A video is the most valuable type of content out there and, also, the most consumed by online users.

It’s no surprise YouTube has become an incredibly powerful platform for digital marketers and even for search engine optimization. After all, YouTube is owned by Google. What better reason than to harness the power of this mega video platform?

With 1.3 billion users, and almost 5 billion videos watched every single day, it can seem intimidating and overwhelming to make your videos stand out from the masses. While it isn’t an easy task to obtain massive success on YouTube, there are actually easy steps you can take to jumpstart your presence on the channel and benefit from its SEO power.

Do Your Keyword and Market Research

Rule number one in marketing is to always start off with what your market is looking for. There are several free tools you can use to do keyword research on the theme of your video. These tools will help you find the top-ranking terms people are searching for based on the theme you select.

One great tool to use is the Keyword Tool Dominator. With this, you can sort top keywords by rank or popularity and then add them to your keyword list. In this case, we’ve selected the top 5 terms we can use for our video idea.

Metadata Matters

Don’t overthink the fancy terminology. It’s actually quite simple to come up with a winning video title. Make sure the file name of your video includes the name of your top keyword before you upload it.

For instance, in the previous example, if we choose our top keyword as “How to Get rid of T Zone Acne” and decide to do our video around that, our file name should be “How to get rid of t zone acne.mp4”.

Once you have the metadata working for you, you can move onto uploading the video to your channel.

Optimize Your Title and Description

If the top keyword is “How to Get rid of T Zone Acne,” you should also include that as your title. The title of the video and the file name should always match. Your title name should also be within the first characters of your video description. This helps the bots who crawl the information match your title to the description, metadata, and tags.

Use Your Tags Wisely

Needless to say, your title and top keyword should be in your tags. This is also where you should include your other top keywords previously researched.

If you really want to get the best out of your tags, you should also do some more quick research on this step. Let’s say we search for our top keyword on YouTube:

Take the channel names of the first two video results and write them down. These two should be included in the tags of your video if you want your video to eventually show up in video suggestions for those channels when people are watching their videos.

This is a quick hack that many people tend to overlook.

Share Your Video. Everywhere.

Promote, promote, promote. Once your video is uploaded and all set, it’s the time to spread the word. Make sure to utilize all your online audiences on social media to promote video views.

Share on Facebook
Take a screenshot, publish a photo on Instagram and share the link in your Bio
Search for Reddit groups who are having conversations on the same topic and casually introduce them to the video without sounding too salesy
Link to the video on your website
Share the video via message, email, or text with your contacts

Run a Targeted AdWords Campaign to Promote Views

This is the easy way to get quick views. AdWords allows you to create video campaigns for YouTube video views.

You can select the demographics and audiences you want to target as well as any keywords, topics, placements. It can be as granular as displaying your video only on certain YouTube channels. You can also target specific locations to concentrate your views if your business is local.

With about $2 a day, you can obtain quite a lot of views with an efficiently targeted AdWords campaign.