In order to be found, you need to be searchable. To be searchable, your brand must transcend across audiences. The online world has made this very crucial. With so many competitions around, it is easier to get drowned and be lost. One of the best places where people search is YouTube and having a good title is very important. Tracy gives out the best YouTube Video Titling practices. Learn how to configure your titles, descriptions, and channel on YouTube. Find out the best practices to completely optimize the platform the best you could. Get to know the kind of content you put in and where exactly to put them. Get found and feed your brand.

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How to Make your Podcast YouTube Videos More Searchable with New Titling Best Practices

I’m here to talk about YouTube, not about Facebook, not about podcasting. This question came up from one of our clients and it’s a good question. It’s about how you configure your titles, your descriptions and your channel on YouTube. It is important because a lot of people are going from live stream to Facebook, from Facebook into your blog posts. These are Brandcasters’ best practices. This is what we do for our clients. We’ve had some clients go in and retitle their videos. That goes against everything that we do in content strategy. I want to take the time to explain what we’re doing here and why it’s so powerful for you. If you’re going to brandcast, if you want to get the most power out of your videos, your podcast, your live streams, all of this content production, including your blogs and your writing, you have to get your ego out of it. That’s the number one thing that you have to do. You have to get over the fact that, “This isn’t about me, it’s about the person listening, the person reading, the person viewing.” It’s about what they’re going to search for, what they’re going to care for, what they’re going to want to read, to view and to listen to. It is all about them. We have to get ourselves out of that mode.

This is not the time to be worrying about what our show title is. This is not the time to be worrying about the branding of ourselves, not in the titling of our videos, our episodes and our blog posts. It is the place to put it on our channel, our website. Those are our things. They belong to us. When people are looking for that, they’re looking for us. These are just a couple of the difference. We have to have a content strategy on the episodes, the podcast, the videos, the blog posts. We have to have a content strategy there that is topic-based, that is going where the pain is, that is going where people are searching. That is all set around the Google algorithm or the Facebook algorithm if we’re on Facebook and we’re doing live streams. We have to think about what people are searching for and what they’re looking for there. That’s the first part of it.

We have to remove ourselves from that process and our thought and not worry about how we’re being found. It’s how our stuff is being found and by our stuff being found, our name is mentioned everywhere. We’re there, our face is there. Everything we need to get them to come find us afterward if they choose to do that, is all there. We do not need to worry about that kind of brand awareness. It’s going to be a natural and organic progression of the whole process. Let’s talk about titles first because that is some of the most critical things. We’re going to take it from the live stream. We’re going to move it over to YouTube, we’re going to put our bumpers on it, which is has our brand on it. It’s going to say Feed Your Brand on it at the end of the day.

If you want to get the most power out of your videos, podcast, or live streams, then get your ego out of all the content production. Click To Tweet

We’re going to move it over there. We’re going to download it and take it off and move it over there. When we load it in, we have a lot of choices to make. We have to title things, we have to put descriptions in and we have to tag them. The first thing that we’re going to do is address that title because that is one of the most critical things. You only have 100 characters to work with. You want to make that 100 characters count. You want to definitely make it topic-based. You want to hit in that title, “What is it that people are going to be searching on? How am I helping them? When I move this over to YouTube, do I want to put YouTube best practices or YouTube titling best practices?” Maybe I want to title it that way, where it’s nice long tale. I’m not worrying about anything else in that. I’m worried about what somebody might type in and how they will decide to choose my video for helping them. Maybe I want to say, “YouTube titling best practices and pitfalls of doing it wrong.” That may attract someone. You want to make it an attractive sounding title, but you don’t want to make it something that is just a catchy name because if I don’t type in the words “Best practices for titling” or “Titling best practices” or “YouTube titling best practice,” I’ll never find you. I’ll never find that video. That’s the first thing that we want to do is make sure that it’s topic-based. Remember that we have 100-character count. We want to make that count and that includes your spaces.

