How to Advertise Your YouTube Videos If you're serious about getting your videos seen, it might be time to investigate pay-per-click advertising. It'll cost you, but you'll see results.
By Jason R. Rich •
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The following excerpt is from Jason R. Rich's book Ultimate Guide to YouTube for Business. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound
If you have the budget, you should seriously consider using paid search advertising (also referred to as keyword advertising) to promote your YouTube videos.
For example, when you use Google AdWords, Google AdWords for Video or similar services offered by Yahoo!, Bing and Facebook, you can create short ads that include a direct link to one of your videos or your YouTube channel page. These paid advertising opportunities are inexpensive and highly targeted, ensuring that your ad(s) will be seen at the exact moment someone is searching for content based on a keyword or search phrase that matches specific keywords associated with your video content.
These services work on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis, which means you only pay when someone actually clicks on the link featured within your ad. While thousands of people may see the ad, if only 100 of those people actually click on the link, you only pay for those 100 clicks, not the thousands of views.
How much you wind up paying per click--or your cost per click--will vary greatly, based on the popularity of the keywords you select to associate with your ad, along with a handful of other factors. Another benefit to this type of advertising is that you can set your budget in advance.
For example, if you know the cost per click is 50 cents and you have a $100 per week budget, you know that in your best-case scenario, your ad can generate 200 new views. You also know the people watching your videos are well-qualified and part of your target demographic. This method works best when your cost per click is low, but the click-through rate (the number of people who click on the link in your ad vs. the number of people who see the ad) is very high.
What's not seen by the people viewing your ad, but that you as the advertiser need to create, is a list of highly specific keywords or tags related to whatever it is you're promoting. It's these keywords (along with the content within your ad), plus a few other factors, that will determine who sees your ad, where it's seen and how often it's seen. The keywords you select are as important as the content of the ad itself.
Every character, word and line within a Google AdWords ad, for example, should have a purpose and impact, plus convey a message. The ad's goal is to attract attention and get someone to click on the link in order to immediately access your video, YouTube channel page or your website that has your YouTube video embedded in it.
All the major search engines offer keyword advertising opportunities, as does Facebook. To learn more about these opportunities, visit:
All have a very low startup cost but offer the ability to ensure that your ads are seen exclusively by your target demographic within the time frame you select. One of the great things about using these advertising services is that you have the opportunity to target your ad's viewers. Plus, you can create, launch and see the results from your ads within hours of launching a new campaign. It's also possible to easily run and track multiple campaigns simultaneously that utilize a different ad message or a different assortment of keywords.
Because Google AdWords is so closely related to YouTube, this is probably the best service to begin advertising with. However, you may want to run ad campaigns using two or more of these services simultaneously in order to reach web surfers when and where they're actually looking for your product or service.
On the YouTube service itself, one fee-based method for promoting your videos is the AdWords for Video program. Like Google AdWords, AdWords for Video allows you to promote your YouTube videos in a way that's highly targeted, yet it's offered on a pay-per-click basis. One difference between AdWords and AdWords for Video is that the latter includes a thumbnail video image within the ad.
Keyword advertising can help you quickly build an audience for your videos, because you can create and launch an ad campaign within an hour or two and immediately track its results in real time. Based on your budget, consider running multiple ad campaigns, with different wording or keywords associated with each, simultaneously on a single service or across several services in order to more efficiently build an audience for your videos.
