Previously in this screencast tutorial series we looked at embedding your screencast in your site, here we’ll discuss how you can get more publicity for your screencast.

Having produced a screencast you may want to get extra viewers using video-sharing sites.  This also makes the video easily embedded into a viewer’s blog – obviously this will only happen if the screencast is interesting to the viewer!  Social news site are sometime receptive of screencast information, I list some details at the end.

As ever if you want people to spread your message you have to give them something that they want to talk about.  If your service is new and you have an interesting product then new-sites and bloggers are likely to use your screencast if it is easy to embed -  our Ztail screencast was used by TechCrunch (Ztail Launches Innovative eBay Guarantee) in their promo piece.

For an example of a highly-rated tutorial screencast that is embedded into many sites, see our Adblock Plus screencast at YouTube.

The easiest sharing site to use is YouTube, the quality of their reproduction is far higher than it used to be.  If you upload with HD dimensions then they’ll offer an HD version which is much clearer, see this ie6update screencast we made that we uploaded in HD:

Vimeo also offer high-quality screencast reproductions but they have strong Terms and Conditions against promotional material.  They allow ’show-reel’ work from professional producers so you can see some of our work in Vimeo but if you make your own promotional screencast that is used to sell a product then you can’t upload it to Vimeo.

If your screencast is educational or about open-source then you can definitely upload it to ShowMeDo.com (I’m a co-founder).  This is an educationally-focused screencast site that supports open-source (only FOSS, not commercial tools) with a viewership of 100,000 visitors a month.

Other sites include MetaCafe, Veoh and Viddler.

Our own observations backed by others like Tubemogul suggest that YouTube will give you over 4 times as many eyeballs as other sites like Vimeo.  Whether these extra eyeballs have any true value is hard to say (just as digg.com’s traffic is often of little value) but given the ease of uploading – it cannot hurt.  Tubemogul’s research suggests that the second most popular video site (Yahoo!) has only 24% of YouTube’s eyeballs.

Social news sites may be useful to you but their users tend to have strong views about what’s interesting to them and what isn’t.  ShowMeDo’s educational screencasts are well-received at Reddit.com (my Reddit account), our screencast tutorial posts get votes at DZone.com (my DZone account).  Neither types of content seem to work at Digg.com.

You’ll be wasting your time trying to push useless content into these sites so save your effort, don’t spam (you’ll just be downvoted anyhow) and find somewhere that will find your content useful.

Joel’s Business of Software forums have threads on the use of screencasts like these two.  If you’re asking a question that fits the forum then you’ll get useful feedback from the other business owners there.  Do not spam this forum, you’ll be quickly deleted if you do!

Next – how to make your audio sound like it was professionally recorded.

Do you want more of your visitors to use your software? We make professional screencasts.  Get in Contact and we’ll help you convert more visitors into users, sell more of your software and reduce your support costs.

Become a better screencaster – read The Screencasting Handbook.  We’re distilling 4 years of experience into our book, this blog series you’re reading was the first inspiration that we should write everything we know into a book to make you a better screencaster.

The Screencast Tutorial Part 7 – Getting More Publicity by ProCasts' Blog about Professional Screencast Production, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England License.

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