The next thing we want to address are those tags. Here’s where we want to make sure every guest’s name shows up. If we have room to put them in our title, we do it because somebody might be searching. I did a video with Steve Wozniak. I want to have Steve Wozniak’s name in because somebody might definitely search that in YouTube. If I have room to, that’s a draw. If they’re unknown, then I don’t want to waste room in my title for it but I’m definitely going to put them in my tag. This is where guests help boost us. If we’re not as famous, this is why we want to have better and more famous guests to help us along here.

That’s one of the places at which we can put all of those people in the tags because maybe they’ll become famous later. Maybe they’re on a PR pitch, maybe they’re going to do a lot of shows and then people are going to start searching for them. We definitely want to make sure we have them in our tags. We want to have your name in the tags. We don’t need your name in the title and we don’t need your show name in the title. We want those things in the tag and the reason we don’t need them there is that they should be on your channel. Your channel is all about you and your channel will be something that YouTube pops in if they type my name in. If they type Tracy Hazzard in, they’re going to find all of my shows, all of my channels. They’re going to find all of the episodes I’ve guested in and been in and all that I’m tagged in as well. They’re going to find me.

YouTube Video Titling: Your channel is all about you.

 

In fact, there’s another Tracy Hazzard who’s a musician and I beat her out every single day on Google, on YouTube and on Facebook. She’s a music star and why do I beat her out? It’s because I produce so much content and there are so many videos and there is so much stuff that I put out there. Those beat out a handful of songs that she’s done or a dozen of songs that she has out there or a couple of albums because they belong on iTunes. They belong in the iTunes music library, not where I tend to post my content. That’s where you’re going to play with your show and your name. It’s going to be in the tags and in the channel.

Before I address the channel because it’s a broader concept, I want to address the description. In the description, you have 5,000 characters to play with. You’ve got plenty of room. You could post your entire transcript from your podcast. Some of you will speak 6,000, I do 10,000 words sometimes. Maybe not me, but you could post the majority of it. There’s no reason not to. Why not? For the most part, at a minimum I recommend a good opening paragraph where you’ve got your keywords, you’ve got information about your guests and you’ve got the introduction to what this video is about. People are watching videos, they’re not readers, they don’t care. That’s why we don’t waste the time putting that whole transcript in there even though you do have 5,000 characters to work with. If that’s got all the important phrases, all the important words put into that one paragraph, it’s plenty. That’s what we use.

Below that, you can do things like add some more links to your show, make sure people can find your website, invite them to book with you if you’re a coach, you put promos after that. A lot of people put the first sentence and then a promo because they want people to click on that. The reality is that YouTube doesn’t make it clickable. They have to copy and paste it anyway. I find it’s better to put it after. It looks better, it looks more professional and it looks less pushy and salesy. That’s my preference, it’s definitely not the recommendation from people who are out there who are pushing their YouTube videos and wanting to make sure they get conversions from them.

We have to remove ourselves from that process and thought and not worry about how we're being found. Click To Tweet

It’s not part of their practices, but I like a more passive way of dealing with getting people to organically choose you. It makes for a better mailing list. It makes for a better audience. It makes for a better sales process in the long run because they definitely chose to come to you. I have to tell you, I have multiple podcasts that are my personal shows, not just the ones that we produce here at Podetize. Feed Your Brand is of course owned by Podetize. We see all the time that traffic comes from YouTube. I get cold calls straight from YouTube. They’ve never seen my website. They will come straight over YouTube. You want to make sure you have your contact information there and that is one of the reasons that I put that in every single post that we do.

Those are some basic tips on the titles, tags and descriptions. Let’s talk a little bit about the show and channel because the channel is important and so often you don’t configure your channels. You don’t take the time to put great header graphics. This is when somebody is deciding whether or not they’re going to subscribe to you. They come in the first time and that’s what they see. They see your big old header graphic, they see your icon which is a square. They see all of those things. If you’re not utilizing that visual space, because remember YouTube video watchers are viewers, they’re viewing things. They are visual learners. You want to have a great visual impact, you want to have good stuff in there. You want to make sure they can see your website if that’s what you want. You want to brand your show name, you want to make sure all of that is very prevalent. Your name, if that’s where it is. Your face, if that’s what you want them to see there.

