Josh Rimer dot Com
How I'm getting famous and how you can too!

Following the speed that YouTube has grown over the past half-decade, it’s not really surprising that YouTube again has topped the charts for the biggest revenue-earners for 2011. According to a Citi analyst, YouTube is estimated to grow to 1.3 billion dollars this year and 1.7 billion next year. Most of all, Google will be taking home $876 million in revenues after the profit has been shared among YouTube partners.

This tremendous growth from YouTube’s initial days can be attributed to the improvements to its monetization strategies. 81 % of the top YouTube videos have ads. And these ads are in no way left-overs of Ad Sense – more and more companies have been attracted to put up advertisements on YouTube specifically (not to mention hiring YouTubers to promote products in their videos). If you’re watching a video from a popular YouTuber, videos typicallyhave at least two or more  ads coming from all sorts of companies.

YouTube recently made headlines when Google’s upcoming CEO Larry Page said that it would be taking after YouTube in revamping his organization’s structure.  YouTube and online video continue to grow in popularity at a rapid pace and show no signs of slowing down!

Almost everyone wants to create the next viral video because of the incredible exposure it can get them and/or their companies. YouTube celebrities have benefited from viral videos in building their audience and many businesses in turn have benefited from that by providing product placement in their videos. Doing so saves companies thousands of dollars that could be spent on commercials and ads that don’t actually get watched and instead ensure that they’re reaching their target audience through the influence of a YouTube Partner with a similar demographic.

In the meantime though, if you’re creating your own content for your company, here are some tips on how small businesses can try to create the next viral video and get found on the internet organically.

1. PROVIDE THE RIGHT CONTENT

Tailor fit your videos to your audience’s taste. Make smart and entertaining product videos, not hard-selling, in-your-face ones. Consider product tours, interviews, how-tos, and skits that are both informative and enjoyable for your audience.

2. USE REAL PEOPLE IN YOUR VIDEOS

YouTube videos are personality driven for the most part, so there needs to be a face behind the brand. Using people in your videos make it easier for your audience to establish a connection with your  brand. Anything from a man-on-the-street type of video where you can ambush-interview shoppers and have them try out your products, to an interview of a client or professional offering value advice to people in your business.

3. TEASE YOUR AUDIENCE

Add an element of surprise to your videos by giving your audience something that they’d never expect with a typical product video. Make them laugh, cry, or jump off their seats. Be creative, and keep your audience guessing on what to expect next from you and your videos.

5. ENGAGE WITH YOUR AUDIENCE

Interact with your audience by giving them something to do. You may use in-video annotations or links that will redirect to something else, or direct your audience within the video itself on what to do next.

6. SHARE!

Share your videos across different social media platforms.  Embed them in social media pages like on Facebook where your friends/clients/fans are most likely to share them with other people. Embed them in your website or blog as well when a new videos go up on YouTube. Tweet out links to them, send out links to them via email, and include links to them in your newsletters.

Use these tips to get more traction on your videos, and consider product placement within YouTube Partners’ videos for a way to ensure you get even more exposure (and third party endorsement by someone their audience already knows and trusts)!

When YouTube was fairly new, the video-marketing world were starting to try to figure out how to optimize videos uploaded to it, but now with rise of social media, it’s made the situation even more complex.  The latest term that’s gaining popularity in the blogosphere is social video optimization.

In a ReelSEO story social video optimization was defined as the “blending of the technology of online video with social interaction (i.e, an interpersonal relationship) for the co-creation of value.”

It was pointed out, however, that while social video optimization is closely connected to search engine marketing, it does have its own mechanism at work. It’s basically more effective than search engine marketing because it allows:

Syndication

Comments and other user feedback

User-generated (and submitted) content

Sharing tools

Promotional activities

Status updates

Other third-party community functionalities part of video

What’s kind of ironic though is that the videos shared on social media websites are often videos found through search engine results.  So really, it’s best to still optimize your videos for search engines, and then help encourage and facilitate the spread of them through social networks.

