941 Marketing Challenge Day 18

Yesterday, you went about creating your first marketing video to be added to your new YouTube channel.

When you save your YouTube video, you’re going to be presented with several different settings that can be optimized to help you get traffic and leads. Today, you’re going to optimize yesterday’s video listing.

First, the title of your video should be relevant to the topic, obviously, but also include keywords that people will search for. For example, yesterday’s video script could have a bunch of different title options, but “FTD Penalties” would be a bad title. Most people aren’t searching using our acronyms and jargon. “What You Need to Know About IRS Payroll Tax Penalties” is a better title.

Second, the description box on YouTube is your opportunity to shine. I suggest putting your full website or landing page URL that you want people to visit as the first item in the description. Then, insert a keyword-dense description of the video, and perhaps even your script if you’re using one. YouTube will transcribe your video for you, but it’s not necessarily accurate.

Third are the video tags. These are a “word cloud” of keywords that help people find your video. Here you might want to include the industry jargon, such as “federal tax deposit” for this example, but you also want to include keywords people use.

After these basic text settings, your next task is to select the thumbnail to use in your video. YouTube will give you a couple options, but you can also drag and drop a file on to the page and YouTube will use that. I recommend using a thumbnail that shows you mid-word, looking engaging.

Lastly, toggle the “Transcriptions” item and enable the automatic transcription feature if it’s not already on by default.

These are the basic steps to optimizing a YouTube video for maximum effect. Do these things for the video you posted yesterday, and tomorrow we’ll continue with more digital marketing.