YouTube is a great place to brand your small business. If you have any videos about your business, maybe testimonials from customers, some behind the scenes that you've shot, an event at your place of business, or you're planning to shoot how-to style videos about your business or industry, these sorts of things are all great content for creating a YouTube video. 

If you read my previous blog on How to Find, Hire and Work With a Video Editor you are most likely ready to advance your YouTube presence even more. Now that you have a video edited and ready to be published to YouTube, you now want to optimize and upload your video so that your audience sees it. This video is going to go over 

How To Upload and Optimize your Video to YouTube 

Why should you optimize your YouTube video? 

The simple reason is so people can find you on YouTube. According to Rand Fischkin, YouTube has more search traffic then both Bing and Yahoo, more than twice Amazon’s and three times Facebook, and if you optimize your video, when someone goes searching for the information that's included in your video, they'll find your video, and if you don't optimize the video, they might not. 

Whether you are interested in housing a place for your videos, or want to grow your YouTube channel, you always want to optimize. Following these optimization steps only takes a few minutes, but it can make the world of a difference when people are trying to search for worthy content.

Steps to Optimize and Upload Your video to YouTube

1.Title Your Video

We start with the title, which you should use to name the video file that will be uploaded to YouTube AND the in the “ title field”  on YouTube itself.  Your YouTube Video title should be relevant to what the video's about, and also, contain terms people might use to search for the content of this video.  While creating a title, it’s important that it grabs the attention of others, as well as being key-word rich for better optimization.  

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2. Upload Your Video

Before you completely upload your video, make sure it is set to ‘unpublished’. This is because you will still have a few more changes to make before making it live to the public.So I'm going to select a file, a pre-recorded video from my desktop. As it uploads, complete the remaining video optimizing steps.

3. Add a Description to Your Video 

For the video description, it’s super important to load it with multiple keywords or key phrases. Most people don’t need to read the description of the video, since they already read the title prior to clicking in the video. So think the main job of the description is to help with optimization, aka people finding the video. So reiterate here what the video is all about.

The first sentence of the description should repeat the title that you chose in step 2. So I want you to use five sentences that reuses your title over and over again. First, you write the title. "How to Upload and Optimize A Video on YouTube to Brand Your Small Business." And then something like, "Do you want to brand "your small business using YouTube? "You should watch this video on how to upload "and optimize a video on YouTube to brand "your small business." Do this until you have about five sentences, this way the description is loaded with strong keywords for optimizing. 

4. Tag Your Video

YouTube gives you the option to add 500 characters in the tag section. Be sure to use all 500 characters, it will help you reach more people. The goal is to find tags that are relevant but not too popular. You can use the service on Tube Buddy, Google or even Instagram to determine what hashtags will work best. 

Determining hashtags can take a lot of research because you have to think about what the audience is searching to find your video, and what hashtags will directly correlate.  Hashtags can be used on most social platforms, as it is another way to be social and see what others are posting about, this way you have the opportunity to connect with them if you’d like. I have a previous blog that you can reference for determining the best hashtags for Instagram. These practices can be a game-changer when it comes to your account or content being discovered!

5. Create a Custom Thumbnail  

Thumbnails are the little photos associated with each video you see on YouTube. Creating thumbnails can be a great way to make your video stick out. You can most certainly take a snippet of your YouTube video and set it as the image viewers see as the thumbnail. However, you can spice it up even more by using Canva to edit the photo. 

Canva actually provides a YouTube thumbnail template. Just add keywords, or your title of the video to make your video more intriguing to viewers. The idea is to stand out with bold colors, a fun photo and BIG font so it is legible.

Once your graphic is complete, be sure to download it to your computer. We're going to go back to YouTube while that downloads. At this point the video should be done uploading and you're able to head to the Creator Studio to add your custom thumbnail by clicking the ‘edit’ button.

6. Closed Caption Your Video

Adding closed captions to your videos will add optimization, and make your videos searchable just by having subtitles.  YouTube will do this for you, but I found it tedious to clean up all of the mistakes in the YouTube version. I pay $1/minute for www.rev.com caption service. Something as simple as adding subtitles to your YouTube video makes a big difference in how your video is discovered. 

It’s Time to Go Public

It’s now time to change this video from unlisted to public, and then hit save. I'm not going to do that right now, because one final tip is if you are working to grow your audience through YouTube, then experts agree that the first 24 hours is the most important time for your YouTube video, meaning you need to show YouTube that lots of people want to watch your video. 

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Now the video is public, so anyone with the link or that discovered the link can find your YouTube video. Wherever you can to drive traffic to that video from outside of YouTube, that will tell YouTube,” Hey, people like this, I'm going to show it to more people on YouTube”. Then you might find new audience members. Once your video is upload, optimization is going to be what drives your audience to your video or channel. 

Happy Optimizing!