The platform is fairly popular among digital marketers as 55% of marketers are currently using YouTube as a part of their digital marketing strategy. 

In fact, only 9% of small businesses are on YouTube and only around 0.25% of all YouTube channels are making money. That means many small business owners aren’t reaping the benefits of video content as much as they could be. 

With that said, the remaining content will teach you how to make money on YouTube, show you how the pros do it, and everything else you need to know in order to generate revenue on the platform. 

Are you ready to start earning some passive cash? 

Keep scrolling! 

How to Start a YouTube Channel

Let’s start with the basics, just in case you’re a beginner. You first need to start a YouTube channel. 

If you don’t already have a Gmail YouTube account, you need one to create a channel.

Step 1: Sign in to your Gmail account on the YouTube Platform

Step 2: Click your profile picture and click on “create a channel”

Step 3: You’ll be asked to create a channel

Step 4: Check the details (with your Google Account name and photo) and confirm to create your channel

Add details to the “about” section, begin customization, and you’re halfway there! 

Creating a YouTube channel is free; however, you may need to invest in filming equipment which could cost you a pretty penny. 

Now that you’re a YouTube creator, how do you get subscribers? 

How to Grow Your YouTube Channel 

Before we jump in, please understand that this process will take time and effort. On average, it takes over a year to get to 1,000 subscribers on YouTube. 

You will also need to upload around 160 videos. These uploaded videos need to have target keywords that will drive enough traffic to your channel but aren’t too competitive that you can’t rank. 

This process can take more or less time depending on your YouTube SEO efforts and other factors. 

Here are a few helpful tips for growing your channel: 

Write engaging and entertaining titles

YouTube marketing is really all about presentation. 

Titles are the first thing a viewer sees and it’s usually a make-or-break when it comes to your video’s performance. Ask yourself: are you presenting must-see content? 

The key here is to make awesome titles that grab your audience’s attention from the get-go without resorting to shady clickbait headlines. People like entertaining content and they also want to know what your video is about just from reading the title. 

For example, you can take a page out of the playbooks of YouTube channels like Slapped Ham: 

These videos heavily rely on listicles, insane, scary, or intense content. 

These types of videos rack up hundreds of thousands of views. We can’t all be Slapped Ham or Buzzfeed, but you can definitely use strategies such as theirs for your videos. 

If you aren’t sure what to title your videos, give The HOTH’s Title Generator a try! 

Optimize your videos

Did you know that YouTube videos show up for 70% of the top 100 Google search results? 

You can even see for yourself. Any given “how-to” search on Google will return something from Youtube:

Let me explain, YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world next to Google. Just like how people search on Google to problem solve, the same rings true for YouTube. 

Think of it this way, your YouTube videos are like any other piece of content that needs to be optimized for SEO. You need keywords, tags, and other basic SEO strategies. 

To be able to boost your chances of showing up in search results, you’ll want to follow some of the best practices for YouTube SEO:

• Include target keywords in your titles and descriptions
• Mention keywords in your video
• Engagement
• Use categories
• Add tags to your videos

Know your audience

With any type of content you create, you always want to make sure that it matches up with what your audience wants to see and their search intent. 

Given that 62% of YouTube’s users log into the platform daily, YouTube has no problems with engagement and retention. Still, the majority of users use YouTube for entertainment rather than to find brands. Businesses still have a long way to go on the platform. With that said, a helpful tip would be to try and find a balance between entertainment and advertising. 

If you’re just starting to learn how to promote your channel, take a look at what your competitors are doing in regards to videos in your niche. 

Look at what videos they have that they got the most views and engagement on. That will give you some ideas of what topics your audience wants and what style of videos they like to see. 

Additionally, you can take a look at your YouTube analytics if you’ve already uploaded a couple of videos. YouTube gives you some detailed information on your audience, watch time, demographics, engagement, and other metrics. 

Engage with comments and the YouTube Community

Although YouTube isn’t considered a social networking platform like Twitter or Facebook, it does however have a thriving community where users are always engaging with content. 

As I briefly mentioned, any kind of interaction with your audience is seen as a positive signal to YouTube’s algorithm. 

Similar to Instagram or even Google reviews, you need to respond to comments and engage with your followers. Even something as simple as liking or pinning a top comment can be engaging with a personal touch. 

Create custom thumbnails

One of the best ways to promote your channel is to create custom thumbnails. Think of your thumbnail as a way to grab a user’s attention right off the bat. 

YouTube automatically captures a screenshot from any given video and uses it for the thumbnail. That snapshot can sometimes appear blurry or even display an awkward moment in the video. 

If you aren’t a graphic designer and don’t have access to a freelancer. You can always use Canva to help you create a custom thumbnail that will boost your engagement. 

As I briefly mentioned, Google shows a video thumbnail next to a search result about 26% of the time, and users are more likely to click that listing. 

Additionally, emotions are a huge driving factor in people’s behavior and choices. Video marketing statistics show that videos with emotional thumbnails tend to get more clicks than those without. 

How to Make Money on YouTube by Monetizing your Videos

First, you need to make sure you meet the requirements which are gaining 1,000 subscribers and having 4,000 hours of watch time. 

To check and see if you’ve already met those requirements click on the icon picture on your YouTube account. 

Click, “Monetization.” 

If you are eligible, it will send you to steps to monetize, if you aren’t you will see something like this:

You will then want to click, “notify me when I’m eligible.” 

You will then be sent an email when you have met all of the requirements and are ready to begin making money on the platform. 

Once you do, here are some tips for earning cash: 

Enable super features: super chat, super stickers, super thanks

If you’ve ever watched a live stream on Youtube, then you may have noticed that some chat messages stand out and are highlighted with stickers. 

Those are called super features. Youtube lets creators enable super chat on their live streams. This feature lets your audience give you anything from 1 dollar to $500, just to get their message featured.

In addition to super chat messages, instead of buying messages to be seen, users can also buy and share fun stickers. These stickers are pinnable to the top of the chat and tend to grab the creator’s attention. 

Finally, a super thanks feature lets people show appreciation by donating a small amount. Users will then receive a featured comment in chat as well as a GIF. 

Ad revenue

The most traditional way you can earn on YouTube is through their video ads. If you’ve joined YPP, you can turn on ad views for individual or multiple videos. 

Keep in mind that your videos need to meet YouTube’s advertiser-friendly content guidelines to be able to run YouTube ads. However, there are a few different ways you can add ads to your video with YouTube’s ad formats. 

Additionally, you will need Google Adsense to be able to begin receiving funds from the ads. 

How to Join the YouTube Partner Program

The first step is monetizing your channel or individual videos. The second step is applying for the YouTube Partner Program. 

• Sign in to your YouTube account
• Click your profile picture in YouTube Studio
• Click “Monetization“
• If you’re eligible click “Done” on the “Review Partner Program terms” card

The difference between the YPP program and YouTube monetization is the difficulty in joining. It is much harder to gain access to the YouTube Partner Program whereas monetization only requires a certain amount of subscribers and views time. 

Here are the minimum eligibility requirements to join:

• Reach 1K subscribers
• Follow all the YouTube channel monetization policies
• Live in a country/region where the YouTube Partner Program is available
• Have no active Community Guidelines strikes on your channel
• Have more than 4,000 valid public watch hours in the last 12 months. 
• Have a linked AdSense account

Here are the benefits of joining YPP:

• Access to Creator Support teams 
• Access to the Copyright Match Tool 
• Access to monetization features

You can also create channel memberships: 

Channel memberships

Channel memberships give users the ability to join your channel through monthly payments that get members-only perks. YouTube creators can give exclusive offerings to the channel such as product discounts, live chats, or other high-quality exclusive content. 

As always though, you need to meet the requirements: 

• Have 1k subscribers
• In the YPP (YouTube Partner Program)
• 18 years or older
• Live in the available locations
• Your channel must have a Community tab
• Your channel isn’t meant for kids
• Your channel doesn’t have a large number of ineligible videos (such as videos for kids or music claims)
• You have agreed to comply with their terms and policies

How do YouTubers get paid?

Data from Forbes shows that the top video creators earn 50% of their income from YouTube ads on video views. As I briefly mentioned, you need to set up an AdSense account and be monetized once you create a channel. You can only get paid once you reach a minimum of $100 on your AdSense account. 

AdSense pays per view which is anywhere from $0.0004 to $0.016. That means if your channel receives 1,000 views, it’s worth $18. A YouTuber would make (on average) $9.90 per 1,000 views. YouTube then takes 45% and the content creator gets the rest. 

Let’s use PewDiePie as an example here:

The Money Nation estimates give PewDiePie an average salary of $12 million per year, which equates to an hourly rate for a 40-hour week of $3.400 per hour. He has over 111 million subscribers. He earns an average of $20,000 from each of his videos.

Now, most businesses and brands aren’t going to make it where PewDiePie is today with YouTube views, however, it is possible to earn an extraordinary amount of money on YouTube if done correctly. 

Sell Products or Merchandise

The easiest way to start selling your merchandise is to link your shop in every YouTube description. However, you can also use YouTube’s Merch Shelf or sell T-shirts and other merch using print-on-demand services like Redbubble. 

How you begin to sell merchandise:

• Pick brand-appropriate Youtube merch
• Start with best-selling items
• Design mockups
• Poll your subscribers to see what merch they want

Use Fan Funding

YouTube Fan Funding is a process of asking your fanbase to support you on crowdfunding platforms. Whether your channel is big or small, fan funding is a model you should be aware of. 

Here are a few popular platforms where this happens: 

Patreon

Patreon allows content creators to make money by offering premium content that supporters can pay for on a monthly basis. Creators have the option to set up multiple tiers at different price points so they can appeal to people with different budgets. 

Brand partnerships as an influencer

Brand partnerships are a mutually beneficial relationship in which creators get paid to market a company’s product/service. In addition to direct payments, creators may also get free products/services. For example, many video game developers will contact video game streamers and give them a free video game key. This helps promote their game while also sharing a percentage of their profits from that game with the influencer.

Affiliate marketing, such as Amazon Associates,  is also another common way that YouTubers can make money. Through this form of marketing, influencers receive a portion of a brand’s or product’s profits on any sales that they helped generate. This is typically tracked through a unique link or code.

Now You Know How to Make Money on YouTube

If you want YouTube to become a passive income stream for your brand or company, you need to create engaging content that brings viewers to your channel.

You need 4,000 hours to become monetized which isn’t easy using only product placements. 

Looking for more digital marketing advice? Don’t forget to sign up for free and check out some of our free SEO tools and guides! 

The post How to Make Money on YouTube appeared first on The HOTH.

YouTube is the world’s second most visited website, with more than 14 billion visits each month – topped only by Google. 

It’s also the world’s second-largest search engine, once again, only surpassed by Google. 

That’s why the platform is invaluable for digital marketing and SEO. If you aren’t leveraging the power of video to promote your business, it’s never too late to start. 

But what if you don’t have Hollywood-par equipment to make YouTube videos?

That’s not a problem. You can create an engaging, high-quality video by only using a smartphone and some basic video editing software in today’s age. 

Videos are fantastic for improving customer engagement and retention. In fact, 94% of marketers say that videos helped their users better understand their products and services. 

YouTube content can also bolster your SEO efforts by placing videos in your blogs. For example, including a step-by-step instructional video with a blog post will make the content more robust and more likely to rank higher in the SERPs. 

If you want to learn how to film your first video, you’ve come to the right place. 

In this post, I will teach you how to make a Youtube video using only basic equipment that you likely already have.

Why Video Marketing Isn’t Going Anywhere

The popularity and prevalence of video content only continue to rise. Even while YouTube is 17 years old now, the platform continues to lead the fray for video creators. Here are a few eye-opening statistics that prove this point:

• By 2022, online videos will account for more than 82% of online traffic. 
• 694,000 hours of video stream live on YouTube each minute. 
• 81% of all internet users have used YouTube. 

Okay, so it’s clear that YouTube is a video behemoth that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. There are plenty of reasons why that is, too. 

One of which is that people prefer to watch videos instead of reading text. It makes sense if you think about it – why spend 15 minutes reading an article when you can watch a brief 2-minute video explaining the same subject?

Forbes even reports that 59% of company decision-makers would rather watch a video than read an article or blog post.

They even go so far as to claim that one minute of video content is the equivalent of 1.8 million written words. So if you have a particularly urgent or powerful message to get across, consider making a video. 

The impact of video on marketing campaigns

Well-made videos can provide incredible value for your search engine optimization. In fact, nearly 25% of all Google searches have video results. 

Do you struggle with your dwell time and bounce rate? If so, you should know that video can drastically help with both. 

Video marketing will also work wonders for brand recognition and customer loyalty. 

• Videos are memorable and will stick in customers’ minds.
• If you regularly update your YouTube channel, it keeps customers coming back for more.
• 99% of YouTube users have accounts on other social media platforms – so they can share your content. 

Here’s another fun fact – videos on social media generate 1,200% more shares than text and images put together. 

In short, if you’re running a modern digital marketing campaign, you can’t afford to ignore the power of video content.  

Yet, there’s a catch to all these mouthwatering statistics – mastering video production doesn’t happen overnight. 

Shooting and editing a good video can be a daunting task for beginners. You’ll also need to set aside a budget for creating videos and maintaining your YouTube channel. 

The good news?

Learning how to make a YouTube video does not have to be complicated or expensive. You can shoot everything on an iPhone (or Android), edit it in iMovie, and still get great results. 

That’s because the quality of your script and the relevancy of your topic matter far more than the video’s resolution or production quality. 

Let’s learn how to write, shoot, and upload videos on YouTube without further ado. 

Step 1: Brainstorming Topics for Videos 

Most video creators find the first step the hardest. For them, topic creation means sitting in front of a blank word processor for hours while their brain slowly melts and turns into soup. 

