Tumblr is a blog format designed primarily for sharing images, and it has some easy to use share functions that can make content quickly go viral. Users primarily find content by subscribing to keyword tags like "gamer" or "roleplaying", and will then see any submissions users' post with those tags in their activity feeds.
Some people actually use Tumblr as their primary website but I personally find it more suitable as an auxiliary site to compliment my primary website with back-links and provide extra reach; for example, my tumblr RPG Video Reviews focuses on reaching gamers on Tumblr by using videogame related tags for my submissions.
Now there are a few ways you can use Tumblr to increase your Youtube views and in this article I'll talk about each one.
#1 Photo Sharing
This strategy works best in conjunction with the Pinterest strategy for getting traffic to your Facebook Page. Ideally, you want to add a funny or shocking image to your tumblr and then have the click-through link be to your Pinterest board where you already have images pinned from your Facebook Page and primary website, along with videos from your Youtube channel.
Set a click through link to something you want to promote!
It's important to ensure you tag your articles so they will be seen. Fortunately tumblr will suggest popular tags for you based on what you are typing into the tag box, which makes it a'bit more useful than Stumbleupon which expects you to psychically pick up on what the most popular tags on the site are.
Tags are vital on Tumblr! Don't forget them!
#2 Video Embedding
You also can embed your Youtube videos directly into Tumblr. The process is identical as it is with adding photos. Better yet, you can embed videos from your Pinterest boards into Tumblr posts, which gives back-links to both your Pinterest boards and your Youtube channel at the same time.
#3 Tumblr Communities
Additionally, Tumblr has some special communities you can submit video content to. Here's a couple of my favorites
#4 Customize your Tumblr to promote your social network accounts
You can customize your Tumblr to have your Facebook Page embedded into the sidebar, along with a link back to your Youtube channel. I also like to include my Twitter feed.
For instructions on how to customize your tumblr, check out this page. You'll need some HTML knowledge to do this.
Customizing your Tumblr will also
help you look more professional,
encouraging visitors to pay more
attention to what you post!
As with anything else, always use social bookmark services like Stumbleupon to drive traffic to your recent Tumblr submissions.
Here's a screenshot of some of my videos added to their database.
Just make sure your video actually has something to do with the article in question or you'll find your videos deleted by mods.
You might also want to keep tabs on these articles, because competitors like to delete links from wikia sites. Yes, there is an unfortunate dark side to wikias. This is the #1 reason why I made my own wiki game database website, RPG Fanatics. We don't allow regular users to delete user submissions and encourage everyone to share their videos.
Anyway, when submitting to the wikia feed app, keep in mind the videos tend to be organized by their titles alphabetically. You should also try to make the title something that will be at the top of the page.
Embedding videos is a great
way to get views BUT can also
attracted unwanted attention from
wiki editors who delete competitor links.
Lastly you can also attempt to embed your videos into wiki articles, though this can often attract the attention of competitors who want to delete your videos and insert their own, or simply delete any videos or links added to an article they have links at. This can be hit and miss, and getting involved in edit wars is something you should try to avoid because it nearly always ends poorly.
After submitting your video into a page you should then share the link on social bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon and Reddit. This will help them gain visibility. Sure, other people's videos are on these pages too but if your video has an attractive enough thumbnail and title you can stand out of the crowd!
Today I noticed that my previous article about Pinterest was getting a decent amount of traffic from Google Search, so today I want to talk about another great way to use Pinterest to build audiences.
The Pinvolve app launched last April and has already taken the internet by storm because it fills a niche with a big demand; allowing you to pin images from Facebook Fan Pages to Pinterest boards. Normally you can't do this, which sucks because Pinterest boards would be a terrific way to drive traffic to your Facebook Fan Pages.
Now let me give you a really great tip. Not many people realize this but one of the most effective tactics for getting 'likes' to your Facebook page is uploading images people want to share like internet memes. Normally it is hard to get people to pin a Facebook image, because Pinterest makes it hard to do so.
