YouTube: An Insider's Guide to Climbing the Charts

Chapter 10. Reaching the World

Alan Lastufka

Promoting Versus Interacting

Knowing how to properly promote yourself on YouTube is powerful. We spent the past few chapters discussing both productive and harmful ways to interact and promote yourself on the 'Tube. In this chapter, we're going to branch out, travel beyond YouTube, and show you how to promote your videos and channel on other sites, including some permanent solutions should YouTube ever close its doors.

In Chapter 7, I discussed the importance of backlinks. Backlinks, in this case, are clickable URL links that, when clicked, take the viewer either to your YouTube channel or directly to one of your videos. You create these backlinks on YouTube by commenting on the majority of the videos you watch, subscribing and friending people, joining groups, and doing an assortment of other fun stuff. If you skipped ahead and haven't yet read Chapter 7 yet, I strongly suggest you take a look at that chapter first, because this chapter builds upon the ideas introduced there.

Some of the sites mentioned in this chapter will also make an appearance in Chapter 12 but in a different context and with different uses. This chapter is about promotion. Chapter 12 is about interacting. While the line between the two might be thin or even nonexistent sometimes, I thought it was important to separate them. Promoting is a form of sales—you have a channel or a video you want someone to view, and you "pitch to them"; that is, you give them a sales pitch ...