There’s been a lot of debate about the YouTube Partnership program on how/if it could really be a self-sustaining income generator for video creators, as well as how fair its revenue sharing is. I believe the Partnership Program can be a good, alternate source of income, but not your main bread & butter, until you’re regularly getting hundreds of thousands of views on your videos. So how do you consistently get that many views?

A mix of luck and perfect timing, can put you on the path to becoming a YouTube hit. By implementing smart strategies as well and  developing your brand, will help you sustain it and go even further. One of the people who’ve done really well with this is Chef John Mitzewich or Chef John to his fans of the popular YouTube channel Food Wishes. Mitzewich started creating YouTube video tutorials back in 2007 which he posted on YouTube for free– all value content, no fluff or gimmicks. He’s been creating videos at a rate of 130 videos a year, another thing which has really contributed to his success.

Chef John’s channel currently has over 100,000 subscribers and 28 million total views for his videos. He doesn’t disclose how much he’s been making from the YouTube Partnership Program annually but he said it’s as much as what an executive chef is earning in his San Francisco home town.

Chef John shows that being at the right moment, in his case, when there’s a burgeoning need for something new & different to what’s already proven to be a popular subject, can help you make it in the YouTube. While John says that he’s paying a price for his YouTube fame, that is, tailoring his content to his audience’s demands, the YouTube Partnership Program has allowed him to reach all kinds of audiences, not to mention fulfill his dream of teaching millions of cooking gourmet dishes. He doesn’t have to open up a school or start teaching classes, and yet the partnership program has make it enough for him to have a name for himself while earning a living in the comfort of his own home.

If YouTubers are earning from ad sponsorships, then there  must be some ad agencies out there who are cashing in on YouTube too.

Ad agencies, who are essentially the go-betweens, help YouTube Partners get some pretty lucrative deals from big brands. One of these companies, Tadcast, has passed the 40 million-mark in product-placement video views.

The Tadcast CEO shared in an interview with Social Times that he thought of the idea of being an ad agency specifically for YouTubers when he was doing a studyat the Harvard Business School after seeing a necessity for filmmakers to make some additional income online. He combined that with the idea that advertisers would soon be allotting a budget for online promotion considering that online-video sharing websites and social media were growing so quickly.

An important aspect that ad agencies need to be aware of when it comes to dealing with YouTubers is that the integrity of YouTubers are maintained by the brands simply being worked into the story lines of the videos. One of the recent brands that have made use of this was Wonderful Pistachios as promoted by MysteryGuitarMan, Annoying Orange and Britanni Louise Taylor to name a few.

Another agency that made the news for being responsible for a whopping number of video views for Neutrogena’s new products is the Creative Artists Agency. It, however, hired an actor to pretend to be a regular YouTuber, as investigated by the LA Times, but still showed that brands were beginning to recognize the influence a content creator on YouTube has over their audience and how companies can benefit from that in a non-traditional advertising way.

There are dozens of YouTubers earning over $100,000 annually from sponsorships and ads.  It’s a big market that’s continuing to grow and more and more businesses realize the incredible reach that many YouTube partners have, and how to best work with them to reach their audiences.  And it worked for me -  I went out and bought some Wonderful Pistachios after seeing them on YouTube – they were great!

The main problem with uploading HD quality videos to YouTube, is the speed at which they upload. My 3 or 4 minute comedy videos can somtimes take almost half an hour to upload.

I came across an article by YouTuber Tim Schmoyer who did a bit of experimenting with the video parameters, bitrates, and whathaveyou’s and he’s found out the easiest and smartest turnaround solution for lessening the upload time for your videos.

First off, Tim started to export his video using Quicktime instead of using iMovie as the latter converts his videos to a size of up to a whopping 750 mb. He also started to export with a single-pass encoding rather than dual-pass, as he isn’t seeing much of a difference between the two. Tim was using low-end recorders so he sees that it isn’t worth it to encode in dual-pass lest you’re using high-end camcorders.