But the Pinvolve app makes the process simple and fast.
I hope this article has empowered you on how to better promote your Facebook Page. In the comments below please let me know how things go for you as you use the app, because I'd love to know!
Follow Carey on Google+ Looking for more information about what you can do with Facebook Pages? Check out these other articles I've written.
The Myvidster.com service is similar to Pinterest in that it is a social bookmarking site but it focuses on bookmarking videos from various video streaming websites (including Youtube).
I made an account the other day to promote my Youtube videogame videos and I'd like to share with you some tips on how to effectively use the service.
Web Albums are key to using Myvidster
Firstly, you should create your collections using long tail keywords, such as Video Game Video Reviews. As I've talked about in previous articles these phrases are easier to capture search engine traffic for because fewer people use them but many people search for these terms.
There's not much else I need to say about the service. It's a social bookmarking tool focused on videos and many categories have little content, so early adopters can take advantage of the site to drive traffic to their videos.
I've tried the tactic myself and found it to be fairly effective at promoting sites where my content is embedded, so I know it can work.
You will have competitors attempt to flag your responses as "spam" but if you are chosen as the Best Answer by the person who opened the question you will get the top spot on the page.
I like to use the shortened URLs for articles on Yahoo Answers!, using a service like the one Google offers. It tends to make the article look tidier and more attractive to users, especially if your video URLs are massively long because they are connected to playlists.
Unfortunately back-links from Yahoo Answers! are nofollow tagged so they don't add link juice but search engines still use links from the service for determining authority, which does help your rankings in the search engines.
One thing I'd suggest doing is make a video response to common questions people ask on Yahoo Answers! and then post the video URL as an answer to every open question where that answer applies.
Note that Yahoo Answers! won't make it terribly easy for you to start off as a new user. All brand new accounts begin at level 1 and any links you place won't become clickable backlinks; people will need to copy and paste the urls to see your content.
However once you gain about 250 points you'll be made a Level 2 user and all links you have ever posted as an answer will become click-able backlinks.
The most important value of using Yahoo Answers! is you'll get a tiny amount of authority ranking of your videos to search engines, and your answer will be seen by other people searching the site for answers to a similar question. Occasionally Yahoo Answers! posts become the top Google or Bing search result for a common question.
Lastly, you can also help your answers rank higher in search engines by plugging them in your Squidoo articles or using a service like Netleeks, both are services I've written about in previous articles.
Today I'm going to let you know about a cool new site that launched this year called Netleeks.
Netleeks allows you to make great little back-link articles in minutes!
Netleeks is so awesome because it allows you to combine several related links together in one social bookmark submission. And unlike reddit and digg, the backlinks on this website are all dofollow!
What I love the most about Netleeks is that it allows you to quickly create a link wheel, which helps increase Page Rank rather effectively. All you need to do is submit several articles that all have back-links to pages that eventually back-link to whatever website you want to promote.
The key to using the service effectively is to submit links that share common title header (for example, the keyword 'review'), then erase the pre-generated descriptions and write original ones (this way Google won't punish the article for having duplicate content as the pages it is linking to).
In just one click you'll then have a nice little article linking to all of the articles, which will add some link juice between them all if your link wheel is setup correctly.
The final step of this link wheel is to submit the link burst to Stumpedia, which will add some link juice to the article since Stumpedia also grants dofollow links.
Netleeks was released in June 2012 and is quickly becoming a power player in the SEO field. I suggest you take advantage of the service now before they become more selective in who they allow to create accounts. I can see this website taking off like a rocket.
I stumbled upon this website today, TopBlip.com, which is designed to integrate with Youtube videos to get them more views in the form of a contest. Unfortunately for me the site is oriented toward people who sing covers for music owned by major labels and I don't make that kind of content BUT I figure there are enough music Partners out there that someone who reads this blog might be interested.
For more information I was able to find this interview with the founders of the site, Sean and Justin Bingham, as they promote their service.