Luckily, coming up with topics doesn’t have to be difficult (or painful) at all – especially if you have an existing website that already has blogs. In that case, an effortless way to come up with topics is to repurpose your most successful blog content into videos. 

All you have to do is identify your top-performing blogs – and voila – you already have plenty of topic ideas. Not only that, but blogs tend to be pretty easy to turn into video scripts. 

To start, use a tool like Google Search Console to discover which blogs are getting the most:

• Organic Traffic
• Customer conversions
• Shares on social media

The blogs that show up at the top are your top video candidates. If the content already found success via text, imagine how popular it would become in video form?

The writing is already there, so all you need are some visuals to go along with it. You could choose to include voiceover narration or use live actors in your videos. Either way, your goal should be to capture the spirit of what made the most successful. 

If the blog was informative, your video should be too. If it was more entertaining, the video should follow suit. 

Creating videos to accompany existing blogs 

Another way to generate topics is to create videos to go along with existing blogs instead of replacing them. In this sense, the video is an accompanying piece, not the main focus. 

Do you have any blogs explaining how to do something or use a specific product?

If so, they are golden opportunities for videos. In particular, you can create a simple tutorial and step-by-step videos to accompany your blog. 

Creating videos like this serves two purposes. For one, it boosts the SEO for the blog post – as a video will increase your ranking power. Secondly, it’s a new video that you can add to your YouTube channel, increasing your chances of ranking on YouTube’s SERPs. 

By optimizing your video for YouTube, you can increase the number of hits you receive on the platform. That’s all the more advertising and recognition your brand will receive due to your videos. 

That’s why you should look for any opportunity to create a simple video educating your audience – and existing blogs are a great place to start. 

Do keyword research on YouTube

If you don’t have any blogs yet or are looking for other ways to come up with topics – you should do YouTube keyword research.

Since YouTube is technically a search engine like Google, its users find videos by entering search queries or keywords.  

As such, researching what your audience searches for on YouTube can spark some topic ideas. You can use Ahrefs’ YouTube Keyword Tool to find what your customers are looking for the most. 

Once you find some hot keywords related to your niche, look at the top-ranking videos. Not only will that help you come up with topics, but you can see where the highest-ranked videos fall short. 

For example, let’s say that you sell acoustic guitar strings and accessories. You do some digging and find the keyword ‘guitar strings acoustic’ works well for you.

The top-rated video covers how to change strings on a guitar. 

How can you outdo that?

Why not create a video breaking down not only how to change strings – but also the name of each string, the types of gauges, and the difference between steel strings and nylon strings. 

Now not only do you have a great topic in mind, but you also know how to outdo the competition with entirely unique content. 

Humanize your company/organization with vlogs

Sometimes, a simple vlog is best if you’re stumped and have zero YouTube video ideas. After all, vlogs will humanize your company – as they grant your customers a glance inside your operations.

You could start with an intro video letting your audience know who you are and what you do. 

From there, you could do a weekly vlog series where you or someone from your company films their daily routine. These ‘day-in-the-life’ style videos are very popular, and they help your audience empathize with you.  

The best part?

You don’t have to spend time storyboarding or writing a script! Vlogs are spontaneous and capture a slice of life, so you don’t need to write them. In fact, a scripted vlog will come off as inauthentic, so flip the camera on and let fate take the wheel. 

Step 2: How to Write an Engaging Video Script 

Now that you have some topics in mind, it’s time to write the script, so your videos actually have content. 

If you’ve never written a script before, there’s no need to be intimidated. 

There’s no right or wrong way to write the script for a YouTube video. You won’t need to submit it anywhere, so formatting factors like fonts and margins won’t matter. 

What will matter is nailing the tone while providing ample information for your viewers. 

When it comes to writing dialogue, it’s best to follow the KISS philosophy or ‘keep it simple stupid.’

There’s no need to get fancy with dramatic monologues or large words. Instead, aim for an organic, natural tone that’s highly conversational. Speak to your audience like you’re talking to a friend.

Also, you don’t want to come off as condescending, so be as down-to-earth as possible. 

You also probably won’t need to script out every single word. For most videos, a simple list of bullet points will suffice. That way, your presenter can speak naturally while ensuring they touch on all the most important topics. 

Yet, if you’re writing subtitles for voiceover, you’ll want to write out every word while being as specific as possible. 

Tone

Take your target audience into account when coming up with the tone for your video. 

What type of content do they enjoy? While being conversational is essential, it’s also crucial not to ignore your demographics. 

For example, if you’re selling products to an older crowd, you’ll want to take on a more professional tone. If you’re targeting the youth, you can be laxer with your copy and even include emojis/modern slang. 

Consistency in tone is also a must for your YouTube videos. If your videos all vary drastically in tone, you’ll have difficulty building an audience. 

Once you’ve settled on a tone, stick to it like glue. The more consistent you are with your audience, the more they will trust you and see you as a thought leader in their field. 

Video length

Your script will dictate the length of your video as well, so be mindful of that. As a rule of thumb, it’s far better to have a shorter watch time than a longer one. 

Why is that?

It’s because viewer engagement begins to fade after 2 minutes. 

To avoid losing your audience, do your best to create concise scripts that get straight to the point. 

Avoid being too wordy or padding your videos for length. If your video is only 30 seconds, great! There’s no need to make a video longer if all you’re after is length. Instead, only add content if it’s integral to the information already provided in the video. 

Here’s a helpful tip: In general, one page of a script translates to one minute of screen time. Going by this formula, you should try to make all your video scripts two pages or less. 

Provide a detailed call-to-action (CTA)

Okay, so now that you’ve provided your viewers with value, it’s time to tell them what to do next. After all, the point of creating videos is ultimately to convert, so you can’t forget to include a clear call to action. 

Before including one, ask yourself what your goal was when you created this video. 

Did you hope to sell more products or get more newsletter sign-ups? 

Knowing that will dictate how you go about creating a CTA. An example would be including the link to your newsletter sign-up page in the description and reminding viewers about it at the end of the video. 

“Don’t forget to check out our newsletter, which is provided in the description.”

Or you can encourage viewers to check out your website to learn more about your products. 

“Like what you see here? Don’t wait to head over to our products page to learn more.”

That’s all it takes to include a helpful CTA informing viewers how to take the next step. 

Step 3: Shooting Your Videos 

Lights, camera, action! 

Or maybe not. It’s no secret that video production equipment runs on the expensive side – especially prosumer cameras and gear. 

It’s not uncommon for cameras to cost hundreds of thousands, and the rental rates are also through the roof. So how can you expect to take your YouTube account to the top without Hollywood-grade production gear?

The truth is you don’t need any of that stuff, especially if you’re only a beginner or have a more than modest budget.

Popular YouTubers have been proving this for nearly two decades now. Some of the most popular creators on the platform only use a simple webcam and basic audio equipment. Countless others use smartphones and free video editing software – yet still rake in millions of views. 

In today’s age, nobody expects YouTube videos to have feature film quality visuals, nor do they need them. 

After all, if you’re looking for a tutorial or educational information, it’s not likely that you’ll care if the video was shot on an 8K digital camera. As stated before, it’s the content that counts. As long as the tutorial lets you know how to use your new washing machine, it doesn’t matter how it was shot. 

Not only that, but the quality of phone cameras has gone through the roof in recent years. Your average iPhone camera can shoot in stunning 4K resolution – which is more than enough. 

DSLR cameras are also relatively affordable and provide amazing visuals. In fact, many short films and TV shows shoot on DSLRs for this very reason. As a point of reference, a Hollywood camera can cost $100,000, while an exceptional DSLR will only run you a few grand (or less). 

Selecting your talent 

All right, now that you have your camera situation worked out – you need to decide who will physically appear in the video (if anyone). 

If you can’t hire anyone and are particularly camera-shy, you can choose to provide voiceover only. 

If you’re going to use people, though, you’ll want to plan that out beforehand. You don’t need to scout for local actors, either. Most of the time, yourself or some of your coworkers will more than suffice. 

You just need someone comfortable enough to read the lines conversationally. 

Also, don’t worry about reading the entire script in one take. Instead, the beauty of video is that you can combine multiple takes into one at the end. 

All you’ll need to do is memorize a few lines at a time and then deliver them to the camera. Once the shooting is done, you can compile and assemble the pieces into one seamless performance. We’ll dive more into the editing process in just a bit. 

Your talent should stay energetic throughout the read. The last thing you want is for your talent to read your lines with little to no enthusiasm, as that will bore your audience to tears. Instead, make sure your talent is pepped up and ready to deliver the lines with a lot of energy. 

It may take a few takes to get right, so don’t get frustrated. Instead, remain calm and stay positive with your talent. If they don’t have high energy, offer them a cup of coffee or an energy drink. 

Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be off to the races. It’s something that takes practice to nail, so don’t be shy about creating your first video. 

Composing shots

Great talent is only half the equation in creating a good video. You’ll also want to incorporate a few competent filmmaking techniques to make your video engaging. 

If you’ve never shot a video before, there are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind. 

Remember to hold the phone horizontally if you’re shooting with your iPhone. That ensures that your video will take up the entirety of the screen on YouTube. If you shoot vertically, you’ll wind up with a ‘portrait-style’ shot – where the sides of the screen will have black bars. 

That doesn’t look good, so always shoot horizontally. 

Beyond that, you’ll want to keep the phone as steady as possible. Try leaning your phone up against something to keep it still during shooting. That can be as simple as using the edge of a book once you find the perfect angle. 

When shooting people, you’ll want to frame them properly. In particular, you’ll want to make sure each subject has ample headroom. 

That means leaving enough space above their head in the shot. There’s a sweet spot here, roughly an inch of headroom. Too much, and it’ll look awkward – as their head will be toward the bottom of the screen. Not enough headroom, and you’ll end up cutting off your subject at the top of the screen. 

A medium shot will work best if your subject is speaking to you head-on. That’s where you frame your subject from the waist up. 

You can shoot from behind each person’s shoulder if you’re filming a conversation. That’s known as a shot, reverse shot setup. 

Step 4: Video Editing 

Shooting is done, which means it’s time to enter post-production or the editing process. There’s a real art to video editing, and it can either make or break your video. 

The good news is there are plenty of free programs you can use that are user-friendly.

If you’re an iPhone user, iMovie is all you need to edit basic videos, and it comes included with your iPhone or Mac. 

So what is editing all about?

In short, it’s how you handle the transitions from shot to shot. In other words, videos are made up of multiple takes, and the editing process is where you string them all together. 

The end goal is to create a cohesive recreation of your script by choosing the strongest takes. 

Yet, you’ll soon find that you need ways to hide specific transitions and smooth out other ones. 

An example would be when you cut to a different shot of the same person in the same place. This is known as a jump cut, and it was once considered a grave mistake in filmmaking. Yet, jump cuts have become far more prevalent in today’s age – thanks in no small part to YouTube creators. 

Yet, they don’t always look good, so you’ll want to have a way to avoid them. 

That’s where B-roll comes into play. B-roll footage is anything extra you capture to enhance your video and hide transitions. 

B-roll can be all sorts of things – stock footage, scenic landscapes, buildings, etc. What’s important is that your B-roll relates to the main video in some way. As long as it does, you can use any type of footage that you want here. 

Breaking down the editing process

Here are the basic components of video editing:

• The Script. You’ll need a copy of the script on hand at all times when editing. It’s what will keep you on track when cutting all the different takes together. Without the script, it’s very easy to get lost. 
• A-roll. The A-roll is the central part of your video, where your actors are reading the script to the camera. Any shot that’s part of your script/original vision is an A-roll shot. 
• B-roll. Your A-roll breaks up the A-roll footage and enhances it. B-rolls can be images and infographics as well. 
• Background music. Most videos are too static if they don’t have any type of music. Bear in mind that you won’t be able to use copyrighted music here, so it’s not a good idea to select tunes from your car’s playlist. Instead, either use stock music or hire a freelancer to create something original. 
• Optional. If you lack the budget to shoot B-roll, then you could always use stock footage from sites like Unsplash, Pexels, or PikWizard.

Cutting and assembling footage

In the past, editors had to physically ‘cut’ the footage together – which was an incredibly cumbersome and time-consuming process. Luckily, modern video editing software has made that a thing of the past – and now all you have to do is drag and drop files:

1. The first step is to import all of your footage into the program. Go to File > Import, and then select the folder containing all your footage. 
2. To stay organized, upload your A-roll first, so you don’t get your footage mixed up. Scour through each take and mark the ones that are best. Remember, you want high energy in the delivery and clear audio. 
3. After that, bring in the B-roll footage. This is where you can decide where you need B-roll the most to cover transitions and add to the atmosphere. 
4. Last but not least, add your background music and any other audio that you want to include. 

You’ll be able to tweak the length of each clip, as well as when it cuts to another shot. Do your best to make each cut appear seamless. When a video is edited well, you shouldn’t even notice it. In other words, your goal when editing is to become invisible.

Pro tip: When cutting from one angle to another, try to cut during motion whenever possible. That’s because cuts that occur during movement appear far more seamless.  

Once you’ve got your cut the way you want it (complete with an attractive video title containing your target keyword) – you’re ready to export the file. Go to File > Share to do so. 

Step 5: How To Upload To YouTube

The last step in learning how to make a YouTube video is the uploading process.

Luckily, this is a straightforward process once you have an account. All you need to do is click on the camera icon with a + on it that says ‘Create.’ Once you do, you’ll have two options:

• Upload a video
• Go live

If you want to upload videos, select Upload video. If you’re going to do live streaming instead, hit the ‘Go live’ button. 

Also, DO NOT forget to fill in the infoboxes for your video – as that’s how you’ll use incorporate SEO for YouTube. 

