Home Recording Review

Have you ever recorded your band's performance, live or practice?

If so, it should be posted on YouTube.

Our band recorded all kinds of videos, from gigs to messing around recording and just plain having fun. Putting those on YouTube has a couple benefits. The most important is the exposure that YouTube can bring your band if you leverage it properly. The second is that you can embed that video in your webpage, exactly as I have here with the instructional video, and YouTube pays the bandwidth for people to view it.

The disadvantage of posting your video on YouTube is that you give up your copyright to that video, and YouTube then has the copyright to the video. Up to this day, it hasn't been an issue for anyone that I am aware of.

Social Media sites like YouTube have a greater percentage of people who listen to new music than most ways that you can promote your site online. A cool Band video, with your music in it, are great promotional tools.

Another Technique is to use Playlists to bring users to your video. The advantages of creating playlists are two-fold.

First of all, you can gather individual clips into a niche-targeted context so that viewers can find related content quickly and easily without having to search for the individual items themselves. By putting in the time and research you can provide this service and boost your web traffic without ever recording a single video of your own.

Secondly, you can gather your own videos either by thematic relevance, or as part of a series. If you have a longer video, it makes sense to break it down into several clips, each with a clear title, so that viewers can opt to skip to particularly interesting parts of your movie.

Either way, you have cut out some of the search and navigation work required of your potential audience, and won them over in the process. The ability to select and bring to other people's attention little-seen videos is a skill in and of itself, and people will thank you for taking the time.

When you upload your video:

• Try to get the best quality recording you can. There are video's on You tube that will tell you the best settings to use. Here is the one that i followed, and the quality difference versus a standard video upload, is huge. After you upload your video, YouTube then compresses it with their method, so putting it up there in the right format really helps.
• Make sure to link to your band website in the description of the video. This will have to be in the first few words, since YouTube only shows a small amount of the description.
• Pick your Tag words carefully. Your first 4 will have the most weight. Select things that people will type into the search box. Are you like another band? (of course you are although i know we all think we are original) Put that other band as one of your tags. When people search it, they will arrive at your video.

Narrow Your Focus Your Ultimate end goal in YouTube Marketing is to make it to the front page. This is done through the number of people that view and subscribe to your video. It is incredibly difficult to make it to that front page. However, it is easier to make it to the front page of one of the categories. Make sure that you classify your video correctly into one of the categories, and then promote it.

Views on your website do count as views, Because of this, you can use Email campaigns, or Myspace Bulletins and Comments to drive people to view your new video. Provide a link to your webpage that has the video on it, and once the user is done watching the video, they are there on your page looking for more!

It's time to harness the power of social media!