Personally the site seems designed to promote the major label artists more than the Youtubers, but if you already upload cover songs to your channel then you might as well embed your videos here so you can get some traffic back to them. It's tough to stand out when hundreds of thousands of people are also making cover songs, so you might be able to get some traffic this way since there are way less people adding their videos to Topblip than uploading to Youtube.
Did you know that Google has been doing webinars to help educate people about how to use their products?
Some of these webinars offer generic information but a few of them are focused on very particular niches, such as how to be a better Youtube Partner. Some of these webinars are invite-only and sent to select Partners but some of them allow anyone to sign up. Google also does a lot of webinars to help people learn how they can get their websites to rank higher in search results or how to more effectively use AdWords or Analytics.
At first it doesn't seem obvious how Pinterest can be used to generate traffic for Youtube videos. If you simply pin your videos to the service and do nothing more, you end up with the same problem we have on Youtube; our pins get lost in the sea of other submissions and it is difficult to stand out from the crowds.
However the problem is many people use Pinterest in an ineffective way, pinning all day long without doing any actual marketing of their pins. Youtubers are no exception, and in fact many users just pump out video after video to their channel without even considering that they should embed the videos on other websites.
It's easy to get the tunnel vision because many Partners focus exclusively on thinking their only product is their video content. So they don't have a website, they don't market any products and they attempt to make money solely off the ad overlays on their videos.
This is the wrong approach.
Instead you should be trying to use your videos as part of a larger offering of content and products. Youtube views shouldn't just be about how much ad revenue you make-- the views are more valuable for their ability to drive traffic to websites. Anyone who wants to use Youtube for business purposes should be taking full advantage of this fact.
While I have a network of websites I control, my main focus of late has been on RPG Fanatics, a wiki database of games that also has powerful community engagement systems. One of the unique things about us is the way we display game box art and Pinterest gives us an excellent way to take advantage of this to market our site.
So I'll take you through the process I use to create my Pinterest boards in order to capture search engine traffic (which is how the site should be used!)
For deciding what keywords to tag our boards with, we once again turn to Google's AdWords Keyword Tool.
The keywords I decide upon are,
"game cover" - 135,000 searches
"boxart" - 60,500 searches
"game covers" - 60,500 searches
"games covers" - 49,500 searches
"video game box" - 14,800 searches
"game box art" - 6,600 searches
"video game covers" - 6,600 searches
"vg box art" - 4,400 searches
"video game box art" - 2,900 searches
"video game boxart" - 1,900 searches
Based on the number of searches for these keywords and the lack of boards using them, I decide to create my board with the title, "Video Game Covers and Boxart".
Using these keywords means that if I can get my board to the front page of Google Search then it has the potential to reach around 67k people every month.
To make things easier on myself I install the Pinterest button add-on for Chrome. I've got hundreds of box art images on my site so I need to quickly be able to index them all.
I then created a copy macro for pasting the keywords "Video Game Cover / Boxart" after the name of each game.
After an hour of this I end up with 416 pins to my video game box art Pinterest board. I can now plug this board as a link, just as I would with any other article.
You see, I already have a modest network of game related blog articles built up on various websites, so I can add this board as a back-link to any of those articles with the anchor text using the keywords I listed above. This will send signals to search engines that they should be ranking my board for searches involving game cover art. Additionally, users on Pinterest who like the images will re-pin them to their own boards BUT the URL for my website will remain. The re-pinning is really great because it allows you to tap into audiences other users have been building with their boards.
One thing you might do is create a board for you and many other Youtubers to have your videos pinned to. For example, I've got this board titled, Videogame Videos on Youtube which my friends and I pin our videos to. I do the same back-linking with it to help it rank highly in search engine results.
The important thing to realize about Pinterest is that the boards are just an article of images with backlinks to whatever website the images are hosted on. So you could make images of cooking recipes or schematics for hacking iphones-- whatever it is your Youtube channel is about, you could make a Pinterest board to help advertise it -- but only if you have a website for your Youtube channel that is hosting the images.
So if you haven't made a website yet, go make one!
