YouTube continues to command the attention of users across the globe with each fiscal quarter seeing huge increases in market share. Bloggers and marketers are paying attention too and uploading videos that show off their products and establish their expertise in the hopes of attracting an avalanche of new visitors to their websites.
Every minute of the day 100 hours worth of video is being uploaded to YouTube. To top it off, studies show that more that 64% of people are more likely to make a buy after watching an explainer video.
Yet the truth of the matter is that many people fail to capitalize on the YouTube craze because they simply can't get enough views on their videos.
This is why video optimization is critical to your success on the second most popular search engine on the planet – a.k.a., YouTube.
UPDATE: Some of the tools listed here are no longer available. Check out TubeBuddy instead.
Optimizing YouTube Videos & Channel
In comparison to blogging, video optimization offers some unique challenges. We all know that the search engine bots can't “read” your video content in the same way that they can devour the written content in your blog posts.
As a result, it's important for us to do all we can to optimize the titles, tags and descriptions of our channels and for the individual videos from the YouTube Watch Page.
Don't miss: Now That You Starting Making Videos Here's How To Get More Views on YouTube
You can turn to YouTube Analytics to track the performance of the videos that you have previously uploaded and this will give you fantastic insights. Based on the Views Reports and Audience Retention reports, you'll get a good idea of what you're doing right and where you have gone horribly wrong.
In this video, I'll introduce you to three additional ways you can track the progression of your YouTube efforts. Please watch this:
Get More Views on YouTube By Tracking Video Traffic 3 Ways
3 Alternatives for YouTube Analytics
#1. OneLoad is formerly known as TubeMogul and it's a service that allows you to upload videos to multiple sites at once including YouTube of course but recently they even added Facebook. When it comes to getting traffic and exposure, we all know that every little bit helps and I've always uploaded my videos to sites like MetaCafe and Daily Motion through OneLoad, primarily because it takes very little additional effort. Now that OneLoad has included Facebook in their video arsenal I'm able to upload some of my more popular videos directly to Facebook which increases my page's Edge Rank and visibility in the news feed.
It was easy for me to copy and paste the stats from OneLoad directly into an Excel Spreadsheet that I can sort by date, title or view counts.
#2. Cyfe is the new kid on the block so to speak and it's a really cool widgetized dashboard. Here's how they describe themselves:
“All-In-One Dashboard Social media, analytics, marketing, sales, support, infrastructure… monitor everything!”
Cyfe can replace a lot of the monitoring tools that you are using now, but in this video I show specific examples of how you can set up Cyfe for YouTube tracking and optimization.
#3. SocialBlade is far from being a newcomer. They are a powerful network of YouTubers with an established blog, forum and online community with chat capabilities. They have nearly 120,000 subscribers to their YouTube channel and they know how more about how to survive the YouTube game than most.
I highly recommend that you subscribe to their channel and connect with them on Facebook and Google+ as well. To date I haven't joined their network but I've been impressed with the valuable content they provide to the YouTube community.
Enter the user name of any user to get the YouTube View Count for the channel's recent and top 25 videos. Find those videos with similar content, that are outranking yours on YouTube and use the handy little tip I shared in the video above (time stamp 07:22) to optimize your video metadata.
Now is Your Time to Shine
I want to see you succeed online and we can always find ways to take things to the next level. If you've been wavered and procrastinating about getting in front of the camera, rest assured that you really don't need to. I recorded scores of screencasts that send plenty of traffic to my blogs. But just like Lisa Irby encouraged me and thousands of others to get in front of the camera I want to encourage you to get started on your video marketing plan. If you want to know what tools I use to record and promote my videos, download a free copy of my YouTube Rankings Assault Kit and let me know if you have any questions on how to optimize your YouTube channel. Don't wait, because the ship is ready to sail and I don't want you to miss the boat!