In the long-run, the goal of your videos is to attract organic traffic by ranking the search results for their respective keywords/topics.
To give your videos the best chance of consistently attracting new viewers on a long-term basis, it helps to promote them as soon as they are published. Promoting your videos as soon as they are published helps give them an initial boost of traction, which helps encourage YouTube to rank your video higher than competing videos.
Here are some things you can do each time you publish a new video to help increase views and shares:
1. Send the link to your video to your email list
Send an email to your list of email subscribers with a link to watch your video. Share a quick story about why you created this video, what they will learn from it, and the benefits of watching it. Encourage them to comment on the video, ask a question, or share it with someone that would also enjoy it.
2. Share your video on social media
Share your video with all of your fans and followers on all of your social networks. Some video marketers create separate promotional videos to encourage their audience to watch their latest video on YouTube. You could also create teaser video to show a short clip from your main video, and include a link to your main video in their post.
3. Embed your video in a blog post
If you have a company website and/or blog, publish a blog post that summarizes our YouTube video and includes a link to the video itself. This simple act of publishing a blog post that includes a link to your YouTube video can help to increase its ranking on YouTube.
4. Collaborate with other experts
Although this is technically accomplished during the video creation phase, featuring other people in your videos can help increase exposure to new audiences, especially when the people featured in your video help to share it.
Interviewing other experts and content creators in your industry is a great way to accomplish this. Video interviews can also easily be re-purposed as podcast episodes, blog posts, and case studies.
5. Reach out to people that have shared and/or linked to similar content
Although this can be a relatively time-consuming promotion technique, it can be very effective and is generally a great way to initiate relationships with other people that are interested in your video topic.
6. Advertise your videos on YouTube
With a Google AdWords account, you can pay to promote your videos on YouTube itself. Just like on Facebook, you can target your ads by age, gender, location, interests, and more.
The great thing about advertising on YouTube is you only pay when someone engages with your ad. If they skip it before the 30-second mark (or before the end of your video) you don’t pay anything.