YouTube is a very powerful social site. It's the first thing that people check when they are looking for video clips; and YouTube videos can be and have been conveniently passed on to other internet users worldwide. Due to its extremely viral nature, YouTube is a wonderful tool for internet marketing. Here are the steps that you should follow in order to do so.

You probably have heard of YouTube. Well, who hasn't? Millions of people are uploading, watching, downloading, or linking to videos in YouTube everyday. If you want to see a video of something, you can always check it out from YouTube.

YouTube is a free video sharing website that utilizes adobe flash technology in order to be able to display videos uploaded by its millions of members. These videos are watched and seen by around 20 million YouTube visitors every month. Videos in YouTube feature thousands of unknown and known people daily.

If you have a website, an account with YouTube would certainly benefit you. You can take advantage of its free video sharing and the extremely vast network of people you could market your product to. Just imagine how much traffic your website would generate through your own videos. There is no better way to advertise to millions of people for free than YouTube. Using this service, you can maximize all internet marketing opportunities. Here's how you can use YouTube more effectively in your internet marketing efforts.

Step 1: Create a definite genre for your video

Deciding on what kind of video you will be creating depends on what kind of target audience you intend to create the video for. Colorful and interactive videos would work best for teenagers or college students. A more classic presentation will suit the professional and working market.

The idea is to create a video that would most attract its target market. Make sure that your video's message is clear but concise. Make sure that your clip won't play for more than 5 minutes.

Create an impact with your message. Try to shock and move people out of their usual indifference. Make them curious about your product, business or service and make them want to possess what you sell through the content of your video.

Make sure that you are clearly identifying yourself with the video. It should contain your logo or your company name. This is a way to make sure that your message won't be lost to the viewers. Take your time in creating your video. Make sure that the finished product would give out the message that you want to convey.

Step 2: Strategically place your video in the net

A strategic placement of your videos in YouTube will raise people's interest and would get them to watch your video. Make it a top-watch video. Chances are your video will appear on YouTubes's home page, generating more possible interest. This is where viral marketing would start to work. Your videos will be watched and passed on by more and more people.

Step 3: Create a link to your website

Remember that the purpose of your video is to attract more people to visit your website. However, a direct sales pitch from a video is frowned upon by YouTube. To avoid having your video deleted (yet still being able to make a subtle advertisement), put a teaser trailer at the end of the video. Put your company name on the trailer and make sure the person watching it would know whom to associate the video with.

Video marketing is the next big thing online. It is underused by many marketers and fantastically profitable for those that do use it.

Many marketers don't use video marketing simply because they don't know how to get started on it. It isn't actually that difficult and you will find it remarkably easy when you do use it.

Videos can very easily go viral and you will find yourself getting a lot of traffic from them. Plus, the search engines love video because it is very popular at the moment. You can often see a selection of videos in the top five ranking for any search term in Google.

Creating the videos doesn't have to be difficult. You can create a live action video using your mobile phone or digital camera, or if you live in the dark ages, a webcam.

Using a tool such as Camtastia or Camstudio you can capture the screen and demonstrate some software or a website. These are very effective videos because people can see what they are buying or what they need to do.

Promotional videos can be created by Windows Movie Maker, which is installed on most Windows XP and above computers or on a website such as Jing or Animoto. These websites create some fantastic videos which you can use as adverts.

Your video needs to be concise, to the point and entertaining. You want your viewers to see your video and be captured and want to know more.

Before you start submitting your video, you need to know which keywords to use as tags. This means doing some keyword research. The Google External Keyword Tool will tell you everything you need to know, or you can use your own favorite tool.

You could manually submit your video to various video directories, but this takes a lot of time. You could outsource it, which will get expensive, or you could use a tool to do it. Alternatively, you can use the TubeMogul website, which is free to use.

This allows you to submit your video articles to a handful of video directories automatically. Once you have produced some videos and are established on their site you can increase the number of video directories.

Once the videos are approved (and some sites will turn them down) you can then sit back and watch your videos spread all over the Internet. They will be picked up by websites and other directories that feed off these main sites, giving you more of an audience.

Set up a Google Alert for your video name and you will be surprised to see how far a single video will get you. So long as you have put your URL in the description and in the video itself, then you will get a good amount of traffic from this.

Video marketing is emerging as a very powerful and effective method of getting traffic. It is still underused and one that you can start to use to further boost your sites in the search engines.

Online video publishing has indeed taken the Internet by storm in recent years, making the use of video for marketing, promotion, news and PR online a true key strategic component and a key business differentiator for internet marketers who want to communicate effectively about their product profile and benefits within the shortest possible of time.

