Preparing to Upload Your YouTube Video
Knowing how to upload a YouTube video is invaluable in reaching new contacts and growing your audience. In fact, a survey by Wyzowl found that 86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool and 92% of marketers value video as an important part of their marketing strategy.
Learning how to prepare to upload your YouTube video will save you time when uploading. This is the first step in learning YouTube advertising for beginners. Here is how to prepare:
1. Come up with a great title
Before you start uploading your video, here are some video marketing tips that will save you a lot of time. It's much easier to have these things done before you upload. The first tip on the list is to come up with a great title for your video. Just like other types of social media content, video content can be optimized for search engines. Optimizing your video content will help you promote it to the right people.
The two biggest search engines for video are YouTube and Google. It seems odd to think of YouTube as a search engine because it's a platform for watching and sharing videos, but it's also the biggest search engine for videos at the same time. With that in mind, coming up with a good title will help optimize your video so it will be more easily found.
2. Create a complete description
For search purposes, YouTube considers keywords in this order.
- Keywords in the title
- Keywords in the description
- Tags
What this means is that you need to create a description that contains keywords, especially in the first two lines of text in your description. This part of the description appears with the video when you search on YouTube.
Next, your description should have a short introduction to what the video is about, including any links you have in the video.
Links to include:
- Links to music used to credit music resources
- Links to related videos
- Link to your YouTube channel
- Links to tools used to make the video
- Links to any resources that you mention in the video
- Links to your website and social media channels
You can create default page settings so you don't need to repeatedly put the same information in each video description.
The internet has developed and grown since the beginning of YouTube. Search engines today can pick up the topic of your video from how you describe it in your description. That means your tags should be long-tail keywords like "how to upload a video" or "how to upload a video on YouTube."
You don't need to create generic tags like "video" or "YouTube." The search engine already knows it's a video on YouTube. You can take a look at other videos that come up when you search for your title. If they come up at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) for your keywords, they may have better tags that you can also use.
4. Choose a thumbnail
Your thumbnail will appear in search engines with the title and description, so it's an important factor driving people to click on your video. Selecting a simple thumbnail is best because many viewers watch videos on their smartphones.
A thumbnail should have a distinct look that's consistent with all of your videos. They can be headshots of the person in the video or the product you are selling. Don't clutter the thumbnail with too much text because it's hard to see in the search engines, especially on mobile devices.
To edit the thumbnail, you can use a service like Canva or Adobe Illustrator. When you know how to upload a YouTube video, your thumbnail will be ready to upload.
5. Edit your video
Before you can upload your video, you need to ensure that your video is the best version it can be. This means using a video editor to finetune and polish it. If your video is for marketing, you want to put your best foot forward. You only have a very short time to capture someone's interest, so making sure they see a concise, powerful video is important. Learn more about how to edit YouTube videos in order to refine your skills and create better content.
Okay, now that you're prepared, let's start uploading.