It’s no surprise I try to share ideas and insights that are actionable. That give you something to actually do, not just be entertained by. And lately I’ve been amazed by what I can accomplish when I have a focused, purposeful hour of work at my disposal.

Which led me to an idea:

What if a post wasn’t just a post, but a one-hour gameplan of something you could do the moment you were done reading that would make some impactful difference on your marketing?

So, I’m giving it a try.

Old Videos
So my one-hour idea/plan today is around the dozens (if not hundreds) of old videos sitting in your resort’s YouTube channel. Specifically, the videos that clearly had good enough content to get a big lump of views initially, but have only seen a tiny trickle ever since.

Now I ask this because, yes, YouTube is a place to upload videos, but it’s also two other things.

• First, it’s a search engine.
• Second, it’s a recommendation engine.

For my example, I’ll use this nice little edit from Mount Snow that I enjoyed last week. As of this writing it has 2,025 views, five positive ratings, no negative ratings, and one comment. All solid signs it’s got some legs.

What I’m gonna do is try to do in less than 5 minutes is identify a keyword string I can optimize this video for and then make a few changes in that regard.

So the first thing I’m gonna do is simply look for themes within this video that might be relevant to someone searching for something on YouTube. And then I’m going to validate that with my ol’ search-predictions-as-research trick from yesteryear.

Then I’m going to quickly check the videos that do rank for that keyword search to see how they’re wording things.

Now, YouTube optimization is much less complex than Google which means that keywords remain a big factor in how you rank. So the title of this video right now is:

Powder Day! 3.8.18

And all I’m gonna do is change it to something like:

Vermont Powder Skiing – 18″ Storm at Mount Snow VT

And then update my description as well to include that same theme:

March is one of the best months for skiing in Vermont. On March 8, 2018 we received more than 18″ of snow and had an incredible day of skiing and snowboarding.

For more info about Mount Snow: bit.ly/abcdefg

The call-to-action adds a simple, trackable result from the additional views I’m hoping to generate, but i’m also gonna start a quick spreadsheet to monitor how many daily views I was getting before I made a change, what I changed the title to, when I made that change, and then leave a space for daily views after so I can circle back in a few weeks and check the impact of these changes. You may even want to add a column for “rank” and then check to see if you actually start showing up on that search page and in what position.

You could do all sorts of fancy things with any one of your videos, but I’ve kept it really simple by just:

1. Looking for a keyword that matches this video.
2. Updating my title and description to match.
3. Setting up some simple tracking so I can identify the winners.

And then I’d do the same thing for 9 other videos (10 minutes reading this + 5 mins a video * 10 videos = 60 minutes).

Circle back in a few weeks, see which ones are doing the best, and see if you can further optimize to either move it up the results for that or a variation of those keywords.

Think Long Term
I did this a while back for some side-project videos that were languishing in the same “got some initial views but not much since” no-viewers-land.

About 3/4 of those videos saw just a small boost in views, but a few of them went from 3-5 views a day to dozens or, in one case, hundreds. Now, a few years later, one has 247,000 views and another has 95,000 views all because I spent one random morning rewriting my titles/descriptions instead of browsing Facebook.

A morning no different from this one.

And that’s a good point to end on: remember that 50 views/day vs 10 views/day doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you can get 10 videos to see that increase you’re looking at an additional 146,000 videos views every year for your channel.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.