Update: I've made another article pertaining to Pinterest, this time about an app called Pinvolve that integrates with your Facebook Pages. If you plan to use Pinterest you NEED to be using this app!
Today I'm sharing with you an infographic that has been floating around the web, created by http://www.comescaricaremusicadayoutube.it. It uses data from the Youtube Creator Handbook which Google released several months ago and is supposed to summarize the necessary steps to become a successful Youtube Partner.
Personally speaking, I take issue with some of the facts in that book (for example, joining a network will boost your subscriber count by 90%? Not necessarily. Many networks just scheme to monetize as many channels as they possibly can and do absolutely no promotion for the overwhelming majority of channels they take in) but I thought the infographic at least summarizes the basic idea of what you're supposed to do with a Youtube channel. So I'm embedding it here for your viewing pleasure.
Before you read on I want to say the most important thing to understand is none of this stuff is special.
These are the basic things everyone should be doing, and because everyone is doing them they aren't necessarily going to bring you a ton of traffic. But they are required in order to for everything else you do to make any difference.
Nobody can find your videos if they don't have key-word rich titles, descriptions and tags; Youtube is a social network so communicating with your subscribers is vital; making videos that provide value to people's lives, rather than re-uploading someone else's music video, etc etc
I'm always excited when I can tell people about a way to successfully market your channels and today is one of those moments!
There is a website called the Youtube Subscriber Train that integrates with your Youtube channel to automatically subscribe you to the last 5 accounts to use the service. Then the next 5 people to use the service will be automatically subscribed to you. In this way it is possible to get 5 subscriptions per day, and the software also penalizes users if they unsubscribe from people right away so the subscriptions tend to remain.
You can think of the service as a sophisticated "sub 4 sub" operation that ensures people don't cheat.
You can also purchase "tickets" to ride the train multiple times per day, allowing you to get subscribers faster. Another thing you can do is get a "V.I.P." pass for $7.99 which allows your channel to be in a banner rotation on every page, plus you will also appear on the page that someone sees after they ride the train. This allows thousands of people to see your channel every day!
I tested the V.I.P. service out and it actually is pretty effective at earning subscribers. The only downside is that only a handful of people can be a V.I.P. and you are bumped off the list after several other people sign up for the V.I.P. service. However you can remain on the list as long as nobody else signs up for the service, so by strategically signing up when the site is likely to get a lot of traffic (such as a weekend) you might earn a lot of subscribers if nobody bumps you off the list.
Personally I received 158 subscribers from the service during the period I was a V.I.P. and the majority of them signed up because they were genuinely interested in my channel (there are no perks for people to sign up to V.I.P.s).
The site also has a page where you can see a list of all the Youtube accounts that subscribed to you. This is useful for gauging whether people are staying subscribed to your channel or not. I like to check the lists to discover new channels and get an idea of what other kind of users are signing up for the service.
One of the things I've learned by looking at channels on the site is that many users have really poor quality videos, so it's not surprising they have difficulty getting subscribers and need to turn to a service like this. However that doesn't mean Youtube Subscriber Train can't be useful to people with high-quality videos; one of the most difficult things about building a Youtube channel is raising awareness of your videos, and my verdict is that this website does indeed build awareness of your channel.
Will the results be quick? No, because you generally only obtain 5 subscribers per day (unless using the V.I.P. service) but if you do it every day then you are getting 150 subscribers per month! That is one hundred and fifty more people who will see your status updates and latest videos, and who might share your videos with other people!
I hope you've found this review to be helpful to you!
As I've mentioned in previous articles about Squidoo, embedding videos into articles I add to the website is an important part of my SEO battle plan for driving traffic to my Youtube videos. In this article I'll talk about some very easy ways I increase traffic to my lenses so they pass link juice to my primary websites.
There is a step by step PDF about what to do titled, Squidoo Step by Step. You should definitely read it before the rest of this article.
Add your articles to Squidoo focused directories
The key is to submit your lenses to directories that specialize in Squidoo content.
