While videos are great for branding purposes, they work extremely well for driving direct sales, too. The trick, however, is not to make them sound like a pitch. You have to come across as someone sharing important information.
While there are many video sharing sites on the Internet, YouTube has some distinct advantages over all other video sharing sites. It is a highly-trafficked social media platform, has a page rank 9, and is owned by Google.
It is estimated that about 35 hours of videos are uploaded every minute—so add exponential growth to the long list of why this is the best place to upload your videos. Since it's a top-ranking authority site, besides the opportunity to put your video on a website that has millions of visitors, you will be getting great backlinks from it, as well.
4 Traffic-Getting Methods
There are four main ways to get traffic to your website:
1. Buy a keyword-rich domain, write content with excellent on-page SEO, and create numerous off-page SEO back links.
2. Use paid advertising.
3. Do social media marketing.
4. Put your link with your YouTube video.
Why YouTube?
While you can be successful using organic SEO strategies, paid advertising, or social media, your results will increase exponentially, when you add YouTube videos.
There are several reasons for this increase in traffic:
1. A thumbnail of a video on a Google search engine results page will attract a higher click through than the other listings. This is because images are, generally speaking, more compelling than words.
2. People prefer to watch a video presentation than to read through a page of text. Over the years, people have become less interested in reading and more focused on watching and listening when it comes to gathering information about something they are interested in learning.
3. You can link to your YouTube video from your blog, your Facebook pages, and other social media. So don't treat your videos as a standalone advertising technique, but integrate it into the rest of your marketing steps.
4. Videos build up more rapport than written words or audio files. Videos simulate face-to-face interactions. This gives you an opportunity to engage people and interest them in what can benefit them and help you earn an income. Please, don't sell, but inform, and rather than tell people what to do, show them how it can be done.
5. A picture is worth a thousand words. So a video of, say, the back office of a new membership site, is much more informative than a blow-by-blow description of it.
6. It is much easier to rank on Google for keywords associated with a video than keywords associated with an article. By targeting local searches with videos, a website will get more visitors.
7. Videos imitate real life—color, motion, sound—and as such are more entertaining than text, which is devoid of all three.
How to Increase Traffic
The secret to getting more traffic from YouTube videos is to make better videos. While a viral video is usually a result of luck more than anything else—because it features something well out of the ordinary—you can still improve traffic without your video going viral. A better video does not have to be a technically elaborate video. Instead, a better video should offer more value through more informative content.
Here are some ideas to improve your video's popularity.
1. Understand what your target audience wants to know.
2. Learn how they best respond to the information.
3. Use trigger words to elicit a desired emotion. For instance, if you're marketing an Internet Marketing product, then use words like "make money from home," "fire your boss," and so on. Although not original, they still work wonders.
4. Keep it simple. Don't bewilder your audience with a sophisticated, complicated presentation.
5. Increase incentives for a favorable response. For instance, you might offer a lot of bonuses if someone buys an affiliate product from you.
6. Choose a structure that best communicates the benefits of your product. For instance, you may simply want to talk, or you may want to offer a slide show, a guided tour, or an expert interview to make your point.
Your goal is to constantly improve what you're doing, trying to isolate a formula that has the most impact on your audience. A study of copywriting principles will make a huge difference when you shape your video script.