Keep the following tips in mind:

• Tags. You’ll want to load up your video with as many relevant tags as possible. Of course, you’ll want to include your keywords here. Long-tail keywords tend to work best here, so keep that in mind. 
• Title. Your page title is the most crucial spot to include your primary keyword, so don’t forget it. 
• Description. The sweet spot here is 150 words that contain relevant keywords and tags. If it’s a repurposed blog post, you can include a link to the original post in the description. 

Once these areas are all filled out, you’re ready to hit upload and go live with your video content. Don’t forget to embed the video on any related blogs, so you receive a boost in traffic. 

Concluding Thoughts: How to Make a YouTube Video 

Video content should be on your radar if you plan on starting a digital marketing campaign. By now, you should understand how to create high-quality videos on a low budget. 

Need help with your digital marketing needs? Book a call with us today, or check out our other resources.

The post How to Make a YouTube Video in 5 Easy Steps appeared first on The HOTH.

Or that 95% of people have watched explainer videos to learn more about a product or service? 

So if you aren’t leveraging the power of video for your marketing campaigns, now is the time to create a video marketing strategy. 

It’s the framework that will help you determine which types of videos will work best for your marketing goals. 

For example, do you want to attract a larger audience, better engage your viewers, or generate more sales?

Once you know your goals, you can begin forming your strategy around them. 

But what if you don’t know the first thing about video production? How do you budget for videos? What resources do you need?

You’re certainly not alone if you’ve been asking yourself these questions. That’s why we put together this extensive guide on putting together a video marketing strategy for your business. 

Also, don’t forget to take advantage of our full-feature HD video service as a source for your video content.  

Let’s get started!

Step #1: Ask Yourself the Right Questions 

Before you do anything else, sit down and ask yourself what your marketing goals are for video creation. In other words, what do you hope to achieve? 

To come up with your goals, you’ll need to start by asking yourself the right questions. Try starting with these five:

• Who is your target audience?
• Which stage of the marketing funnel are they in?
• How can you solve their pain points?
• Which marketing channels are you using to reach them?
• Which metrics and analytics will you use to measure your success?

In particular, answering the first three is the most crucial, as these questions are necessary for any type of marketing campaign. 

Above all else, you’ll need to identify your target audience and nail your messaging. Otherwise, your video will fall on deaf ears, and you’ll wind up with nothing to show for the money you spent creating videos. 

Who is your target audience?

You need to know who you’re speaking to when creating videos. If your business doesn’t already have a target audience, niche, or buyer persona – you’ll need to find one now. If you do, then you’re all set for this section. 

Your target audience is the people whose problems you solve with your products and services. They’re also the people most likely to find your video content interesting. 

If you sell gardening tools, your target audience would be gardeners and landscapers. If you provide relaxing massages, you’ll want to target people that are tense and stressed out. 

You’ll want to ask yourself three questions about your audience:

• Who is your product or service for? 
• What’s the purpose of the video? 
• Where do your target demographics spend time online? 

Answering these three questions will identify your buyer persona, pinpoint the stage of the marketing funnel, and teach you where to distribute your video. 

As an example, let’s say that you sell guitars online. Your target audience is guitarists, and your goal is to reach more of them. 

That’s when you decide to make animated videos breaking down popular songs on guitar to engage with a broader audience. (The Attract level of the funnel – more on that below). 

You share the video on guitar forums, guitar-related social media pages, and guitar Reddit groups for distribution. 

As you can see, simply answering those three questions did a majority of the work in coming up with an audience and subject matter for your videos. 

Attract, engage, nurture, or delight?

Once you have your target audience in mind, you’ll need to pinpoint the goal for each video that you create.  

In general, most video marketing strategies fit into one of the following four categories:

• Attract. If you want to heighten your brand awareness and reach potential customers (like the example above), the video’s goal is to attract. 
• Engage. Do you want to educate your prospects on new products, services, and concepts with your videos? If so, then your goal is to engage. 
• Nurture. Your videos aim to nurture if you want to increase your conversion rate and convince customers to make purchases. 
• Delight. If you want to thank your existing customers with entertaining video content to ensure they keep coming back, your goal is to delight. 

Your goals may only touch on one or a few of these categories, or they may include all the above. 

What are your goals? 

It’s best to be as detailed as possible when clarifying your goals. 

An actionable goal should have a target metric and a specific date, such as:

“Our goal is to increase our click-through rate by 200% in 12 months by including videos in our email marketing campaigns.”

Now you have a goal that will hold you accountable for the end result. Not only that, but you have a clear timeline in place (12 months) – and you know what you have to do to make it happen (include videos). 

If you want to see improvements at each stage of the funnel, you should make videos for each category (Attract, Engage, Nurture, Delight). That way, you’ll actively attract new customers while engaging, nurturing, and delighting existing ones. 

Yet, you may only require a few videos from each category. It will also depend on the budget you have set aside for video creation. If you can only spare the funds to create a handful of videos, make sure that they go toward the most important category for meeting your goals. 

Once you’ve determined your primary goals, you can get far more detailed with your video marketing strategy. 

As soon as you’ve got everything set, you can use the user-friendly one-page template that we designed to help you create the perfect video strategy. 

Step #2: How to Nail Your Messaging and Storytelling 

Now that you have clearly defined goals for your videos, you’ll need to decide what stories you want your videos to tell. This is where it helps to sit down and clearly define your messaging. 

Here are the core components of your messaging:

• The pain points of your target audience and how you can solve them. 
• The values and mission statement of your company. 
• Specific language and terms that you use. 
• The tone of voice that you use in your videos. 

Now that you’ve got your messaging down, you’ll need to incorporate the primary elements of storytelling. 

How to tell a great story 

In a nutshell, your story structure will be identical to that of a Hollywood movie – albeit with a few marketing tweaks:

• Start by identifying your protagonist. Instead of Luke Skywalker, the hero of your story is someone from your target demographic – an ‘every person that relates to your audience (i.e., a fitness guru if you’re in the health and wellness niche) 
• Next, no story is interesting without a conflict. In the case of video marketing, the conflict is your customer’s problem. 
• The conflict gives way to the quest, which is introducing your product or service that will save the day. The quest includes educating your customers on how your products and services work. 
• Lastly, putting your product or service into action will provide the resolution to the story. 

Don’t forget to include emotion

Nobody likes to watch robotic corporate videos that have no semblance of humanity.  

So if your video marketing strategy is to film talking heads spewing out tired business diatribes – you’re going about it the wrong way. 

Just as with film or television, people respond to emotions above all else when watching video content – and there’s plenty of evidence to support this. 

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science found that videos that exhibit high-arousal emotions ‘cut through the clutter’ and are most remembered by viewers. 

So if you want your video to have a powerful impact on your viewers, you should decide which emotions you want to elicit from each video. For example, injecting a fair amount of humor into a video aimed at widening your audience can help you break the ice with new prospects. 

Conversely, if you’re raising awareness for a nonprofit that’s doing crucial work to end poverty – you may want to elicit empathy from your viewers by making them confront a hard truth.

P&G’s ‘Thank You, Mom’ Campaign  

Here’s an example of the power of emotion in video marketing. 

In 2010, Procter & Gamble wanted to create a video ad campaign for the upcoming Olympics that was in line with their brand mission – to touch people’s lives and form an emotional connection with customers. 

To do so, they focused on celebrating the mothers of Olympic athletes with their ‘Thank You, Mom’ campaign. The video was a touching thank you to the moms of athletes and moms everywhere. 

The campaign proved to be the most successful ad campaign in the organization’s 175+ year history. The video ad campaign generated $500 million in global sales, created 76 billion media impressions, and was viewed over 74 million times. 

As you can see, eliciting emotions from your audience is a potent tool that you shouldn’t ignore. 

One study even found that customers with emotional connections to brands had a 306% higher lifetime value than those who were only satisfied. The more you can get your customers emotionally invested in your brand, the better – and videos are an excellent way to do just that. 

Step #3: Develop a Detailed Roadmap for Your Videos 

Video production is a process that demands structure, so you’ll need a timeline and a roadmap to navigate its waters safely. In fact, you’ll need to keep track of several timelines for each video. 

For example, movie studios track the progress of films according to three timelines, and you should too:

• Pre-production (2 – 3 weeks). This phase involves creative planning, scriptwriting, storyboarding, and creative approval processes. Everything you need to do before the camera starts rolling falls under the umbrella of pre-production. 
• Production (1 – 2 weeks). As soon as the lights go up and the camera turns on, you’ve entered the production phase. You’ll want to incorporate the tightest planning here, as this is the most expensive part of the process. For most digital marketing videos, you should be able to knock out the production phase in about a week. 
• Post-production (2 – 3 weeks). Once all the footage is shot, and the crew wraps things up, you’re now in post-production. During this phase, you will edit the footage and decide if re-shoots are necessary. If you discover any missing pieces, you may need to re-enter the production phase briefly. If you’ve got everything you need, you’ll be ready to distribute the video once the editing is complete. 

You should keep track of these three timelines for each video you produce. That’s the most reliable way to stay organized and meet all your deadlines. Also, at any given time, you’ll be able to see which stage each video is in (i.e., this one is going into production while another product video enters post-production). 

Mapping it out 

Besides a timeline, creating a roadmap will help you visualize the goals of your overall video marketing strategy. 

In other words, the roadmap contains all your plans for videos that will attract, engage, nurture, and delight. 

When married, your roadmap and timeline will look something like this:

#1: A brand video for the attract phase – an entertaining intro to your company and the problems that you solve. 

• Planning, writing, and scheduling: 2 weeks
• Shooting the content: 1 week 
• Editing, exporting, and distributing: 2 weeks 

#2: A how-to video for the engage phase that demonstrates how to use a new product. 

• Gathering materials, casting, and writing: 2 weeks
• Shooting the video: 2 days
• Editing, exporting, and distributing: 1 week

As you can see, this is an easy way to keep track of which videos you’re producing and how long it will take to create them. All you have to do is check the boxes as you complete each stage of the production process for each video. 

Step #4: Don’t Forget Your Budget

For startups eager to hit the ground running with video content but don’t have the budget for it – guerilla filmmaking is the way to go. 

You can create successful YouTube videos by only using your iPhone and some basic editing software in today’s age. Granted, you’ll be pretty limited in what you can pull off, but it’s still doable. 

For larger companies, you’ll want to pump some money into your video marketing campaign, but how much?

If you want to create detailed explainer videos and how-tos with crisp visuals and professional graphics – you’ll want to hire a video production company. 

You should also consider hiring freelance editors, sound designers, and composers to do additional work on your videos. 

How much each service will cost will depend on the scope of the video and the talent/reputation of the company. Prices can range from $1,000 to $500,000 – as there is no set price for video production.  

That’s why it’s best to shop around here and compare prices to find the best deal. 

According to Smart Insights, $20,000 is the average budget for a video marketing campaign. If you aren’t sure what’s right for your business, you can use our free business valuation tool. 

Step #5: Decide Which Type of Video to Make 

Testimonial Videos

A customer testimonial video carries a lot of clout amongst customers. After all, 93% of customers say that online reviews influence their purchasing decisions – and a testimonial video is a review you can watch. 

That’s because people will trust the words of an actual customer more than any self-promotional tactic. 

These videos are powerful because they prove to your prospects that your products and services do what you say they will. 

If you’ve done any recent case studies on customers, now is the time to use them. Focusing on a single case study is an excellent technique for creating a testimonial video. Here are a few more tips for shooting testimonials:

• Capture something authentic. People can tell if a moment is genuine or not. If you have the chance to film customer reactions to trying your product for the first time, their authentic positive response will do all the selling legwork for you. 
• Include the results. If you’ve changed a customer’s life with your product or service, you should include the results in the video. Before and after shots work particularly well here. 
• Focus on the buyer’s journey. Remember to take your viewers on a journey by telling a complete story. Your case study is your protagonist, so be sure to show how you resolved a conflict in their life. 
• Production quality matters. A testimonial video aims to make your company look as good as possible. As such, you want to reflect a professional image by producing a high-quality video. 

A well-produced testimonial video serves two purposes. For one, it reflects staunch professionalism in your company, as you clearly care about quality. Secondly, customers are more likely to trust a professionally made video than a low-quality one. 

Including all these components will ensure that you wind up with a testimonial video that has a powerful effect on your prospects. 

Commercials 

If you’ve spent any time watching TV or YouTube, then you’re more than familiar with commercials. They’re brief video ads that primarily serve to attract new customers. 

In particular, the goal of any commercial is to stick in people’s minds above all else. 

You’ve won half the battle if you can get someone to remember your catchy jingle, logo, or tagline. 

That’s why commercials are so effective at widening your reach. 

In today’s age, commercials appear on social media channels like Facebook and Tik Tok, YouTube, streaming services (Hulu and Netflix), and good old television. 

So if you want to gain more followers or break into a new demographic, you should invest in producing commercials. 

Besides using paid channels, you can also run your commercials on your homepage and website for some free advertising. 

Here are some tips for producing memorable commercials:

• Use bold visuals. This is where it helps to have the help of a video production company. Commercials aim to entertain with striking imagery ranging from the beautiful to the macabre. That’s why the quality of your visuals matters so much for a commercial. 
• Don’t forget the music. Your audio is equally as important as the video (or even more so). Some of the most memorable ad campaigns of all time featured simple, catchy jingles. If your commercial doesn’t have any music, you should hire a composer to change that.
• Include a clear call to action. There’s no need to hide the intent behind a commercial, as everyone knows it’s an advertisement. You’ll want to include bold calls to action that will let your prospects know what to do next. You can encourage them to check out your products or visit your website to learn more. 

