How to use YouTube to market your website

                                                    Marketing your business using a video-sharing website like YouTube is a great way to establish your credibility and to boost your sales.

If you haven’t heard of YouTube before, you have been on a different planet and you skipped customs on the way back. It’s one of the world’s most visited websites and it has engrained itself in our society like nothing else. Today, here on Earth, the Internet is frequently used for online media streaming and YouTube is at its very heart.

Broadcast Yourself

Remember Time magazine’s “Person of the year” 2006?: “You. Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.”

YouTube is one of my favorite websites. I find that many of the searches I start often lead to YouTube and I now often search for information in video form first. In this, the information age, we would be using our resources badly if we were to read articles using our eyes and brain like a sucker. In fact, Google estimates that 20% of all searches conducted end at a video. That is a lot of video viewers.

In recent years I have come to see YouTube as less of a video-sharing site and more of a Search Engine unto itself! That means Search Engine Optimization!

Video is great – I remember working a job once where I was shown the health and safety standards and procedures on a VHS while my boss went for a cigarette. Videos allow you to provide information that is the same again and again regardless of the viewer and with video and audio allowing for demonstrations and explanation… Videos can be paused and reviewed and the information digested thoroughly. In general – I would rather watch a video tutorial than have someone explain the same thing to me or even reading about a procedure.

If you wanted to know how to use a piece of software (let’s say Adobe’s Photoshop, for example), then you might easily type “Photoshop tutorial” into YouTube. In fact, I dare you to conduct this search. YouTube reports: “About 134,000 results”

YouTube has become synonymous with the idea: “Whatever you want, whenever you want” … which is fitting as it is a subsidiary of Google.

Here I’m going to show you how to market your business using YouTube and make sure that you are providing the content that your potential visitors are looking for.

If you are a blogger, you should definitely expand your reach into the world of video sharing – or “vlogging”: You still get to appear as an expert in your field and through your expertise you can drive traffic to your website.

At the end of the day, YouTube is a great marketing tool because you have the power to reach out to a great deal of people and drive them to your website. The more people that find your website, the more money you will make.

If you’re not using YouTube to market your website or your blog, you should be!!! You will drive traffic to your website or blog in no time if people like your videos.

If you have a camcorder, a digital camera, a webcam or screen-capture software, you can begin marketing your business and website using viral videos today.

NOTE: You may also need a piece of non-linear video editing software or a photo editor to make your video’s but you have these. Windows includes MovieMaker and Mac OSX includes iMovie.

Vlogging and Building Trust: The Power of YouTube

For more information on blogging (vloggings older sibling), please read the following VodaHost blog post: http://www.vodahost.com/web-hosting-why-you-need-a-blog.html/

YouTube is a free-to-join video-sharing site. Essentially, what that means is that if you have a video you wish to share with the world, you can create a YouTube account, post your video and it can be watched by any Internet user that stumbles upon it.

You can show tutorials of a software for example. Maybe  software you have created. You can make short films. You can show-off your music or show people how to create music the same way. Have a unique perspective on a great way to make money? Share it on YouTube and viewers will visit your site if you have included that call-to-action in your videos.

All this wonderful free information makes your video viewers trusting of you as you have shown yourself to be an expert.

Building trust with customers is essential to any successful business and utilizing YouTube can achieve just this for your company. Video marketing consisting of video has proven itself to be highly effective in generating a firm bond between the customer and your business on both a professional and personal level. Videos present the viewer with a real live person to whom they can relate and grow to trust on a more personal level.

This can be exploited to its full advantage by businesses in order to attract more clients and create a positive lifetime relationship. Using a business for the first time is always a risk so potential clients want to ensure that they are making the correct choice when it comes to the business’ productivity and reliability. Through the use of videos, clients are able to develop a personal relationship with the company before any business is done. This allows you to foster a connection between customers and separate yourself from the competition when it comes to sincerity, reliability,and credibility.

