In my six years as a digital marketer, I’ve worked with more legal clients than I can even remember. So many have come to me asking why their YouTube channel isn’t providing them with any leads. Having a successful YouTube channel takes a lot of work, and a lot of factors go into creating one. But I want to touch on one specific mistake I’ve seen time and time again: bulk uploads.
It’s not exactly a secret that video marketing can bring great returns to your firm. Many video production companies have capitalized on this fact to sell videos to lawyers. In some cases they will leave their client with dozens of videos, but no guidance on how to use them effectively. If you’re like most of the lawyers I’ve met, you don’t have time to deal with strategizing the release of so much content. So they make the mistake of dumping all of their videos up onto their YouTube channel and their website at the same time.
So right now I’d like to take a moment to talk about why this can hurt your videos’ effectiveness, and give you some solutions that won’t eat up all your time.
Consistency
Your audience and the search engines want the same thing from your website: content. But more than that, they want new content. They want to see a site that is an ongoing source of new information. So let’s say you have fifty videos that answer questions that are frequently asked by the people you are trying to attract. It’s very tempting to upload all of them at once to start attracting those viewers as soon as possible, right? Resist that temptation. Google rewards channels and websites that are consistent with their content schedule. Just in the case of YouTube, a channel that uploads one video every week for fifty weeks is going to receive more favorable rankings than a channel that uploads fifty videos in one day.
That said, you can certainly upload multiple videos in a week, as long as you can continue with that schedule. If you want to upload three videos every week, commit to it. Also, there will be some cases where uploading multiple videos at the same time makes sense, like if they are all linked together via annotations as a part of a series. But generally speaking, spread it out.
Subscriber Burn
Every YouTube user’s homepage is a feed of recent videos from channels they subscribe to. They are put in order of the channels they watch most frequently. If a user skips over too many new videos from the same channel, that channel will begin to fall down the feed, and eventually disappear.
So let’s say you have a channel that releases one video every day. You have a subscriber that likes your content and watches every video. Your channel appears at the top of their feed. You decide if your subscribers like one video every day, surely they’ll love two! That same subscriber just doesn’t have the time to keep up with two videos every day. So they start missing your videos. YouTube will take note of that, and your channel will start to lose its placement at the top.
This is what’s known as subscriber burn.
Overwhelming even your biggest fans with too much content at once can cause your traffic to drop dramatically. You are tasked with finding the sweet spot where your subscribers will check out as much of your new content as possible. This number varies widely for different industries. Large entertainment channels like Rooster Teeth upload multiple videos every day and maintain a strong audience. For professional industries, I recommend once or twice a week. I have found great success with three times a week. Just consider your audience and the type of content you are creating, and decide for yourself what is reasonable.
How to Schedule Your Content
So now the question becomes, “How do I keep all of this in mind without letting it take over my entire life?” Let’s continue with the example of a company that has fifty frequently asked question videos. The most convenient and efficient way to handle them would be to upload all of them to your channel and your website at once. Well…you can! I know I just said not to, but hear me out.
Both YouTube and most content management systems have a scheduling feature. On YouTube, when you go to upload a video, simply select the Schedule option from the drop down. You can schedule all fifty videos right then and there. Optimize their titles, tags, and descriptions, and then tell YouTube what day and what hour or half hour you want that video to release to the public.
You can do the same for blog posts or pages on your site. Embed your video, write your accompanying content, and schedule a time for WordPress or whatever CMS you are using to release the post or page. You could do an entire year’s worth of blogging and YouTube in a day if you are really ambitious.
Just remember: be consistent and don’t burn out your audience!
