You should be using YouTube for marketing for several reasons:
- search engines love videos - YouTube videos are incredibly popular and so search engines reckon that searchers would probably like videos in the search results
- Google owns YouTube - your video on YouTube is likely to get indexed quickly and you can provide links to your other sites
- videos go viral - people pass on interesting videos
- you can create / become part of a community at YouTube - people can subscribe or become fans of your videos - every time you upload a new video they will be informed - free automated marketing!!
- videos provide a richer experience, allowing you to make your point with greater impact
- videos inspire trust (assuming that you are on-screen or talking for at least part of the time)
- you can include YouTube videos in your own webpages without incurring massive bandwidth costs
Using YouTube For Marketing - Essential Tips
I am going to focus on YouTube for marketing since it is the biggest video site. Many of the same principles will apply at the other sites:
- be friends - find videos that are related to your target market and add the creators of the videos as your friend. You may then use the Share feature to share your videos with your friends
- submit your videos' RSS feeds
- comment on other peoples' videos
- encourage people to subscribe and vote for your videos
- join groups
- promote your videos through blogs, articles, websites, facebook, myspace etc and don't forget to bookmark them on the social bookmarking sites like Digg
- tag your videos using your keywords - you can do this when you upload your video
- make your videos "remarkable" in the Seth Godin sense - ie worth making a remark about. You want your video to go viral and your traffic to skyrocket
You will probably have noticed that many of the tips for using YouTube for marketing relate to becoming involved with others. This is a principle that applies right across all internet marketing activities. It is connections that drive success.
YouTube Marketing Tools
There are many software tools that will make outrageous claims about how they can automate YouTube marketing. The problem is most of these tools will eventually lead you to being banned. Since Google took over YouTube, anti-spamming measures and penalties have increased dramatically. Many tools will fail after a couple of weeks as YouTube changes login procedures or finds new ways to identify automated actions. If you are going to use video marketing tools, ask yourself - what would make my video look suspicious? A sudden burst of viewings within a short space of time, possibly from the same IP address (or one recognised as being used by automated software) will alert YouTube. And once that happens you will be on the radar and may even be penalised when the traffic is legitimate.
A very useful site that I can recommend is Tubemogul. Not only will Tubemogul submit your videos for you, it will also allow you to track your videos. And it's free! To use Tubemogul, you will need to create accounts at each of the video sites.