Every lens you make should be submitted to all of these directories, as they will provide high PageRank backlinks to the lenses and the sites are followed by people who are looking for great Squidoo articles.
Create and submit an RSS feed for your lenses
You can also create an RSS feed for your Squidoo lenses. Normally Squidoo doesn't provide a link for this but through a third party website called http://squidutils.com/ you can obtain it. By associating your account with them you can generate an RSS feed of all your lenses, and then submit them to the directories. There is also a tool for allowing you to ping search engines when you update an individual lens.
There are many RSS directories you can submit your feed to that will boost your rankings just by getting listed but these directories are also used by hundreds of thousands of people every month. Getting listed will introduce new audiences to your articles.
Another great technique is to reach out to other Squidoo authors and cross-promote each other's lenses and blog articles which have related subject matter. This is effective because everyone wants backlinks to their articles, and including backlinks to one another's content saves both parties from having to manually create another link.
There are even Facebook Groups formed specifically to allow Squidoo authors who wish to network to find one another.
Granted not everyone in these groups always understands what you are trying to do. Many people do not fully understand the Penguin and Panda updates to Google Search, and seem to be under the impression cross-promotion is not allowed by Squidoo or Google.
Some of the conversations I've had with people about the topic of cross-promotion leads me to believe that they think Google can detect the motivation of every link on every article, when that is impossible. What Google does is punish content mirroring, because content mirroring is obviously being done for promotional purposes. Google also punishes linking to articles which have no relevent keywords to the page the link is coming from; for example, making an article about Dora the Explorer link to an article about astrophysics wouldn't be considered relevant, but linking Dora the Explorer article to another about cartoons would be perfectly fine.
The unfortunate reality is that many people would rather sit at their laptops all day writing their own articles on thousands of websites than collaborate with other users to maximize efforts.
In the end, it may take a lot of effort and approaching people individually to get some results with cross promotion.
Despite what naysayers claim, mutual backlinking is allowed on Squidoo
Buy other people's lenses
Another thing you can do is just buy other people's pre-made lenses that have established search engine rankings, and then use them to add link juice to other articles you've made. To assist with the buying and selling of lenses, check out this Facebook Group, "Buying and Selling Squidoo Lenses".
There is also this page over at webnuggetz.com where you can buy pre-made Lenses for $5.
The benefit of buying lenses is you can use them to add links to your other lenses, increasing the reach you have and expanding your network of articles.
Constantly revise your articles
Due to the way Google works, the "freshness" of an article matters. The more you update an existing page, the fresher it is valued by Google. So because of this "fresh factor" many Squidoo authors take advantage of it by revising their lenses every week and then alerting search engines to the changes by using a service like Ping-o-matic.
Personally I find this tactic requires too much time and effort, largely because I already have a heavy workload. Constantly making tweaks to existing articles just to bump them a little higher isn't as worthwhile for me as creating brand new articles so they can send link juice to other articles. Still this tactic may be worthwhile for you to try.
I hope this post of mine has given you a lot of useful ideas on how you can increase views to your Squidoo Lenses and boost their rankings.
Did you know that your Youtube channel has an RSS feed? You absolutely do! By going to the Youtube API page you can quickly generate an RSS feed for all the latest videos on your channel.You just need to enter your username in the 'author' field and make sure the field is sorted by publish date, and you'll have a feed that continually updates with every new video you upload.
Amazingly these Youtube RSS feeds include dofollow links to each video, as well as any website URLs appearing in the video description section. This is a great SEO technique that can really save you a lot of time if you want to embed your videos into a blog feed without messing with plugins that may or may not work.
Additionally, I strongly encourage you to submit your Youtube channel's RSS feeds to RSS feed directory sites; as an example I routinely submit the feeds for all the featured contributors to my RPG Fanatics website. This will give you a backlink from their domains to your channel and visitors to these sites might find your videos while they perform searches for blogs.
I also submit the RSS feeds for all the blogs I embed my videos into, including my Squidoo articles.
