Oh oh oh Matthew shameless traffic grab.

heaps of people have been hitting up this blog about youtube promo. So I thought I’d give it more there.

Hi new visitors, I’m Matt I provide online promotion management for bands and stuff.

ALSO AN ANNOUNCEMENT: I’M GOING TO HAVE EASE UP A BIT ON MY AUSTRALIAN BASED BLOGS - I JUST NOTICED I’M TRYING TO HOLD DOWN ALMOST 30 BLOGS HERE!!!

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OKAY I would only talk about Britney Spears pregnant or Britney Spears naked or Paris hilton pregnant or Lindsay lohan pregnant on a blog about online promotion and music marketing to experiment and illustrate a point about this crazy google blog type age we’re living in.

In 2009 Right here is where I might put my affiliate ad for a youtube marketing handbook, software or something. BUY BUY BUY

Y’know if it was $19.95 you’d at least probably get $5.

AND offer a bonus gift of a free digital product from the bands store! nice. 

ANYWAY onto this controversial article. Well it’s not actually controversial to me, I’m well aware of this kind of carry on, but y’know - if your product/music/service/quality is poor . . . NO amount of sneaky stuff is going to help you - or . . . do little more than stroke your ego!

But if you do have good stuff well. Drop me a line. we can be nnnnnnnnnaughtyyyyyy
YOUTUBE PROMOTION TECHNIQUES 

Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: "How the hell did that video get so many views?" Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine.

When most people talk about "viral videos," they’re usually referring to videos like Miss Teen South Carolina , Smirnoff’s Tea Partay music video, the Sony Bravia ads , Soulja Boy - videos that have traveled all around the internet and been posted on YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc. - videos with millions and millions of views.

Over the past year, I have run clandestine marketing campaigns meant to ensure that promotional videos become truly viral, as these examples have become in the extreme. In this post, I will share some of the techniques I use to do my job: to get at least 100,000 people to watch my clients’ "viral" videos.

Secret 1: Not all viral videos are what they seem

There are tens of thousands of videos uploaded to YouTube each day (I’ve heard estimates between 10-65,000 videos per day). I don’t care how "viral" you think your video is; no one is going to find it and no one is going to watch it.

The members of my startup are hired guns – our clients give us videos and we make them go viral. Our rule of thumb is that if we don’t get a video 100,000 views, we don’t charge.

So far, we’ve worked on 80-90 videos and we’ve seen overwhelming success. In the past 3 months, we’ve achieved over 20 million views for our clients, with videos ranging from 100,000 views to upwards of 1.5 million views each. In other words, not all videos go viral organically – there is a method to the madness.

I can’t reveal our clients’ names and I can’t link to the videos we’ve worked on, because YouTube surely doesn’t like what we’re doing and our clients hate to admit that they need professional help with their "viral" videos. But I can give you a general idea of who we’ve worked with: two top Hollywood movie studios, a major record label, a variety of very well known consumer brands, and a number of different startups, both domestic and international.

This summer, we were approached by a Hollywood movie studio and asked to help market a series of viral clips they had created in advance of a blockbuster. The videos were 10-20 seconds each, were shot from what appeared to be a camera phone, and captured a series of unexpected and shocking events that required professional post-production and CGI. Needless to say, the studio had invested a significant amount of money in creating the videos but every time they put them online, they couldn’t get more than a few thousand views.

We took six videos and achieved:

• 6 million views on YouTube
  
• ~30,000 ratings
  
• ~10,000 favorites
  
• ~10,000 comments
  
• 200+ blog posts linking back to the videos
  
• All six videos made it into the top 5 Most Viewed of the Day, and the two that went truly viral (1.5 million views each) were 1 and 2 Most Viewed of the Week.

The following principles were the secrets to our success.

2. Content is NOT King

If you want a truly viral video that will get millions of people to watch and share it, then yes, content is key. But good content is not necessary to get 100,000 views if you follow these strategies.