When establishing a marketing technique and strategy for your business and considering video as an option, make sure that you consider the following: Product and service costs are not the primary information that should be focused on in a marketing video and might not be required at all for a successful marketing campaign. The most essential component of your business is your reliability and sincerity and your video should make sure to demonstrate this as succinctly as possible.

More than likely, your clients will be far more attracted to this type of marketing video. Overall, sincerity and trust are far more important to a client than price no matter how tight a budget the customer is under.

Getting Started: How to Sign-Up with YouTube

Visit http://www.youtube.com/ and click Create Account

Fill in all your information, including a link to your website. Keep your information keyword rich using the same keywords as your website.

When Viral Marketing Videos Explode

For more information on how to create a viral marketing campaign, please read the following VodaHost blog post: http://www.vodahost.com/web-hosting-how-to-create-a-viral-marketing-strategy.html (and please note how the article uses an embedded YouTube video to provide information).

How to Make a Viral Marketing Video Clip

“How-To” Videos are perhaps the best overall strategy for SEO and viral marketing and a smart move can be building out a “How-To” YouTube channel.

Whether it’s a grown man dancing in cities all over the world, two teenage girls singing a favorite song in their bedroom or a small dog skateboarding, viral marketing videos drive huge amounts of web traffic to source sites. The new kind of marketing is cheap to produce and yet very effective. If you’re looking to make your own viral marketing video clip, follow these steps.

1. Identify your market. While predicting the success of a viral marketing video is difficult, you should still shoot for a general audience type. Think about age group, cultural backgrounds and interests of your potential audience so you make a viral video that hits the mark or at least part of it.
2. Keep the production values low. One of the most sought after qualities of viral marketing videos is real life authenticity. Use a hand held video camera and amateur actors to make a good viral marketing video.
3. Think about the virility. The most important factor, and the one factor that is definitively an “X” factor, is the virility. Look at successful viral marketing videos and try to identify the qualities of the videos that made people want to pass them on to their friends and families. Try to include the same kinds of qualities in your viral video.
4. Distribute the video correctly. Post the video on the usual video websites, like YouTube, and send it to as many acquaintances as you know. Also, it’s important to get the video on to blogs and websites so that many people see the video in one shot. If you see that the video is picking up traction, get ready to make a sequel so you can keep the momentum going.

• You should always keep the material on your viral video appropriate. You do not want a racy or explicit video to haunt you later on.
• You must make sure that your video is in a valid file format before it goes viral. Typically accepted file formats include .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG
• If you want a lot of people to watch your viral video, keep it short and advertise it as much as possible.
• Don’t post anything that’s copyrighted or libelous.

Video Responses

But even better than getting your own video views doing what you do with your videos, why not leverage the power of someone else’s popular videos to get your videos even more traffic? Increased traffic to your videos means increased traffic to your website, which means increased business for you. Increase your traffic and you will make more money with your website.

1. Create a video related to your niche and post it on YouTube.
2. Search YouTube for popular videos in your niche. You’re looking for other people, your competitors, who are basically doing the same thing you’re doing. The difference is, you’re looking for people who have a ton of video views. Views in the 10,000 are good. If you can find someone in the 100,000s – fantastic!
3. Watch the video your competitor created. The reason for doing this is two-fold. You can only make an intelligent comment / response if you have watched the video. But even more importantly, you can learn from your competition. There is something about that video or the person doing the video that makes them successful. See if you can harness some of that popularity and change what you’re doing to make your business more successful.
4. Sign in to your YouTube account.
5. Create your video response. You can do that down below the video just above where people post comments. Choose “post a video response.“
6. Add your video to your video response. Click the link that says, “Choose a video.” Remember, you must already have uploaded the video to your YouTube account. You cannot grab a video off your computer and post it as a video response without first uploading it to YouTube.
7. Choose the button that says, “Respond with this video.“ Your video will now appear as a response to your competitor’s popular video. Your traffic will increase if you post relevant video responses on other people’s videos.

