Promoting a YouTube Collab Video

This week I’m running a collab video contest; this is the final post in a series that I hope has made your collab’ing experience more enjoyable. Yesterday we went over how to find someone to collab with. Today, we are going to talk about promoting a collab video.

Having a YouTubelebrity in your video doesn’t guarantee you more views. Smosh could make an appearance in your video, but unless they put the word out about your video as well, no one beyond your existing audience will see it.

Social Networking/Bookmarking

Don’t be shy about asking the YouTubers who appear in your video to promote it. Do they have a ton of followers on Twitter? Ask them to tweet a link to the video. (Buck has Twittered three links to my blog in the past and each time I’ve seen hundreds of new, unique viewers – just from a Twitter status!) Add your video to Digg and Stumbleupon, ask your friends for votes on both of those sites. Build a little Digg group of friends and agree to always help each other out by digging each others posts. And don’t forget about posted items on Facebook or bulletins on MySpace.

On YouTube

Ask the person you collabed with if they’ll put the video in their autoplayer for a day or two. Videos have 48 hours to make an impact on YouTube’s Most Viewed / Most Discussed charts. One day in LisaNova’s autoplay is good for about 15,000-20,000 views. That’s significant. Ask the person you collabed with to leave their latest video as a video response to the collab. This especially helps if you have an intriguing title. Or ask them to send out a bulletin or two. Or embed it in the V-Log section on their channel.

Outside of YouTube

If your collab might be interesting or relevant to an audience outside of YouTube, register for forums and post threads with links to your video. Try not to be too spammy when you do this though, look for appropriate sections of the forum, and make sure you say in your thread why users of the forum should be interested in this link. When I uploaded my Now That’s What I Call Emo video, I registered and posted it on numerous Dashboard Confessional and My Chemical Romance forums, for obvious reasons.

Credit

One factor that will greatly improve the chances of your collab partners pimping your video is whether or not you promoted them on your video. Give credit. Use the video description to link everyone who appeared in your collab. Include on-screen credits at the end of the video if at all possible. Use annotations to link everyone as they appear on screen. Doing so will make your collab partners much more interested in promoting you in return.

There really aren’t guarded secrets to any of this stuff. People won’t search you out. If you want people to see your video, you have to put your video in front of peoples’ eyes. It’s really that simple.

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