Don’t get me wrong: the content is what will drive visitors back to a site. So a video must have a decent concept, but one shouldn’t agonize over determining the best "viral" video possible. Generally, a concept should not be forced because it fits a brand. Rather, a brand should be fit into a great concept. Here are some guidelines we follow:

• Make it short: 15-30 seconds is ideal; break down long stories into bite-sized clips
  
• Design for remixing: create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others. Ex: "Dramatic Hamster"
  
• Don’t make an outright ad: if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing. Ex: Sony Bravia
  
• Make it shocking: give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex: "UFO Haiti"
  
• Use fake headlines: make the viewer say, "Holy shit, did that actually happen?!" Ex: "Stolen Nascar"
  
• Appeal to sex: if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video. Ex: "Yoga 4 Dudes"

These recent videos would have been perfect had they been viral "ads" pointing people back to websites:

• Model Falls in Hole on Runway
  
• Cheerleader Gets Run Over By Football Team
  
• PacMan: The Chase
  
• Dude
  
• Dog Drives Car
  
• Snowball – Dancing Cockatoo

3. Core Strategy: Getting onto the "Most Viewed" page

Now that a video is ready to go, how the hell is it going to attract 100,000 viewers?

The core concept of video marketing on YouTube is to harness the power of the site’s traffic. Here’s the idea: something like 80 million videos are watched each day on YouTube, and a significant number of those views come from people clicking the "Videos" tab at the top. The goal is to get a video on that Videos page, which lists the Daily Most Viewed videos.

If we succeed, the video will no longer be a single needle in the haystack of 10,000 new videos per day. It will be one of the twenty videos on the Most Viewed page, which means that we can grab 1/20th of the clicks on that page! And the higher up on the page our video is, the more views we are going to get.

So how do we get the first 50,000 views we need to get our videos onto the Most Viewed list?

• Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.
  
• Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.
  
• MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We take advantage of this.
  
• Facebook: Share, share, share. We’ve taken Dave McClure’s advice and built a sizeable presence on Facebook, so sharing a video with our entire friends list can have a real impact. Other ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends, or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
  
• Email lists: Send the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list (and the recipients’ willingness to receive links to YouTube videos), this can be a very effective strategy.
  
• Friends: Make sure everyone we know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.

Each video has a shelf life of 48 hours before it’s moved from the Daily Most Viewed list to the Weekly Most Viewed list, so it’s important that this happens quickly. As I mentioned before, when done right, this is a tremendously successful strategy.

4. Title Optimization

Once a video is on the Most Viewed page, what can be done to maximize views?

It seems obvious, but people see hundreds of videos on YouTube, and the title and thumbnail are an easy way for video publishers to actively persuade someone to click on a video. Titles can be changed a limitless number of times, so we sometimes have a catchy (and somewhat misleading) title for the first few days, then later switch to something more relevant to the brand. Recently, I’ve noticed a trend towards titling videos with the phrases "exclusive," "behind the scenes," and "leaked video."

5. Thumbnail Optimization

If a video is sitting on the Most Viewed page with nineteen other videos, a compelling video thumbnail is the single best strategy to maximize the number of clicks the video gets.

YouTube provides three choices for a video’s thumbnail, one of which is grabbed from the exact middle of the video. As we edit our videos, we make sure that the frame at the very middle is interesting. It’s no surprise that videos with thumbnails of half naked women get hundreds of thousands of views. Not to say that this is the best strategy, but you get the idea. Two rules of thumb: the thumbnail should be clear (suggesting high video quality) and ideally it should have a face or at least a person in it.

Also, when we feel particularly creative, we optimize all three thumbnails then change the thumbnail every few hours. This is definitely an underused strategy, but it’s an interesting way to keep a video fresh once it’s on the Most Viewed list.

See the highlighted videos in the screenshot below for a good example of how a compelling title and screenshot can make all the difference once the video is on the Most Viewed page.

6. Commenting: Having a conversation with yourself

Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. So do we. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video. We get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitely have a lot of fun with this). Everyone loves a good, heated discussion in the comments section - especially if the comments are related to a brand/startup.

Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment. We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.

We usually get one comment for every thousand views, since most people watching YouTube videos aren’t logged in. But a heated comment thread (done well) will engage viewers and will drive traffic back to our sites.

7. Releasing all videos simultaneously

Once people are watching a video, how do we keep them engaged and bring them back to a website?