• Make sure your video has relevant, useful content. Otherwise people will not return to see what else you have.
• Do not spam. Your video must be relevant. Post your video responses only when appropriate. Otherwise your visitors will not come back.

How to Embed YouTube Videos in your Website using BlueVoda

1. Publish your YouTube video normally or find a video that you wish to embed in your website.
2. Note the video’s URL address. – Something along the lines of: “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwcFJ2Mwq40” – Use the LONG FORM of the embed code that YouTube provides you.
3. Click the YouTube logo within the BlueVoda website builder
4. Double click on the YouTube element you positioned on your BlueVoda workspace.
5. Add information about the YouTube video including URL of the video that you noted. Hit the [OK] button and you’re just about done! – Preview your webpage to see the results.

SEO and YouTube

YouTube has a search algorithm that includes the optimization of the following:

• Title
• Description
• Tags
• Number of Views
• Rating

All of these items can be manipulated by the video owner, as well as the viewing/sharing audience, to determine placement in both YouTube search listings and to be carried over to Google’s own universal/blended search listings.

Whenever you post videos, make sure they have been well SEOed. You have many opportunities to SEO your videos when you are filling in the information after you have posted it.

Your videos can be targeted. Make sure that you use your keywords when posting YouTube videos, in the title, the description and as the tags.

Anchor description length of 27 characters (max) – this is the maximum amount of characters you have for keyword placement before the “three dots” and the end of each video link on YouTube.

Include a clickable URL in the first line of the description tag. The first line of the description is what appears by (And again, if you want to avoid it looking truncated, keep it to within 27 characters.). This link could be to a blog page that contains extra information about your video.

A Note on Link Building

It has been shared that YouTube adds “nofollow” to all video titles… except those displayed under “Recent Activity.” If possible, try to keep most desired videos in “Recent Activity” section. The anchor text length on “Recent Activity” link is 27 Characters. Building links to these videos (embedded on-page) is ideal for SEO. Plus links to video channel helps with reputation management.

Optimizing your own Website with YouTube video

Embedding YouTube videos on your website not only saves on the cost of streaming media hosting, but you can also get YouTube’s own tracking stats at no charge as well. Check out the below tips for on-site optimization with YouTube video.

• Create a separate text-optimized page for EACH video on your site.
• Surround the video with a description and link to your YouTube page with anchor text being the keywords you would like to rank for.
• Submit the same description to each video site (i.e. Yahoo! Video, YouTube, Google Video)
• Use Google Website Optimizer to help you determine which video works best. You can then set up Goals in Google Analytics and learn which video was the most successful. Create different variations of the video and then simply run a test using the free Google Website Optimizer and change nothing but the video on the different versions of the pages.

A WARNING on Embedding Videos from YouTube

Badly deployed YouTube videos are a terrible thing, especially when they auto-play.

An auto-loading video is one that starts playing as soon as the page in which it is embedded is loaded by a browser.

YouTube makes it easy to embed your videos on your website. It’s a really great feature too, primarily because embedding the video from YouTube will cut down on your page load time. I do feel a warning is important here though because you can embed YouTube videos into your website the wrong way! We have found that very often, auto-loading videos are a bad idea – for several reasons. First, your visitor feels like they have had their browsing privileges taken away. Second, the sudden volume can give a heart attack if you have your speaker system at a volume optimized for another program.

Your visitors DO want to watch your visitors but they want to do it in their own time. The Internet has given people the feeling that they can do whatever they want whenever they want.

Video HAS NOT replaced plain text just yet and you ARE NOT the decision maker – your visitors are the decision makers. Let them choose to watch your video. Don’t push it in their faces.

Beyond YouTube Marketing

Video marketing does not begin and end with YouTube (even though it is the World’s most popular video sharing site). There are plenty of other video-sharing websites out there and you should market using your videos there too.

Why not check out Dailymotion and Vimeo as two great websites to use to escalate your video marketing campaign?