How to Promote Your YouTube Videos

Creating great YouTube videos that your audience loves is tough work — but unfortunately, it’s still NOT enough!

We live in an increasingly noisy world, and it’s only getting harder to stand out…

So if you want your videos to really get noticed — you’ve got to spend just as much time promoting your work as you do creating it!

Here’s a basic overview of everything you should be doing immediately after your YouTube videos go live…

1) Prepare Your Assets

Before promoting anything, it’s smart to make sure you have everything you need to promote…

We have an internal 4-step video production process that results in these assets being produced —

• Your Actual YouTube Video: Our editor delivers a full 1080p HD .mp4 file, and we rename the file to match the YouTube Video Title
• Thumbnails: We generate 4 thumbnails to choose from & A/B Test
• Captions: Immediately after the final video is cut, we upload the file into Rev and typically get captions back within a few hours
• Matching Blog Post: Ever since our YouTube channel was instantly terminated for no reason, we create an accompanying  blog post to go along with each YouTube video.

Once we have all these, then we begin the next step of our new video promotion SOP…

You don’t need all of these assets — but I’d recommend at least having a video and thumbnails 🙂

2) Upload & Schedule New Video

Our new video file gets uploaded into a few different platforms —

• YouTube Creator Studio: Simple enough…
• Facebook Creator Studio: We mirror our video content to our main Facebook Page. This technically reduces the amount of juice we push into YouTube, but we believe it increases our overall reach. 
• Instagram TV: We mirror our video content here as well…
• Vimeo: We mirror everything in Vimeo, just in case something goes wrong with YouTube and we need to rapidly switch out the video embeds throughout our websites…
• Amazon S3 Glacier: S3 provides stupid cheap cloud storage, and Glacier is a long-term storage solution within S3 that’s even cheaper. This is where we keep both raw & produced backups.

YouTube & Facebook allow you to schedule new videos, and we always take advantage of this for 2 reasons…

1. It gives each platform time to cache the full HD version of the version across all their different servers (ensuring the best possible quality for all your viewers, and thus increasing early engagement).
2. It allows us to schedule & concentrate all our promotion efforts to create the most ‘algorithmic juice’ we possibly can. 

The algorithms that drive organic video recommendations are extremely biased towards video engagement, and the quicker we can get these algorithms to see great metrics on our new videos — the quicker the videos get pushed out organically to a larger audience…

So your goal is to drive your most engaged viewers straight to your new video ASAP after publishing…

This will create the largest ‘spike’ in highly-engaged viewership possible, and hopefully the algorithm will say “Oh, this video is really keeping people on our platform — let’s push it to more and more people.”

Scheduling everything in advance also allows you to immediately jump into the comments section and start conversing with your audience, which drives up your early engagement numbers even further…

So everything that can be scheduled in advance, we schedule in advance — and it’s all scheduled around the YouTube & Facebook videos going live…

Also worth mentioning — figure out WHEN you need to schedule your videos for optimal engagement & viewership with a tool like VidIQ…

This is also the stage where we backup our videos by uploading them into Vimeo & Amazon S3 Glacier. Once the raw & final video files are uploaded there, we can delete them from our local computers…

There’s a lot more that goes into this part of the process (such as writing optimal titles & descriptions), but we’ll leave that for another tutorial…

3) Schedule Social Media Promotions

Remember — our overall goal is to drive our most engaged viewers to watch our new YouTube videos ASAP after publishing…

So however you need to reach your most engaged viewers — that’s where you need to schedule your promotions. For most people, that’s going to be social media…

We use a tool called SmarterQueue to schedule promotions across every social channel that we’ve got —