A lot of the time our clients say: "We’ve got 5 videos and we’re going to release one every few days so that viewers look forward to each video."

This is the wrong way to think about YouTube marketing. If we have multiple videos, we post all of them at once. If someone sees our first video and is so intrigued that they want to watch more, why would we make them wait until we post the next one? We give them everything up front. If a user wants to watch all five of our videos right now, there’s a much better chance that we’ll be able to persuade them to click through to our website. We don’t make them wait after seeing the first video, because they’re never going to see the next four.

Once our first video is done, we delete our second video then re-upload it. Now we have another 48-hour window to push it to the Most Viewed page. Rinse and repeat. Using this strategy, we give our most interested viewers the chance to fully engage with a campaign without compromising the opportunity to individually release and market each consecutive video.

8. Strategic Tagging: Leading viewers down the rabbit hole

This is one of my favorite strategies and one that I think we invented. YouTube allows you to tag your videos with keywords that make your videos show up in relevant searches. For the first week that our video is online, we don’t use keyword tags to optimize the video for searches on YouTube. Instead, we’ve discovered that you can use tags to control the videos that show up in the Related Videos box.

I like to think about it as leading viewers down the rabbit hole. The idea here is to make it as easy as possible for viewers to engage with all your content, rather than jumping away to "related" content that actually has nothing to do with your brand/startup.

So how do we strategically tag? We choose three or four unique tags and use only these tags for all of the videos we post. I’m not talking about obscure tags; I’m talking about unique tags, tags that are not used by any other YouTube videos. Done correctly, this will allow us to have full control over the videos that show up as "Related Videos."

When views start trailing off after a few days to a week, it’s time to add some more generic tags, tags that draw out the long tail of a video as it starts to appear in search results on YouTube and Google.

9. Metrics/Tracking: How we measure effectiveness

The following is how we measure the success of our viral videos.

For one, we tweak the links put up on YouTube (whether in a YouTube channel or in a video description) by adding "?video=1" to the end of each URL. This makes it much easier to track inbound links using Google Analytics or another metrics tool.

TubeMogul and VidMetrix also track views/comments/ratings on each individual video and draw out nice graphs that can be shared with the team. Additionally, these tools follow the viral spread of a video outside of YouTube and throughout other social media sites and blogs.

Conclusion

The Wild West days of Lonely Girl and Ask A Ninja are over. You simply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own, even if you think you have the best videos ever. These days, achieving true virality takes serious creativity, some luck, and a lot of hard work. So, my advice: fire your PR firm and do it yourself.

 

Kurb is a New Zealand based media promotions company providing a regular blog on digital promotion, marketing digital content and creating revenue from new media online. 

Kurb also provides online promotion and revenue management services for musicians and artists internationally and online / digital coaching for small business. We rank 1 for "online promotion" in ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />..:NAMESPACE PREFIX = ST1 />New Zealand. 
 
And the best value fast turnover physical media services in New Zealand including CD / DVD duplication and poster services.
Our physical media services come with free graphic set up and support, free delivery, and free promotions advice and support for musicians.

We provide expert and affordable promotion support in all web 2.0 areas: Cutting edge Social Network promotion (Myspace, Facebook, Bebo etc.), Social Media, Blogging, Spam management, Content creation, Content management, Content Distribution, OMD, RSS, Aggregators, podcasts, Search ranking, Search marketing and PPC campaigns on Google and Facebook, Website design, Website monetization, Video production + promotion,

We also have an extensive self promotion area for independent musician and talent featuring dozens of articles, how to features and blog links.

http://www.kurb.co.nz
http://www.myspace.com/kurbpromo
http://www.youtube.com/user/kurbpromo -
http://kurbpromotion.wordpress.com
http://kurbpromotion.blogspot.com
http://www.squidoo.com/kurb

So next part - what I’m doing now!!! Or more . ..  last week . . .

Last.fm
garageband.com + ilike
reverbnation.com
squidoo.com
RSS, feedburner etc.

Because while things were cooling off I was taking the opportunity to update my own music stuff and learn the old fashioned way from getting in there and getting my hands dirty.

