6 Ways To Get More Out Of Your Video Content

Want to get more out of your videos? Follow these simple tips for increasing your reach and quantity of optimized content on the web.

Video is comprised of more than moving images. Don’t forget that you can optimize audio, copy, and screenshots.

1) Put Your Transcription On Your Blog

You are transcribing your videos, right?

I’ve said it once. I’ll say it again. People consume content in different ways. Do your readers a favour and let them skim the transcription in your blog. Follow your copywriting rules and put in your H1 and H2 headers to make things easier to read. The added benefit to you is that search engine bots will have more to index if you put the transcription in the body of your blog post.

2) Post Your Transcription to Scribd

Once you’ve created your transcription, drop it into a .pdf, add some links back to your blog, your RSS feed and put your contact information in it. This may not give you any SEO juice, but if someone finds your content on Scribd, you’re giving them the opportunity to find you and come back for some more helpful tips.

3) Upload Your Audio Track

When you’re in your editing software of choice, export out the audio track and then upload it to www.archive.org. Add a description of your audio file and add some appropriate keywords so that people can find what you’re talking about. You can also use it to add the audio file to Slideshare (see below).

4) Put Your Screenshots on Flickr

Most editing software allows you pull out a screenshot from your clip. Export out some interesting frames and upload them to Flickr with the right keywords to give yourself some extra reach.

5) Turn Your Video Into A Slidecast

If your video is straightforward, or if it’s from a presentation you did, take that audio track that you created and make a slidecast on Slideshare. You also might try using some of your screenshots to drop them in the slideshow to save time and still give people some glamour shots of yourself. I’ve also noticed that URLs show up as hot in the Slideshare descriptions, so when you post to Facebook, you can get some traffic back to your site.

6) Clean Up Your YouTube Captions

Last week, YouTube announced that it was automatically creating machine based transcriptions of videos.

Don’t rely on them.

If you’ve read through the captions you’ve seen that the service isn’t quite there yet. Some of the text is completely nonsensical. Not only is this annoying for the hard of hearing, but when Google indexes the captions, you may wind up in some strange search results.

Use your transcription to add your own caption file. That way YouTube isn’t putting words in your mouth and you’re getting indexed for something you’ve actually created.