He also tried comparing different videos in .mp4 (720 and 1280p) and .flv on YouTube by downloading them and used a VLC player and Mac’s Get Info to monitor their bitrates. He now saves his 720p H.264/AAC files with the video encoded at 5.0 Mbps (5,000 kbps), and the sound encoded at 256 kbps, which is already a very good quality and enjoys faster uploading now (almost half of the time of what he used to spend on YouTube before).

Here’s his new parameters for his YouTube videos:

You might think that most YouTube videos go viral purely by accident. There’s certainly a mix of luck and timing involved, but there’s often a lot of strategy and promotion behind them too. Aspiring comedian Craigery Morgan, who has gained overnight success with his Surprise Birthday party video, got a whopping 5.5 million views on that video alone, which he largely attributes to it being shared on places like Facebook. Morgan shared some tips on how social media propelled his video on Open Forum’s Tara Fuller, which included the following:

1. Come up with a social media strategy that will actually work for you.

With so many social media networking websites out there, it would be hard to maintain a presence on all of them.  Morgan’s friend Michael Vacirca, a software engineer, designed a social media “base” that would keep all his social media accounts (e.g. Twitter, Tumbler, Facebook) in one place so that a single post would be distributed to all of them.

2. Optimize your uploaded videos.

Morgan had a video up on YouTube before which was only able to get about a thousand views. What seemed to be the problem with it was that it didn’t have any info or links to his social media websites, nor previous videos at all. Make sure to take advantage of the description section just below your videos by posting links or contact details in it to let your audience know that you want them to reach you. This was exactly what Morgan did with his viral video and since then emails and messages poured in.

3. Tease your audience on what’s coming up on your YouTube channel.

“Before I post a video, I like to give a little hint about what the next one will be about,” Morgan said. A couple of days before he uploaded his next YouTube video parody which was based on Food Network’s Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee, he tweeted “Looking forward to a Semi-Homemade Christmas… ” Keeping your audience guessing on what you’re probably up to will give them a reason to stay tuned to your channel or blog.

Oh ya, and being good looking and shirtless probably doesn’t hurt either.

Who would’ve thought that Google, which bought YouTube back in 2006, would see the latter as a new business model in reorganizing its structure and strategies. Google’s upcoming CEO Larry Page, who will be in Google’s executive office starting next month, has proclaimed that Google will be taking cues from YouTube’s free-thinking and energetic atmosphere in revamping its office culture and business agenda.

Despite losing money in 2009, YouTube was quick in getting back on its feet, and although Google didn’t disclose its sister company’s earnings, critics were saying that YouTube’s revenue doubled last year. Of course, YouTube has really grown to be a popular and rather lucrative destination for amateur video-makers and music chartbusters/Hollywood celebrities alike in fact, allowing many to earn six-figure paychecks. Apparently, YouTube’s HQ is also becoming a potential mecca for Google employees with YouTube reporting that it would be increasing its 600-employee workforce by 30% this year.

YouTube is also supposedly going to be working on developing more “hyperspecialized” channels this year that will cater to specific niches. It’s all in an effort to get audiences flipping between channels on YouTube like you would on cable TV.

Click here to read the whole article about this from the Seattle Times – or just get out there and start making more videos, because YouTube is obviously only going to keep growing.  The sooner you get going with a solid YouTube strategy, the better off you’ll be!

One of the most important things I’ve learned in my YouTube career was that putting good content on YouTube isn’t enough.

YouTubers need a social media strategy to get their content seen and shared. If your videos aren’t going out through social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc – then you’re not going to see very good results in the numbers of views your videos get. You really have to work on tweeting, sharing and keeping your audience posted and replying to their messages, otherwise, your videos won’t pick up any steam and will likely fizzle out after not many views.

