Tarmack
Rhetorical Porcupine
I'm going to pick the brains of this community at some point for comments and criticism of my channel, but I thought since I've only just found the forum that I would try to give a tip/trick that may not be commonly thought of. I did see another thread mentioning adwords but I wanted to go into a bit more detail.
Adwords is the google program giving context sensitive ads to searches and it functions on Youtube as well, as we all likely know. Google gives between $50 and $100 periodically ($75 more frequent from what I've seen) to new start up accounts in advance credit without having to pay a dime just to try the program out.
here's a link advertised on this very site that I clicked on while typing this post for the $75
https://services.google.com/fb/forms/adwordscredit3 (hopefully this link stays active for some time)
When you go to create an ad you can select age/interest demographics to target as well as specific keywords to target as well. So you can narrows it down quite well to what kind of videos you do. The program gives you an estimate of how much "per click" you will be paying from your start up credit but you won't get a true picture of how much it costs until the first day or two are done. I'd recommend a $3-$5 per day budget so you don't blow the whole thing right away and can make a few changes. I'd also recommend making 2-3 different ads so you can compare them with each other to see which ones perform better.
Now continuing with recommendations. First of all don't get discouraged when you run ads and see a very large number of views with a very large number of "impressions". Impressions are how many times your ad was displayed and 1000 impressions per view is a fairly normal number. I did find in my experiments that the "in stream" ads were the most successful for gaining views (in-stream = the ones you have to "click to skip"). The neat thing about "in-stream is that you have 5 seconds before the person can click to skip the ad, so if you can hook them in 5 seconds you're golden. If not, then as long as they click skip before 30 seconds if your video has gone by, you won't get charged for a view.
I would also strongly suggest you limit all of your ads to youtube exclusively if you're trying to build a channel that stands on it's own. If you're promoting a product then fine, but for those of us who want subscribers it makes far more sense to target people who are already on youtube and may be logged in rather than those searching google for random things.
That's my suggestion for some free promotion. My best ad so far is coming in at an average of $ 0.07 per click in my target demographic of video games. I do indie and AAA game reviews and caustic game industry news commentary to give you an idea of the kind of channel I'm abusing google adwords for. Honestly I think it's probably quite refreshing and unique for people to see an ad that isn't selling something and rather is just an interesting opinion. Certainly not what they are expecting.
Adwords is the google program giving context sensitive ads to searches and it functions on Youtube as well, as we all likely know. Google gives between $50 and $100 periodically ($75 more frequent from what I've seen) to new start up accounts in advance credit without having to pay a dime just to try the program out.
here's a link advertised on this very site that I clicked on while typing this post for the $75
https://services.google.com/fb/forms/adwordscredit3 (hopefully this link stays active for some time)
When you go to create an ad you can select age/interest demographics to target as well as specific keywords to target as well. So you can narrows it down quite well to what kind of videos you do. The program gives you an estimate of how much "per click" you will be paying from your start up credit but you won't get a true picture of how much it costs until the first day or two are done. I'd recommend a $3-$5 per day budget so you don't blow the whole thing right away and can make a few changes. I'd also recommend making 2-3 different ads so you can compare them with each other to see which ones perform better.
Now continuing with recommendations. First of all don't get discouraged when you run ads and see a very large number of views with a very large number of "impressions". Impressions are how many times your ad was displayed and 1000 impressions per view is a fairly normal number. I did find in my experiments that the "in stream" ads were the most successful for gaining views (in-stream = the ones you have to "click to skip"). The neat thing about "in-stream is that you have 5 seconds before the person can click to skip the ad, so if you can hook them in 5 seconds you're golden. If not, then as long as they click skip before 30 seconds if your video has gone by, you won't get charged for a view.
I would also strongly suggest you limit all of your ads to youtube exclusively if you're trying to build a channel that stands on it's own. If you're promoting a product then fine, but for those of us who want subscribers it makes far more sense to target people who are already on youtube and may be logged in rather than those searching google for random things.
That's my suggestion for some free promotion. My best ad so far is coming in at an average of $ 0.07 per click in my target demographic of video games. I do indie and AAA game reviews and caustic game industry news commentary to give you an idea of the kind of channel I'm abusing google adwords for. Honestly I think it's probably quite refreshing and unique for people to see an ad that isn't selling something and rather is just an interesting opinion. Certainly not what they are expecting.