The Internet is full of information and the average attention span of a web user today is measured in seconds. When web users search for their information at a search engine, they will get thousands of search results; when they visit your website, they may only spend a few seconds and little efforts to scan through what you are selling or proposing and decide whether your content, style, look and approach are a good fit for what they were actually looking for. These first few seconds are crucial and if you can delivery clear and targeted message by offering a fast, highly visual way to get their further attention and engage their interest, you have done bingo.

Does this mean that you just need to simply put up 10-min video tutorial on your website or just slamming some video contents up on your web pages, you will instantly sell more products or services? If this is your way of marketing with video on the web and hoping to get high conversion rate of traffic-to-sales, you will more toward getting disappointments than good news.

In order to make your video to effectively market your products/services online and convey your product/service key traits and characteristics within a very short amount of time in a unique, memorable way. These are a few rules of thumb to follow:

1. Get Your Video Seen

If you want your video to be your effective marketing tool, it must be able to see by as many web users as possible. Hence, don't just keep and tight your video inside your web site borders. Let your video content be free and distributed to the majors video sharing websites such as YouTube and Google video so that not only others can watch and talk about it, but they can easily download it, redistribute it, if not even publish it directly on their own sites.

2. Small File and Load Fast

Statistics show that average web users spend their time waiting for a page to load is about 7 seconds. Web pages that take longer than 7 seconds to load, their visitors normally are on the verge of clicking away and visit other website. Hence, you need to make sure your video file is small enough, ideally less than 1 megabyte and load almost in real time to keep the interest your visitors. AVI is the most common video format, the file size can easily exist 10 megabytes for a short 2-3 minutes video; hence if you share your video in this format, you most probably will get click away from you visitors because of long loading time of your video file. Hence, you must get a video format conversion tool to convert your video to a more internet friendly format such as SWF format.

3. Let Them Know It's A Video, A Short Video

If the web users do not know that it is a video, they won't click it and play it; hence your video will get watch. So, you must let the web users know that the box is a video; the best way is to make it look like a video / VCR-like by having a play and stop button where the web users can click to play the video and stop it whenever they want to stop it.

Let the web users know also this is a short video. No one wants to sit through a 30 minute presentation on the history of your company; be focused on your products/services and deliver your messages preferable within 2 minutes.

In Summary

Effectively market with video on the web is not just slamming some video content up on your web pages, it more toward effective video communication through video publishing & sharing on the web.

With video technology, communication can now be a totally different experience. This article discusses the many ways by which video technology can be used in internet marketing.

Almost every form of interaction one experiences everyday entails communication. It is through communication that we are able to understand others, learn new ideas, explore new wisdom, and express our own feelings and thoughts. Over the passage of many years, communication has evolved from a simple system of sounds in the ancient times to a very advanced feature of video technology.

Video technology's use in internet marketing is also a rapidly rising trend these days. Here's how you can be in on this trend to boost your web presence.

--- Using Videos for Internet Marketing ---

1. Video Email Marketing Campaigns

People's attention span has decreased with the increasing saturation of information in the internet. People only have only a few seconds to spare for communication and information that do not interest them. The challenge to internet marketers, therefore, lies in catching hold of the customers' interests for more than a few seconds, or getting the message across in as short a period of time as possible.

Video emails make the latter possible. For a few seconds of video, people can be told about your wonderful product or service. Now, people won't have to read reams and reams of your ad copy. They only need to spare a few seconds of their time to view your video pitch.

Video emails are also more effective than emailed copy because videos are much more stimulating and engaging. You can also demonstrate your product's effectiveness in video –something that you cannot do with text copy which allows only descriptions, not demonstrations.

With the current developments in video streaming, video emails have also never been easier to use. Your target consumers won't have to download the video to watch them. You need only include a preview clip with the email and this clip, when clicked, will connect the viewer to the video server which can stream the video live to your consumer's media player.

2. Videos in your website and online blogs

The brain becomes more engaged with multimedia displays and content. Therefore, you should be sure to incorporate videos in your website and online blogs. Your videos online can be lengthier and more detailed than the video emails that you have sent to your target consumers' inbox.

Through video infomercials and updates, you can get your message across much faster and you can be more easily remembered by your site's and your blog's visitors. Moreover, if you provide tags and codes with your video, your website visitors can easily copy the video content to their own blogs and personal websites. This will increase your business' reach.

3. Video Blogging

Now this is the most practical application of video technology today in internet marketing. YouTube is a huge community of people who love watching and referring videos. In fact, YouTube has become so popular that Google even purchased it from its original owners. Major broadcasting companies have also agreed to supply YouTube with video content from shows that they wish to promote online.

All you will need to do is become a member of this enormous community of video lovers and post you own interesting videos. You can post your company infomercials, if you want. However, for more effective marketing, you'd better make your videos more interesting and captivating. Your video clip should have value beyond your marketing pitch so people will be more inclined to pass it on to others.