The Ultimate YouTube Tips, Tools and Tutorials Roundup
According to the latest statistics from YouTube, “100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute”. This is just one of the many staggering facts and figures surrounding the success of the internet’s most prominent video marketing platforms.
Here’s another fascinating factoid: “According to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more US adults ages 18-34 than any cable network.” It’s funny how things change, when I was in that age group cable TV was the next big thing, and today it seems everyone wants to cut the cord. With that said, these days when you think about the ever changing landscape of social media and content marketing, I’m sure there’s no doubt in your mind that YouTube is here to stay.
Measuring Your Success on YouTube
If you’ve been creating videos for awhile, you might be asking yourself, “How can I measure my own success on YouTube?”
I know it takes a lot of guts to get in front of the camera to record YouTube videos (believe me, I’ve had my share of bad hair days) or even to get behind the mic to record video screencasts. On top of that — there’s all the time you spend researching topics and keywords for titles — and last – but certainly not least, your hard work putting together a video marketing and promotion strategy.
That’s why I put together this roundup of valuable YouTube tips, tools and tutorials, so you can have a collection of video tracking tools and marketing resources all in one place.
I’ve shared a few of these here on the blog before and there are also some that I’m mentioning here for the first time. Take a look at them, and pick the ones you feel will provide the most insight for you based on the goals you have for your channel. Without further ado, let’s start with something new.
ReEmbed
I’m starting this roundup off with ReEmbed because this tool is useful for anyone with a blog.
That’s right – you can use ReEmbed if you don’t have your own YouTube channel but you’re savvy enough to embed relevant YouTube videos in your blog posts. It’s also a subtle way for me to nudge you (once again) to start a YouTube Channel, because I think you’ll be surprised when you see how well your audience responds to video.
Here’s a little bit about how it works. Install the ReEmbed plugin (or a place snippet of code) on your site, and you’ll get a chance to see which videos are actually being watched by people visiting your blog. You can even get access to realtime stats in your ReEmbed dashboard similar to the realtime traffic reports found in Google Analytics. Pretty sweet right?
You can create a customized video player that will coordinate with the colors of your blog theme and a bunch of other goodies. I go into more detail about this in the video below titled:
Online Video Grader
The folks at Pixability created this handy gem. Enter your YouTube Channel and domain and the Online Video Grader and it“measures how you use video on your website, how you rank on Google and other video search engines, and how effective your YouTube channel is.” Give it a couple of minutes and the tool will diagnose the performance of your videos and how well they work in conjunction with your website. You’ll get a report like this. Hopefully your’s will have results like these:
And if you’re thinking I like this tool a lot because I got such a fantastic score — you’re absolutely right.
A key stat the Online Video Grader displays is one that you’ll have a hard time finding on other tools. It’s this one:
4,995 Tweets for your YouTube videos
I’m not aware of any other service that adds up all of your YouTube video tweets and gives you a total. This is also a good time for me to say Thank you! To all of you who shares my videos on Twitter. I really appreciate all of you for doing that. Click on the image to learn more about my YouTube channel but you can run this report for any channel on YouTube.
Tracking, Advertising and YouTube Sponsorship Deals
Check out the previous reviews I’ve done and you’ll also find some interesting opportunities you might want to explore listed below:
- Discover 3 YouTube Analytics Alternatives: SocialBlade, OneLoad and Cyfe
- Get introduced to vidIQ which I also cover here along with some other Chrome Extensions for YouTube
- Learn about a tool geared specifically toward doing keyword research called TubeTrackr here (if you have over 5,000 subs try Tubular Labs)
- Predict the future growth of any channel with Statfire
- Develop a strategy for TruView advertising with Strike Social
- Land a paid sponsorship deal with advertisers through a relatively new service called Famebit
Udemy and Skillfeed Courses
Udemy and Skillfeed are two online learning platforms that are quickly gaining popularity due to their ease of use and popular course listings. Of the two, Udemy has the most courses and they also have a smart phone and Chromecast app. Sign in with Facebook and you’ll find several classes offering tutorials for YouTube. The course fees range anywhere from $9 up to $499. But on occasion, you can find a really good one that’s offered for absolutely free.
The first Udemy course I signed up for and highly recommend is: YouTube: Grow Subscribers Successfully and Make $4,000 per Month from Manfred Warner. This course is updated on a regular basis and well worth the current cost of $199.
What about taking a free class on Udemy?
Sign up for my course titled Building an Engaged Audience on YouTube. Take the course and you’ll have access to the YouTube Channel Audit Checklist that I created as a handy tool to help my students understand the strengths and weaknesses of their overall video marketing strategy on YouTube. When you join the class be sure to download the checklist at the bottom of the page. Portions of this course is also available on Skillfeed along with these YouTube tutorials from other Skillfeed instructors.
More tips tools and tutorials
Before you go, I want to leave you with a few more of my favorite resources for growing and promoting your YouTube channel. And for those of you who want to explore what’s available beyond YouTube I added some additional site for you to check out as well. I’m sure you have a few that you would like to share as well. Please leave a comment below or on Google so we can have a look!
