9 Secrets to Promoting Your Acting Using YouTube Videos

Great Example of How to Set Up YouTube Channel

Internet Marketing Using YouTube to Get Found on Google Search

Nothing is working like YouTube to get your target audience to take action.  In the case of an actor, you want to be found by agents, managers, casting directors, or any other person who has anything to do with a televsion show, movie, or commercial.  As noted in our earlier post:  5 Ways Actors Can Promote Their Film or Televsion Acting Careers on YouTube  creating and posting as many videos showing you in actual performances and in specifically designed vignettes of you at your best can already create opportunities, and may be the way of the future.

1. YouTube has a search function. And YouTube videos will show up in regular Google searches.  If you create a great title for your video, add a good description, and provide relevant keywords in the title, description, and tags, your potential audience will find you through the search mechanism on Google and/or YouTube. They may also find you because you are related to other searches and videos they watch.

2.  Selecting keywords.  There are three ways to be found on line.  The most likely is through a Google Search or a YouTube search.  YouTube is the second most popular search engine ahead of Bing and Yahoo.  You will be found on that search through the use of keywords.  You do this every day.  You enter the words you believe will get you the information you need.  What will the casting director use as keywords for his search?

For the answer you will go to the Google keywords tool.  If you forget the url, just look up keyword tool and it will always be at the top of the page.  Enter in various words that you believe might be used by a casting director to find talent:  Actor, character actor, female character actor, comedic actor, leading man, etc.  The keyword tool will let you know how often those words are looked up, and it will also recommend others.  Play with this tool until you have some really good ideas.

One thing to note.  Longer keywords will get fewer hits, but will get much higher conversions.  So Italian female character actor over 40 might only get a 100 hits a year.  But if a director is looking for that person, and you are online with that description, you are half way home.

On the other hand, just using actor as a keyword will get millions of hits.  But 99.99% will not be directors, and it will be almost impossible to compete for high rankings for that keyword anyway.
One of the benefits of having 50 YouTube videos on your channel, is that you have 50 titles and 50 keywords to play with.

3.  If you have a website, create a video page or pages.  You could have a page for each character type that you are trying to promote.  Or you could just have a video page with all the videos on one page.  Each of these should then have a couple of sentences about them on the page with keywords in those descriptions.


4.  A blog is a great place to include these videos.  Put your best ones (3 or 4) in the side column.  Now put up one post with a video for every two posts you do on other subjects.  The reason for this is that having too many videos will make the blog load slowly.  Google doesn't like this.  When you do a blog about a video, you have another opportunity to create Titles and Tags for that idea or aspect of your acting.  The blog might get seen even when the video doesn't. 

5.  If you want to really punch up the activity on your blog, website, and YouTube videos, send out Tweets about them.  Don't worry if you don't have followers.  You want these Tweets to go to the "Public" participants in Tweeting.  Make each Tweet a great and interesting headline with your keywords included.  NY Male character actor recreates role of Clarence Darrow in this short video.  Then attach a "short url"   You can create short URL's at bit.ly . 

You can do a lot of Tweeting by using a service like HootSuite.com.  Check them out.  You can put up 10-12 Tweets per day in about 10 minutes.  You can do even better than that by using their bulk upload service. 

6. You can add your YouTube video to your blog, your facebook, you can Tweet about it, and you can socially bookmark the original video, the article on your blog, and the facebook entry. All of these increase the chances of the video being seen, and also benefit your activities on these other web tools.

7. Daily Motion, Vimeo and other video repositories similar to YouTube may pick up your video and add it to their listings. But if you don't want to wait and see if they do so, you can upload the same video to each one.  Or you can use an aggregator like tubemogul.com to put the video up on numerous of these sites all at once.

8. The best part is that the you create these YouTube videos and upload them once.  That is the total work needed.  They will still be selling you years from now.

9.  Set up a YouTube Channel.  Follow the directions for setting up the channel in a way that will give your visitors the easiest way to navigate within your channel.  Your goal in all internet marketing is to make it easy for your audience to find you and to find the things about you that will result in a conversion.

Now you can sit back and let your videos become silent salesmen for your skills.