My favorite RSS Aggregation sites
The following is a list of sites I use to submit my RSS feeds.
FeedAge is great because they have a feature called an RSS blend which allows you to combine several RSS feeds together as one RSS feeds. I use this to create a feed for all my featured contributors to have listed together. This allows the feed to update more often and have more varied content for pulling keywords.
As you can see in the accompanying screenshot, within five days of submitting my feeds I already received about 70 views to them. That may not seem like much but those are each new people being introduced to my videos. And it only takes a few minutes to submit these feeds to the website, which also provide some strong backlinks to my channel.
Plazoo is a search engine that crawls RSS feeds to find information for its users. Each listing makes for a great dofollow backlink!
http://feedfury.com/faq
Feed Fury costs $5 per submission but it does provide a strong dofollow link back to your site. The choice is up to you whether you want to pay for a link or not.
RSS Mountain allows free submissions and has a lot of different categories for you to submit your feeds under. It's one of the more popular directories.
RSS Network has an easy to use form that allows you to submit a feed to their expansive database.
Unfortunately they don't like the Youtube RSS feeds because the 'description' field is missing but you can definitely add feeds for the blogs you embed your videos into!
FeedSee has a painless submission process compared to many of the other directories I've listed here and their database is moderated by live people to prevent spam links from appearing in the database. Getting listed with them will provide a solid back-link.
RSS Micro is another fantastic directory you should get listed on. It's even one of the top Google Search results for RSS directory, ensuring that you'll get some decent traffic from it for being listed there!
I've been a Youtube Partner for several years now, focused primarily on videogame journalism with my show The RPG Fanatic. A lot of my content is video game reviews and many people have asked me how I capture video games footage for editing purposes.
This article will have all the advice I can give about the steps involved in video game review creation and how you too can make videos as good as The Angry Video Game Nerd.
How to record video game footage
For videogame console systems, I don't recommend using a video capture card for your PC unless you have a huge amount of Hard-drive space. For example, 10 Terabytes of space. And you need lots of RAM else there will be a huge delay between the gameplay and the commands you input using your controller.
I would instead recommend getting an HD capture box, like this one made by Hauppauge.
You can also be cheaper and buy a recordable DVD player. The honest truth is once you go through all the levels of compressing your gameplay footage during capture, editing and finally Youtube's flash compression, your "HD" footage is no longer truly "HD" and nobody can really tell the difference when they watch the videos on Youtube.
There are a lot of free software for ripping images off a DVD. I personally use Handbrake as it has produced the best results for me.
Do not use something stupid like Windows Media Maker if you can help it. The final output always looks like garbage and it offers very limited editing tools, especially when it comes to audio.
If you use a Windows based PC, I recommend the consumer (cheap) version of Sony Vegas. It's a great piece of software with some powerful audio functions.
However if you want to spend more money, get Premiere by purchasing the Adobe Creative Suite. One advantage to this is that you'll also get After Effects bundled with it, which can be used to make really great special effects for your live action segments.
I would recommend staying away from anything Avid. It's very pro software meant for high-end video editing, but the interface is so ridiculously non-intuitive you'd be better off not buying it unless you want to take film editing classes or have a friend show you how to use it.
Personally I use a Mac Pro for all my video editing, so I use Final Cut Pro. It's the only real choice. If you have a good Mac, get FCP or FCP X. Personally, I use an older version of FCP that I'm a lot more comfortable with but I've edited on FCP X too, and it's pretty user-friendly. If you've never done any video editing before it's very intuitive software.
If you are worried about how to edit a video and would like to learn some film theory, I recommend checking out any of these books about the topic.
What camera to use for recording live action segments
One thing I should point out is if you don't have a decent HD camera for recording live action segments, I recommend getting the Sony NEX-VG10 or the newer VG 20.
These cameras will give you a great picture and the built in audio mic is acceptable for product reviews (but not narratives! get a real mic and solid state audio recorder for that). Both cameras also come bundled with Sony Vegas, so you get both editing software and a great camera in one package.
