3.

3: Promotion Secrets: The Places To Get More Views

They say “build it and they will come”, but with YouTube, that’s often a total lie. PROMOTE it, and
they will come.

If you upload a new video and wait for the almighty YouTube algorithm to make your video go viral,
you're probably gonna be waiting a long, long time.

Unless you have thousands of subscribers already, we have to get the initial ball rolling ourselves
because we have to PROVE to YouTube the video is good by giving it some data (i.e. people clicking on
the video, watching it, and engaging). Because like we said in the previous trainings, otherwise
YouTube cant know if the video is good without user data.

This is where promotion comes in, which also allows you to reach an even wider audience.

And, wouldn’t it be great if the people who would LOVE your videos had conveniently already got
themselves into online groups?

Well they have. You just have to go tell them about your content in a non-spammy way.

So where are these groups filled with your ideal viewers? Here are 3 of the big ones:

1. Forums (search variations of your niche + the word 'forum' or ‘message board’ on google)
2. Facebook groups (search variations of your niche on Facebook)
3. Sub-reddits (search variations of your niche on reddit.com)

And you can no doubt find communities in other places too with a little searching, but those 3 places
tend to have some of the best results.

Because the idea is, if you’ve made a video relevant to that community, if you share it with them then
they’re gonna enjoy it or find it helpful, and it helps grow your channel too, so it’s win-win.

So, here’s how it works. You start looking for these niche communities. For example, if your channel
is about weight loss, you find weight loss communities. If it’s about affiliate marketing, you find
affiliate marketing communities. And so on. I guarantee for every niche there will be some online
group where people who are interested in that topic all meet up and share things. It can take a little
bit of research and maybe asking around for some recommendations, but it’s 100% worth your time,
as if you can find a community suitable to your niche, that’s essentially a group of people who would
love your videos and potentially also become customers and clients of yours.

The key thing is, once you find one of these communities (whether it’s a forum, a facebook group, a
subreddit or something else), when you first join, genuinely try to add real value and chat with people
a little before even mentioning your own videos.

Only once you’re a part of the community, then share your video with some context of why it may be
helpful/interesting for them. Don’t be spammy. Yes, this takes longer, but the long-term results are
much better than link-dropping and leaving.

You only need one group to respond well to your video to kickstart the YouTube algorithm. And
remember, if your video is highly relevant to the community, they’ll be glad you share it too, the trick
is to make sure it’s not coming across in a spammy way by first getting involved with the community
a little and making sure your posts follow their rules.

Now, apart from these small communities, where else can you promote your videos?
1. Blogs – Just like with communities, there’ll be blogs about pretty much any niche imaginable,
no matter how specific. One promotion strategy is to find as many blogs as you possibly can
that are related to some of your videos. Some will have a ‘submission’ tab where you can
submit relevant content (i.e. one of your YouTube videos). If not, scroll to the bottom of the
blog and you will normally find a way to contact the blog owner, whether that’s an email
address or social media profile. Send them a very polite message saying that you like their
blog and the work they’re doing, and that you have a video you think their audience would
really enjoy. The message should be constantly be stressing what’s in it for them? You want
to show that you understand their blog and explain why embedding this video of yours in a
post would be good for them. It should feel like you’re providing them content, not that you’re
asking a favour. The more successful the video of yours has been, the bigger the blogs that
may consider it. However, even if you could get your video included on a couple of small blogs,
that would be some great credibility and promotion. This strategy typically has a low success
rate, but just 1 or 2 successes can have a dramatic impact which makes it worth doing,
especially once you develop a customizable email template you can send to lots of different
blogs quite quickly (make sure to change it enough that the email feels personal).

2. Tumblrs – Just like with the blogs strategy, you can find relevant tumblr accounts (e.g. if you’re
in the self development niche, a tumblr blog that posts about self development) and once
again send them your video as content they can use. If you’re struggling with this, you could
also create your own tumblr blog about your niche and post a mix of content to it, some of
which will be your own videos. If you use a lot of relevant hashtags and follow similar tumblrs,
this will no doubt attract attention your tumblr posts and as a result attract new people to
your YouTube channel.

