Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a motivational speaker who can speak about video marketing and how to get more views on Youtube at your next business event. Contact us to check availability. The full transcript of the above video is included below.
Full Video Transcript:
Hi, and welcome to another edition of Strategic Business Insights. Today we’re going to talk about getting more views for your YouTube videos. Now, I’ve been doing a lot of videos, and there are different categories to videos on YouTube. There are some videos that are just like real viral, shocking, entertaining, super-funny collages of things or music videos. That’s a different category. We’re not going to talk about that in his case. What I’m talking about is educational, value-added videos. In this case, they’re business videos.
That’s not the kind of thing where you’re going to get millions of views. It just doesn’t work that way. But you see some videos that have like 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 views, 100,000 views on a video, and you get just a huge pile of them that have like 12 or 36 views, almost none at all. So were going to talk about the distinction between these two.
Now, look, this is important: When you do a video—here’s the beginning of your video, here’s the end of your video—YouTube measures how far someone gets before they leave. Did they get halfway through and they’re gone? Did they get almost to the end? Did they watch the whole thing? Or did they just do 10 seconds and they’re gone?
The further someone gets watching your video, YouTube knows that’s a good video. People kept on watching it. It’s called audience retention. How long did people stay engaged with your video? So you want to make sure that people stay as long as possible through that video, ideally seeing the whole thing. That means a couple of things. Actually, more than a couple, but let’s start with two.
The first 10 seconds is critical. Right away you have to say what is this video about. On my videos, I start all videos the same: “Hi, and welcome to another edition of Strategic Business Insights. Today we’re going to talk about…” boom. Immediately.
That first sentence, “Hi, and welcome to another edition of Strategic Business Insights,” that could be classified as a bumper, what they call bumpers on videos. So again, here’s the beginning, here’s the end of the video – well, you can have a little intro at the beginning. That’s called a bumper. And then you have a little intro or an exit, something at the end, maybe like a splash page or some sort of an animation or whatever. That’s a bumper.
So people talk about putting bumpers on your video. And I would say, generally speaking, don’t do a beginning bumper or do a very minimalistic bumper like what I did, “Welcome to another edition of Strategic Business Insights. Today we’re going to talk about…” boom. People don’t care about who you are. Like I haven’t told you my name yet, right? They don’t care. I’ll tell you my name at the end.
At the beginning, don’t tell them your name, don’t tell them your company – they don’t care. Tell them what is this video about. Then, tell them how you’re going to tell them. “We’re going to talk about four things.” “Today, we’re going to talk about…” boom – the topic. “There are three things you need to know.”
What have you done right there? You’ve told people, “Okay, this is what the video’s about, and there are three things.” That’s going to keep them engaged because here’s the beginning, here’s the end, they know that the first thing’s going to be about here, the second thing’s going to be about there, and the third thing’s going to be about here. They don’t want to miss any of them. They want to get all three. So telling them, “We’re going to talk about three things,” keeps them engaged with your video.
Now, another little thing that you can do is, this is a green screen video, so I have chosen a background image, and you can pick a background image that’s appropriate given the topic that you’re talking about. That is going to have a couple of impacts. When people see the thumbnail, on YouTube when they do a search there’s a list of videos where there’s a thumbnail of each one, so they’re going to look at those thumbnails, and if you have a professional-looking video thumbnail with a nice background, it increases the number of people who are going to click on your video rather than one of the other ones that’s listed. So that’s the initial conversion.
Actually, the very first conversion is to put tags and keywords into your title, description, and the tags of the video that will result in your video showing up in that list in the first place. Now, there’s actually a YouTube keyword tool that you can find. It’s publicly available. Anyone can use it. So if you’re going to make a video, go to Google, search for “YouTube keyword tool.” You’ll find it right away. Go there and search for those keywords, and you’re going to find a whole list of keywords, related keywords or keywords that YouTube thinks are related to what you entered that you can look through.
Look through those keywords. It’s very interesting. You’re going to see probably a ton of musicians or rappers or movie-trailer-type keywords because that’s what people are going to YouTube for. Again, it’s like orders of magnitude more. Like a good business video can get maybe 100,000 views, or maybe 200,000 views would be like an outstanding business video. Meanwhile, a music video can have 30 million views. So it’s totally different.
So the vast majority of those keywords are going to be music-video-related, musicians, pop culture, movies, rappers, whatever, sports stars, Kobe Bryant and so on. So you’re going to find a lot of those, but you’ll find a few gems where you’re like, “Wow, no kidding! People are searching for that?” So you can put that in as well.
So the first level of conversion is to increase the keywords in your title, description, and the tags of the video. That’s going to result in you showing upon that screen, the initial search results page. The second level of conversion is to have a video thumbnail that’s attractive somehow, whether it’s maybe you look really good or you put a picture of a gorgeous girl out there somehow. Having a good background image is going to make a difference. It’s going to look more professional. That’s going to increase the number of people who click on your video.
And the third thing is that those first 10 seconds, you have to tell them right away “this is what the video’s about, we’re going to tell you four things” or whatever it is, give them an idea of what they’re going to get, which is going to increase the length of time they stay engaged with your video. What’s that going to do? YouTube is going to rank your video higher for those keywords. Your ranking is going to go up based on audience retention.
I’ve seen this on my own videos. Some of my videos are better than others, and the bad ones, it doesn’t work. But on the good ones, people watch it longer, and all of a sudden I notice that my video’s ranking higher and higher and higher. All of a sudden they get these big spikes, like they have the analytics for all the videos, and you can see like there’d be a little traffic, views, and all of a sudden it’ll kind of jump up and I’ll get more every day, and then it’ll jump up again and I’ll get yet more. What’s happening in those cases?
Well, the first case, it’s my video is just showing up as like a related video to a not very popular video. But once it sees the retention is good, all of a sudden my video becomes a related video to the ones on the right-hand side that show up to popular videos. So people see the popular videos and my video’s right here. And if it’s really good, then they’ll move it to the search results page on the primary search, and then I start getting a ton of views. Like I’ve got a couple of videos that all of a sudden they just started getting a ton of views, and it’s because they moved up that ladder.
Again, ton of views for the category that we’re talking about. I wish I could get 30 million views on a video. It just doesn’t work for my type of content. But the bottom line is, even in this category it gets me a lot of exposure, and as a professional speaker, a huge part of my marketing is these videos and the stuff that I do on video on YouTube.
So give it a try. There are ways to get a lot more views on YouTube, but I hope these tips have helped you out. Thanks for watching this video. This is Patrick reminding you to think bigger about your business, think bigger about your life.
Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a keynote speaker who has spoken at business conferences and in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
