What are some ways to promote vlogs?

Nathan Williams

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Hello,

Vlogging in my opinion is hard on youtube because there are so many people out there who do it already. I would love to get some more subs and views, and am wondering how to achieve this. Any advice? What are some forums that focus on vlogs for example? Or how to promote them on social media?

thanks
You could always try to promote your vlogs on social media such as Instagram, Twitter or Facebook :)
 

javacentral

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Rather than promoting, you should be implementing SEO and the process for that starts with the idea for the video.

What I mean is you need to be choosing topics that might draw in some search traffic.

Example without any SEO reflection or planning: Making a video about "a day out at the park" - which I'm guessing you'd title "My day at the park" or something. Now, it doesn't matter how amazing that video or the editing is, people aren't typing in "A day at the park" into the search bar. Once you've made a video that isn't really searchable content, no amount of SEO can overcome that. You're already life very hard for yourself. That is why I said the process starts with the idea for the video.

Example with SEO reflection and analysis at the planning stage: Thinking about stuff people might be searching for, you think back at what you've been doing recently and you remember you had a session with a careers advisor who gave you some pretty cool advice about writing a CV. That's something people might be searching for. You therefore plan a video about your appointment with the advisor and you give a summary of advice you received. You can then end the video with what you'd like to do as a career and why and then invite the viewers to give their opinions in the comments and to check out your other vlogs etc. At the end of the video, you remember to leave a 20 second gap for the endscreen. Then after editing, you now have something to work with for a decent SEO title "How to write a good CV and job discussion" - Likewise you write a short description with some searchable keywords that accurately reflect the content of the video and you put the keywords in the tags.

You then create an outro endscreen in that 20 second gap pointing to 3 more of your videos. The aim is to create a gateway into your other videos. You are targeting search traffic through the choice of content and the SEO metadata. If the vid is good, it will have high retention rate which will move it up the search results. If people like your personality and style of vide, they'll check out 2-3 other vids and sub even if they're not also about jobs. The advantage of SEO over "promotion" is that it will bring in a steady strem of NEW viewers every day. Whereas promotion will bring in a peak of views for a few days (when your post is front page on reddit or whatever) but will then drop off as the promotion is replaced by other people's content.

The above is just an example obv. - CV advice is probably a very competitive term (ie too hard to get on front page) and you shouldn't choose it. As a starting channel you should be targeting longtail, non-competitive terms that will still bring in a steady stream of new unique visitors every day. That is how you get the ball rolling on a small channel.
Very nicely explained!