3. Medium – as well as getting featured on someone else’s blog, why not write your own blog
post and publish it on a platform with millions of monthly active users like Medium? It’s free
to create an account and do this, and you can simply use the script/outline you wrote for your
YouTube video as the core of the post, and include a link to the ‘video version’ of the article
(i.e your YouTube video) or links to other videos of yours that are related to the article. This is
not only a way of creating backlinks, but a way for a whole new audience to discover your
channel.

4. Quora – In case you’re not familiar, this is a question and answer site. A great promotion
strategy is to search Quora for questions related to your niche, and then answer the question
but also provide a link to a relevant video of yours stating that they can get a more detailed
answer in the video. Make sure the answer you give is still helpful as just directing people to
your video will come off as pure self promotion, but if you give a real answer and link to your
video/channel as well, then your answer may get upvoted and people who are looking for
help related to your niche will find your videos, so there’s a high chance they’ll check them
out.

5. Pinterest – Pinterest is like a virtual scrapbooking site, and I highly recommend making a free
account and creating a pin “board” for your YouTube channel. Keep in mind the SEO advice
from the last training about using searchable keywords for your title, as Pinterest can bring
you traffic from both inside their community and from Google search. Once you have a board
setup, you can begin pinning your YouTube videos to it so that the Pinterest community can
discover them – again, just make sure to optimize your SEO so it’s highly searchable. This is
 not only another way of promoting your videos and reaching a wider audience, but it is also
another example of creating backlinks to your video, which as you know from the previous
training is very powerful, especially backlinks from trusted sources like Pinterest. So, for the
sake of 20 seconds of pinning every new YouTube video you post, it is 100% worth it.

6. YouTube Self Promotion Subreddits – As well as subreddits for your individual niche, there
are also some sub-reddits dedicated to YouTube promotion. I would not use these overly
extensively because a lot of people in these subreddits are just there to post their videos
rather than watch other people’s. However, for a quick influx of views to get some initial social
proof, they can be useful. More than that, some of them also have a system where you can
request feedback for your video if you give feedback to someone else first; this can actually
be very useful and is well worth doing. https://www.reddit.com/r/smallytchannel is my
personal favourite, but there are others that can work too like /r/SmallYouTubers/ and
/r/AdvertiseYourVideos/ . These small YouTuber communities can also help you connect with
more people on a similar path. There are also other subreddits designed for sharing great
videos, but in these do not go overboard with self promotion: /r/mealtimevideos/ and
r/videos/

7. Guerrilla Marketing – The reality is that the best promotion methods and tactics are the ones
where you get creative, because those are the ones other people haven’t thought of. Always
keep a look out for new places to share your content with a wider audience, and new tactics
for getting the best results. One slightly controversial example is I know some people get their
friends to upvote their posts (for example on reddit) so that the posts get more visibility.
Studies have shown that if a post gets a few extra upvotes or likes in the first 10 minutes, it
dramatically effects how well the post does overall. Now, this kind of thing is considered vote
manipulation so I’m not going to recommend exactly that, but it’s important to start thinking
outside of the box.

So, to conclude, we cannot simply sit around and hope YouTube promotes our videos if we’re not even
going to promote them ourselves. There are so many options out there for those willing to go and find
them. The first 24 hours after a video goes live is crucial in terms of the algorithm making a decision
about how much to push the video, so driving as much traffic to your video within the first 24 hours
via promotion is a very effective strategy. In fact, it may be worth adding a final step to the upload
checklist we mentioned earlier, which is ‘promote the video everywhere you can!’

However, one of the best promotion places of all we haven’t even discussed yet, because it deserved
a whole training to itself, because if done correctly, it can be incredibly powerful. As you may have
guessed, I’m talking about other social media platforms – Instagram, Twitter and all the rest - and
we’re going to be getting to that in the very next training.