Speaker 1: There's the easy way and then there's the hard way. Let's do this one the easy way. Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake of robertoblake.com helping you create something awesome today. So welcome to another YouTube tips video. This is the kind of thing I like to do on Fridays for you guys. So you'll wanna subscribe if you're trying to grow your YouTube channel or you have questions about how YouTube works. So for today's topic and a lot of you have asked about this one is, well, does closed captioning even do anything for my YouTube channel and how can I do it? I don't have the time to sit there and manually type everything in. Is there a better way? Well, I've got some great news for you guys. The way that I've been closed captioning my YouTube videos is really simple and it's really fast. There was one little caveat though. It costs money. Now disclaimer, this is not a sponsored video nor does this particular company have an affiliate link which sucks for me because I would sell the crap out of it because I use it all the time. I actually have been trying to make sure that I do closed captions for almost all my YouTube videos. The more expensive ones are the speaking engagements. I'll get around to that eventually but for everything that's under 25 minutes, I usually throw closed captioning on it and the way that I've been doing that is with a easy to use service called Rev.com, R-E-V.com. Like I said, they're not paying for this. I'm getting zero money out of it but it is something that will help you. One of the reasons I do closed captioning aside from the fact that I think it's really good to do that for the disabled is the fact that I also know that I have an international viewership and it's going to really help them out if they're not native English speakers but can read the English language to be able to follow along especially since I talk a little fast. Some of you at home even say that you do like to read the closed captions on my videos because sometimes you don't hear everything 100% clearly and I am trying to work on that just a little bit but if nothing else, the closed captions are there. The other more practical reason is YouTube search. As I've talked about, the YouTube algorithm needs as much information and data as possible to try to understand what your video's about and relate it to other video topics so it can show up in the right hand side for related videos or so they can show up in your YouTube channel homepage feed based on what people are watching and so if you want more views overall both locally and abroad, I would recommend closed captioning your videos especially those of you who are doing short form content. If you're doing content that's under five minutes, then with Rev.com, you're paying $1 for every minute of video so if you're doing something under five minutes, three minutes, throw a few bucks at it especially if you're making money from your YouTube videos in the first place, just go ahead and do that. If you're uploading only once a week even if you have longer content, then it's worth it. I probably spend a lot of money considering my volume of content on closed captioning but I'm okay with that because my channel's profitable and I ultimately believe that beyond the SEO benefit, beyond the ability to get more views from it, I just think it's the right thing to do personally and so I invest in that and I think that also gives me a leg up if I ever want to take some of this content and be able to use the text information as a transcription for a blog post or an article or even an info product like an e-book, it's gonna make that really easy for me so I think it's a good investment no matter what. Also, if you're ever interested in uploading your videos for whatever reason to Amazon, that actually requires you to do closed captioning so you can upload to Amazon's video on demand service which is totally free for you to do and you can actually make money in Amazon from some of your content but it has to be closed captioned so whether you're doing YouTube videos, this is actually practical for you if you want to do that or if you ever want to make a film someday. You can also use the same transcription file and use that for your Facebook videos. So overall, I think that Rev.com is a really smart idea to invest in that for any video content that you're doing but I also think it can help you in YouTube. It saves so much time instead of manually editing the captions for your YouTube videos and if other people in your community want to translate your content into their native language, it really does actually help with that as well. I've had people submitting French and Spanish closed captions for my YouTube videos and they've actually been pretty accurate and I think that's partly because I've been doing English closed captions and people can use those to help so I think it's a very practical thing to do and it can help you reach a much broader audience overall. So Rev.com, if you guys are watching this while you're transcribing the video, big props to you. Thank you so much for the great work that you do here on my YouTube channel and if someone from the marketing department in Rev.com is watching right now, reach out to me, it's important. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you have questions about closed captioning or translations for your YouTube channel, leave those in the comment section. Also, I'd love to know in the comment section, are you closed captioning or translating any of your YouTube videos and if so, has that actually been beneficial for you in any way? I'd actually love to hear about your stories and whether or not closed captioning has done anything for you or not in the comment section. Like this video if you like it, don't forget to subscribe. Check out the other awesome content on the channel. As always, you guys, thanks so very much for watching and don't forget, create something awesome today.