Commercials are still a powerful marketing tool, especially when you include all the tips you see above. 

Explainer/How-To Videos 

Are you looking to engage with your audience? If so, you’ll want to produce at least one explainer video. 

What’s that?

An explainer video lets your audience know how your products or services work and demonstrates the problems they solve. 

A how-to video is similar but different in that it primarily focuses on teaching viewers how to do something in a series of steps.

The ideal explainer video briefly introduces your company and then gets straight to the point. In other words, you demonstrate a customer pain point and then explain how your product or service solves it. 

An example of an explainer video 

Let’s say you sell a water bottle with special insulation, so the liquid inside stays cold for hours – and you want to create an explainer video for it. 

To start, you open on a jogger running during the day’s peak heat. Sweat pours down their face, and they reach for their water bottle. After they take a swig, they spit it out because it’s as hot as a cup of coffee. 

That’s when you introduce your product and quickly demonstrate how it works. A spokesperson takes a minute or two to explain the technology. After that, you show the same jogger during the heat of the day – only this time – they have your special water bottle. They take a cool and refreshing drink, and the video ends. 

That’s an example of a successful explainer video that incorporates the story elements that we brought up before. It demonstrates a customer pain point, explains why your product is the solution, and then shows the resolution to the conflict. 

Social Media Content 

As of 2022, there are 3.96 billion users on social media platforms worldwide – and they’re all exposed to video content. 

In the early days, social media was primarily text-based. Now there’s Facebook video, Instagram live, Snapchat, and others. Then, of course, there’s the behemoth that is Tik Tok – a platform that thrives off short-form video content. 

If you’re serious about your video marketing strategy – you’ll want to include videos on your social media accounts. 

That goes beyond paying to run video ads on Facebook and YouTube. Instead, you should create videos primarily to embed and share on social media. 

These videos should be SHORT, so aim for a minute or less. 

While they’re shorter in length, the principles of video production still apply here. You’ll want to use consistent messaging, tell a story, and elicit emotions from your viewers. The catch is that you’ll have less time to do it. 

Visuals matter more than audio for social media videos. 

Why’s that?

It’s due to the features of platforms like Tik Tok and YouTube. They have muted autoplay and video looping, so you’ll want your visuals to do most of the work. Including subtitles with your video is also a good idea, as prospects can watch your video without sound and still receive its core message. 

Product videos 

Lastly, product videos are quite popular, especially for eCommerce stores. A product video will show your product in action while breaking down its features and selling points. 

A well-made product video can be compelling for customers. That’s because they get to physically see your product perform its functions in real-time – which is a lot more potent than simply seeing images of it. 

It’s best to keep product videos concise, so you don’t lose your viewers’ attention. The sweet spot tends to be 30 seconds or less. You should quickly present your product, list all the reasons why it rises above the competition, and then provide a CTA, so your prospects know what to do next. 

Where should you distribute your product videos?

You can use paid advertising channels such as YouTube or Google Ads or post them to your website and social media channels. You can even use product videos in your email marketing campaigns. 

Fun fact: 8 out of 10 customers report buying a piece of software or an app after watching a product video. 

Step #6: Decide Which Style of Video to Use 

A video’s style differs from its type. In particular, the style has to do with the way you present your information. 

For example, will you use actors, animation, studio sets, or live locations? 

Let’s say that your type is a product video. The style could then be animated, acted out, presented with graphs, and more. 

You can also choose to tell a narrative or a documentary-style of story. 

Here’s a look at some of the most common styles for video marketing. 

Narrative Style

Do you want to tell a story the same way that Hollywood movies do? If so, then you’re seeking the narrative style of video. That’s where you tell a fictional story with characters, conflict, and resolution to promote your brand. 

What kind of narratives can you tell?

It can be anything from telling your brand’s story to a day in the life of a made-up superhero. 

There are no limitations on which kinds of stories you can tell, so feel free to use the full force of your creativity. 

The narrative style works best for commercials and social media content. You won’t have much use in telling a narrative story inside a product or explainer video. 

Like commercials, narrative videos work best during the attraction phase. They’re great for introducing new prospects to your brand. 

What should go into your narrative stories?

• Relatability
• Solving customer problems
• Eliciting emotions (sadness at the pain point, joy at the resolution achieved by the product)
• A protagonist that relates to your target demographic
• Entertainment and fun

These components will help you form an engaging narrative video that sticks in the minds of your customers. 

Documentary Style

You’re shooting a documentary if you aren’t making up a story but are following a real story. The goal here is to capture real life in its natural form with as few interruptions as possible. 

The documentary-style works wonders for testimonial videos and case studies. 

Since you’re showing real-life success stories, it’s best to represent them in a documentary format. 

Trademarks of the documentary style include shooting on location, conducting interviews, and shooting dramatic recreations. You can and should include all of these components within your testimonials and case study videos. 

For example, if your product revolutionized how your protagonist did their job during the day – you can include a dramatic recreation. That’s where you film them performing their daily tasks at work while showcasing how your product helps them out and saves time. 

It’s best to keep your documentaries short as well. If you have hours of interview footage, condense it to the essential soundbites. A one or two-minute documentary is long enough to hold customers’ attention, especially if it’s well-made. 

Instead of resolving conflict, you don’t have to worry about a three-act structure with a documentary. Instead, you just need to answer three questions: what, why, and how? What is the focus of the video? Why does it matter to the customer? How can they learn more?

Animation 

Animated videos are incredibly versatile – as every style of video can work in an animated format. From product videos to explainer videos, animation can pull them all off with ease. 

Animated content also tends to be less expensive than other forms of video. That’s because it doesn’t take much in the way of human resources or costly equipment. 

The catch?

The animation will take nearly twice as long to produce due to the technical and time-consuming nature of the process. So if you’ve got animated videos on the docket, you’ll need to allow extra time for the production phase. 

Yet, animated videos can captivate audiences and retain their attention better than most. A successful real-world example is Compare the Market’s Meerkat campaign. These animated videos sparked a phenomenon and contributed to 70% of the company’s market growth in the UK. 

Step #7: Use a Reliable Video Production Company for Professional Shooting

If you do any research on the costs of video production equipment, you’ll soon realize how unbelievably expensive it is to buy cameras, tripods, and editing software. A modern digital camera can cost $100,000+, for example. 

For most companies, it’s unrealistic and would be a waste of money to keep Hollywood-grade camera equipment lying around only to shoot online video. 

Instead, it’s far more cost-effective to hire a high-quality video production company to do the shooting for you. The great thing about these companies is that they have all the expensive equipment, so you don’t have to buy anything. 

Moreover, they’re trained professionals and know how to use the equipment properly. 

The power of working with a video production company 

If your staff has no experience shooting videos, it’s best to leave it to the pros. They will know how to achieve crisp, clean images that won’t take too much space. They’re also used to the challenges that pop up during production, something that can prove to be overwhelming for beginners. 

For more elaborate videos, production companies will know how to create shots that cut well together, as well as using complicated visual effects and lighting techniques. 

Production companies will also know how to compose shots, white balance the image correctly, and deal with continuity errors. 

Another perk is that they can often handle both production and post-production. 

That will significantly reduce the amount of work your staff has to do, which is a plus. All you’ll have to take care of is writing the script and distributing the video once complete. 

Forming a lasting relationship with a production company

When forming a relationship with a video production company, your goal should be to be in it for the long term. It’s best to have the capacity to create a ton of video content instead of only producing a commercial that you run once. 

The more video content you can create with the company, the more value you’ll get for the money you spend. 

That’s especially true for videos that will accompany your blog content. While SEO takes some time to get going, once it does, its effects will last far into the future. 

That means the videos you work on today can continue to make money for you tomorrow. As long as your posts and videos continue to rank on page #1 of Google and YouTube, they’ll continue to generate organic traffic for you. 

Bear in mind that it’s likely that you’ll only outsource production for the most crucial videos that you’ll share on your homepage and landing pages. 

When it comes to creating videos for social media marketing, you don’t have to worry about the quality as much – so it’s usually fine to shoot these yourself (i.e., company vlogs). 

Yet, you’ll still want to make sure your vlogs and quick social media videos have consistent messaging and elicit emotions from your viewers. The message is what counts here, not so much the cinematic quality of the visuals. 

Pro tip: If you’re engaging in a video ads campaign specifically for social media platforms – it can be worth outsourcing to a high-quality video production company to make sure that you nail the look and tone of the content. 

Step #8: Tailor Your Video Content for Each Goal 

By now, you should have clearly defined goals for your video marketing strategy. You should also have a timeline, budget, type, and style of video picked out.  

The final step is to align your planned videos with your marketing goals and tie them to each funnel stage. 

To make things easier, here’s a guide breaking down which videos work best for each stage of the funnel:

Attract Stage

• Commercials
• Industry videos 
• Educational videos 
• Product or service videos 

Engage Stage

• Brand videos 
• ‘Day in the life vlogs and consumer lifestyle videos
• Testimonial videos and case studies
• Explainer videos, tutorials, and how-tos

Nurture Stage

• Social media videos, short videos, Tik Toks
• Customer spotlight videos (highlighting a customer success story) 
• FAQ videos (answering consumer questions about your products and services)
• Product review videos (reviewing your products or third-party products and services)

Delight Stage

• • Thank You/Welcome Videos: welcoming new visitors and thanking customers
  • Bonus tutorial: a free video explaining how to use one of your products
  • Pro tips and tricks: insider content that teaches viewers new skills and shortcuts
  • Event videos: these are highlights and recaps of your corporate events 

  
  Do your best to diversify your content so you’re not constantly repeating the same thing. 

  An ideal video marketing strategy will combine all the content and video styles you see above – especially early on. That allows you to monitor and test each video type to see what sticks with your target audience and helps you achieve your goals. 

  Check out our learning hub for more on content marketing and how to use video. 

  Step #9: Optimize Your Distribution Efforts

  Okay, so now you’ve got a boatload of excellent video content, but where do you show it off? Where can you upload it so that the right people will see it?

  That is known as the distribution part of the process. Here, you’ll need to decide where you can afford to show your videos and on which video platforms. 

  Which distribution platforms are best?

  The short answer is any that you can get your hands on! 

  Your goal should be to distribute your video to as many places as possible, or at least that you can afford. 

  There are three primary types of distribution that you’ll run into. There is owned distribution, earned distribution, and paid distribution. Here’s a brief rundown of each:

  • Whenever you upload videos to online properties that you own (i.e., your website, landing pages, blog, social media accounts, etc.), it’s owned distribution since you own the distribution channels. 
  • Did someone feature one of your videos on a guest blog or share it on social media? If so, it’s a form of earned distribution. These refer to all the efforts you put in place to distribute your work to other channels without owning them or paying for it. (It’s similar to earning backlinks or using organic SEO to rank higher on a search engine). 
  • Whenever you pay for your video to show up on platforms (such as YouTube, TV, or Facebook), it’s a form of paid distribution. It’s the equivalent of using PPC campaigns for SEO). 

  How do you know which of these distribution channels is right for your business?

  It can be tough to tell, as there’s no one answer. Many variables are involved, such as your budget and the breadth of your reach. 

  The good news?

  Our team created a resource identifying the eight most reliable online distribution channels for video content. 

  Step #10: Monitor Your Success, Tweak, Rinse, and Repeat 

  All right, you just pressed the button to upload your videos into cyberspace. You’re finally getting the chance to share the videos you’ve worked so hard on with your target audience. 

  … Now what?

  It can be daunting to know what to do next after you upload your content. Do you just sit back and pray for good news?

  Should you stay glued to your screen, monitoring your watch time and total video views?

  Nope! 

  In fact, your view count typically isn’t even the most important metric to pay attention to measure your success. The metrics you’ll want to monitor will depend on your marketing goals. Here’s a list of the essential KPIs for video marketing to make things easier for you. 

  

  Concluding Thoughts: Getting Your Video Marketing Strategy Off The Ground 

  Closely follow this guide, and you’ll have everything you need to create, develop, and put into action a successful video marketing campaign. 

  Video marketing both gets easier and trickier once you start rolling. The good news is that by knowing your KPIs, you can tweak and adjust your strategy accordingly. As long as you pay attention to the hard data – you can experiment with trial and error until you find something that hits big. 

  It will take a fair amount of experimentation to discover the winning formula for your business, so it’s crucial not to get gun-shy after a video doesn’t perform the way you’d hoped. 

  Need more digital marketing advice? Go ahead and schedule a call to speak with one of our digital marketing experts today.   

The post An In-Depth Guide to Getting Your Video Marketing Strategy Off the Ground appeared first on The HOTH.

While longer ads are an excellent marketing tool, bumper ads are an often-overlooked complementary element. These six-second messages let you retain audience attention and shine the spotlight on your company or product without interruption.

To highlight how great this advertising format is, we’ve delved into its foundations and provided five excellent bumper ad examples, along with a guide to creating bumper ads and tips on how to get the most from them.

What Are Bumper Ads?

Bumper ads are unskippable YouTube ads that are up to six seconds long. They appear before a video begins or during it and are a great opportunity for brands and marketers to showcase a concise yet highly impactful message.

(Image Source)

Since they’re only a few seconds long and unskippable, audience attention retention is much higher than with other ad formats. They’re also less likely to frustrate viewers who just want to get to their video.

When run alongside other ad formats and longer videos, bumper ads build brand awareness and can help with YouTube SEO.

When to use a bumper ad?

Bumper ads are an effective way to get around “ad blindness,” a term used to describe how most users have learned to ignore ads — even video ads.

When you demand just six seconds of someone’s attention, there’s a higher chance you’ll get it.

The best way to use a bumper ad is to send a single memorable message about your brand. The aim is to make a great impression from the first second and lead users to your website, products, or services.

