Sneaky Video Rebranding & Distribution – Building Links
The technique I’m about to explain might play with your moral compass a bit – but I’m not here to judge – it can be used in a white hat, gray hat, or black hat fashion, or you can choose to ignore it completely.
That’s entirely up to you. I’m just here to tell it like it is and give you some insight into what other marketers do online. They’ve been doing this one for a while but it’s still wide open for anyone that wishes to explore it.
YouTube.com has tens of millions of users and tens of millions of videos online.
That’s no secret.
It’s also no secret that the vast majority of their users are just average “Joe and Jane blogs” that want their 5 minutes of fame. They don’t care about distributing their videos far and wide. YouTube.com is their be all and end all.
That’s where you can step in and use their content to your advantage.
The technique is pretty simple really.
- Download YouTube.com videos (related to your niche market) to your desktop.
- Rebrand those videos (add a watermark that contains your websites URL, so anyone that views the videos are exposed to your website).
- Upload those rebranded videos to as many other Video distribution websites as possible – including your link (with targeted anchor text) in the video description to pick up valuable backlinks to your website.
…depending on your “redistribution source”, every time you repeat this you can add as many as 30-40 new targeted backlinks to your website.
You’re also adding the same volume of passive advertisements for your website – anyone that views these videos becomes a potential visitor when they see your watermark (or clicks on the link in the video description field).
If you can redistribute 100 videos like this, to just 20 other video depositories, you’ve gone and generated yourself 2,000 new backlinks to your website and have 2,000 passive advertisements out there working for you.
If this sounds like you here’s what you’ll need.
Tools to download YouTube videos to your desktop. There are heaps of these…
A tool to Watermark those videos. Here’s one that allows for bulk editing…
…and there are more options here.
A video distribution method (you want this to be as automated as possible). Check this one out…
BTW – if you’re going to do this you’ll want to make sure you give each video a unique title and description (wherever possible) on all the directories you submit to. To be clearer, I mean the same video having multiple titles and descriptions (with a variety of keyword terms as anchor text) on each directory for maximum impact.
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Hi Duncan,
A couple of questions. In regards to getting a bunch of links to it, aren’t there only a few sites that will actually have an active link? I was considering doing video marketing to get backlinks and was going to sign up for a service. But on their sales page, it mentioned only about 5 or 6 sites actually give you a backlink. Do you have an exact number of how many video sharing sites actually give you a live link?
Second, if you can get links from more then a few video sharing sites you say you using this method you could get a ton of backlinks. But in regards to most of the links then coming from the same domain, have you found the links still have good SEO value, or does having a bunch of links from the same domain get devalued?
Thanks for any response,
Ernesto
Duncan,
I have a question. I did a search for watermarking software and I noticed that they are kind of expensive. Do you you know of any “free” programs or trial programs (that won’t leave their watermark logo in the trial period…it would be removed when you buy the whole product).
Also…If I had to I could I use Windows Movie Makeror Camtasia 3?
I use Camtasia 3 since it was free awhile back. If I were to use lets say Windows Movie Maker…how would I tehn load it up? I thought that inorder to work on slides in WMM the slides would need to be saved as a JPEG…so what would happen if I downloaded the video? Can the file be saved as a JPEG so I can work on it in WMM?
This is really very unethical – in effect it’s stealing other people’s work and passing it off as your own.
However, if you make your own video and add a watermark, upload it etc then that’s ethical and a very useful article.
I would also stay away from the “blackhat approach” (I was just telling it like it is and there are plenty of whitehat variations / implementations of this technique – then again there are literally hundreds of independent mirrors of YouTube all over the show). However it’s simple enough to send a quick PM on YouTube asking if the user doesn’t mind distributing it to more places in exchange for a link in the description field. There are also “article to video” auto creation services available now for those that want an easier solution to video creation – but I’ll be talking more about that in a future piece.