Building a YouTube Marketing Strategy in Its Breakout Year

Eighteen months after three former PayPal employees uploaded that first eighteen-second clip from the San Diego Zoo, YouTube is reporting somewhere around 100 million video views a day and roughly 65,000 new uploads. It’s no longer a platform to watch from the sidelines. Here’s a step-by-step approach to building a real presence on it, without falling into the trap of treating it like broadcast television with a different logo.

Step 1: Claim a channel and use it consistently

Setting up a branded channel takes minutes, but the businesses seeing results are the ones treating it as an ongoing home for content, not a one-time upload. Consistency matters more here than production value.

Step 2: Make something people would watch even if you weren’t the one who made it

The clips getting traction on YouTube right now are entertaining, useful or strange, made by people with no budget and no marketing department. A repurposed television commercial reads as exactly what it is: an interruption. A short, honest, informal video, even an imperfect one, fits the platform’s culture and earns attention that an ad can’t buy here.

Step 3: Write titles, tags and descriptions like you mean them

YouTube’s own search has become a discovery engine in its own right, and its related-videos feature rewards clips that are properly tagged and described. A vague title with no tags is nearly invisible no matter how good the video itself is.

Step 4: Leave embedding turned on

Embedding is the single feature that separates YouTube’s growth from its rivals. A video that plays directly inside someone else’s blog post spreads in a way a video that’s only viewable on YouTube’s own site never will. Turning that off to protect views is a mistake; the views come from being embedded everywhere.

Step 5: Actually participate in comments and video responses

YouTube supports video responses, letting other users reply to your clip with a video of their own, and comment threads that can run long on anything popular. Businesses that show up in that conversation, answering, thanking, occasionally responding with another clip, build a relationship the platform’s biggest channels are already benefiting from.

Step 6: Track views and comments as your real metrics

There’s no deep analytics dashboard yet. View counts and comment activity are blunt, but they’re honest, and watching how they move week to week after a new upload tells you more than any theory about what your audience wants.

The mindset shift this requires

The businesses struggling with YouTube right now are the ones still thinking in television terms: polished, scripted, one-directional. The ones getting traction are treating it like the participatory, informal, conversation-driven space it is. That shift costs nothing and matters more than any single tactic on this list.

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