Most marketers primarily use bumper ads to boost brand reach and awareness.

How to pay for bumper ads?

Google and YouTube use the Cost-per-Mille (CPM) model for bumper ads. In this bidding model, brands are charged for every thousand views their ad gets on YouTube.

To ensure brands stay within their budget, Google uses Target CPM. This is when brands can set the bid for how much they want to pay for every thousand times their ad is played. Google Display then optimizes your bid to get the maximum number of impressions within your limit.

With an estimated cost of around $1 to $4 per thousand views, bumper ads are relatively cheap compared to other forms of advertising.

Bumper Ad Examples

Bumper ads are an excellent avenue for brands and marketers to unleash their creativity. Here are five brands that got it right with their bumper ads:

#1. General Insurance

General Automobile Insurance Services is primarily focused on auto insurance. However, rather than creating a generic car accident/mishap-based bumper ad, they used their six seconds to add humor and catch attention.

Using a tattoo error to highlight how everyone makes mistakes and needs insurance to cover them is an out-of-the-box concept that works.

Another thing General Insurance gets right is the messaging. They focus on a single message and don’t delve deep into brand details or product features. Instead, they entice readers back to their website to learn more.

#2. Dove

Dove focuses solely on its product in this bumper ad. They go straight to the customer’s pain point — “Does your anti-dandruff shampoo leave your hair dry?” — and then provide the solution — the Dove Dermacare Scalp shampoo and conditioner.

The narrator also says 1–2 lines to explain how the new haircare series helps with anti-dandruff care.

This is a more generic bumper ad format, where they simply talk about the product. But it works because those six seconds lead any viewers with the same problem directly to a solution.

Since the ad focuses on one product rather than the brand, this kind of bumper ad makes sense here.

#3. Liberty Mutual

Liberty Mutual Group provides customized insurance for auto, property, motorcycles, and more. Since its offerings are more complicated than the Dove ad above, the Liberty Mutual team went the creative route.

The main benefit of insurance is to save money. Liberty Mutual uses their bumper ad to show just how much money they can save you.

Rather than a simple tagline or statement saying “we save you money,” they choose to show it via a user that has saved enough that they can now buy customized items for their dog.

Notice how this implies that they don’t just save money, but they save so much of it that they can also afford to splurge on unnecessary and fun purchases. Thus, proving how great their insurance is.

#4.Grammarly

Grammarly, an online text-editing platform, adds flair to a direct message with their bumper ad. The student-focused ad uses a statistic about how prevalent the tool is among its target demographic.

It further underlines its popularity by adding a catchy yet relatable line at the end, with the actor saying, “It’s more popular than all-you-can-eat pizza.” This statement is complemented by an end screen that shows the Grammarly logo and a clear line that says the tool is free.

All of these elements combined are aimed to entice college and school students to try out this free app that can make writing easier.

#5. Adidas

Brands can also show their products in action in their bumper ads. Adidas’ ad for their RDY collection of sportswear is a cut-down version of a longer interview with Japanese Olympic silver-medal-winning boulderer Miho Nonaka.

The ad shows the athlete in action wearing their gear, plus a quote from her. It ends with a screen that tells users how to find that specific collection.

A bumper ad like this gets straight to the point, and instead of telling users how good their product is, it implies it by showing the best of the best using it.

5 Best Practices for Effective Bumper Ad Campaigns

Now that you’ve seen some excellent bumper ads and how they get viewer attention, it’s time to create and implement your own bumper ad campaign.

Need help getting started? Our PPC experts can help.

Otherwise, here are five best practices for engaging and profitable bumper ads:

#1. Use clusters

Bumper ads must be a part of a cluster of ads that highlight the product/service/brand. Each ad in this cluster is focused on one specific message.

Let’s say you want to advertise a marketing software that:

• Is easier to use than competitors
• Has more features
• Has better integrations

You can use a bumper ad to showcase each of these advantages. The first bumper ad can focus on the great UI, the second can focus on unique features, and the third can focus on third-party integrations.

You can break down this campaign into more ads, say one for each feature or key integration, or you can pair these up with longer ads that explain them more thoroughly.

Topic clusters are a common strategy in content marketing and can be used to plan your bumper ads as well.

#2. Avoid complex messaging

Since your bumper ads are only six seconds long, you must avoid complex messages. Instead, focus on the key takeaway for the end-user or customer.

For example, in the Liberty Mutual Insurance ad, rather than delving into HOW they save customers money, they focus on what customers can DO with the extra money.

Longer ads can explain the how, but your bumper ads should simply tell users why they should care about your product.

The message must be simple, memorable, easy to understand for your audience and handle one main element (customer question, pain point, feature, product).

#3. Aim for visual appeal

In most of the ads we’ve shown above, eye-catching visuals are what reels users in at first.

General Insurance hooks viewers with the sneezing-while-getting-tattooed gag, while Adidas directly shows the athlete in action.

Notice how there’s no dilly-dallying or basic company logo, nothing that a user would see in another generic ad. All logos and slogans are saved for the last two seconds. The first four are all about impact.

Even if it’s a very short ad, users will turn away or tune it out if there’s nothing interesting. This is why it’s important to get straight to the point.

#4. Mix bumper ads with other types of ads

Tailor your bumper ad campaigns such that they lead to longer ads or other brand videos. You can use them alongside TrueView ads, display ads, and overlay ads.

Sheba, a popular cat food brand, created a unique ad campaign to connect with pet owners. They wanted to help cat owners get past the dreaded “4 am wake up,” so they used bumper ads in the daytime and customized ads at night — all of which led to a 5-hour video created to help owners get back to sleep.

The campaign was a massive success, with a 100% increase in ad recall among satisfied cat owners.

While some ads can be cut down to create bumper ads, like in the Adidas example, it is recommended to create bumper ads separately.

#5. Use targeted ads

Like most Google Ads assets, you can target your bumper ads toward a specific audience. This target audience is defined by demographics (age, gender, location, etc.), interests, marital status, education, etc.

You can set these parameters so Google knows who to show the ads to make the biggest impact. You don’t want to show high-schoolers ads about homeowner insurance. Targeted ads help prevent situations like this.

Bumper ads can also be used for remarketing. This is when you target people who have previously interacted with your brand, website, or product.

While you can’t build remarketing lists off of bumper ad viewers, you can use data from other ad formats to show bumper ads to the right people.

How to Create Your Own Bumper Ads

Follow these steps to create a YouTube bumper ad:

• Create a Google Ads account: Start by creating a Google Ads account to monitor all your YouTube ad campaigns and related data.

• Create a new campaign: Click on “Campaign” to navigate to the campaigns page, select the ‘+’ button and choose “New Campaign.”

• Add campaign goal: In the following screen, select “brand awareness and reach” as the ad goal.

• Select campaign type: When prompted, select “Bumper” as your campaign type.

• Add campaign details: Campaign name, budget, language, and targeting options can be customized in this step to ensure that your bumper ads reach the right audience.

• Create and upload ad: Create a bumper ad with your advertising team, choose a banner to go along with it, and then upload your ad.

You can learn more about the process here.

Give Your Brand a Much-Needed Lift with Bumper Ads

Bumper ads can elevate your advertising campaigns by exposing your products to a focused audience that can’t ignore the message. They can lead viewers directly to your website or longer ads or videos that further explain your offering.

If video production, Google Ads, and paid campaigns are not your forte, you can always let the experts at The HOTH handle it. Schedule a call today!

The post YouTube Bumper Ads Guide: How to Make a Big Impression in Just 6 Seconds appeared first on The HOTH.

Although written content has been the basis of content marketing for several years, times have changed. Many would rather watch a video than read pages of content. 

In fact, a report from HubSpot suggests that 85% of marketers are using YouTube, making it the most widely-used platform for video. Additionally, thanks to our easy access to smartphones, the average person spends approximately 50 minutes a day watching online videos. 

These numbers are certainly impressive, but how do they apply to your content marketing efforts?

Below, we’ll walk you through the steps of starting your YouTube channel, and provide you with additional tips to set yourself up for success. 

Why You Should Make YouTube Videos for Your Content 

There are almost 2 billion active monthly users on YouTube, which gives you an enormous opportunity to gain visibility and spread brand awareness.

Successful channels are even eligible to make money from advertisements and monetization. Although YouTube gives a content creator 55% of this revenue and takes 45% for itself, it’s still worth having extra income from advertisements. You may even have the chance to gain sponsorships and begin affiliate marketing which provides an additional source of revenue for your business. 

Even if you decide not to use YouTube for money directly but only for branding and video marketing, you still need subscribers. They boost your play count, watch time, and user engagement. These are all super important for signals to YouTube’s algorithm. 

However, the largest benefits come from implementing video content into your website. Video content is easily shareable, engaging, and memorable. With it, you can increase dwell time and boost your SEO, while also enjoying more traffic to your website.

Step 1: Create Your Channel

The first step to starting a successful YouTube channel is creating it!

In order to do this, you will need a Google account. YouTube is owned by Google (this is why YouTube is so instrumental in boosting your SEO), so you will use your Google account to access and manage your YouTube channel.

Once you’ve got your Google account information ready, all you have to do is head over to YouTube and log in with that information.

Once you’re logged in, click the account thumbnail icon in the top-right corner of the screen to open the drop-down menu. From here, click the settings icon to go into your account settings.

In your account settings, there will be an option to create a channel.

It will ask for your name, but if this account is for your business, you’ll want to choose the option that says Use a business or other name.

You will then be prompted to enter the name of your YouTube Brand Account. Use the name of your business or something similar. Remember, this is how audiences will identify your channel and the people behind it. After you have confirmed your account name, your YouTube channel has officially been created!

Step 2: Customize Your Channel

After creating your YouTube channel, the next step is to customize it to make sure that your channel stands out from the rest.

You can upload photos to your channel and your account icon, making it easy to identify your brand at a glance.

After choosing some photos that fit your channel, click the About tab to add more details.

In the About tab, you can add a description of your channel. This is a great opportunity to tell your audience what you’re all about.

You can also add contact information or links to your website, which will give prospective customers the resources they need to easily reach you.

Step 3: Verify Your Account

Once your account is created and customized, you’ll want to verify it so you have full access to benefits like custom thumbnails and the ability to upload longer videos.

To verify your account, click on the account icon to bring up the drop-down menu, then click on Creator Studio. 

Or use this link: www.youtube.com/verify to verify your account using your phone number. 

From here, click on Channel and then Status and features.

Then, all you have to do is click the Verify button!

Step 4: Upload Search Engine Optimized Video

Now that you have your channel set up, it’s time to start uploading your YouTube content. 

With YouTube, uploading videos is as easy as clicking the upload button and dragging your video onto the screen. Using the best editing software for your videos is also an important factor for branding and video quality.

As your video uploads, you’ll have the chance to add a title, description, and tags to the video.

These details are incredibly important for YouTube search engine optimization and ensuring that your content reaches its intended audience. Here are some tips for helping your video rank:

• Title – Your video title should be 5-10 words long. It should also include a keyword at the front of the title, which tells YouTube what the video is about. With this information, YouTube will suggest your video when people type your chosen keyword into the search bar. Adding other relevant information, such as the year or “how to”, can also help.
• Description – Your video description should be about 150 to 200 words. In order to rank your video higher on YouTube, you should include the keyword that you used in your title multiple times throughout the description, especially in the beginning. You can also link back to your website in the description, which increases the chance that your viewers will visit your website.
• Tags – The tags help YouTube categorize your video and suggest it to viewers who are watching related content. You should use your keyword here, too. You only need about five tags, any extra tags will only confuse YouTube. In addition to your main keyword, you should include a few alternative keywords that are similar to your main keyword. Then, include a few broader terms that relate to your keyword.

Step 5: Embed Videos to Your Website

Once you’ve begun creating content and uploading your search engine optimized videos, you’ll want to embed them on your website to further increase your traffic and your rankings.

Don’t know how to embed a video on your WordPress? It’s simple!

First, log into your WordPress dashboard and either create a new post or navigate to the post that you would like to add your video to.

Then, click the plus sign in the top-left corner to add a block to the current page.

Here, you will have the option of inserting a Video block, or a block specific to YouTube.

…or a block specific to YouTube.

After inserting the new block, you will be able to embed your video using its YouTube URL.

It’s important to use the URL here instead of uploading your video directly to your site. If you upload directly, you won’t get any SEO benefits!

The presence of links between your website and your YouTube video is essential for driving traffic and increasing your rankings.

How Do You Get Followers on YouTube with a New Channel?

You might feel a bit of an urge to buy Youtube subscribers, especially if you are a new channel just trying to reach that 1K mark. Youtube Analytics may also help you keep track of your metrics and which piece of content gets the most engagement and views. 

Let me tell you why it won’t work. The truth is that video creators behind Youtube’s top channels don’t spend time, effort, and money on growth schemes. Because bought subscribers don’t engage, they look shady to any real audience you have, and you risk getting caught by Youtube’s fake engagement policy. 

With that said, let me give you some great advice for earning free (real) subscribers for your new Youtube channel:

Create awesome Youtube video thumbnails

Thumbnails don’t affect your SEO or video ranking, but they certainly encourage people to click on your video instead of the videos above or below it. Visuals are such an important part of creating your own Youtube channel brand. 

They can also boost your channel name and brand. The best way to grab someone’s attention is using a custom thumbnail. Adding text, images or other elements to the thumbnail can make your video look much more appealing. 

Not only will you want to create great video thumbnails, but you’ll want to create awesome channel art, which includes a good channel banner. As a quick reminder, the appropriate size for a Youtube banner is a 2560 x 1440 pixel image.

So, how do you create awesome thumbnails? Use free websites to help you design your thumbnail graphic art such as Canva. You can also use Canva to help you design your infographics, your Youtube banner, and much more! 