I knew that as a digital music coach there’s - obviously - heaps of technical stuff I need to know - and this stuff can be intensely frustrating because of the technical aspects ot the interwebz – but totally necessary!

Podcasts for example are one of my pet hates. Cute name. It’s amazing how people rattle it of when lets be perfectly honest. To set up a podcast at the very least you need to have intermediate internet skills. You need to upload a specially generated text script to your host where the mp3 is stored and create an enclosure. If you don’t know what you’re doing it’s no walk in the park. Trust me.

That’s why it is SO important to have a grasp on what internet promotions will work. You can lose nights and nights doing this stuff, lost in the possibilites, and I look at the situation and say – here are sites and techniques that are actually offering opportunities. And that’s what this blog is about. Yknow I do a 40 hour week alone just promoting bands – and my business – on the net so I try to construct my blog around what I would do if I only had an hour or two a day to promote my music, or you’re the guy in the band who’s responsible for online stuff. The essentials.

That’s why I don’t say sign up for every site, trot out the tired line about "using every opportunity" and I’ve talked about avoiding all those sites that are just going to be a waste of time basically, because theres no one there. Use the sites that matter, that are at the critical mass. The tipping point.

So looking at the growing field of aggregators and other web 2.0 platforms and decided it was time I invested some energy into this. Myspace represents now the beginning of a new era, it was the first time people started interacting with music online in a big, populist way, actively discovering new bands and it shifted the momentum of music toward the internet. Now, as I’ve described before, more music will come to people via the internet but as social niches start to break down, and technology will allow for newer and more means for suitable content to come to you.  
 
So lets get down to what I’ve been checking out:

http://last.fm 

last.fm boasts 15 million users so thats pretty much getting there. In fact, when I joined up last year, I was astounded to find I already HAD fans who had "scrobbled" my music - put it into the system and as an aggregator, what they’re doing is big for the future of music: they’re using all that data from the 15million people "scrobbling" the tunes into perfectly analysed recommendations of what songs and bands you might be into based on users that have similar tastes - all by the magic of computer science. They also have a widget and are obviously keen to use all that keen data analysis fandango to help you get some interesting stats on what people are doing with your music.
 

Last.fm is also leading the charge to suss out royalties for artists. We are not talking about a lot here so don’t get too excited. But still.

So they’re doing some stuff. You can see they’re trying to use what they’ve got going on to create a platform for artists and already having found an astounding list of fans and weird mp3’s of mine that people had on their ipods I kinda went uhhhmmm critical mass much??? BUT I didn’t really find their "music manager" that great to use, so though I’d definately get on last.fm and keep it updated perhaps bi-monthly, I probably won’t be hanging around.

http://www.garageband.com 

Now garageband itself wasn’t much of a big yahoo - to me it was definately always one of the so so sites, yknow based around a reward system for reviewing your fellow members which is lets be honest . . . not a skyrocket to success. BUT I will say garageband also had a cool musicians section where I checked out

http://www.fanbridge.com - which offers free mailing lists for musicians. Going full time with music probably isn’t going to happen if you’re not all over managing your mailing list. @ years ago everyone

http://www.myxer.com - offers ringtones. definately non essential unless you’re hitting the teen market but hey why not?

BUT the thing with garageband is that you’re instantly creating access to your music on the Ilike widget which provides a very similar service for itunes and is used by 21 million people!!! and y’know we’re talking active music people here! people who WANT to find and share new music through the aggregator services, and the Ilike widgets that are provided for most social sites - facebook, myspace, bebo etc.so lets go over it. person X likes madonna, prince, and micheal jackson. person Y likes madonna, prince, micheal jackson, and you. So these systems are going to suggest to person X they check out . . . you! now just times that by 21 or 15 million and you’re getting some pretty hard data.  

http://www.reverbnation.com

so im stoked with reverb nation basically just because of the toys I got and it was all pretty hassle free - I hadn’t checked out fanbridge but I knew I had to suss out the options for the all important mailing list for a start so thats why I ended up on reverbnation check it out. Though I don’t know the figures ALSO it gets critical mass points for having an active and acessible local section where almost 500 kiwi artist are already active. that’s a good sign.

