog. For example we put a video on one of our most popular blogs and to date we have almost 5,000 views on that one video. That video took about 15 minutes to create and another 15 minutes to edit in iMovie
• They don’t use social media. To get videos going, you need to put your video in front of a big social media audience. So any YouTube video should be published on your social media channels, multiple times.
• The videos aren’t named correctly. YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google. You need to make sure you name your video like you would a blog. Find a page title people are already searching on so they can happen upon your video through search. This means you need to write about 2 paragraphs of text in your video description. You also need to use your keywords within the tags for each video.
• No one reaches out. Email your video out to your distribution list. The trick here is to link a picture of our video to the actual video page as some email clients don’t do a great job of playing embedded videos.
• No pay, no play. Consider doing some advertising to get views to prime the pump in terms of viewership. Media companies do this all the time because if there are more views on a video it’s more likely to rank higher.

Like any kind of content marketing, the key to getting views is having a large audience to present your content. This means using social media, your own website’s traffic and other assets. The more eyeballs who see your video, the more likely there will be more video views.