One of my members put a pole on my site, and the results were a little surprising. How did you find the site? Google Search ---------- 40 ------ 31.50% Kev's Youtube Video's----- 60 ------ 47.24% From a Friend ------------ 6 ------ 4.72% Other - Explain in post ---- 21 ------ 16.54% Google: Last week my site had 33,000 pages indexed. This week its less then 10,000 pages indexed, oh well. I have a site map installed, so every night a site map gets uploaded to google. My site is ranked #1 and #6 in certain key word searches for the nitch of my site. Youtube: I have a youtube partner account, my videos are watermarked and my channel is branded. My 256 videos have been viewed a total of 1,078,355 times and I have 1,822 subscribers. Conclusion: Even though my site is ranked #1 on certain key words in google searches - youtube still refers more people. This goes against the common train of thought of google, yahoo and MSN being the top referring sites - this is no longer true. As the internet changes, so my the website owners. We must adapt to what people are doing. And people are going to youtube and other video sites. Instead of waiting for people to "find" my site. I made videos, posted them on youtube and put my content right in front of their face. And guess what, it has paid off. My first website had @850 members in the first year (2006 - 2007). For the first year I did what a lot of people here are doing - building back links, listing in directories, blah, blah and more blah. The second year I took the site down, reopened it with Vbulletin and started posting youtube videos. The new site grew at about 4X the rate of the old site. My traffic and my youtube videos are directly related. If traffic grows stale, or levels out, I can post a series and videos. In the following days, my traffic spikes. When I signed up for a youtube partner account, and branded my youtube channel - the very day my site got a spike of 500+ uniques. Welcome to the 21st Century. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKBabAfFhps
you might get more traffic from youtube but google traffic will still convert more. for one of my site, i get some youtube traffic which convert to nothing
I disagree - most of my new members are from youtube. The new member introduction section is filled with post about finding my site on youtube. Most of my youtube subscribers have converted to members of my website. and another consideration sultanofseo, how many videos do you have one youtube. How many total views have your videos had and how many subscribers do you have? If you have one video that been watched 100 times - do not expect much. But if you have dozens of videos that have been seen a hundred thousand times - then yes, new members will start showing up.
So maybe its time I thought up some ways to promote my sites with youtube. Then again, I dont really recieve a lot of traffic from google searches anymore
i guess it depends on your niche and target audience. also whether you are selling anything or just looking for readers/viewers/subscribers. glad to see youtube is working out for you well.
agree, but it reflects point very well If you post videos which are relevant to your site, then traffic will convert the same as from SE
Its a challenge to the mind set that most of your traffic will come from google ranking. This is simply not true any more. Even though my site holds several #1 slots in my nitches keywords, youtube is directing more traffic to my site.
That is the mind set I am challenging. Google is no longer "King" of traffic - youtube is. Even though youtube is not a search engine - well, it is kinda, unless you are on youtube, your site is missing out on a massive amount of traffic.
Actually Kev, i agree that YouTube can give us very promising traffic but I think i have some questions for you. Earlier, i have a soccer site which on last November got around 3,000-4,000 unique visitors per day. From this number, only around 20% came from Google. 70% of my traffic came from YouTube and the other 10% was from viral marketing. Well, I uploaded almost all soccer highlights (in three biggest leagues: Spain, England, and Italy). My busiest days were Saturday and Sunday (I uploaded the soccer highlights to YouTube and also to Dailymotion and megavideo). Just like you, I always placed my website URL on my videos. I got so many subscribers and nice daily views. My hard work finally paid off. (uploaded & edited videos were very time consuming) However, my golden age with YouTube finally came to an end due to copyright infringement. Yes, these soccer associations did not allow me to upload any of the highlights anymore since last December despite in fact my videos were free advertisement for their leagues. Now I really want to get involved in YouTube marketing again but I don't know how to make video about my niches. I mean, for example, i have a laptop site, so what kind of video should I make? I review a laptop and I make a video about it? And I see there are so many competitors out there. In example, I want my video to be ranked first for keyword "A", but there are so many videos about "A", how can I grab visitors from there? I ever created some videos recently but they can only attract around 100-200 visitors, even less. I ever tried to understand how YouTube ranks videos but I still have no idea. Last week, I played GTA IV and I created a gameplay video from my own PS 3. I uploaded it to YouTube. I used keywords such as GTA, GTA IV, GTA 4, Grand Theft Auto 4, etc. on the tags. But when I tried to search for "Grand Theft Auto 4 Gameplay Video" (which is the title of my video), I can't find my videos anywhere on page 1. My video is not listed there. As I thought, I only got around 100 views (so pathetic). The other GTA 4 gameplay video got around 10,000 views, even more.
I like Youtube obvioulsy, the biggest flaw is the video content and the flagging - 2 flagged videos and kiss your account good bye. But one large successful campaign and you can be famous. I have seen some great results for my clients through Youtube.
I think Kev hates the Youtube dealers like myself - well not personally - but he doesn't like that idea.
Well I can relate to your copy righted material, I have lost a few accounts for being to adult .... that's a flawed system where two members report the video and it's flagged, two flagged videos equals a ban and loss of account - a black hatters heaven. Now on to your videos, the competitor videos may not be so reliant on Youtube traffic, he may have strong links to the video and be doing well in the search engines, this is where my service is great - imagine a video in the top 20 most viewed videos - the number of sites linking to your video and embedding your video is phenomenal and not to mention Youtubes PR passed down from the honor pages to your video. Another tip is to make your title, keywords, description the same or similar to your competitors video - this also works with videos that are on the most viewed list or popular videos, you want to appear within their results - on the video page for similar videos. yesterday I finished a campaign where I got the video up to around 130 000 plays and from there the video went into a fit with natural traffic and all the other goodies you'd expect being on most watched page.
Wait a minute. So basically you believe videos which get good rank on YouTube are those who get plenty of viewers and links? So if I start a new video and I use title and keywords which already popular (i.e.: "Mario Bros"), I will easily outranked by my competitors?
Correct, if you can get on the major honor pages like most viewed, most commented, top favorites, most votes etc. then the PR juice is passed down to the videos - this alone boosts your video within google search. Now added with the fact that many web masters and bloggers will naturally embed and write about your video simply because it's in front of over 1000 000 Youtubers daily - based on a "Most Viewed Video" in top 20. then there's the Youtube galleries that rip directly from Youtube (like tagged.com) and they copy the "Most Viewed Videos" of the day directly to their extremely popular web sites - equals more plays and video links. If you are only going for natural plays on Youtube .... yes and no .... your competitors already have established videos, copying their video details will assist you in gaining plays, but a new Video has one advantage it's new, I suggest you only ever purchase traffic to a new video for this fact : "Most Viewed Videos" Today is the second most viewed page on Youtube (second to the index of course) and only videos under 48 hours old will be listed there .... so the first 48 hours of a video will make or break the campaign. Purchasing Plays to an old video has no use or impact - apart from inflating plays. You only buy plays for one reason to get on the front page or gain quick honors.
I can not tell you that. My site is a discussion forum, my videos are pointed towards the different sections of the forum. When I make a video I already know what "section" of the forum its going to be posted in. So, is you site a forum or just a website? What are the categories of your site? Do you use a CMS with sections or categories where articles are posted? Your statement is a little misleading. If an account is flagged for copyright infringement, then sure, it will will be deleted. If you account is flagged for graphic content, or suitable for adults only, then no, your account will not be deleted. Nope - I have never paid for hits or views. Several of my videos won youtube awards on certain days for most viewed, most commented or most rated. Hate is a bad word.