We’ll have to see how they go, but even in the last week i’ve had 150 hits off my widgets lets check them out:


 FACEBOOK BUTTON - facebook dont provide urls - whats that about? heres an easy facebook button.

REVERB NATION MAILING LIST

REVERB NATION PLAYER

<

REVERB NATION TUNE WIDGET - "THE MOTHER OF ALL WIDGETS"

This thing is pretty sweet!!!

http://www.squidoo.com

Now reverbnation also allows you to add the RSS feed from your blog to your reverbnation page and ALSO allows html in your profile just like myspace was historically the first to do . . . which as an internet guy has set me off on all sorts of cunning thoughts of search engine optimisation ohhhh juicy juicy backlinks for google . . . and you can embed your widget love!!!

which brings me too squidoo the project of my old favourite superguru seth godin - it’s a combination of a blog and a wiki, you create and update pages about . . . oh anything you like!

Seth Godin is not dumb. Add RSS feed from your blog. Add your youtube videos. Add your itunes . . . and this is where it starts getting significant. Add an amazon store, where you can sell relevant amazon stuff from your squidoo page and collect commission. eassssyyy

hullo is that the future knocking? Yes. but it’s along way to the front door, lets worry about getting out of the chair first.

BUT the whole reason I even mentioned squidoo which is kind of a new thing is that Squidoo is spectacular for google goodness. I started my page last week and already squidoo is ranking number 8 for the search term "kurb".

As myspace found out, sometimes good things come to a spammy end. But where Google love is concerned, I’d get your arse on squidoo. This could be a long shot for blowing up too.

Yknow just like file sharing and spamming, the record industry and myspace respectively could have taken the power back by legalizing. Instead they cracked down and paid the price when they found out it was bigger than they were. Squidoo is smart by letting people make money from them. They won’t lose thier community.

OKAY

You know about my RSS feed I set up on http://www.feedburner.com - if you check out my blogging HQ @ 

http://kurbpromotion.wordpress.com - yes its the one with the horrible 90’s design

 But in a lot of ways I’m actually surprised. In the old days i’d waste my nights signing up for sites where the big proposition was that they would HOST YOUR MP’S FOR FREE!!!!! BIG DING DONG DEAL!!!

 NOW these type of guys have seen that all their bases are belong to Myspace, Facebook etc. so players entering the music 2.0 arena are getting like Seth Godin on it, they have to get down on a level and actually provide the tools that are going to make a difference to the artists who use them. I found writing this I couldn’t really go into all the services each offered because it’s getting pretty utility.

These are sites that are doing somethiing exceptional; that’s what you got to be like.

Myspace isn’t going to make you famous, and spamming myspace isn’t going to make you famous, but if you’re goint to get stuck in and hammer out that fanbase you’re going to need the tools.

JOIN THESE SITES!!!!

coming soon:

More technology??? God I think we need a digital coach!!!!

How are you going to afford that? I dunno. might have to do a 50/50 release with Kurb.

Standby.

Kurb is a New Zealand based media promotions company providing a regular blog on digital promotion, marketing digital content and creating revenue from new media online. 

Kurb also provides online promotion and revenue management services for musicians and artists internationally and online / digital coaching for small business. We rank 1 for "online promotion" in ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />New Zealand. 
 
And the best value fast turnover physical media services in New Zealand including CD / DVD duplication and poster services.
Our physical media services come with free graphic set up and support, free delivery, and free promotions advice and support for musicians.

We provide expert and affordable promotion support in all web 2.0 areas: Cutting edge Social Network promotion (Myspace, Facebook, Bebo etc.), Social Media, Blogging, Spam management, Content creation, Content management, Content Distribution, OMD, RSS, Aggregators, podcasts, Search ranking, Search marketing and PPC campaigns on Google and Facebook, Website design, Website monetization, Video production + promotion,

We also have an extensive self promotion area for independent musician and talent featuring dozens of articles, how to features and blog links.

http://www.kurb.co.nz
http://www.myspace.com/kurbpromo
http://www.youtube.com/user/kurbpromo -
http://kurbpromotion.wordpress.com
http://kurbpromotion.blogspot.com
http://www.squidoo.com/kurb