Everyone cannot afford an expensive PR firm to help them promote their video, but you can have the next best thing. Just do what PR would do yourself. First, look at everything from your audience’s vantage point, then get to work to make sure your audience sees it – while making it all look even better for them.

* Customize Your Thumbnails – YouTube and video editing software allows you to put a professional-looking thumbnail that helps describe what’s inside the video visually for your audience. Choosing the right thumbnail will increase views exponentially.

* Study Your Keywords and Terms – Keywords are still important when it comes to any type of content you put online. But, now they are even more important in terms of ensuring that they’re right. You don’t want to use a keyword that draws the wrong audience. Always put your audience first with your keyword choices.

* Optimize Your Titles – Titles are very important when it comes to a video. Don’t be tricky about a title because people will be angry if they come to your video because of a salacious title, only to find something they didn’t expect. Be clear, concise and accurate but use the right keywords to get the right attention.

* Include a Call to Action – You can tell them directly as the host, you can include annotations, and you can also include the CTA on an insertable exit portion of the video (called an “end card”) that is consistent throughout your videos. This provides the CTA that your audience needs.

* Optimize Video Descriptions – Use every aspect of the description area to describe the video, using the right keywords and right language and saying what your audience will get out of viewing the video. Plus, use links that are inside the video and anything you talk about in the video.

* Allow Embedding of Your Videos – Many people turn off the embedding feature, but if you do that you’re missing out on other people using your videos in their content. When someone embeds the video, you get the credit for the video being watched and people will find your channel.

* Cross-Promote on All Social Media – Just like you promote a blog post or a product, promote your videos on all your other social media. When you have a new video, link to it on every social media account you have, with a specialized burb that gets the attention of the audience.

* Recommend Other Videos via Annotation – A really awesome feature that you can use for your videos is annotations. An annotation is where you can make a clickable area right inside the video so that people can learn more about other things you do.

* Use the Features Offered – With YouTube you can embed a featured video, embed a watermark to brand your video, and more. Use the features that they give you to make your videos better and to help you promote.

* Allow Channel Ads – Use one of your better videos to allow YouTube to use your video to run a channel ad. This is free to you, but very powerful. Yes, YouTube is going to use your video as their own to promote YouTube, but your video will get a lot of views in the process too.

* Be Regular – Don’t skimp on your videos; try to produce one at least weekly to keep your audience interested. If you don’t put up videos on a regular basis, then you may lose viewers that would otherwise be wonderful ambassadors to your brand by recommending the videos and your channel to others.

* Run Paid Promotions – Once you have a number of videos on your channel, run a pay-per-click promotion campaign. This will help you increase subscribers faster than other methods, but you must do this only when you have a good number of high-quality videos.

Finally, as you become more popular, send out press releases about the things you’re doing outside of YouTube. Get active within your community, and become a well-known name brand throughout the internet and not just where your videos reside.