So far we’ve looked at two ways of using other people’s videos in your Content Marketing efforts – we looked at using Video Responses, and we looked at embedding other people’s videos on your own blog or website.
In this post we’re going to look at another way to leverage other people’s videos in your content marketing efforts – and that’s using Playlists on YouTube. YouTube likes playlists – and playlists feature in the YouTube Creators Playbook (page 45 of the current edition).
What Is A Playlist?
A Playlist is a collection of videos that share a similar theme or topic that are organized into a playlist. Now there are several ways to use Playlists of your own videos – but one of the really cool things about Playlists is that you can add other people’s videos into them.
This can help your videos in several ways:
- You can optimize your playlist for keywords, just as you can optimize your videos. So your playlist may come up in either YouTube search results or Google search results. And those search returns can then lead to your video(s) being watched.
- If you include really popular videos by other content creators in your playlists, then the principle of ‘the rising tide floats all boats’ comes into play. And the popularity of those videos within the playlist helps your playlist rank higher in YouTube’s algorithm.
- You can share your playlists. So you can embed them on your blog or website, or link to them on Facebook. Or tweet links to them. So it’s a great way of showing that you have a deep knowledge of your market area – effectively positioning other people’s content to answer specific questions that members of your audience have. And if you have content that’s related to other people’s videos, then there’s a good chance that your content will get watched as well.
Creating A Playlist
Creating a playlist is pretty straightforward. And I’ll outline the steps for you:
1. First, go to the ‘Video Manager’ on your YouTube channel and click on the ‘Playlists’ Tab:
2. Click on the ‘Add New Playlists’ button:
3. A ‘naming’ tab will appear. Fill in the title of your playlist and a brief description. Make sure to use keywords that you want to rank for on YouTube. (For this playlist, my three keyword terms are “Motown Style Grooves,” “Bass Guitar” and “James Jamerson.”
4. Now it’s time to ‘populate’ your playlist. There are two ways to do this – you can either type the URL straight into a field by clicking the ‘Add Video By URL’ button:
. 
5. Or you can add videos as you find them by using the ‘Add To’ Button:
Pressing the ‘Add To’ Button brings up a sub-dialogue, and allows you to add that video to any of your playlists:
Caveat: DON’T Double click as this will add it to your playlist twice!
When you’ve clicked on it you’ll get an ‘Added To…name of playlist’ message – and you’ll also get a text field where you can make some notes on the video you’ve added.
6. If you ever need to edit your playlist, then head back to your Playlists Menu via the Video Manager screen and click on the ‘Edit’ Button on the right hand side:
The edit screen allows you to delete a video from the playlist (the ‘X’ in the red square below), re-order the videos in your playlist, add a custom thumbnail, add text notes if you want to and so on. I suggest setting up a playlist and checking out what you can do.
When You’ve Created A Playlist – Share It!
On the ‘Edit’ page for the playlist there is a Share Button. That will give you a code that’s similar to the ‘Share’ codes for normal videos. You can copy and paste it into blog posts, on facebook walls, on Tumblr blogs, on your website….etc etc:
Some Thoughts On Playlist Strategies
How you use playlists depends on where you are in your video marketing efforts.
If you’re starting out and have created just a few videos my advice is to make each video part of a playlist with other videos on a similar topic by other creators. So that you create a ‘resource’ for your audience that gives them a complete view of the topic. If some of those videos are popular with good viewing figures on them…that’s good for you.
If you’ve created a bunch of videos already then you can still do the above strategy to take advantage of the ‘rising tide floats all boats’ effect that connecting your videos to a really popular video can do. But you can also use playlists to organize your content by topic.
Summary
YouTube tells us that they like playlists – see the Creators Handbook. So you should use them. They are quick and easy to set up and can help ‘populate’ your YouTube channel with other people’s content in your early days as a video marketer.
Related posts:
{ 1 comment }
You can’t believe Paul but your post gives me energy to work more on my videos. Great guide with the help of screen shots on you-tube playlist. Thanks for the post.
Comments on this entry are closed.