How to Make your Podcast YouTube Videos More Searchable with New Titling Best Practices

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Hey there, Tracy Hazard here from Feed you'd brand and I'm here to talk about YouTube. Not about Facebook, not about podcasting. I'm here to talk about YouTube. This question came up from one of our clients and it's a really good question and it's really about how do you configure your titles, your descriptions and your channel on YouTube? And it is really important because a lot of people are going from livestream to Facebook, from Facebook into your blog posts. These are brandcasters best practices. This is what we actually do for our clients. But we've had some clients go in and retitle their videos and that just goes against everything that we do in content strategy. And so I really want to take the time here to explain what we're doing here and why it's so powerful for you. So first things first, if you're going to brandcast, if you really want to get the most power out of your videos, your podcasts, your live streams, all of this content production, including your blogs and your writing. And I know this because I'm an in columnist, right? I tell you that all the time. You have to get your ego out of it. That's the number one thing that you have to do. You have to get over the fact that this isn't about me. It's about the person listening, the person reading, the person viewing. It's about what they're going to search for, what they're going to care for, what they're going to want to read, to view, to listen to. It is all about them. And so we have to get ourselves out of that mode. And so this is not the time to be worrying about what our show title is. This is not the time to be worrying about our branding of ourselves. Not in the titling of our videos, our episodes and our blog posts. It is the place to put it on our channel, channel, our website. Those are our things, right? They belong to us. When people are looking for that, they're looking for us. So these are just a couple of the difference. So we have to have a content strategy on the episodes, the podcasts the videos, the blog posts, we have to have a content strategy there that is topic based, that is going where the pain is, that is going where people are searching. That is all set around the Google algorithm because that's what we do. Or the Facebook algorithm. If we're on Facebook and we're doing live streams, right, we have to think about what people are searching for and what they're looking for there. So that's the first part of it. We really have to remove ourselves from that process and our thought and not worry about how we're being found. It's how our stuff is being found and by our stuff being found. Our name's mentioned everywhere, we're there, our face is there. Everything we need to get them to come find us afterwards if they choose to do that is all there. So we do not need to worry about that kind of brand awareness. It's going to be a natural and organic progression of the whole process. So let's talk about first titles because that is some of the most critical things. So I'm going to take my live stream right here that we're doing today because I'm starting this on Facebook. So if you're watching it in YouTube, you didn't even know it was a Facebook and does it really matter? No, because YouTube is your preferred way to watch a video. So we're going to take it from livestream, we're going to move it over to YouTube, we're going to put our bumpers on it, which has our brand on it, right. It's going to say feed your brand on it at the end of the day. And so we're going to move it over there. So we're going to download it and take it off and move it over there. When we load it in. We have a lot of choices to make. We have to title things, we have to put descriptions in, we have to tag them. So the first thing that we're going to do is address that title because that is one of the most critical things. You only have 100 characters to work with, so you want to make that hundred characters really count. So you want to definitely make it topic based. So you really want to hit in that title what is it people are going to be searching on? How am I helping them When I move this over to YouTube, do I really want to put YouTube best practices or YouTube titling best practices? Maybe I want to title it that way where it's nice long tail. And I'm not really worrying about anything else in that. I'm worrying about what somebody might type in and how they will decide to choose my video for helping it. So maybe I want to say YouTube titling best practices and pitfalls of doing it wrong. And so that may attract someone. So you want to make it an attractive sounding title but you don't want to make it something that is just catchy name. Because if I don't type in the words best practices for titling or titling best practices or YouTube titling best practices, I'll never find you. I'll never find that video. So that's the first thing that we really want to do is make sure that it's topic based in that and remember that we have 100 character count. So we want to make that count. That includes your spaces. The next thing we want to address is those tags. Now here's where we want to make sure every guest name shows up. If we have room to put them in our title, we do it because somebody might be searching. If I have a famous guest on I did a video with Steve Wozniak, I want to have Steve Wozniak's name in because somebody might definitely search that in YouTube. So if I have room too, that's a draw. If they're an unknown, then maybe I don't really want to waste room in my title for it. But I'm definitely going to put them in my tag. So this is where guests kind of help us boost us. So if we're not as famous, this is why we want to have better and more famous guests to really help us along here. So that's one of the places at which though we can put all of those people in the tags because maybe they'll become famous later. Maybe they're on a PR pitch, maybe they're going to do a lot of shows and then people are going to start searching for them. So we definitely want to make sure we have them in our tags. We want to have your name in the tags. We don't need your name in the title and we don't need your show name in the title. We want those things in the tag. And the reason we don't need them there is is because they should be on your channel. Your channel is all about you and your channel will be something that YouTube pops in. If they type my name in, if they type Tracy Hazard in, they're going to find all of my shows, all of my channels, they're going to find all of the episodes I've guested in and been in. And so they're. And all of that I'm tagged in as well. So they're going to find me. There is no way. In fact, there's another Tracee hazard who's a musician, and I beat her out every single day on google, on YouTube, on facebook. And she's a musician, she's a music star. Why do I beat her out? It's because I produce so much content and there's so many videos and there's so much stuff that I put out that I can beat out. Her handful of songs that she's done or dozen songs that she has out or a couple of albums. Right, because they belong on itunes. Right. They belong in the itunes music library, not where I tend to post my content. So that's really where you're going to play with your show and your name. It's going to be in the tags and in the channel. Now, before I adjust the channel because it's a broader concept, I want to adjust the description because the Description, you have 5000 characters to play with. So you've got plenty of room. You could post your entire transcript from your podcast. I mean, some of you speak 6,000. I do 10,000 words sometimes. So maybe not me, but you could post the majority of it. So there's no reason not to. Why not? But for the most part, I at minimum recommend a good opening paragraph where you've got your keywords, you've got information about your guest, you've got the introduction to