Hello and welcome to the “Best YouTube Advice Ever.”*
*Probably not the best advice ever, but still pretty dang good.
YouTube started out as a way for people to share videos of themselves lip-syncing to lame songs and getting hurt on skateboards. Now it’s the second largest search engine and a major advertising medium. Even MIT uses it to provide open courses on the general theory of relativity.
When you sign up for a YouTube account, you’re assigned your own channel, which you can use to broadcast anything you want. Not really though. Make sure to read YouTube’s content guidelines before you begin. You can’t have anything that is principally an advertisement, contains offensive content, or uses copyrighted material. Otherwise, you’re good to go.
Here are a few hints:
- 1. Name and tag all your videos in the most descriptive and simple way possible. Take some time to think about who might be searching for your video and phrase the title in a way that makes it easy to find. Fill in every blank that you find.
- 2. Be social. Subscribe to other people’s channels. Make comments on other people’s videos. You can even do video responses.
- 3. Put a link to your site in the first line of your video descriptions. YouTube isn’t great for generating traffic, but this is one place were you can get a direct link to an outside website.
- 4. Don’t just post a video. Promote it. Once you get it uploaded on YouTube, share links to it using social bookmarking sites.