I found a great article by Greg Jarboe on the power of social media in bringing in more audiences for your YouTube channel which gives a bit of analysis and statistics on recent social media trends, including:

1. Tell a great story.

Social media specialist Guy Kawasaki says that you have to “tell a story that’s worth retelling” in the form of inspiration (stories of breaking the odds), entertainment (viral videos, music vids, etc.), enlightenment (e.g. docmentaries), and education (how-tos).

2. Take advantage of YouTube’s Autoshare feature.

It’s easy to activate YouTube’s autoshare features. For people who don’t necessarily go on YouTube for self-promotion and use it simply for entertainment (watching viral videos, news, etc.) and would like their friends to know about the videos on YouTube they watched or liked, then they can also enable the Autoshare for sharing YouTube activities.

3. Put in extra effort.

Connect with people (e.g. influential bloggers/editors, community managers, traditional  media editors, PR specialists) in the loop by emailing them about your videos which may be related to some of their work/content. These people might find interest in your work and feature you, or could refer you to other people who may be interested to collaborate with you.

Social media’s power in video marketing/promotion may seem obvious, but it’s a part of the YouTube equation that so many content creators slack off on. If you want to reach more people with your YouTube videos, make sure you’re getting them out to all of social media contacts, on various platforms, and often.

Have you wondered how to customize the look of YouTube videos embedded on your blog or website? Or did you even know you could? YouTube, in fact, has defined its parameters for both YouTube pros and beginners so they can tinker with how their vids are shown. Here are just a few simple things that you can do by editing the paramaters:

- autohide/remove the play buttons and progress bar

- add/ditch the border

- delay playing the videos for a few seconds

- play the videos in HD by default

As well as more complex ones:

- disable keyboard shortcuts

- disable video annotations

- show the related videos after the video finishes playing

- show the search bar

Here’s an example:

If I want to post my video Britney Spears Hold It Against Me Official Music Video Parody, and want it to automatcially be shown in HD, without controls, but with the related videos and search field to show up  after it finishes playing – here’s what I have to do:

a. Embed the video parody in my page as usual. The easy way to do this is by clicking the embed button below my video to generate the code for it, then change the video’s width and height based on my preference.

b. Switch to the HTML editor (because I’m on the visual editor) and paste the embed code on my blog.

c. Add a <?> after my video’s url (&amp; with the old embed code), followed by the code for HD playbacks <HD>, disabling controls <control> and info <showinfo>,  showing related videos <rel> and search <showsearch>. I separate each tags and their corresponding values using a semi-colon, yet leaving no spaces  between them. Take note that the search field won’t come up if the option for related videos is disabled. The new and old embed codes–whichever applies  to your blog– should look like these:

OLD

<object classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″ width=”480″ height=”300″ codebase=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/

flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0″><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true” /><param name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”always” /><param name=”src” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/3UbsK7gOMdw&amp;hl=en_US&amp;

feature=player_embedded&amp;version=3&amp;hd=1&amp;controls=0&amp;

rel=1&amp;showsearch=1&amp;showinfo=0” /><param name=”allowfullscreen” value=”true” /><embed type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”480″ height=”300″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/3UbsK7gOMdw&amp;hl=en_US&amp;

feature=player_embedded&amp;version=3&amp;hd=1&amp;controls=0&amp;

rel=1&amp;showsearch=1&amp;showinfo=0” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true”></embed></object>

NEW

<iframe width=”480″ title=”YouTube video player” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UbsK7gOMdw?HD=1;controls=0;rel=1;showsearch=1;showinfo=0” height=”300″ frameborder=”0″></iframe>

And my video looks like this (although you have to actually be logged in to YouTube to watch this one since it’s rated 18+… YouTube doesn’t like cleavage):

Pretty cool, eh?  Go ahead and try changing the parameters of embedded YouTube videos on your blogs too and have fun with having more control over them!