The full program

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A few lessons from this program

Want to know how to do online video well?

Learn from Damien Somerset, he's a legend in web video. Damien edits Ask-A-Ninja, the most successful online video series. And he's the producer of ZapRoot, the most successful online green video series.

He recorded an hour-long, data-packed program full of specific techniques you can use right now to improve your online videos and grow your audience. Here are a few edited exceprts from the program.

Be accessible

Accessibility is what's changed. You are not a success online if you do not reply to your comments, And reply to your messages. Do things that feel like, they are targeted directly at your audience. You have to be there. You have to be there like they're there. So have to engage them on ALL of the platforms you want to be successful on.

Pick your platform

If you are a startup and you have a show that has no viewers, you want to cast your net wide--as wide as possible. And then you can start paring down the platforms that you're successful on. If you're kicking ass on DailyMotion, you want to stay there. You need to optimize your time, so if you're not doing well on DailyMotion, you should stop spending time on it.

Know your power

If you're a big show, you want to go to targeted platforms and say, "I'm this big show. I'm a big deal. Are you going to put me on your front page? If so, I'll come to your platform. If not, have a nice day." Ask-A-Ninja doesn't focus on all the platforms any more. Now they try to bring their users to their site. They can be thrifty about where they're spending their time and efforts.

Relate to other videos

If your videos do not relate with others that are popular--in an effective way--or are targeted enough to the topics of your video, you're doing yourself a huge disservice. If your video is about earthquakes, it's title better have the word "earthquake" and it better relate well to other videos with earthquakes. Before you title a video about earthquakes, go search YouTube for earthquakes and see which titles are effective and which aren't. There are keywords that have been proven effective in that category already, so use that knowledge.

Promote cleverly

Easter is coming up. You know it's coming. Make an Easter video. Also, we build into our shows ways that we can talk about things that are going on in pop culture at the time. That is not what a lot of people are doing. People are making things and they're like, "Oh, I made this thing and let's put it out in the best way I can." If you know where your video is going, what time it's going up, and you know what people are actually looking at already, you can be so much more effective.

Track your audience

In the show description, add links to the topics you covered--and measure the click rate. In ZapRoot, people love automobies. They love auto stuff. They'll click through auto stuff. They engage heavily with auto stuff. But I don't know that unless I have numbers to tell me that. If you just put the hyperlinks in there, you'll never know who's clicking through.

Be sustainable

You have to make your web series as sustainable as possible. If you set the bar too high for yourself, you are going to fail. And the long street of web video is littered with these people. Doing a show every day is incredibly hard and will take up a lot of your time. You need to come up with a method that is sustainable.

Your turn. Do you have any advice about online video? Add it to the comments.