This is one of those exceptions to it where I say, “Put your face here.” This is an okay place to do that. You can put it either in the square or you can put it on the side of it. Don’t take your whole room with all your face, that’s a little overdone. It seems too egoish. You want to make sure that people know, “I met Tracy at an event. That’s her face. That’s what she looks like. I’m at the right Tracy Hazzard.” You do want to make that recognition happen. This is a place for you to do that. Also, your channel has tons of configuration. It has its own description, its own tag, its own title, all of those things exist, use them. Use the full character counts. This is how you’re going to get found on YouTube. They liked to serve up channels. They don’t just like to serve up videos because YouTube wants you subscribing. They want to serve you more content. If they can get you to subscribe to your channel and they can get who’s ever searching to subscribe to your channel, then you’re on pace for doing what YouTube already wants to encourage as a behavior. This is the time. This is the place to put all of that and make sure you configure it.

YouTube Video Titling: When it’s important, it’s viewed and found again.

 

There’s another step you can do, which is to configure playlists. If I’ve got Feed Your Brand episodes and maybe these are all about YouTube and these are all about videocasters and I want to group them together in one playlist, this is a chance for me to add those additional keywords, to add those tags and to configure that playlist so that it will also show up in search criteria. That’s also another level you can do once you’ve got multiple episodes and you’ve got a lot of content to search through. I just wanted to give you a broad brush on what we do here in terms of making sure that videos get searched just like blogs because it’s just the same. The algorithms are almost exactly the same because Google owns YouTube. We want to make sure that you are using the same content strategy practices. The same practices that we use on the podcast, the same practices we use on blog posts. This is the same content strategy that you should be using to do YouTube video titling best practices, to do YouTube video description practices. Just utilize those same techniques. It works exactly the same way.

It’s still hard to be seen on YouTube. I know it. There are a lot of videos being viewed every day. There are billions of videos being viewed worldwide every single day. When you have a hot topic, when you’re talking about something that is in the news right now, when you’re talking about something that is of interest, you definitely want to make sure to put those into the description, the tags and the titles. Make sure you’re putting that. If you have the old content and you need to go back into it and edit those things, you can do that. You cannot reload up a video. Don’t do that because it won’t let you reload duplicate content. Once you replace a video, you lose your statistics but you can absolutely edit the titles, the show description and the tags to be relevant.

Remember that YouTube video watchers are viewers. They are visual learners. Click To Tweet

If all of a sudden something’s come up because you were talking about something and maybe the #MeToo Movement and now it’s coming up because of what’s going on in Congress, you definitely want to retag your videos so that they get found at that moment. We do this a lot in our product business. We go to other places and we make sure to redo things for the season. There might be seasonal things and seasonal reasons why you want to retag your video. These do not have to stay static. That’s also something that I want you to remember. It’s important for you to be able to utilize that to get the most out of this content that you created so that it doesn’t become old and no longer in use or no longer viewed. When it’s important, it’s viewed again, it’s found again, it’s served up by YouTube.

I hope this has helped you dial in some thoughts about this videocasting world because I know it’s new to a lot you. I know it’s new to a lot of you to be taking your live streams, which was a totally different model because it was all about showing up and going live and hoping people show up for you. It was more about that than it was about what you were talking about. This is a little bit different. This is about having a content strategy. I just want to make sure that you are getting there and getting these types of practices that we see that work well overall. This is Tracy Hazzard and I’m from Feed Your Brand and you can find us on the web at FeedYourBrand.co. You can find us on Facebook, @FeedYourBrand and on YouTube at Feed Your Brand. Thanks again for joining me. Until next time.

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