4 Useful Tips to Promote a Book on YouTube More Effectively

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Edward Parker, Mahendra Bajiya, social media marketing, video marketing, YouTube marketing

I recently shared 7 Reasons for Using Videos in Your Social Marketing Campaigns. Many commented that it’s hard using YouTube effectively–a statement I agree with, as I’m pretty inexperienced in its use myself. Which is why I hope you find today’s guest post by Mahendra Bajiya useful! Mahendra is an entrepreneur and blogger who uses YouTube to promote a variety of products. He is particularly intrigued by its potential to market books, due to its wide reach and demographics.

Image: Pixabay

Many authors don’t focus enough on using YouTube to promote their books. That is unfortunate, seeing as it is the second largest search engine on the planet, and there are lots of reasons why you should be publishing videos to promote your book on its platform.

While promoting a book on YouTube effectively can be tricky, there are a few useful tips that will help you to get started:

1. Create a professional YouTube channel

Before you start to publish any videos promoting your book on YouTube you should first set up a professional-looking channel in your name (or the pseudonym that you use). Think of your channel as an author profile that lets viewers learn more about you and the books that you publish.

Some of the more important elements for a professional YouTube channel include the profile photo, header image, and description (i.e. the ‘About’ section).

Consider also creating a trailer for your channel that lets viewers know your story, and connects to the books that you’ve published.

2. Design trailers and teasers that give viewers a reason to read the book

The key to a good book trailer or teaser is that it should convince viewers to buy your book. The best way to do that is to give them a strong reason.

For non-fiction, you should focus on the benefits of reading the book, such as the problems it will help solve. On the other hand for fiction, you should try to get viewers interested in the story, so they want to know what happens next.

Creating videos for YouTube doesn’t have to be that complicated, and all you really need is a camera and a user-friendly video editor. For example, you could try Movavi Video Editor, which is pretty easy to use (check it out for yourself on https://www.movavi.com/support/how-to/video-for-youtube.html).

3. Come up with short topics related to your book’s content

While teasers and trailers can be helpful to promote a book on YouTube – there are only so many of them that you can create. Instead, you should try coming up with other short topics that are related to your book’s content in some way.

It is easier to do this for non-fiction books, as you can base the videos directly on the books’ content or find topics tangentially related to it. For fiction, this can be harder, but videos that expand on the characters, backstory, lore, history, or any other aspect of the book may be a good place to start.

Make sure each topic is narrow, so you can use it to create a short and targeted video.

4. Optimize the videos for YouTube discovery

One of the main benefits of marketing books on YouTube is the fact that it has lots of internal traffic. But to take advantage of that your videos need to be optimized so that people can find them on its platform.

To start optimizing your videos you should first focus on YouTube SEO best practices, such as keyword optimized titles and descriptions, tags, playlists, captions, and so on.

On top of that, the title and preview image of your video should be catchy and need to convince viewers to actually watch the video once they find it.

All of the tips listed above should help you to get more viewers on YouTube and ultimately that should lead to more book sales. Just be sure that you have a link from your YouTube channel and from each video’s description that points back to your website – so that viewers know where they can go and grab a copy of your book!