Video marketing is rapidly becoming one of the best ways to boost online visibility and to market a business in general. Effective marketing produces all kinds of great benefits, including increased profitability. If you want to get terrific bang for your marketing buck, getting up to speed about video marketing is a must.

With all of that being said, don’t assume that you can just whip up a few videos, upload them to your website and watch the traffic–and leads–pour in. It just doesn’t work that way. It isn’t quite that simple. Luckily, it’s not terribly difficult, either. As long as you do a handful of things, you’re almost certain to experience incredible success through your video marketing efforts. We’ve rounded up nine particularly useful tips that will help you avoid the most common mistakes that are made by beginners.

1. Upload Your Videos to YouTube

If you don’t already have a YouTube channel for your business, create one. Before posting your videos anywhere else, post them on YouTube. After all, it’s the second largest search engine, and it also happens to be owned by Google. What this means is that the videos you post there can appear in the search engine results pages, giving you yet another avenue for attracting people to your website. Keep in mind, however, that videos on YouTube sometimes take time to attract views. The longer you’ve had your channel, and the more videos you post to it, the easier it will be to get views. The nice thing is that videos keep attracting views for years.

2. Next, Upload Your Videos to Facebook

After posting your videos to YouTube, share them with your fans on Facebook. Make sure the videos are public, so they can be also be seen by your followers’ followers and by the world at large. Facebook videos tend to “fizzle” quickly, but they also tend to attract lots of views right when they’re posted.

3. Put Thought and Effort into Your Videos

In a single month, more than 6 billion hours of videos are viewed on YouTube. People have lots of videos to consume, so they’re not going to bother if you aren’t offering something that’s compelling. Compelling can be informative; how-to videos are quite popular. Interviews, behind-the-scenes stories, case studies, and highlights of your best products and services are also great options to consider. Keep your niche audience in mind while developing videos to ensure that they appeal to the right people. Before sharing a video, ask yourself if you’d sit and watch the whole thing.

4. Optimize Your Videos

YouTube provides lots of ways for you to make it easier for the right people to find your videos. Think of it as SEO for videos. You want to optimize the videos that you share with keywords and other relevant information. Include targeted keywords in the headline, the description and the tags. Google can’t “crawl” videos to pick out keywords, but a great workaround is to create transcripts for all of the videos that you post. These are also useful for the hearing impaired, so it’s a win-win.

5. Include a Strong Call to Action

Example of a Call to Action

Your videos shouldn’t be overtly salesy, but they still need to promote your business. The best way to do this is by including a strong call to action. A call to action is simply prompting viewers to take action of some kind. In most cases, it’s asking them to call your business or to visit your website. YouTube allows you to add a message across the bottom third of the screen. Use it for your call to action, and make sure that it includes your website URL, your phone number, your business name and your business logo. Include a direct link to your website in the description too, and use anchor text that says something like “visit our website.”

6. Share, Share, Share

There are so many videos on YouTube that you can’t expect yours to magically attract views. You need to gain exposure for the videos that you create, and the best way to do that is by sharing them wherever you can. Social media is excellent for this, as you can share one video with thousands of people with just the click of a button. Of course, optimization matters here too. When sharing videos on social media, include descriptions that are optimized to perform well on the search engines. Encourage others to pass your videos along, and make it easy for them by including social share buttons, when applicable.

7. Delete Poorly Performing Videos 

Over time, your YouTube channel will become loaded with videos that you’ve created. From time to time, go through and remove the ones that have very few views. Similarly, delete ones that have a lot of down votes. Poorly performing videos drag down your entire YouTube channel, making it less likely for people to find it and watch what you’ve shared. Analyze these videos to try and discern what made them so unpopular, and try to avoid repeating the same techniques with future videos.

8. Engage in Consistent Branding

A great way to make your videos stand out and to keep people coming back for more is by being consistent. You want to maintain a consistent branding message across all of your videos. Use a similar “voice” in your videos, and include a consistent logo, color scheme and the like. Consider introducing and ending your videos with the same little script, so viewers become more familiar with you and your videos. If someone in your organization happens to be great in front of the camera, have them be your “spokesperson” in these videos, and have them appear every time to keep up the same image.

9. Buy Ads

While PPC advertising is generally complicated, it’s less so with YouTube videos. Most companies are able to set up very modest campaigns and still manage to generate a lot of buzz and interest. This is especially useful for the period right after you’ve set up your new YouTube channel. The ads will help draw in viewers, and, with any luck, some of them will stick around. The more activity your videos receive, the better they will rank, and the likelier it is that other people will find them. In the lower third of the ads, you can include clickable links, so add links to your website to boost the overall effects of your ads even more.

YouTube and digital videos in general have democratized the world of video marketing. The old days of having to pay a fortune to air a 30-second ad on TV are over. Today, all you need is a decent camera, a good idea and some persistence to make major headway with this type of marketing. These efforts tend to have a snowball effect, so be sure to hang in there. At first, it may seem like you’re getting nowhere. Once you’ve generated several videos and have shared them and identified what works and what doesn’t, you’ll start attracting more promising leads and, in the long run, achieving better profitability.