Within a year from its launch in Dec 2005, YouTube was voted Invention of the Year by Time Magazine and has since become the second most popular search engine. It has revolutionized the world by making video sharing and viewing accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Its massive reach and free hosting make it an ideal web traffic generator. Here is how to optimize your videos and communicate a brand presence for huge results.

If you are making a promotional video, try to keep the length less than 2 minutes. Don’t worry so much about quality but focus on getting the message across. A real estate agent was able to sell a property above asking price when her video of a walkthrough of the house attracted many offers, leveraging the technologies of YouTube and Craigslist. Similarly a maker of high end blenders, dispensers and mixers boosted sales through a series of videos that showed their products being used to blend a range of items from marbles to rake handles.

To help your video reach its target audience, come up with an interesting title like ‘fire your boss’, if you happen to be pitching a work from home business. Think of the keywords that people will type to look for your product and insert these into the title, description and tags.

Basic video editing features are available on the fly as you post on YouTube, like annotating and trimming. Annotations are text that appear as watermarks that can be positioned anywhere within the video for whatever duration. Use these to promote links to your websites.

Creating and customizing a channel on YouTube allows you to project more of your personality or brand presence. It is the home page for an account, displaying the account name, the account type, the public videos uploaded, and any user information entered. The visual appearance of the channel can be modified with the built in tools and you can sequence videos that are thematically linked in the order you want by building a playlist.

Next promote your video by blogging about it, posting the link in social media pages or forwarding it to your newsletter subscribers.

You can also buy keywords on YouTube, similar to pay-per-click networks or social media networks. Successful bidding for a keyword will result in a thumbnail of your video and two lines of text displayed on the right hand side when that keyword is searched using YouTube Search. There appears to be a growing preference for videos over text as the medium of information among internet users, which should ensure a bright future for video marketing. buy likes for youtube