I like to approach these things with big wins.
One, ask yourself who your message would help? Who would find this really valuable? It may not be people you'd typically think. Look outside of your industry.
Find where those people hangout online. Where are they on Facebook? What are they reading? etc.
Then brainstorm ways that you can show up on those channels. For example: let's say your peeps love Forbes. Have you pitched Forbes yet?
Or let's say that mommy bloggers would go crazy for your idea (so you think). You hit up some of them via email and tell them you'd love to share this free content. You'd think it'd be valuable.
Content creators are always in the biz of finding more great content. So, when you can provide it and it makes sense (your job is to show why it makes sense) then people are happy to promote.
The scariest part about this is pitching it because it can feel vain.
The key is thinking about those you're helping, removing yourself from the equation and releasing the outcome.
Then see what happens :)
Happy to discuss in detail how you can find potential partners to promote your work, formulate the pitch and even create some email templates for you to send out on a call. Shoot me a message if you want to set up a call.
Here are some obvious answers:
1) Run a Google AdWords campaign to drive views to your video through the 4 different paid ad options for YouTube videos
2) Run a Facebook ad campaign
3) Run a StumbleUpon paid discovery campaign
4) Submit / share your video to video curation sites like
ShowYou
5) Send out an email campaign promoting your video (or partner with someone that has an established list)
Here are some less obvious answers:
1) Annotate your other YouTube videos and/or get other YouTube Channels to add annotations to some of their highly viewed videos
2) Have your video posted on popular Facebook Pages and pay to promote the post
3) Submit your video to social groups / communities (e.g. Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups, Google+ Communities, etc)
4) Create a landing page on your site, embed your video and optimize the page around a keyword theme to get the page to rank organically for relevant key phrases
5) Find influencers on Twitter (using a tool like Followerwonk) to get them to post your video on their social channels
This really depends on your audience and the strength of the content. What is your video about?
In general, you can start building momentum by getting your influential friends to spread the link. Then share the link with communities of your target audience (you may find the communities on Twitter, Facebook Pages, Reddit, or other forums like Hackernews).
For most websites and forums, it is usually really important to get a lot of views very early on. * The details vary depending on the ranking criteria of the websites.
In addition to doing some outreach/PR to get it seen and shared in more places, there's probably some work that could be done on the title, description, and tags. Adding corrected captions can help too. Remember that YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine and people won't be able to find your video if you don't have the words they're searching for associated with it.
If you want a video to have the chance of going viral, it is necessary to set up support in advance to get a lot of likes, comments and shares immediately upon uploading. If your video is already uploaded, there is less pressure to make that happen.
The best way to get more visibility quickly is to work with someone who already has connections you can tap. Many people who do blog outreach collaborate with bloggers who are influential on social media as well.
A blog outreach project will raise visibility, get your video embedded in many posts, provide relevant links to your site and your video, and each one of those posts can be promoted across social networks. They can even link to each other to rank multiple posts for target keyword phrases.
We use multiple platforms to place content and increase reach including PostJoint, InkyBee, and GuestCrew for identifying blogs with social media influence. Posts containing your video can then be promoted using tools such as JustRetweet and ViralContentBuzz.
Google loves video. Putting video into posts gets those posts featured higher in search engines. Combining both will get your video more views.
I have posts that explain much of what I mention in this response. If you'd like links or additional details feel free to ask.