what this video is about. Because remember, people are watching videos. They're not readers. They don't really care. So that's really why we don't waste the time putting that whole transcript in there, Even though you do have 5,000 characters to work with. So that's got all the important phrases, all the important words all put into that one paragraph. It's plenty. So that's what we use is just that. And then below that, you can do things like add some more links to your show, make sure people can find your website, invite them to book with you. If you're a coach. Like, you put promos after that. A lot of people put the first sentence and then a promo because they want people to click on that. But the reality is that YouTube doesn't really make it clickable. They have to copy and paste it anyway. And so I find it's better to just put it after. And it just looks better. It looks more professional and it just looks less pushy and salesy. But that's my preference. It's definitely not the recommended from people who are out there who are pushing their YouTube videos and wanting to make sure you get conversion from them. It's not a part of their practices, but I think a more passive way of dealing with sort of getting people to organically choose you makes for a better mail list, makes for a better audience, makes for a better sales process in the long run because they've definitely chosen to come you. Now, I have to tell you, I have multiple podcasts, right, that are my personal shows, not just the ones that we produce here at Pottiti or Feed. Your brand is of course, owned by Potitize. And so we see all the time that traffic comes from YouTube, I get cold calls straight from YouTube. So they've never seen my website. They will just come straight over YouTube. So you want to make sure you have your contact information there. And that is one of the reasons that I put that in every single post that we do. So those are just some basic tips on the titles, tags, descriptions. Now, let's talk a little bit about show and channel, because channel is really important. And so often you guys don't configure your channels. Like, you don't take the time to put great header graphics. I mean, this is when somebody is deciding whether or not they're going to subscribe to you. They come in the first time, right? And that's what they see. They see your big old header graphic, they see your icon, which is a square, and so they see all of those things. And if you're not utilizing that visual space, because remember, YouTube, video watchers are viewers, right? They're viewing things. So they're visual learners. So you want to have great visual impact. You want to have good stuff in there. You want to make sure they can see your website if that's what you want. You want to brand your show name. You want to make sure all of that is very, very prevalent. Your name, if that's where it is, your face, if that's what you want them to see there. This is one of those exceptions to it where I say, put your face here, right? This is an okay place to do that. You can put it either in the square, you can put it on the side of it. Don't take your whole room with all your face. Like, that's a little overdone. It seems too egoish, right? We're going back to that. But you want to make sure that people know, oh, I met Tracy at an event. Oh, that's her face. That's what she looks like. I met the. Right. Tracy Hazard. Right. So you do want to make that recognition happen. So this is a place for you to do that. Also, your channel has tons of configuration. It has its own description, its own tag, its own title. All of those things exist. Use them. Use the full character counts. This is how you're going to get found on YouTube. Because remember, they like to serve up channels. They don't just like to serve up videos because YouTube wants you subscribing, they want to serve you more content. So if they can get you to subscribe to your channel, if they can get who's ever searching to subscribe to your channel, then you're on pace for doing what YouTube already wants to encourage as a behavior already. So this is the time, this is the place to put all of that and make sure you configure it. But there's also another step you can do in which that is to configure playlists, right? So if I've got feed your brand episodes and maybe these are all about YouTube and these are all about video casters, and I want to group them together in one playlist. This is a chance for me to add those additional keywords, to add those tags, to configure that playlist. So that playlist will also show up in search criteria. So that's also another level you can do once you've got multiple episodes and you've got a lot of content to search through. So I just wanted to give you kind of a really broad brush on what we do here in terms of making sure that videos get searched just like blogs, right? Because it's just the same. The algorithms are almost exactly the same because Google owns YouTube. Right? So we want to make sure that you guys are using the same content strategy practices, the same practices that we use on podcasts, the same practices we use on blog posts. This is the same content strategy that you should be using to do YouTube video titling. Best practices to do YouTube video description practices, just utilize those same techniques. It works exactly the same way. Now it's still really hard to be seen on YouTube. I know it. There's a lot of videos being viewed every day. It's like crazy. It's like in the billions of videos being viewed worldwide every single day. And so it is really hard to be seen and heard. So when you have a hot topic, when you're talking about something that is in the news right now, when you're talking about something that is of interest, you definitely want to make sure to put those into both the description, the tags and the titles. Make sure you're putting that. So if you have old content and you need to go back into it and edit those things, you can do that. You cannot reload up a video. So don't do that because it won't let you reload duplicate content. And once you replace a video, you lose your statistics. But you can absolutely edit the titles, the show descriptions and the tags to be relevant. So if all of a sudden something's come up because you know you were talking about something and maybe the Me Too movement, and now it's coming up because of what's going on in Congress, then you definitely want to re tag your videos so that they get found at that moment. We do this a lot in our product business. We go in other places and we make sure to redo things for the season. Right. So there might be seasonal things and seasonal reasons why you want to re tag your video so these do not have to stay static. So that's also something that I really want you to remember. And it's important for you to be able to utilize that to get the most out of this content that you've created so that it doesn't become old and no longer in use and no longer viewed. That when it's important it's viewed again, it's bound again. It's served up by YouTube. So I hope this has really helped you guys dial in some thoughts about this video casting world, because I know it's new to a lot of you. I know it's really new to a lot of you to be taking your live streams, which were a totally different model because it was all about just showing up and going live and hoping people showed up for you. Right. And so it was more about that than it was about what you were talking about. And so this is a little bit different. This is about having a content strategy. So I just really want to make sure that you guys are getting there and getting these types of practices that we see that work really well overall. Again, this is Tracy Hazard and I'm from Feed your brand. And you can find us on the web@feedyourbrand.co. of course you can find us here on Facebook @feedyourbrand and on YouTube @feedyourbrand. So thanks again for listening. Until next time.

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