Custom thumbnails tend to be more successful than random copyright-free images. Backlinko also suggests using bright colors in your thumbnails such as yellow, green, and orange tend to stand out more. Use your personality, your creativity, and your color palette! 

Use youtube’s clickable subscription tools

Youtube offers built-in tools that are clickable to help you encourage viewers to subscribe. Such as an end screen and a brand watermark. These methods work both for new videos and existing content. 

At the end of your video, you can remind people to subscribe to insert your call to action before Youtube moves on to the next video. You can add an end screen to videos during the uploading process as long as the video is around 25 seconds long. You can update any existing videos with an end screen as well. 

To add an end screen to an existing video, click on “content” in the left menu of Creator Studio, then click the video you want to update. Click “end screen” on the right side and add a “subscribe element” to your video. 

If you want to add a branded watermark you can always click “customization” in the left menu of Youtube Studio and then 

Create playlists for your videos

Playlists are a good way to increase your channel watch time which affects your ability to monetize. The neat thing about Youtube is that it will autoplay your playlist to your audience in the order you want. 

So, for example, if you created tutorials for beginners to the advanced, you can place them in the correct order for your viewers. Using playlists can also help your audience break down some of your information without watching hours of video. 

Collaborate with other creators

Outreach is a great tactic for any SEO from blogging to Youtube. Building a community can be a great way to gain subscribers. 

Use your connections to reach out to other Youtube creators to ask if they would like to collaborate with you so you can both leverage off each other’s viewers. Your audience trusts your brand, and their audiences trust theirs so collaboration can be a win-win for both of you! 

Once you begin to expand, you may even find that your audience may suggest different collaborations, so keep an eye on your comment section for ideas. You can ask for suggestions as well, which may also help you encourage engagement for your viewers. 

Be consistent when posting videos

Most Youtube SEO experts agree that posting a video once a week to start with, then increasing to 3 to 4 videos a week as your channel grows. 

The concept is that the more videos you post, the more your audience will grow. But, the goal is to prioritize quality over quantity. 

It would be best to focus on quality and consistency before banging out a ton of underwhelming content on your Youtube account. You can also use programs like Hootsuite to help you schedule your videos for publishing. 

According to a study by Boosted, the best level of engagement on Youtube happens on Fridays, Saturdays, and Wednesdays. On most days, the best time to publish your content is around 5 p.m., however, you can also post anytime before 9 p.m. with some level of success. 

However, keep in mind each social media platform has different days and times that perform the best so research is key here. 

Use a call to action (CTA) phrase

Ask your viewers to subscribe, it might sound simple, but there’s a reason every Youtuber adds a “hit like, share, and subscribe” bit after every video! Encouraging engagement is a great marketing tip for new channels. 

In fact, a good CTA phrase encourages high value with low risk to your audience and the average click-through rate across every industry is almost 5%, which is higher than Google ads. 

Try to remind your viewers why your channel is worth subscribing to. Make sure you ask for a sub after you’ve given them some new or useful information. Asking too often or too soon may result in sounding too salesy which can be a turn-off for some audiences.

That’s It! 

Like any marketing strategy, you need to be consistent in your efforts in order to achieve the best results. Upload videos regularly to keep your audience engaged and continue to enhance your SEO benefits.

You might even want to consider creating a custom intro for all your videos on your channel to help with branding.

Don’t forget to sign up for free and check out some of our other SEO tools! 

The post How To Start A YouTube Channel appeared first on The HOTH.

That’s a clear indicator of the power of video as a medium. 

It’s so powerful that we watch 6 billion hours of YouTube content every month.

Here’s another fun fact – did you know that YouTube is the second largest search engine globally, only surpassed by Google? 

While not traditionally thought of as a search engine, YouTube has a ranking system for search queries just like Google, and you can optimize your content for it. 

81% of internet users watch YouTube. These are leads you could capture and transform into leads for your business. That’s why it’s a no-brainer to use YouTube as part of your digital marketing and content marketing strategies.

Now that you know about the power of video and how it can impact your business –  it’s time to learn the fundamentals of YouTube SEO. That way, you can learn how to cater to the algorithm and start dominating the YouTube search. 

The following guide will teach you:

• How YouTube ranks videos
• YouTube SEO tips
• How to do keyword research for videos
• How to optimize videos to rank well
• How to build links & promote your videos

Let’s dive in.

Understanding How YouTube Ranks Videos

Google’s ownership of YouTube has helped the platform transform into a powerhouse for video search and secured instant indexation. It also helped YouTube secure a preferential spot in SERPs (for certain queries).

Like Google, YouTube also uses an algorithm that measures a wide array of metrics in order to rank videos.

That means relying solely on keywords and descriptions when it comes to YouTube SEO won’t cut it. Instead, there are a few areas that you can focus on to increase the visibility of your videos:

• Views & frequency
• Watch time
• Number of subscribers
• Annotation linking
• Flagging
• Likes & dislikes
• Shares
• Favorites

YouTube SEO involves the optimization of not only your video content but also your playlists, metadata, and search descriptions.

As with other search engines, YouTube ranking factors are always changing and evolving. Over the years, its algorithm has seen many changes and variations. If you want to stay on top of the game, it’s crucial to keep up with the latest developments at Google and YouTube related to SEO. 

In its early days, YouTube ranked videos solely on the number of clicks and views they received. 

That quickly proved unsatisfactory  – as it led to the proliferation of ‘clickbait’ – a video with a deceitful title and thumbnail with the aim of generating lots of clicks. The content of these videos was often poor or nonexistent, as the goal was only for users to click on the video.

The team at YouTube then began implementing the metrics that you see above. They began ranking videos for viewer satisfaction above all else. 

The goal of YouTube’s algorithm is the same as Google’s – to match the user with the highest quality, most relevant content. That pays off big for YouTube, as they keep users on the platform by recommending more videos to watch. It can also pay off for you, too, by greatly increasing the visibility of your videos when you cater to each ranking factor. 

Keyword Research For Videos

While you can’t rely primarily on keywords for your entire YouTube SEO strategy – it’s still imperative to use them. 

In fact, video keyword research is the first step in developing an SEO strategy for YouTube. Without it, you won’t know how to discover what your target audience searches for online. That’s why it’s crucial to begin by creating a list of common search terms used by your audience. 

How do you do that?

A fantastic way to start is to head over to YouTube and use its basic search bar. 

Simply pop in a word or phrase related to your niche – and YouTube will suggest a whole bundle of keywords. Let’s say that your business is creating custom backdrops for photography. As such, you do a search for ‘backdrop’ on YouTube, and it spits out:

• Backdrop decoration ideas
• Backdrop stand
• Backdrop photography
• Backdrops for YouTube videos

And voila! You now have 4 top-ranking keyword ideas you can add to your list. The reason why these keyword suggestions are so effective is that they’re search terms that people actually use on YouTube. 

As a result, you now have relevant keywords actually used by your target audience. 

All that, and you didn’t have to pay a dime for the insight.

Another technique is to find a top-ranked video in your niche. Going with the example above, you would want to use one of the top three videos that pop up when you search ‘backdrop.’ From there, all you have to do is poach the keywords the video uses – and you’ll have a tried and true list of video keywords that you know will rank. 

Ranking on YouTube and Google 

Having your videos rank on YouTube is great, but do you know what’s even better?  Ranking on YouTube AND Google! 

While it is true that Google gives YouTube preferential treatment in SERPs, this is only true for certain keywords. These keywords are commonly referred to as “video keywords.”

Before you start working on your next clip, you might want to google your targeted keyword to see if any videos appear on the search engine result pages. If they do, you know have visibility of your competition. From there, you have two options. 

You can either choose a different keyword to pursue that doesn’t have videos on Google – or you can attempt to outrank it with superior content. Either way works, although the latter takes a bit more effort. 

Yet, learning how to outrank content will provide you with a considerable advantage. If you can create a video that uses the same keywords but has more likes, shares, and subscribers, you’ll take the throne. Outranking content comes in handy for other forms of SEO as well, such as link building.

In general, video keywords make sense only for certain topics. Not every keyword will show videos, so it’s critical to do your homework. 

Google will generally display “video results” for the following keywords:

• Product or software reviews.
• Tutorials (e.g., “how to install Adobe Photoshop CS6”)
• How-to keywords (e.g., “how to make a YouTube video”).
• Funny videos (e.g., “funny cat fails”)
• Anything sports, fitness, or fashion-related.
• Current news events

Bottom line: Don’t invest in videos before you check SERPs and evaluate organic potential. The last thing you want is to waste part of your budget on a video that doesn’t rank. 

On-Page YouTube Ranking Signals

Now that you know how YouTube’s ranking system works, it’s time to start creating videos. If you don’t have one already, you’ll need to create a new YouTube channel. You’ll want to use your company name and include any necessary branding in your channel name. 

For your content, there are several on-page elements that you can optimize to improve your visibility:

Make your video file name your keyword

Since you have a list of relevant keywords to use, it’s time to start placing them in your video content. First and foremost, you’ll want to change your video’s filename (not the title, we’ll get to that in a second) to the target keyword. 

Why do that?

Because it’s the first thing YouTube will see when crawling your video. 

You see, YouTube’s algorithm has no way to physically watch your video. That means it can’t determine if your content relates to your target keyword. What it can do is read the file name for your video. So if your target keyword is right there, front and center – YouTube will know that your content relates to it.

So do yourself a favor and rename the file from ‘backdrop_video_FINAL3004.mov’ to ‘backdrop-decoration-ideas.mov.’ 

Just like that, you’ve let YouTube know that your video has to do with ideas for decorating backdrops. (the #1 suggested keyword from before.)

Also, make sure that your video is in one of the three codecs that YouTube agrees with the most: .mov, .mp4, .wmv. If you’re shooting in a different codec, you can always use a free converter like Handbrake.

Much like saving a picture for SEO purposes in code, adding a descriptive name to your video file will improve its organic visibility.

Organically place your keyword in the video title

Besides the file name, you’ll want to use your target keyword in the video title as well. In doing so, you’ll want to use it in an organic way that doesn’t seem forced or tagged on. Your title should make grammatical sense and clearly represent what the content of the video is about. 

Here’s an example of a poor YouTube video title:

“Backdrop Photography for Backdrop Stand Decoration Ideas”

As you can see, it doesn’t make much sense, and it tries to jam in too many keywords. Remember, you’re naming your video not only for YouTube but for your viewers. That’s why you should avoid keyword spam and go for a concise and informative title instead. 

Here’s an example of a much better YouTube title using one target keyword:

“Top Backdrop Decoration Ideas for 2022”

There’s only one keyword now, ‘backdrop decoration ideas,’ and its use is organic, flows, and makes perfect sense. Viewers can easily tell that they’ll learn creative ideas for decorating their backdrops. 

YouTube also prefers organic titles like these. While it’s a best practice to include your target keyword in your title, it won’t have as much impact as the video file. What’s more important than using the keyword is making sure the title clearly represents what the video is about. 

You can think about it like this; the file name is for YouTube, and the video title is for your viewers. 

Lastly, you’ll want to keep the character length in mind when naming your video. As a rule of thumb, keep your title under 60 characters so it won’t get cut off when displaying in the search rankings. 

YouTube’s header section

In the header section of your video, you can add links that will refer visitors to relevant pages (e.g., a behind the scenes for your video, social media profiles, etc.). That comes in handy not only for getting more video views but also for your user experience. 

There are numerous options that you can use to maximize the visibility of your video content. 

You can also take advantage of the header on your YouTube channel. Here, you can use keywords, add social media buttons, digital marketing links (affiliates, etc.), and more. YouTube’s headers are often overlooked, but they provide ample opportunities for SEO. 

Write long, keyword-rich video descriptions

As we already mentioned, YouTube and Google cannot view or listen to your video. This means that both platforms rely heavily on the text that surrounds a video to understand its topic. A 30-word description won’t do you much good.

As is the case with long-form content, the more YouTube knows about your video, the more confidently it will rank it for your targeted keywords. 

Bear in mind that you’ll have a 1,000-character limit for your description. While it’s wise to write more than 30 words, you don’t want to write a book, either. 

Instead, you should aim for 200-400 word long descriptions. That’s the ‘sweet spot’ that isn’t too long and isn’t too short. A description of this length will inform your readers while helping you rank for multiple variations of your keyword. While you’re at it, throw in some related keywords if you have room. 

Another factor to consider is after the first 100 characters users will need to hit a ‘show more’ button. 

As such, you’ll want to include the most important information at the beginning of your description. If you have a crucial affiliate link or CTA (call-to-action) to include, make sure to place it right at the start. 

Lastly, you should include a transcript of your video for the hearing impaired. That will improve the user experience and accessibility of your videos. 

Strategically use keyword tags related to your video

Video tags are another way to let YouTube know what your video is about – as they clue the algorithm in on the content and context of your video. 

As such, you’ll want to get as specific as possible when using tags. Of course, you’ll want to use your target keyword and its key variations. You should also aim to include related keywords and variations as well. 

So should you go completely tag-happy and add thousands of tags to your video, whether they’re related or not?

No!

While it may be tempting to load your videos with dozens of video tags, you need to be highly strategic with them. For example, if you include a tag that ISN’T related to your video, you may incur a penalty from Google. 

As with other aspects of SEO, it’s always best to avoid spam. You shouldn’t spam keywords, nor should you spam keyword tags for your videos. 

Once you’ve included your primary keyword, related keywords, and their variations, you should call it a day with keyword tags. 

It’s also wise to take a look at the tags that your competitors are using for their videos. You can find the tags that the competitors use by either looking at the HTML under meta keywords or by using this plugin.