• Facebook Pages: Since we upload each video natively onto our main Facebook Page, any other relevant Facebook Pages we have just share that 1 post from the main page (maximizing reach). For instance, we generally have the E-Commerce Empire Page share the videos uploaded from the StartupBros Page…
• Facebook Groups: Our most engaged social channel (by far) — we create a post with a link to watch the new video on YouTube. Since our groups are ultra-engaged, we don’t need to worry about the reach penalty Facebook gives for sharing YouTube links. And we’d rather have those ultra-engaged views count towards the YouTube algorithm (rather than the videos uploaded to the FB Pages above).
• Facebook Profiles: Posts on Facebook Profiles can’t be scheduled (to my knowledge), so we’ll manually make posts on our personal profiles (or share posts from the pages) whenever we feel it would help. 
• Instagram Profile: You can use SmarterQueue to mostly schedule promotions onto your IG Profile; but you’ll still need to open the app on your phone and manually click “post”. Instagram is also very dumb when it comes to links — so you’ll need to say “link in bio” and change out the link in your IG Biography for them to click on. We use TubeBuddy’s Latest Video Promo Tool to automate this…
• Instagram & FB Stories: SmarterQueue makes it relatively easy to post IG Stories as well, and those will then be mirrored to your FB Page Stories. We usually throw some text over the video thumbnail that says something like “Swipe Up to View the New Video”. Just be sure to set up the “Swipe Up Link” or whatever when doing it!
• LinkedIn Pages: LinkedIn allows for native video uploads, but we aren’t using them. We simply share some text & a link directly to the YouTube video (or sometimes, to the blog post with the video embedded inside)
• LinkedIn Profiles: Same as the above. Fully scheduled & automated inside SmarterQueue.
• Twitter: Simple text & link to the content (usually YouTube video, sometimes blog post with video embed).
• Pinterest: Same as LinkedIn or Twitter, except we need to screw around with the text to comply with their format.

So everything that can be scheduled inside of SmarterQueue — we schedule it in advance. Then there’s just a couple things we need to do (copy & paste some stuff for Instagram and share some posts) after the video goes live…

4) Schedule Email List Promotion

If you’ve been building an email list around your content & the audience you’ve been building — they’re generally going to be interested in your future videos, too! 

We schedule a short & to-the-point email broadcast to our subscribers using ActiveCampaign…

Insert Image

Just like our pre-scheduled social media promotions, these are scheduled to go out the moment the video goes live — creating the largest spike of engaged viewers possible…

We send our email list traffic directly to our website (the blog post with the YT video embed), rather than sending them directly to YouTube itself. We’re able to give them more value directly on the website (with the bonus materials on top of the video), and don’t like the idea of forcing our fans to autoplay a YouTube video. 

Plus — our fans also don’t need to see any ads when they watch the embeds through our website (rather than YT itself).

5) Get Ready for Going Live

Now that you’ve scheduled everything you can, it’s time to prepare for going live…

Once again — the goal is to drive the largest spike in engaged viewers in the shortest time possible. So everything that we can’t schedule, we still need to be ready to quickly execute as the video is going live —

• Post to Instagram TV (IGTV): We recently started uploading our videos directly into Instagram TV as well. Not expecting too much out of it though 🙂
• Create a Pinned Comment: You’ve probably seen these all over YouTube. Pinned comments are a great way to drive additional engagement or push whatever call-to-action you’d like. You want these up immediately after the video goes live.
• Feature Video on YouTube Channel Page & Playlists: We’ll generally change out the Channel Trailer to show off the newest video, and also add it to any relevant playlists.
• Embed Video Throughout Website: We generally make videos that supplement the tutorials you find on our website, so it makes perfect send to embed our new videos throughout our existing content to immediately drive ultra-engaged views.
• Insert New Video Throughout End Screens & Cards: Your YouTube End Screens & Cards can be a solid source of ultra-engaged viewers, and is a great way to leverage the suuccess of previous videos into even more success.

Generally, we are doing all of the above in real-time as we respond to new comments on the video (after it has just gone live). Responding to comments in real-time and having conversations with your fans is an awesome way to drive wild engagement stats that simply can’t be matched by those who don’t reply to comments…

So any time we run out of comments to respond to, we’ll jump back to that list and knock off an item. Once the comments slow down (or we run out of places to promote the video), then we’ll call it a day…

6) Set Up Evergreen Promotion

After we’ve wrapped up new video promotion, we generally set up some basic evergreen promotion…

On top of the website embeds, end screen features, and other permanent promotion spots that were already set up — we also like to set up some evergreen social media promotions with SmarterQueue —

Insert Image

Don’t Stop There!

There’s a whole lot more that you can do to promote new YouTube videos. Keep looking for new oportunities to spread the word (and let me know what works for you!)…

For instance, we include an auto-updating link to our latest YouTube video in the email signatures of every member of our company (using TubeBuddy’s promo link tool) —

We’ll also make sure our entire team knows about the new content and why our audience needs it — so they can start sending these premium tutorials out in response to email questions or phone calls we receive…

We also start mentioning the newest YouTube videos in-person, on coaching calls, on podcasts, and anywhere else we can. Word-of-mouth promotion is still the most powerful form there is!

I’m sure there’s MANY other methods out there to promote new & existing YouTube videos — and we’re always exploring the find the best ways to do it…

Use our system as a foundation, and keep experimenting!

Just be sure to come back and let us know what worked best for you, so we can add it to our promo system 🙂

Go fourth and create those videos, bros!!!