Real Life Highscore

I’m absolutely in love with the way residual earnings works. Whenever I make a YouTube video I know that if I optimize it right not only is it going to earn a nice burst of earnings when I publish it but I know that it’s also going to keep earning small amounts for a long time to come. The secret to this long term and often juicy earnings is search engine optimization, or SEO. In this article and video I break down the SEO of a very short and unassuming video I made a while back that has earned more than $220 since it’s creation – and it’s still earning!

The Video in Question: Diablo III: Hours to Paragon Level 100 & Best Act to Farm XP

The above video was published on August 26th, 2012 and is 2:42 in duration. I published it just after the new Paragon Level system was released for Diablo 3 and it’s style is half-guide and half-news video. At the time of writing it has attracted over 80,000 views and has an estimated watchtime of 120,000 minutes. These stats are pretty nice for such a simple and easy video but they are very achievable for someone who knows how to pick the right topic and SEO content for it.

Picking an SEO Friendly Topic

An often forgotten part of SEO is that you actually need to pick a topic or a niche that has a lot of people searching for it. Diablo 3 was a solid niche at the time and will continue to be very strong for years to come. Even more important than this, however, is that the niche-within-a-niche of levelling is extremely popular. When you become familiar with your niche you will begin to notice what things are popular search topics, the things that people constantly ask. Levelling is one of these and the new Paragon Level system in D3 meant for many more months of levelling  which was a great opportunity for me.

Most of Your Income Will Come from Search Traffic

This is one of the most important lessons you can learn if you want to earn a living making YT videos. You can get a lot of views and earn a bit from promotional activities but search traffic is consistent, long term and just pays better as well. Your subscriber base is another consistent long term earner but it can take a long time to build that up to a level where you can support yourself. Good SEO, on the other hand, can take effect almost immediately.

Titling Your Video Properly

Your main keywords, the real winners, should be in your title.

“Diablo 3”, “Paragon Level 100” & “Best Act to Farm XP”.

All of the above are serious keywords and things I was pretty sure people would be searching for. There is a small amount of weighting towards the start of your title over the end, so I tend to lead in with the title of the game.

Keyword Placement in the Description

The first sentence should reiterate your main keywords! This first part of your description appears in search results and receives the most weighting in determining relevance. Don’t just list out your keywords though, make it an actual user friendly sentence.

“People are already starting to crack the one third mark for Paragon levels so I thought I would take a look at how long exactly it takes to reach Paragon level 100 in Diablo 3.”

As you can see in the first sentence I cover “Diablo 3”, “Paragon Level 100” & “Paragon Level”.

Your first paragraph is also pretty important, so use it to target some additional keywords.

“As a by-product of this I also discover the best places to farm Paragon XP to level up quickly.”

The above is the other main sentence of the first paragraph, I’m sure you can pick out the keywords by now.

Finally, don’t underestimate the value of the rest of your description. I like to include links to my social media and other sites at the bottom but sometimes I’ll also write out a few more paragraphs of detail. I didn’t do this in the video we are looking at today but I have noticed increases in search traffic on other videos I have done this for.

Learning How People Phrase Their Searches

While it’s not too hard to come up with a good set of keywords for a niche you know it can sometimes be hard to know all of the different ways people search for the one topic. Alternate keywords like “power levelling” instead of “XP farming” can sometimes be hard to pick up on. I highly recommend reading a guide I wrote on Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI. Seriously, check it out. It seems simple but knowing how to come up with these different keywords can help you capture a lot more search traffic.

Keep on Making Content, Testing New Techniques & Reviewing Past Successes

I learnt a lot reviewing this older video, even if you only earn a few dollars a month going back over your videos that are earning can reveal a lot of info about how people search and what keywords you are managing to capture. Some of my best keywords have come out of looking at how people have found my older videos.

To see more YouTube Success Guides and Videos make sure to subscribe to RLZiggyD on YouTube!