For most musicians YouTube marketing consists of putting up a video of our music, sharing it around a bit and hoping… errr… PRAYING to get some fans.
But you can do better and really, it's not that hard to dramatical improve the number of eyeballs watching your vids.
In this post, I'm going to show you a few simple things you can do to optimize your videos. Then at the end, I'm going to show you a free tool that will make the whole process super simple and super fast.
There are 5 main elements that YouTube uses to rank videos:
- Title
- Description
- Tags
- Views
- Ratings
At first, you won't have views or ratings so you will be focusing on titles, descriptions and tags.
Side Note: As a bonus, your videos can also show up in the Google search rankings if you do well on those 3 aspects. Double bonus!
Title
You get the most search engine value from your title. Include your name and your song title in the title so current fans can find you easily.
You can also add the word “video” to your title since many people include that in their searches.
If you did a cover, make sure you add the original artist's name in there for some added SEO juice.
And you might even try sliding in a few keywords related to the content of the song. For instance, check out the title for my “Take This Ring” video from 2011. A good chunk of the views can be attributed to me sliding in the “bride and grooms first dance” phrase.
It doesn't work in every instance but it doesn't hurt to look around for key phrases too consider.
Tags
This is really important. Don't just put one-word tags in your videos. Most people search phrases such as “top playlist 2018” or “bride and grooms first dance”.
If you have longer tags, then you have a higher chance of ranking up your videos. Also be sure to add your name and/or lyrics people use to search for you or your song.
Description
Describe your video in the description. Make the beginning of your evoke curiosity so they are intrigued to click on it and if you can slip in another key phrase.
Also, include links to your website and “direct” link to your music or artist page on any platforms where you are promoting your music (like Spotify, Pandora, etc).
I even put all the lyrics in there.
Pro tip: look for 3-5 videos that are very similar to yours and popular. Then grab the urls and link to them from your video. Google loves that you are trying to help the viewers find related content so they stick around on YouTube and watch more. Check out the description in my ISRC codes video for an example that is paying dividends.
Free Tool
Want a quick way to make sure you are using the best tags, creating the best title, easily adds functionality to your videos that makes it more likely to be liked, shared and and subscribed to?
Duh!
Check out TubeBuddy. Its a YouTube optimization app for your browser that will save you tons of time looking for good tags, related videos and linking up related videos to keep people binging on your stuff.
Click here or the image below to check it out.
Seriously, it is going to help you big time. Hell, I used it on my ISRC video above. I was able to optimize the video enough to get 42,000 + views without a ton of promotion.
