In January 2012, I decided that I was going to publish a 1-Minute Marketing tip per workday. My experiment was see if the video tips would have an impact on the organic search performance for Boxcar Marketing. My thought here was that Google owns YouTube (the second largest search engine) and is heavily pushing Google+. So, I was curious about:

1) how video results were appearing in search engine results and if those video results would also drive organic traffic or referral traffic to BoxcarMarketing.com, 

2) what promotional channels were going to engage my audience the best, for example, what if I only promoted the videos on Google+ vs. Google+ and Twitter or Google+, Twitter and Facebook, and

3) what was the minimum amount of effort required in order to still see results?

The Process

Each morning en route to the office, I would think of a 1-minute marketing tip to share (2-3 min). Using iMovie, I would then record the video in 1 take (launch app, record, export = 3-5 min). Then I would upload the video to YouTube (3-5 min). I have YouTube set up to auto-post to Twitter when a new video is loaded but I would manually share the link on Google+ and Facebook (1 min).

Total time: 15 min per day

That's only 53.25 hours total for the whole year!

What did I learn?

Well there was a fault in my reporting methodology. I was tracking some key metrics in a paper day planner (don't ask) and we had an office fire in July (yes, everything burned). Thankfully I was also recording views and impact using Google Annotations, plus I have the data insights and analytics for YouTube and the website. But I'm missing the real-time observations that I was jotting down on a per video basis.

Anecdotally here's what I learned (or rather remember learning)

• Certain videos perform better initially than others. Often this is due to a combination of the timeliness of the topic and the promotional tactics (time that I posted the video, activity on Google+, outreach efforts, etc).

• Posting a main video in my YouTube channel drastically increases the number of views for that particular video.

• Videos are a slow burn. The views build gradually over time but definitely have a tipping point when they speed up in terms of exposure. When I simply upload the video and promote via Twitter, Facebook and Google+, the first day is usually less than 10 views but over time the view per video moves into the 100s.

• There appear to be break points based either on duration since the video is posted or number of views. For example, over a week most videos would have 30-50 views but this would steadily climb and by 10-15 days after posting, the video would have 100 views. At this point, I'd see the video appearing in YouTube suggested videos and the views would climb again.

• Nobody cares about the lighting but they do care about the level of the camera (eye level, don't look down into the camera). They also care about seeing a screencast for how-to related tips.

2012—By the Numbers

• 253 working days
• 213 videos loaded
• 57 subscribers
• 9,188 views
• 3,299 minutes watched
• 73.7% of playback locations were directly on YouTube (this is a completely new discovery channel for Boxcar Marketing because we had no YouTube presence before. Google search accounted for 9.2%–as in the videos showed up in Google SERPs)
• 245 views happened on boxcarmarketing.com, 34 on facebook, 18 on plus.google.com
• 346.89% increase in google organic traffic in 2012 vs 2011
• 241.21% increase in facebook referral traffic
• 702.27% increase in twitter referral traffic 
• 99 referrals from YouTube.com vs. 0 in 2011
• 70 referrals from Google+ vs. 0 in 2011
• 69% of viewers are 35-44 years; 53.3% are 45-54 years; 45.3% are 55-64 years; 29% are 25-34 years (which is inline with Boxcar Marketing's client base)

Here's a look at the top 10 videos by views for 2012

1. How to Change Your Twitter Name Without Losing Followers 885 views

2. Are You Retina Ready? Website Images on iPad 3 610 views

3. Managing Facebook Hidden Posts Is Now Hidden 425 views

4. StatMyWeb.com 423 views

5. Tennis Ball Massage 344 views

6. Facebook Share Button May Not Appear on Posts from 3rd Party Apps 276 views

7. Migrating Contacts from Facebook to Google+ 197 views

8. Have 60 Facebook fans but a Reach of only 29, why? 1 Min. Marketing Tip on Facebook Edge Rank 169 views

9. Set Events As Goals in Google Analytics 162 views

10. Tagging Campaigns using URL Builder 161 views