Create a high-quality video transcript

Crawlers cannot interpret the content of a video the same way that we do. Video transcripts represent a huge asset for search because they can be crawled by search engines. 

Furthermore, video transcripts can be optimized to include your most important keywords. This will help you tell crawlers what your video is about.

Many YouTubers use automated transcripts as their starting point. This is a good idea, but you will have to manually clean up and replace errors to make the text readable. Automated transcription isn’t perfect by any means, so expect lots of misinterpretations and run-on sentences. 

Another option would be to manually create your transcripts before creating the video. That’s the preferred method if you write scripts for your videos. Since the script already contains everything you’re going to say – it doubles as a transcript. You’ll need to add a few tweaks to it, though, such as adding timestamps after you shoot the video. 

If you don’t write scripts for your videos, creating a transcript beforehand would be too time-consuming.

The SEO benefits of adding short transcripts can be seen from the first few days. While both options for creating transcripts involve quite a bit of work, the results can be well worth it. If you have the resources to spare for creating a transcript, it’s worth the investment. 

Another benefit of creating a transcript is that users can view your videos with subtitles. That comes in handy for the hearing impaired but also for viewers watching without volume. That can help increase your views and gain more subscriptions. 

Upload a custom thumbnail for your video

Your video’s thumbnail is the equivalent of its handshake for viewers. It’s the first impression they get of your content, so it better make a strong one. 

While YouTube offers automated thumbnails, it’s best not to use these. They’re often bland and don’t convey the content of your video very well. If you want to find the most success with your video, creating a custom thumbnail is the way to go. =

It turns out there’s evidence to support this, too. According to the Creator Academy, 90% of the top-performing videos on YouTube use custom thumbnails. 

An attractive thumbnail is a great way to improve your click-through rate, too. Users are far more likely to click on a video that has an intriguing image than one that doesn’t. 

So what’s the best way to create a custom thumbnail?

If you’re savvy with Photoshop or a similar program, you could tackle it yourself. Otherwise, there are plenty of experts you can hire online through platforms such as FreeUp. For a fee, they will create a stunning, attention-grabbing thumbnail for your video. 

If you’re going the solo route, there are a few essential things to know, such as compatible formats. Your thumbnail should be:

• 1280 x 720 pixels
• 16:9 ratio
• 2MB or smaller in size
• .jpg, .GIF, .bmp, or .png format 

As long as you follow these guidelines, your thumbnail will display perfectly on the YouTube search results page. 

Promotion & Link Building Techniques For YouTube Videos

After you have totally optimized your video with the steps above, it’s time to get into promoting it through video marketing.

Because YouTube REALLY cares about metrics, it wants to rank videos that are getting lots of views, links, and embeds. You’ll want to use this fact to your advantage.

It’s best to get as much attention as possible to the video right when you publish if you can. Here’s what to do:

Get as many natural views as you can as quickly as possible

After you create your video, it’s time to acquire as many organic views as you can. First and foremost, you’ll want to send it to your email list and publish it on all your social media channels. Beyond that, here are some candid tips on how to acquire more initial views:

Create compelling content that outdoes the competition

The last thing you want to do is create a video that’s another face in the crowd. In other words, you’ll want to provide value to viewers that they can’t get from any related video. 

Before creating a video, do an in-depth analysis of all the top-ranking competitor videos. Where does their content fall flat? How can you provide more insights and go into more detail? A unique video with valuable content will always generate more views than a paint-by-the-numbers one. 

Encourage your viewers to like, share, and subscribe 

If you’ve watched any YouTube video in recent years, you’ve heard the formulaic, “Don’t forget to like and subscribe.” Well, it turns out this phrase is so repetitive for a reason – it gets results. 

Reminding your viewers to share your video can also be a goldmine as it can lead to more organic views. Do your best to put a unique spin on the phrase to add credibility to your request. That way, your viewers will feel as if you truly care and aren’t simply going through the motions. 

Create relevant playlists for viewers

It takes time to do, but creating playlists for your related videos can help you gain more views. YouTube’s analytics found that top-performing channels create more playlists than the bottom 25%. 

That clearly indicates that viewers appreciate playlists and watch them often. Make sure that your playlists only contain related videos, though, as random playlists won’t work and will reflect poorly on your brand.

These are all reliable ways to boost your initial views, which will help you out in the search rankings.

Start building links to the video and get embeds

As stated before, link building is a crucial part of any SEO campaign, and YouTube is no different. The more links you have to your video, the better chance you stand at ranking higher.

In addition to building links to the video, you’ll want to get embeds as well. Am embed occurs whenever someone directly links your video to their content. An embed could take place in a social media post, a blog post, a landing page, or other locations. 

How do you obtain embeds?

A great way to do so is to perform some simple outreach. You can find online articles related to your video and reach out to their creator. Let them know that you’ve created a helpful video that relates to their content and that you would like them to embed it in their post. 

They’re likely to agree because your video will add power to their post and help them outdo the competition in their SEO strategy. 

In other words, it’s a win-win situation for you both. 

As far as including internal/external links, YouTube can take the heat of pretty much whatever types of links you want to throw at it. 

Concluding Thoughts: How to Rank Videos On YouTube

Ranking videos can be an awesome source of traffic for your brand. Video SEO shares many factors with traditional SEO – which comes in handy. 

To get your videos ranking on YouTube, you’ll need to do smart keyword research, create stellar content, and strategically use link building and tags, among other things. As long as you follow the steps found here, you should find success in optimizing your videos for YouTube.

Feel free to share this guide on social media if you find it helpful!

Also, please don’t wait to schedule a call with our expert SEO consultants at The HOTH. We can help you make sense of YouTube SEO so you can catapult your brands’ videos to the top of the search results. 

The post Youtube SEO: How To Rank Videos In Youtube appeared first on The HOTH.

Not only is SEO the building block of your entire marketing presence, but it also has a direct impact on your user engagement, conversion rates, and revenue. In fact, 55% of people watch videos daily and 85% of marketers are using YouTube, making it the most widely-used platform for video. 

It’s no secret that video is a rapidly growing trend in digital marketing. Video content offers many benefits over text-based content, such as being more entertaining and memorable. In fact, share rate on social videos is 12x higher than images and text combined. Video content can also directly influence some of the most important Google ranking factors.

Let’s start with how you can improve your SEO with video by understanding the following three major ranking factors:

Dwell Time

Studies suggest that the average person spends around 2 hours and 20 minutes a day watching video content. That said, dwell time is a huge factor in video content. Dwell time is when a user remains on your page before bouncing back to the search results page.

You can usually increase your dwell time by writing longer content and making it more engaging for the visitor. But the truth is, nothing is better for dwell time than a video.

A video immediately captures a user’s attention, and ideally, keeps them engaged for the duration of the video. An attractive video thumbnail can only go so far, you need engaging content for your videos that can improve your SEO rankings. 

You can notice improvements in dwell time that go beyond just the length of the video. A study performed by Wistia discovered that users spent over twice as much time on pages with video content than on pages without.

Google interprets dwell time as your website providing value to its visitors. Keyword research is a great way to bring in organic traffic; however, a video can keep a user on your page longer which results in better conversion rates. As a result, Google will place your website higher on the SERPs, earning you more organic traffic for your SEO efforts.

Page Quality

If you want your pages to rank on Google, they need to offer valuable, high-quality content by combining a variety of media such as useful videos which creates a better user experience for your target audience. 

You may already know that pages with longer content will rank better than pages with short content, but why not add videos to further increase the amount of content on your page? It’s a good idea to remember that long-form content holds value for your reader as well as visuals such as infographics and other helpful illustrations.

(Image Source)

If you limit your web pages to strictly text-based content, you’ll continually be outranked by pages with stronger and more diverse content such as Youtube videos. Incorporating text, images, and of course, video, is a great way to boost your page quality and brand awareness. 

A page that is more informative and unique thanks to the inclusion of video content will receive a higher page quality rating by Google’s search results. Needless to say, a higher page quality means higher rankings! You can learn more about page quality and Google’s search quality guidelines here.

Backlinks

As we mentioned before, embedding videos onto your web pages will increase the overall quality of your website and is a great start for any content marketing strategy.

As you provide more value with this form of content, an increasing number of websites will begin linking to your content which may increase conversions. 

One study found that having both text and video on your webpage can nearly triple the number of backlinks it receives.

On top of that, when you host your videos on YouTube, Vimeo, or other platforms (we recommend YouTube – more on that later), you can place links back to your website in the description. 

That means with each video you create, you’ll secure yourself a new backlink. 

That’s the beauty of video marketing! 

How to Get the Most Out of Your Videos

The SEO benefits of video content are glaring. Now that you know these benefits, you’re probably wondering how you can get the most out of your video content by using Google’s algorithm and SEO basics. 

And, as you probably know, Google analyzes many aspects of your website to determine where it will rank for a given Google search and video content is one of them! If you aren’t too sure where to start, try using some of these tips to maximize the reach of your content.

Let’s explore some great ways to improve your SEO with video: 

Plan your videos around relevant, educational content

First and foremost, your video needs to provide value to your website’s visitors. Otherwise, it will have very little benefit. You can have a great concept, but if your content isn’t helpful or educational with some entertainment you may not get very far. 

One reason it is a great idea to create educational content about your service or product is that product videos can help eCommerce stores increase product purchases by up to 144%! 

You need to create your videos with a purpose in mind, whether it is to educate customers about a product, help them solve a problem, or shed some light on your brand.

A study found that 71% of people made a purchase after watching an online video from that brand. So, it’s safe to say if you plan your videos with the right type of content then your conversion rates have a huge chance to increase which boosts your business. 

You probably already have content that does this – and that’s a good thing!

Try modeling your videos after popular content from your blog or other pages on your website.

If you aren’t really sure what type of content to start with, explainers and demos are the best video formats for generating conversions and sales. 

Upload your videos to YouTube

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, with over 2 billion active monthly users. 

This is a huge audience that you may not be taking advantage of yet. By uploading your videos to YouTube, you’ll tap into an entirely new traffic source. If you can succeed on Youtube, then your brand is sure to follow. 

If you are linking back to your website with each upload, you can get a huge increase in traffic through YouTube alone.

In fact, Brian Dean of Backlinko performed a study and analyzed 1.3 million Youtube videos. The findings resulted in a realization that comment count, number of videos, number of shares, and likes are all connected with higher Youtube rankings. 

In the same study, Brian Dean also found that videos that ranked on the top page of Youtube results had an average video length of 14 minutes and 50 seconds. That supports the concept that long-form content is great for video SEO as well as article length. 

Not sure how to get started with YouTube? Don’t worry. We’ve got a simple step-by-step guide for you.

Add a compelling title, description, and tags

During the upload process, you should be filling out every detail of your video! Metadata such as rich snippets is important for Googles crawlers to understand what your content is all about. Including a great meta description and even including subtitles can increase your viewership.

This provides both YouTube and Google with extra information about your content. It will also increase traffic on your Youtube channel and boost your website ranking. 

Once these search engines know what your video is about, they will be able to properly rank it in search results.

Make sure to fill your title, description, and tags with relevant keywords to help it rank as high as possible!

Embed videos to your website

Embedding your videos is one of the most important aspects of using video content!

Embed each video onto a webpage with similar text-based content. This will help relevant web pages rank better in Google while also fueling traffic.

You’ll want to embed your video content using the embed code from YouTube instead of uploading it directly, this method may increase your rankings on search engine results pages.

The presence of links between YouTube and your website is what creates all of these benefits!

Create and upload videos consistently

Any SEO strategy is incomplete without consistent effort! Actually, 90% of brands post at least one YouTube video per week as a part of their social media marketing strategy. So, the consistency of video creation is a factor in video SEO. If your competitors are doing it, you should be too. 

You need to consistently make videos and add them to your website in order to achieve all of the results that video content can offer. You also need to share your video content on all of your social media platforms. 

It would be best to upload your content on the top three video channels which will give you the most views. Your website (85%), your social media platforms (84%), and Youtube (67%).

Once you get the hang of the process, it can help to make a schedule for your video productions. As an example, people watch more business videos on Thursday (about 22% more) than any other day of the week. If you publish business-related content, Thursday might be a good day to schedule your videos. 

Aim for regular uploads – once a week, for example – to keep yourself accountable.

As an additional tip, the quality of your video really does matter, HD videos account for nearly 69% of the videos on the first page of Youtube. So, the time your content is published, the length of your content, and the quality of your videos are all video SEO ranking factors to keep in mind. 

You’re Ready to Improve Your SEO with Video!

If you stick to these simple rules, you’ll be on your way to successful video content in no time!

Of course, not everyone has the time or the ability to churn out SEO-optimized videos week after week. 

Need some help? Give us a call. We’re here to pitch in with all your digital marketing needs.

The post Using Video to Improve Your SEO: HUGE Benefits (And How to Do it) appeared first on The HOTH.

This post is a list of the hands-down best video intro maker tools.

Here are all of the Youtube tools we’ll be looking at:

• 1. Intro Maker
• 2. IntroCave
• 3. IntroChamp
• 4. Renderforest
• 5. Panzoid
• 6. Tube Arsenal
• 7. Biteable
• 8. Filmora
• 9. FlixPress
• 10. Ivipid
• 11. Wideo
• 12. Videobolt
• 13. Introbrand

Though there are 12 tools on this list, we do have our own two top picks:

Our Favorite Intro Tool:
Filmora by Wondershare: The most versatile and powerful, but pricey option. Filmora will help you create jaw-dropping and intricate intro videos (or full-length videos) that look exactly the way you want them to.

The Best Bang for Your Buck:
Intro Maker: This is one of the leanest and most basic options. Intro Maker will help you to quickly make a lot of intro videos with your logo or other images.

That being said, you should probably check out the rest of the tools before deciding on one.

