Hacking Freaks

1. MAKE IT FINDABLE

This is the most obvious advice I can think of. YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine. Think about who you want to reach, then think about what they would be searching for when searching for your video. Then use those kind of words in the title, in the video description and as the tags of the video. Use the most important keywords first and then use a more descriptive text. If you start picking up some views, some ratings and some embeds along the way, this is highly important as this will give you a better chance of ending up in the Google Universal search. AND PLEASE DON’T FORGET to use the word “Video” as the word right next to your most important keyword. People search for things such as “fashion video”, “monster sledge hammer video tutorial”, “pearl jam music video”, “Volvo video” etc etc. (and yes I forgot this on the video below… but hey.. that’s why I wrote – don’t forget!!)

2. POST IT IN A BLOG POST

80% of all views on videos posted on YouTube are done outside the YouTube website. This means you should embed your own videos as well as try n have others embed them. Just as most pages on the Internet lack an inbound link, most of the videos on YouTube lack an inbound embed or link. This means that regardless if you have a lot of readers on your blog or not, you should post your videos in a blog as they will become more highly valued in the YouTube search than other videos.

3. SHARE THE BLOG POST ON TWITTER AND FACEBOOK

Also a quite interesting thing that people tend to forget. Once you’ve published your new video. Why not draw the benefit of both attracting some visitors to your blog as well as pick up some nice views for your video. Share your post on Twitter, on Facebook, on SU, on tumblr and all other places where you can share resources. Sort of tells it’s own story this advice. If you publish video, people tend to like it better and they also tend to consume the full content as they don’t have to do anything but sit back and enjoy. So it is a good thing to share as it gives your users more than the mere plain text does.

4. ASK PEOPLE TO SUBSCRIBE, FAVORITE AND COMMENT IN THE END FRAMES OF THE VIDEO

In the video you are but stupid if you don’t ask people to subscribe to your channel in one of the last frames. If you know that you publish videos on a certain frequency, then you should also tell your viewers in one of the last frames of the video when they can expect the next one. Also!! You should try and ask a provocative question or a question that requires reaction. Make a statement of some sort and then ask the users to comment on it.

5. POST IT AS A REPLY

Lately I have started making YouTube responses. You know when you post your video as a response to another video on YouTube. It is awesome and it pulls some views. You will get more views if you manage to choose a good thumbnail. It also gives you a better chance of ending up in the “related videos” pane to the right of the video you have posted the response to.

6. USE A GOOD THUMBNAIL ICON THAT IS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE CONTENT ON YOUR CHANNEL

As my friend Seda has told me on a few occations. “Tits work m8!!” He’s correct. If you are only out to spoof view count you should try some tits as your thumbnail image. However, if you’re out there to do something else, or to actually convey some message… then perhaps you should think twice about this thing. Cause there is no doubt you will get clicked more if your thumbnail is highly interesting, provocative, clear or illusive. I haven’t worked that much on this because I don’t know how to separate the sound from the frames of my video yet. But this will come to me and I’ll be able to show you some good examples. Traditional marketing people might have some opinion about this one. What makes people tick on outdoors stuff? Anyhow. Think about your thumbnail when you cut your video as it is important that it ends up at either 25% 50% or 75% of the video. If you’re paying for a branded channel you will get some more options on YouTube, but if you then share that same video on let’s say Facebook.. then your specially created thumbnail won’t follow..

7. USE THE URL AS YOUR IM STATUS

Also very straight forward. If you’re using Skype or MSN this comes as no news to you. If you post “I am pregnant” in your IM status field, then people will out of the clear message you like crazy congratulating you like hell.

What I want to say with that is that people actually read what it says next to your name. Write something like “Cool! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pNqjEXGHK0″ and you’ll pull some views from that as well. (By the way, I have no clue where that link goes… why not try it out?

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8. FIND RELATED FORUMS TO THE CONTENT OF YOUR VIDEO AND POST IT AS A REPLY

People always tend to forget the power in the forums. They are the most persistent 1.0 technology working as a 2.0 technology that still don’t die. It is as thought the anonymity of the forum climate is still highly appealing to a lot of people. Search for a forum of your main video topic and you’ll be able to find at least one question in there where your video fits as an answer. If you do the black hat thing… then make a question, fake some discussion and then post your video as the perfect answer. BUT DO NOT DO IT IN A HACKER FORUM… you will go busto

9. FIND BLOGS WITH A LOT OF READERS AND POST A “SIBLING” VIDEO AS A COMMENT

This is something you should do if you have a channel that has a lot of related content on it. If the users of the commented blog find your first video interesting they will probably watch one of your other videos. Your job then becomes to post your general video that you want to increase the view count on as the video before your comment video. If they are the same, then GFY!!

10. USE TUBEMOGUL AND OTHER SEEDING SERVICES

I love the flexibility of TubeMogul. It is awesome. You create your accounts once on the different services where you want to upload. Then you just have to post it once and it is posted everywhere!! BEWARE large companies out there… You probably shouldn’t over do this thing as 1. it doesn’t look very well if you have 5 views on one of your videos on several of these platforms. Even though the aggregate might be big, you want to give that impression as well!! So.. add them one at a time, build up a fan base and then you can go on to the next platform. 2. you will start getting comments eventually and you’ll have to monitor these as you’ll get an occational “F**k you”.