How to Make a Great Book Trailer – Part 4 of 4

Your cat does SEO for YouTubeA lot of the authors I talk to think book trailers don’t do anything. But the reality is that if the book trailer isn’t easy to find on YouTube, it will never be seen. This post will show you how to get a ton of viewers to find and watch your video.

 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for YouTube

In previous posts we covered how to design and create a compelling book trailer. In part 1 we covered how to write a great script, in part 2 I showed you where you could get free royalty-free images and music, and in part 3 you got to see how Animoto does a great job at creating dynamic slide-show book trailers.

Once your book trailer is on YouTube, log in, and go to your “Video Manager.” Click on “Edit” to edit your video.

The goal is for your readers to do a search on YouTube for their interests and for your book trailer to come up on the first page of search results.

 

Find the Best Keywords

Go to Google’s keyword tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

In the text box, type a list of words and phrases that relate to the experience your book provides. For example, I might type the following list.

thriller
action
page-turner
thriller book
Jewish book
36 righteous
theodicies

Now add on books and authors similar to your genre.

Bourne Identity
The Bourne Identity
Bourne Identity book
Bourne Identity Robert Ludlum
Robert Ludlum
Da Vinci Code
The Da Vinci Code
Da Vinci Code book
Da Vinci Code Dan Brown
Dan Brown
The Killing Floor
Killing Floor book
Killing Floor Lee Child
Lee Child

One time only, you’ll need to type in those annoyingly hard-to-read Captcha words to prove you’re human. You are human, aren’t you?

Start the search and Google will list how often people search those terms locally and globally. You want really high numbers. Any global search result that has over 10,000 monthly searches is a keeper. Make a note of the best keywords and now it’s time to test them.

 

YouTube Search Results

When filling in the title, do a YouTube search to see how many other videos have the same complete title as you do. If the exact match isn’t found, YouTube will pull videos that have some of the same words as are in the title. If there are too many with the complete title, choose a different one.

For example, I want to check how many videos have “Bourne Identity” in the title. I type the phrase in quotes to make sure the videos have that specific order of words (instead of  videos with bizarre titles like “the identity of him was bourne from goodness”). Looking at the results, the entire first page of results has the words “bourne identity” in the title. So now I’ll try “Bourne Identity book” to see if that weeds out all the movie-related videos. Perfect! After about three videos, there are no more videos with that exact phrase in the title.

 

Filling in the YouTube Information

After finding a few more keywords that work — the keywords have more than 10,000 global monthly searches according Google’s keyword tool, and have only a few search results on YouTube — use those keywords in the book trailer’s title, and at least twice in the first paragraph of the video’s description, and once at the last paragraph of the description.

The title of my video is “Fighting with God – Jewish version of Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity – Book Trailer.” I posted it last week and so far it’s got 45 views:

 

At the top of the description, I put a bitly custom link that goes to the Amazon page for my book. Here’s an example of a book description that incorporates the key words.

http://amzn.to/TheTorahCodes
This book trailer of Fighting with God; Death of the 36 Righteous shows what the sequel to my first book The Torah Codes will be about. It’s a Jewish version of Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity in that the main character, like Jason Bourne, knows martial arts and must fight government powers. The first book, The Torah Codes, is an award-winning bestseller and is available now at http://www.amazon.com.

Once you finish the Description box, put five keywords in the Tags box. Have the first be your best keyword, and then add four others.

The rest is pretty straight forward. Choose the most appropriate category for your video.

Save changes.

I hope this series of blog posts have created changes in the way you think about book trailers, changes in how you plan your book trailers, changes in how you make your book trailers, and changes in how you post your book trailers. I also hope that you will now…

Save changes.

***

Book marketing mentor, Ezra Barany is the author of the award-winning bestseller, The Torah Codes. Contact Ezra now to begin the conversation on how he can help you. You can connect with Ezra via FacebookTwitter, contact him through this blog, or by email: EZRA at THETORAHCODES dot COM.

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  • I need to go back to read the other three posts in this series, since I missed at least two of them.

    Recently, I have used a program called Source Filmmaker to create two videos. Both have over a hundred views on YouTube.

    One thing I’m trying to do for the sake of getting more views and subscribers is interacting with other people in the niche. There are plenty of them who only have slightly more views than I do, and it’s worth liking and commenting on their videos to get their attention, and possibly get them to do the same.

    All I need to do is to put a little more effort into it.

  • J P says:

    Thanks for the advise. We’ll see what happens next!

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