Video marketing is not only one of today’s leading means to market a service, product or business online but it is positioned to become even more of a driving force within the search marketing industry.
One of the most successful and long term ways to build your brand, build your channel and video views on YouTube is the power behind the subscriber. Internet marketers are well aware of the power behind subscribers, hence their long relationship with their FeedBurner accounts and history in email marketing. This will serve as a guide to using YouTube to initiate subscribers for your video channel.
In Q1 07 YouTube was the leader in online streaming video. Comscore reported “YouTube.com drove the lion’s share of the video streaming activity at the Google Sites property, with 53.5 million unique streamers and 1.1 billion streams initiated.” .
Comscore goes on to prove that “More than 126 million Americans viewed online streaming video in March.”
These numbers are pretty impressive and given the fact that this is a number of video views in America ONLY is a stand alone impressionable figure. Did you know that six out of ten consumers watch streaming video?
This means if you are not doing video marketing now then you are not capturing 60% of your market base!
Lets take a quick look at the top sites based on overall traffic globally. Alexa has a list of the top 500 sites globally and interestingly enough YouTube ranks #4 on their list. Not to mention additional video sites at #39, #41, #42, #75 and the list goes on.
Ok, so we know that video is growing rapidly and we know its worldwide. We know YouTube is globally the highest trafficked video sharing site in the world. Now its time for the secret to success on YouTube. That secret is the power of the subscriber.
The more subscribers you have the more people get to see your video via their subscriptions window. This is a powerful tool and technique to use when marketing on YouTube. Below are the steps to invite subscribers to your channel.
Once you log into your account simply click on the “account” link. The window below should appear.
Once you are at this screen click on My Contacts:
You will see all of the people you have sent friend requests to listed here with their status of the friend request listed to the left hand side. On the right hand side you have 3 powerful options. Send a message, Invite to group (great for segmenting your friends into marketable silos) and invite to subscribe. This last link allows you to send a message to a person literally inviting them to subscribe to your channel.
Here is your “call to action”. Unfortunately, YouTube does not allow you to do this on peoples channel directly so you have to request a friendship first so their is some leg work that goes into this but it is well worth the investment.
I will be posting on YouTube marketing techniques and tricks over the course of the next couple months. Stay tuned to learn more about video marketing and harnessing the power of YouTube.
