When you own and operate your own blog, there is a daily battle to find new ways to build links and drive traffic to your site. There are many ways to accomplish this, from article submission to the buying of links, but are there other non-standard tools to use? Part of the fun of running your own website is finding new and interesting ways to market your blog. Sometimes some of your best marketing moves start out as things you wouldn’t normally think of. You can actually use Google’s YouTube video site to drive traffic to your blog as well.
The first thing you do to use YouTube to increase traffic to your blog is to film a creative video that is somehow related to the subject matter you write about in your blog. In doing this, focus on humor first although for some niches a how-to video or other type of instruction content could work just as well. You don’t need a video that will take the world by storm, although that would be nice, but something that will hold peoples interest will do just fine.
Once you have the video made, you need to run it through your video editing software and add a watermark. A watermark is simply a logo or text rendition of your blog’s URL that is placed over the corner of the video and stays there through the entire run of the video. Most video editing software can handle this task fairly easily, if yours cannot there are free and low cost digital video editing software available from various sources online. Once your video is watermarked, then every time someone views it they will also be viewing your blog’s URL.
Once your video looks just the way you would like it too, you can take the next step. Upload your video to the YouTube site, but when doing so make sure you take advantage of some of the variable information available to recently uploaded videos. The first thing to do is come up with a catchy and memorable title for your video. Now, use 5-10 tags that relate in some way to your keywords so that they will perform some of the marketing of your video for you. Finally, there is space to input a description of your video. You will want to try to accomplish multiple things with this description space. What you are trying to do is come up with a description that accurately describes your video but at the same time uses the keywords of your blog and mentions your blog’s URL.
By doing all these things you will end up with a video that is highly ranked for its keywords in search engine results and that broadcasts your blog’s URL to everyone that views it. YouTube and other video uploading sites can be used this way to successfully market your blog to people who may not stumble across it based on standard website marketing techniques.
Thanks for the informative post. I actually thought about this the other day, in pretty much the exact same words as you mentioned. Now that I have a confirmation on what I should be doing to increase my blog traffic, Ill give it a shot.
Thanks again and keep up the good posts.
Comment by Simon — May 29, 2009 @ 9:28 am