Chapter 2:

Researching YouTube Before You Start

Before you ever upload a video to YouTube or even think about creating a video, it is helpful to do some thorough keyword research in your target market and find out what keywords are popular and what types of videos get tons of views.

The Search Process:

Practically the entire internet is now driven by search and searching processes…And YouTube is no different.
Like any search engine, visitors at http://www.YouTube.com are presented with a search box as the main mechanism for finding videos of interest. Using keywords, YouTube users find videos of interest and then are presented with related videos that they can add to their viewing list, or watch immediately. With basic keyword research on YouTube, you can discover what types of videos are
popular. You simply type in the keyword and look at the thumbnail picture, title, keyword tags, and view count of the videos in the search results.

Researching Keywords With The YouTube Search Function:

The popularity of a video can be gauged by looking at the views count and it is important to see that there are two ways that videos results are returned: By the title of the video and the ‘tags’ used to describe the video. By all appearances, the ‘tags’ are the most important keyword reference to optimize (though knowing that the company is owned by Google, and Google’s secretive ranking measures, we are not 100% sure that tags are the only ranking device) In fact, these are probably the 2 most important optimization tools (other than making a great video) that you can use to get your video viewed many, many times. Fortunately, most YouTube users are not experts at keyword optimization and only tag their videos with a few related keywords. With a little thought and brainstorming, you can make your videos ‘findable’. Today on YouTube, there exists a situation roughly similar to the one mentioned above with how the search engines were in the 90’s…Amateur videos that are not even trying very hard to get top rankings for hot keywords are at the top of the results.
To get similar results, you simply need to pick the best keyword tags for your videos (and it may be prudent to also include your 1 or 2 most important keywords in the title of the video) Online research tools may be useful to find great keywords such as WordTracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) and it would be a great investment your time to get all of the very best keywords and put them in the tags list for each of your videos. If you start with a keyword list from WordTracker (or another comparable keyword tool) and then check your best keywords one by one using YouTube’s search feature, you will
get a pretty good idea of how competitive your niche is.

Sort Your Search Results:

Search results can be sorted by date added, view count, rating, or relevance to keyword. As you are researching your keywords, it is important that you sort search engine results to get the best possible view of what keywords and what type of video will work best. The main sort feature you will want to use is view count because this will show you which videos are getting tons of eyeballs. It is easy to overlook these important search tools, and as of writing this, there is no way to set your own personal search settings. The chart below explains the various sorting tools available to you.

The above screenshot is pretty basic, but take note that each of the links in the search
refinement box will allow you to get new information about your keyword.

4 Keys To Success:

1: You should use the search refinement features when doing keyword research if you want to get the most efficient results for your marketing effort.
2: It should also be noted, annoying as it is, that at the time of writing this eBook, there is no way to ‘customize’ your search settings, so that every time you research a new keyword, you must click one of the sort links to get the data you are looking for. Maybe YouTube will fix this soon, or maybe some marketer will create a research utility using the YouTube api.
3: After you’ve created a YouTube account and uploaded some videos, take the time to create a custom profile and your own custom channel information. You should also create at least one group, and you may want to create a playlist if you have more than 1 video. This will give you a big advantage when people sort for ‘Channels’, ‘Groups’, and ‘Playlists’. If YouTube users are so unsophisticated now that they can barely pick more than 2 or 3 decent keywords to tag their videos with, there is little doubt that few to none areactually taking the time to make customized channels, play lists and groups. This is doubly true for marketers, who may overlook these simple optimization features available and lose out on the potential rewards for 5 minutes of extra work.You can of course do all of these things after you have logged in to your profile page by finding the appropriate link. It is easier than it sounds, and may only require 5 minutes of your time (we’ll cover how to do that later).
4: While it is important to consider all of these elements when making a video, it is helps to make a video that is worth watching! Indeed there are many worthless videos on YouTube that have received 10s or even 100s of thousands of views based solely on the keyword tags used. I have personally seen absolutely 100% worthless videos that no one in their right mind would even waste 15 seconds of their life watching that had over 100,000 views.
I have also seen videos that use no keyword tag optimization (or very obscure keywords tags that alone might only bring a handful of viewers) that were so good that they have hundreds of thousands of views because they were so good that people just had to share them with friends!

The point is, that your goal of research is to use good keywords and then make a
good video. With both of these, your promotion efforts will not be in vain.

@logan1617