After Google, YouTube is now apparently the most-used search engine in the world. YouTube now allegedly sees more searches than either Yahoo or MSN. I think that’s amazing. And I also think it is an amazing opportunity for those of us who want to increase traffic to our websites.
But does YouTube really represent a realistic option for increasing traffic to your site? Last year I set out to test this very theory because, frankly, I was a little cynical. My own suspicions were that most of these searches were from teenage kids looking for clips of their favourite bands or stupid stunts and I doubted that YouTube could be effectively harnessed for the sake of marketers.
So I created a small number of short (2-5 minute) videos on a topic related to one of my websites and published them to see what happened.
And I must say that the results truly impressed me. People were finding my videos either in YouTube itself - or on Google which tends to rank videos highly - and then watching my videos. Over a few months, thousands of people watched them and a decent number then clicked on the link pointing to my site.
As a result I saw a marked increase in my traffic as a result of this experiment and it really turned me on to the possibilities.
So how difficult is it to harness the power of YouTube? Honestly, the answer is not very, and I’d to tell you exactly how I did it in the hope that you too can benefit from the power of online video.
Making The Video
Nothing flashy is need to make a video to market your website. Personally I used a cheap digital camera and just basically spoke into the lens. For YouTube ensure your videos don’t go over 10 minutes in total length. Personally I pretty much read some of my more popular articles and tips so I was able to reuse much of my existing content rather than having to create plenty of new content.
I literally took an article that was generating traffic and then read it to camera.
Upload The Video
Sign up for a free YouTube account if you haven’t already and you will find how easy it is to upload the video. All you need to do is to locate it on your computer and press the upload button.
Once the video is uploaded the final step is to name it correctly. As you are basically reusing the content of an existing article, use the article title as the title for your video and include a link back to your website in the description.
That really is pretty much all there is too it. I recommend doing a number of these videos as they can be a little hit and miss and the more you have out there the greater the difference will be to your traffic levels.
One final tip is to enable comments on your videos in your YouTube account as I have found a surprising number of people are keen to ask questions about the videos I have uploaded and this can also be a good way to lure people back to my site by explaining that the answer to their questions is at this page or that page on my site.
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