However there are some cheaper cameras you can also get, though the picture quality won't be as amazing.
How to film your videos
Film-making is the art of painting with light. Even with a great camera, in order to produce really great shots you need to either purchase a professional 3 point light kit or go down to Lowe's / Home Depot / Walmart and get three shop lights.
If you do choose to use shop lights then you'll need to tear off the metal grills (so they don't cast shadows over you). This will give you suitable lighting for making some product reviews (though the color temperature tends to be a'bit hot).
Regardless of which kind of lights you obtain, you should also buy some welding gloves because lights get insanely hot and you can easily scar yourself for life or burn your house down if you don't pay attention.
Recording good quality audio
Nothing ruins a great shot more than terrible sound quality.
You can record your audio voice over for the game footage segments by plugging a mic into your computer BUT if you do record the audio separate from the footage using something like Garageband, then you'll need to record the audio at the appropriate frequency so it will match the frame rate of your video capture.
Recording audio voice overs at the wrong frequency screws a lot of novices up. Always capture video at either 30 (29.9) or 60 frames per second and your audio at 48.0 khz.
This is the only non-frustrating way to get the video and audio to perfectly sync up....I mean, if you did record audio at a different frequency it is possible to get something somewhat synced up by doing a lot of compressing, but it's never going to be perfect. Recording your audio and video at the correct settings will make your life a lot easier.
Also realize that the least frustrating way to record audio that will match your live action footage is to do all the audio recording on the built-in mic of your camera. However, note that a consumer brand camera (such as the NEX-VG10 I mentioned earlier) will have a feature called auto-gain which will greatly degrade the quality of the audio. Basically, any time there is a lull in your voice it will crank the gain way up because the camera assumes it should be hearing something but the noise is just too low. Auto-gain on cameras results in the sound levels going up and down constantly, which creates a lot of staticy noise.
However, for a Youtube product review this shouldn't be a major problem. If you use software like FCP or Vegas you can even apply audio filters that help compensate for autogain and get rid of the static.
Which video streaming service to use?
You have a lot of options here, because Youtube has many competitors like blip.tv, dailymotion and vimeo.
However I would start out using Youtube. If you don't do any marketing of your video then you'll still be publishing content into the ethers, but far more people use Youtube to search for videos than any other service so you'll still get some traffic just from searches alone.
Now it is possible to drive traffic from Youtube to something else like blip.tv. This works by uploading a short 30-60 trailer for your episode onto Youtube and then including a link to your full episode on blip.tv in the video description of the Youtube trailer. However, you need a large fanbase on Youtube to make this tactic work. Only a small portion of your fans will take the extra time to travel from one video to yet another video to load. I'd focus on building a big fanbase before focusing on blip.tv. If you get a Partnership, Youtube ads pay much better anyway and all monetized videos automatically become promoted videos
You can also do things like plug your video as a Video Response to a more popular video. Just shop around different videos with similar subject matter, until you find someone who doesn't require approval for a video response to go public. Or you can ask the creator if they will approve your Video Response by sending them a PM through Youtube. Video Responses helps getting your content seen.
How to compress your video for Youtube
Your video editing suite should allow you to export your finished video in H.264 with the dimensions set to 1280 x 720 (this size is often referred to as '720P' ). There is no reason to upload at any other settings, as these are the settings Youtube will convert the video file to if it isn't uploaded that way already. So unless you want Youtube to compress your video and reduce it's quality, always upload at H.264 with the dimensions at 720P.
How to determine keyword tags
For determining the keywords used in your video title, description and tag fields, use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool
This form will determine how often keywords related to your video subject are being searched, which will make your video appear in more results.
I should point out that new users have some advantage now because Youtube changed their algorithms to heavily favor new videos.
Setting up annotations
For how to setup your annotations (very important for Youtube), check out this video tutorial I've made. This video is a combination of advice I've received from other Partners and from Youtube Partner staff in private webinars.
Conclusion
I hope this information answers your questions about how to record video game footage for Youtube and make product reviews of the games you play.
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