HOW-TO: Publicise Videos

From Wiki

It is up to all of us to help spread the word about ShowMeDo tutorials. Kyran and I are only familiar with certain niches and sites, it is very likely that you'll know better places than us to spread the word to interested people.

1 How popular is your video?
2 Writing a good description and title
- 2.1 A Good Title + Description
- 2.2 A Bad Title + Description
3 Key points
4 General advocacy
5 Social News Sites
6 Social Bookmarks
7 Video sites
8 StumbleUpon

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How popular is your video?

First you'll want to check your video's popularity in our global rank: http://showmedo.com/mostPopular

Remember that many of our users come to use to see our main body of content which is Python (also Ruby and Graphics subjects). If your tutorial is outside of our 'popular' topics you'll have to do a bit of work to get visitors to come in. We invest time in Search Engine Optimisation to help people find you but if you can spread the word you'll help many more targetted users come and find your tutorials.

Need help? Speak to our other authors in our Group (http://groups.google.com/group/showmedo) and ask them how they get users to come and view their content.

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Writing a good description and title

Remember that a visitor who sees your pages for the first time will take just a moment to decide if they should investigate your screencasts or just move on. Your title has to grab them and your description text has to make them want to watch the video. Your description text is also used by Google to send people over when they're searching for exactly the sort of thing you show in your screencast. So - write a useful title and write a good, comprehensive description. Keywords play a strong role in both the title and the description.

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A Good Title + Description

"Writing Code and Navigating in Wing IDE v3" - it tells you the program that is being shown and tells you what you'll see. A good description would tell the user (in several paragraphs) what they are going to see, which features are demonstrated and what they'll learn by watching the video.

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A Bad Title + Description

"Course Outline" + a description that reads like "This is an introduction to the program". The title doesn't tell the user *which* program is being shown and what is demonstrated. The description has no keywords for Google and no 'meat' to make the user feel compelled to watch the screencast.

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Key points

These points will help you get repeat visitors to your series:

Have a useful title (descriptive and inviting)
Make your description long and Google-friendly, i.e. several paragraphs, mentioning many key terms. This helps Google send users over from the web when they're searching for your kind of tutorial
Spread the word to social news sites to get some attention (but this fades quickly)
Spread the word to key mailing lists
Try (we can help) to get a link to your series from key websites (e.g. if you talk about wxPython then get a link in the wxPython wiki) - this sends in a consistent stream of visitors but you can only do this if your series is strong and exactly related to the site you're posting on

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General advocacy

You can help by posting to:

Your own blog, blogs of friends, possibly blogs of other ShowMeDo authors (ask in our Google Group)
Forums where the users would find your link useful
Friendly Bloggers who work on your topic (e.g. the founders of the tool that you've made videos about)
Mail-lists
Appropriate Wikis (including Wikipedia if your video is explicitly about the topic and the page doesn't have many background-links - do not do this on busy pages, e.g. the 'python programming' language page!)

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