When was the last day you went without YouTubing something? It might take awhile for you to think. That’s because YouTube is the second biggest search platform worldwide, boasting more than one billion users, millions of creators and over 100 hours of content freshly uploaded each minute. You want to see it, you YouTube it. Simple. So here lies the problem: if you’re uploading video, in an online space already full of content, how is your stuff going to be found? How do you get your uploads to your audience and off results page 48?
Reaching Viewership Goals Begins with the Right Plan
As creators quickly discover, uploading catchy, unique, in-demand content is just the first step in getting your videos discovered. While there’s no guaranteed success formula on YouTube, one of the best ways to getting noticed is optimizing your uploads. So what does it mean to optimize on YouTube? It comes down to strategy and learning how to be searchable. The first step in this is pretty obvious, it’s your content quality. Creating great content is the key component to successfully optimizing your video. Without it, generating views and subscribers will be almost impossible.
Discovering Your Targets
Next, it’s time to understand your audience and viewership goals. If you want people to find your content, you need to first find your people – your target audience – and focus on what they’re already looking for as it relates to what you’re doing. Take this information to grab their attention as you execute. On the technical side, YouTube optimization means taking full advantage of the tools available on the back-end (often called ‘metadata’) that tackle everything from your title and description to tags and thumbnails.
The Takeaway:
Do: Take the time to understand your audience before you begin optimizing your content.
Don’t: Overlook the importance of good content. Without this, it will be hard to find viewership no matter how much you optimize.
There are several ways to cut down on the time it takes to optimize. VISO Catalyst for example is designed to cut down on the time you spend optimizing, so you can get back to creating videos and doing what you love. Optimization is a big way to get the most out of your content, so stay tuned next week for tips on executing this in your tags.
