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C h a p t e r 2 0 Marketing Your YouTube Videos 235

Advertise Your Video

This is a relatively new option for producers of YouTube videos. YouTube now
offers the option of advertising your video on the YouTube site to YouTube viewers.
YouTube calls the ads Promoted Videos, and they work just like Google AdWords
or any other pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program. This is such a big deal that
I’ve devoted a whole chapter to the topic; flip ahead to read about it.

Note

Learn more about YouTube Promoted Videos in Chapter 22, “Advertising
Your YouTube Videos.”

The Big Picture

You can’t just upload a video to the YouTube site and expect a thousand views
overnight. It takes a lot of hard work and creativity to attract viewers to your
videos; it doesn’t happen by chance.

If you’re lucky, all your effort results in an upsurge of viewers for your video. At this
point, success begins to beget success. That is, the more viewers you attract, the
more they talk about and recommend your video, thus further increasing the view
count. You need viewers to create more viewers.

Then, if you’re even luckier, your video’s view count is high enough to become one
of YouTube’s top-rated videos. When this happens, your video appears on YouTube’s
Videos tab, which displays the daily most-viewed videos. This is when your video
hits the big time; with this type of prominent exposure, you get even more views
than you did before. As I said, success begets success.

From there, the next logical step is to go viral. This happens when your video’s
viewership expands beyond YouTube. Maybe a local television station picks up the
video, or you get a mention on a major website, or CNN or MSNBC—or even
David Letterman or The Daily Show—start showing the video on the home screen.
If you’re lucky enough for this to happen, get ready for a wild ride. Your view count
could easily hit the seven figure mark, and you could get more buzz than you ever
thought possible.

This, of course, is what we all strive for: massive exposure with minimal cost and
effort. But both you and I know that the effort wasn’t minimal; you have to work
hard just to get basic exposure for your video, let alone go viral.