YouTube & WordPress Integration: 15 Tactics

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In case you haven’t noticed, most top blogs and news sites have their own YouTube channels. Developing quality videos for your business should be a part of your content marketing strategy. Once you have produced your videos and uploaded them to YouTube, you need to aggressively promote them. Let’s not forget that adding YouTube to your posts could make your website more engaging, keep your visitors on longer, and even improve your search engine rankings (more shares, quality links, …). Integrating YouTube with WordPress is not that hard. Here are 15 ways you can go about integrating your YouTube presence into WordPress:

Add enhanced widgets: want your YouTube channel to get more attention? Adding your videos to your website is a good idea. There are plenty of quality YouTube widgets that let you add your videos to your sidebar quickly.

Add a YouTube button to your site: most folks have no trouble adding Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ share buttons to their sites. Why not do that for YouTube? Plugins such as Sharebar make the process easy.

Display related YouTube videos on your site: this is a strategy worth exploring if you would like to keep people on your site longer. The trouble is you need to implement it the right way or you could end up slowing down your site significantly.

Promote your YouTube content using social toolbars: social toolbars such as Wibiya make it easy to promote your YouTube presence more aggressively. Just make sure you pick one that is not going away soon.

Optimize your videos for SEO: creating a video sitemap for your site, enhancing your feeds, and adding the appropriate markup could do wonders for your website. We use Video SEO by Yoast to handle these tasks. It is a time saver for businesses.

Add a YouTube Subscribe button to your site: a pretty simple way to let your visitors know about your YouTube presence. Google already has plenty of badges for you to add to your website.

Lazy load your videos: it is nice to have YouTube around, so you don’t have to pay for the bandwidth when you share videos on your site. Videos can slow down your site, so you may want to lazy load them when possible.

Display video thumbnails when possible: if you want to give your site the look and feel of an online magazine, you may want to think about adding video thumbnails to it. Plugins such as “Video Thumbnails” automatically display video thumbnails in your template and save you time in the process. This particular script can save thumbnails to your media library and set each as a featured image automatically.

Take advantage of Google+ Hangouts: Google has put a lot of effort into making Google+ a successful social platform. People are doing all kinds of fun Hangout events on Google+ already. Use this feature to connect with your audience, promote your business, and give something back to the community.

Give your visitors heads up about your new videos with notifications: Foobar is a plugin many use to promote limited time deals and updates with their audience. You could also use it to promote your YouTube channels and other social outposts.

Add a YouTube gallery to your site: yet another way to get people to stay on your website for a longer period of time. Make sure you go with a solution that is mobile and tablet friendly.

Share your social activities with your visitors: this goes beyond YouTube posts. If you are posting on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube on a daily basis, you may want to let your visitors know about your activities so they can keep up.

Use video popups when appropriate: sometimes you want to show videos to your visitors after they have taken an action (e.g. clicked on a button). Depending on the type of website you run, this strategy could work well. The Vimeo YouTube Popup plugin is just one script you can use to add video popups to your site.

Add an enhanced player to your site: many folks go with the default player that YouTube provides when adding videos to their sites. You are going to have an easier time keeping your visitors engaged with a player that has more advanced options though.

Remind your visitors to subscribe before leaving your pages: this is an aggressive strategy that we have covered here a number of times in the past. Not everyone is going to be happy with this approach. But you might get more likes, shares, and followers by using exit popup boxes.

Becoming a master in YouTube marketing can take a lot of time and effort. You should focus on producing great content and actively promoting your channel to get the best results. The above plugins and scripts help you integrate your YouTube presence into WordPress in a painless fashion.