Why Use A Youtube Intro Maker?

Intro makers give you a quick and easy way to customize your intro without having to spend a lot of time and effort.

Showing your brand isn’t the only value that intros provide. Intros can be as simple as a logo, or a more intricate hook that gets your audience to keep watching.

85% of marketers say they plan on creating more video content in 2018.

As video grows in importance for marketing, optimizing your videos is crucial to get them watched. This includes optimizing the video’s intro.

Basic Guidelines for Making Your Youtube Intro

Your intro should be the following:

• Visually interesting to capture attention.
• Branded with either your logo, colors, face or something else unique to your company.
• Long enough and clear enough to tell the story of what your video is about.
• Short enough to not cause people to bail. Aim for 5 to 10 seconds.
• Unique and engaging enough to make people want to stick around.

An intro maker can help you capture all these elements so you don’t have to make your intro from scratch. These tools help with this by giving you a template to start with and generally easy-to-use editors and graphics.

The result is you making more videos thanks to the time you’ll save:

(Image Source)

The best Youtube intro tool for you is going to depend on your needs and budget: some tools have features you can’t live without, while other slimmer tools might be able to do all you need.

Whatever you’re looking for, you’ll find something on this list to make your video’s intro great!

Click here to see how we can turn your blog posts into beautiful videos.

Now, let’s talk get into the different tools.

1. Intro Maker

Intro Maker is a lesser-known intro making service, but it’s simple to use.

The Good:

• IntroMaker has one main purpose. It was designed solely to create animated intros that feature your logo.
• It’s easy to use if you’re looking for a clean and simple intro.
• Despite it’s simple interface, IntroMaker.net makes videos in full HD at 1920x1080px.
• This would be a good option if you need to make a lot of simple-looking intros that match the quality of your HD videos.

The Bad:

• There are some free videos in their catalog. But you’ll likely pay per template, starting at $5.
• There’s not a lot of options for customization
• The service only offers straight download templates through your email.
• These are simpler videos with no 3D capability. Videos can only be delievered to you .MOV format.

Check out this sample of an Intro Maker intro.

2. IntroCave

IntroCave offers a different and unique spin compared to other intro makers on the market. This option allows you to splice in your content to a base video from their library, and then render it for downloading.

The Good:

• Intro Cave is extremely easy to use.
• There is a free option showing their company watermark, but you’d only use it for demos.

• There are a lot of beautiful particle effects to improve the overall quality of your videos.
• You can get some great high-quality HD video options if you’re willing to opt for one of the paid options.

The Bad:

• It’s a more popular app so there’s a chance someone else will be using your same template.
• You have to pay if you want HD or just to remove the watermark.
• Higher definition videos will cost you anywhere from $5 to $20 per video.
• Intro Cave only accepts PayPal for payment processing. If you don’t have a PayPal account, you’re out of luck.

Here’s an example of an IntroCave intro.

3. IntroChamp

IntroChamp is one of the other no-frills options currently on the market.

If you have videos that need good-looking intros but you don’t need a wide variety of intro clips for them, there is probably an intro template that looks nice and will work well for you here.

The Good:

• The prices aren’t bad. You pay by the template, and most of them are only $4.98.
• You can choose from over 300 different template options.
• Some of the templates are pretty high-quality.
• It’s pretty basic to use so you can create an intro in about five minutes.

The Bad:

• There’s not a lot of ability to customize the templates.
• Although there are over 300 templates, some are better than others. A few look like old CGI throwbacks.
• There is no free option.
• Intro Champ only supports video exports which are emailed to you. You can’t export to Youtube from their platform as with other options.

So if you use IntroChamp just know that you need to store the finished files yourself and upload them to YouTube on your own.

Check out this IntroChamp sample.

4. Renderforest

Renderforest is probably one of the most popular Intro Makers, with over 5 million videos created so far.

The Good:

• They have a massive collection of templates.
• There are plenty of customization options.
• Renderforest allows you to modify the lighting, speed, and animation of whichever template you pick.
• They offer more than just intros if you decide you want additional services.

The Bad:

• They’re pricey. They do have a free option, but you pay for what you get. If you want the special features, you’re going to have to upgrade.
• The free videos are low quality, only 360SD, and they come with a watermark.
• The user interface isn’t as smooth as some of the competitors.

Check out this sample of Renderforest in action.

5. Panzoid

Panzoid definitely has some die-hard fans, but it’s also a bit old school.

The Good:

• They have a great editing suite for modifying any of their templates to suit your needs.
• Panzoid offers video editing services and backgrounds as well as Intros.
• They have a great community of engaged people you can communicate with, get advice from and learn from.
• Best of all, it’s entirely free.

The Bad:

• The site’s user interface is busy, and it’s not easy to navigate.
• The tool is not user-friendly, and it feels pretty outdated.
• The animation options are limited.

Here’s an example of how a Panzoid intro might turn out.

Want some help with your videos? Click here to learn how you can turn your blog posts into professionally produced videos.

6. Tube Arsenal

Tube Arsenal is one of the newer tools on the market, but it’s got some good things going for it.

The Good:

• No software or experience is required to figure out how to use this tool. Tube Arsenal was designed to be easy to use for beginners.
• They have some extremely visually appealing flat design templates
• They also offer a few particle-effect laden templates, which are pretty good.

The Bad:

• The amount of customization available is pretty limited.
• There is no free option. You pay per template, and they range in price. They can start as cheap as $9, but the more popular ones seem to be $15 for the basic version.
• If you want 1080p HD, you’ll be paying an extra $2-$4 per template.
• The website isn’t the easiest to navigate.

Check out a Tube Arsenal intro.

7. Biteable

Biteable is one of the simplest intro makers to use.

The Good:

• Biteable is completely free to use unless you want to upgrade.
• It’s easy to navigate.
• Their 2D intros are good quality and look polished.
• It’s easy to modify your intro for each video you produce.
• It’s great for simply describing the content of your video.

The Bad:

• It doesn’t provide much as far as customization.
• There is no 3D option.
• Biteable’s watermark will be on your intro unless you go premium.
• It’s not eye-catching. It’s you’re looking for something to really grab people’s attention, this isn’t the tool for you.

Check out this sample of Biteable.

8. Filmora

Filmora is the Cadillac of intro makers. If you’re looking for the top of the line model, you just found it.

The Good:

• It’s a fully-fledged video editing and animation-creating studio. If you’re already an experienced, successful channel, this might be the tool for you.
• It has a ton of advanced features and options. There are tons of effects and motion elements that you can implement, with more available for purchase.
• Unique to Filmora, it offers a number of musical tracks that you can build into your intro.
• Filmora also offers the ability to download their mobile app, which means you can even do basic animation on-the-go if that’s your thing.

The Bad:

• It has some monthly pricing schemes, all of which are more expensive than $30 with some as expensive as $300.
• The editing and customization features can be pretty complicated to navigate.

Here’s what a Filmora intro can look like.

9. FlixPress

Flixpress is a popular intro maker with over 7 million registered users. It’s ideal for small businesses who plan on making more than one video a month.

The Good:

• They do offer a free plan and affordable, flexible pricing options.
• They give you the choice of either signing up for a subscription service or selecting a pay as you go plan.
• There are a ton of infomercial-like animations, and backgrounds to select from.
• It’s very straightforward to use and edit.
• Flixpress is the longest running video-making service around.

The Bad:

• There’s not a lot of negative things to say about this one. The big call out here is that it’s focused on business users. If you’re looking for animations or other flashy features, this isn’t the tool for you.
• Keep in mind that while Flixpress has a free option, it’s pretty limited. To really get any benefit out of this tool, you will have to pay for it.

Check out a FlixPress intro.

10. Ivipid

Ivipid is pretty cool if you’re looking for something simple and quirky, but it’s not really a professional business tool.

The Good:

• This intro maker is very straightforward with a basic three-step design.
• The videos are easy to make, and they let you build customized intros that mimic big brands such as the Pixar lamp.
• The pricing is affordable, although the credit scheme is a bit confusing.
• You can upload your videos to the cloud and access them anywhere.

The Bad:

• There are a limited number of templates.
• The tool is not meant to provide advanced editing and customization.
• There is no free option.
• The interface is outdated, and there’s not a lot of support options if you have issues.
• The site is designed to be gimmicky and probably doesn’t offer what you’re looking for if you want a professional business image.

Take a look at Ivipid in action.

Want to get beautiful videos created for you? Look to see how we can help you here.

11. Wideo

Wideo claims to be the simplest intro video maker on the market.

The Good:

• It’s a great tool for making simple cartoon animation videos for your channel, which may serve the same purpose as a traditional introduction.
• You won’t have any major troubles making animated videos with the app.
• You can easily use their template options to make a large number of different intro animations without having to put a ton of additional effort into each extra video.
• Wideo also offers a seven-day free trial period so that you can figure out if this is the right tool for you before having to fork over your money.

The Bad:

• It’s not as simple to use as it claims. It has a ton of features which are not necessarily well documented.
• The main drawback of is its scope: this is a tool for making simple flat-design animated videos, and nothing else.
• Although there is a free trial, after the seven days you have to pay if you want to use this tool. The upside, if you plan on using it a lot, is that it’s per month and not per template.

Check out this sample of Wideo.

12. Videobolt

Videobolt is designed to be a quick and simple tool targeted at beginners looking for something easy to use.

The Good:

• It is easy to use; the video editor is simple and straightforward.
• The tools are great quality.
• The website interface is excellent.

The Bad:

• The biggest downside of this tool is the price tag. There is no free option and $7.99/ month only gets you one video a month. Ouch.
• There are few tutorials. If you want to go beyond the basics, the tool has the ability, but it can be hard to figure out the editor.

Here’s a shot of what Videobolt can look like.

13. Introbrand

Introbrand is similar to the other tools mentioned here but is more design-focused and specialized in logo animations and video intros for video marketing.

The Good:

• Introbrand has 70 exclusive templates made by professional motion designers and their template library keeps growing.
• Designs are contemporary and can fit a variety of different brand styles
• This intro maker is hassle-free as it doesn’t require a subscription
• Free video previews mean you only pay for exporting
• Templates are easy to customize with your logo, text and colors

The Bad:

• • Though their quality is quite nice there are fewer templates than in other tools
  • There is no free option for your export

Here’s what an Introbrand intro might look like (though there are a good variety of template styles).

Conclusion

Now you know the good and bad in the variety of intro maker tools on the market.

The point isn’t that any one tool is better than another. The tool you choose will depend on the capabilities you need from it and your budget.

That being said our personal favorites are Filmora and Intro Maker.

If you have a hefty wallet and want top-of-the-line, go for Filmora.

When looking for just something basic to showcase your logo, consider Intro Maker.

Which tool is your favorite and why? Let us know in the comments!

The post The Best YouTube Intro Maker Video Tools appeared first on The HOTH.

With just a few simple strategies, you can use video to drive loads of traffic to your site, increase your click through rates, and get more people to buy!

Ready to get started?

1) Show Up At The Top Of Google With “Suggested Clips”

Google is now including video snippets in the search results – and often right at the top of search results.

If you’re trying to rank your website for a competitive phrase, it can pay off to create a video for the same topic.

Not only can you rank on YouTube (more on that later), Google will often feature videos at the top of the search results.

Here’s an example of one of the videos that ranks for a valuable keyword:

Keyword: how to get seo leads

See how there are multiple advertisers above this video?

Our video on youtube ranks just under the ads for this keyword. Those ads are going for around $5-$7 PER CLICK. This video was created for $200.

Not only is our video appearing at the top, it’s literally appearing above all organic search results!

This video has over 1,000 views …and it didn’t cost us $5,000 – $7,000.

Here’s how to get these:

1. Create the content: We like to first take “how to” type content that we’ve already written on our site and create a video out of it. Google likes to feature “how to” content in suggested clips, so the type of content is important.
2. Upload a transcript of your audio: This helps Google identify what section to highlight.
3. Embed your video in your blog post: We embed the YouTube video in our original blog post.

2. Get More Real Estate With The Video Carousel

If you’re trying to rank for a keyword, you can often piggy back off the authority of YouTube to show up in the search results:

Here’s another example from the same keyword from above:

1. We rank in the suggested clip
2. Our blog post ranks
3. We’re also ranking in the video slider!

This put us on the 1st page THREE times for this keyword.

By creating videos and embedding them in your posts, you can take up more real estate in the search engines!

3) Get More Mobile Traffic By Embedding Videos

Did you know that 60% of all searches are mobile?

Google has been displaying rich snippets on mobile when video is embedded.

Look at the difference between how this keyword looks on desktop vs mobile.

Keyword: boring niche

This is what it looks like on desktop:

You’re likely to catch more eyes and more clicks.

To take advantage of this, all you have to do is embed your video in your blog post!

4) Rank Your Videos In YouTube

Did you know that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world?

You can’t rank your website there, but you can create videos and optimize them for the same keywords!

5) Syndicate Your Video To Dominate The “Videos” Tab

Want to see a cool trick that can help you dominate the “Videos” tab of Google?

Check out this example – Our video is ranking multiple times on the videos tab:

Here’s how it works:

1. Create a blog post and embed your video in it
2. Use HOTH Syndication to syndicate the blog post (with the video embedded)

It’s simple and easy to execute and can help you get more traffic and more views!

Conclusion

By following this guide, you’ll be able to get more traffic to your website by using video.

Do you have any other tricks to get more traffic with video?

Let us know in the comments!

The post 5 Ways To Get More Traffic Using Video appeared first on The HOTH.

Needless to say, it was a blast teaching about the massive opportunity with video & video SEO in 2018 and beyond.

Check out the replay and slides below!

The post Double Your Traffic With Video Webinar Replay + Slides appeared first on The HOTH.