Weblog Hits

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year or so, you probably know that YouTube is one of the most popular web sites on the Internet. Every day millions of people visit YouTube to watch the latest viral videos, or check the recent activity on videos they have uploaded to their account. If you play your cards right you may one day wake up to find one of your videos featured on the YouTube home page - which could result in millions of views and could even give your career a significant boost.

One day I logged into my account and found that a video I uploaded was featured on the YouTube home page. I lucked out and this happened the week that Google acquired YouTube which further increased the exposure of my video. In less than a week that video received over 1.5 million views. To date it has been viewed over 3.5 million times. But how did this increase traffic to my blog?


Quite simply, I added the web site URL of my blog at the very beginning of the description of my video. This does a couple of things. First, your web site URL is clearly visible to everyone that visits the YouTube home page. Your video will be on this page for about a week and you can expect an extra 2,000 visitors a day from this direct copy and paste or type in traffic. To the left you can see an example of how your blog URL would look if featured on the YouTube home page.

The second thing is other blogs and web sites will likely feature this video and link to it directly. The viral video effect has begun. Your video may be picked up by morning news shows such as ABC’s Good Morning America. One of my videos was on the Ellen DeGeneres Show and Yahoo 9, which further increased the YouTube rankings for the video.

When your video is linked directly from high traffic web sites, guess what? Your URL is not only visible, but clickable. I asked Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net for permission to use one of his videos as an example. To watch this video on YouTube, click here. If you like, Digg his video as well.

As you can see, this is a much smarter approach compared to adding a quick and lazy description with no URL at all.

Once your video has been optimized in this way, you should then start promoting it to social networking sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, etc. If you are really motivated, I’ve made a list of 55 social bookmarking sites you can use to promote your videos. The more your videos have been visited, rated, commented on and favorited - the higher it will climb in the YouTube rankings and the more likely it will get featured.

Also submit your video to some of the groups on YouTube. Email your friends and family and have them give you 5 stars, comment, save to favorites, etc. Basically, what you want to do is try to build some momentum for your video. Most people simply upload their video and do nothing else - take some time to promote your videos and you might get that breakthrough you’ve been waiting for.

If you want to go the extra mile, I recommend putting your URL in the video itself - either at the beginning or the end - or brand your video with a watermark. This is highly recommended if you are confident that your creative work has true viral video potential. The last thing you want is someone like ebaumsworld ripping off your video and taking all of the credit. The recent video of Kramer’s racial tirade gave the celebrity blog TMZ.com tons of exposure on the web, television and print - perhaps even radio. Without the watermark on the video - someone else might have been made famous.

I’m not going to go into the details of how to create a good viral video as there are a lot of mysterious forces involved with making a hit. A good article on this subject is here: 10 Ways To Make Yourself a YouTube Star.

What if you don’t have the knack for creating viral videos? I have a solution for you: go to the YouTube home page and see who is currently featured. If you find a video that isn’t promoting a web site, email them and offer to pay them to put your URL in the beginning of the video description. I have done this a couple of times for as little as $25 and have received a ton of traffic for a very low cost. I’ve found that $25 doesn’t work all of the time, so you may want to offer $50 if you don’t get a response. I recommend doing this with videos that closely match your target audience.

I just emailed the owner of the most recently featured YouTube video titled “Rocket Scooter Goes Airborne!” to see if they are interested in a sponsor. Who knows… maybe they’ll say yes to my offer and my link will be up there soon.

Once you have mastered YouTube, don’t stop there. There are a ton of other video sites spreading like rabbits to submit your video to. Good luck!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 at 7:49 am and is filed under Tips and Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.