I’m not going to hide the truth. YouTube marketing and the process to ranking videos is starting to change.

Back when I first got started with YouTube we could upload any video and get it to rank on page 1 quicker than its taking me to write this email.

That has obviously changed. It’s still easy, however, those shortcut technique don’t work anymore.

But, you know what else has changed? The thumbnails! Look at this!

So what is really going on with the rankings?

Search behavior and watch time.

This means if people search a keyword in Google or YouTube, see your video and watch it all the way through you will get rankings and eventually creep up to the top (with the possibility of getting a huge thumbnail)!

Don’t believe me? Well, Google just patented “watch time” as a ranking factor so no other search engines can use it. They did this because they know people don’t watch bad videos!

I mean, they literally PATENTED “watch time” as a ranking factor…telling us “YO! We want good videos and if you give us good videos we will reward you with rankings”!

So we played around with it worked over and over. Not only did it help us rank but it gave us HUGE clickthru rates up 40%…yep 40% clickthru rates on our YouTube videos.

Take a look at this video where we got it to page 1 without backlinks and got 45% clickthru rate using two annotations:

This only happens because we made the perfect video for that search term “mind palace”.

It was the video people wanted when searching that keyword and we made the perfect Call-To-Action at the end of the video. The CTA offered more free training that was directly related to “mind palace” and people ATE. IT. UP.

The beauty of this is that it is now working for our client every day. Every minute. Every second. Whether he decides to go on vacation or work.

So are backlinks still important??? YES! Very much so. But, they’re beginning to play less of a role and taking its spot is “watch time” and “how people respond to your videos”.

When you combine the perfect video with the perfect backlinks and the perfect CTA you get results that are more powerful than anything we have ever seen.

With all this new info coming out and with all the new test we’ve been running I will be hosting a NEW LIVE WORKSHOP which you can register for here!

– Brandon
Sold With Video

PS – I will be giving out more training on Periscope too. Add me @brandonlucero as we get more into this. Don’t forget to save your spot for our FREE LIVE YouTube Marketing Workshop showing you how to rank videos that sell for you!