It is no secret that video marketing is an excellent way to bring in visitors to your website, and simply to promote your business on the internet. However, just like any other kinds of marketing activities, video marketing needs to be done well in order to bring you good results. While many online “gurus” claim that YouTube can bring you instant success, the reality of things is a bit more subdued. Yes, video sites such as YouTube are an excellent marketing platform, but they are not magical solutions where you can expect to get thousands of visitors to your website just because you have uploaded one video. Here are some quick tips that will help you get the most out of the time, money and effort that you spend on creating videos. You will see that by applying them, the returns that you get from your YouTube videos will probably increase.

And remember one thing, while many experts mention “YouTube” all the time because it is the most popular video sharing site, these tips will work on any other video sharing site that you can use as well.

• Keep current about recent news developments related to your industry

When something new comes out, or people hear about something that they are interested in happening, they increasingly turn to YouTube to watch some information about the issue. It is thus important that you upload a video as soon as something interesting happens in your niche. For example, if you sell mobile phones, this could be the release of a new model of the iPhone or BlackBerry.

• Give practical information (how to videos)

In addition to finding out about recent happenings, people use YouTube for video guides on how to accomplish something. If possible, provide some interesting content which tells the viewer how to do something that is related to your niche and don’t forget to include a link to your site for them to find more information and related products and services.

• Integrate your social media efforts

This simply means that you can include a link to your Twitter or Facebook profiles in your videos or in the video description. The more people you have that follow you on social networks, the more effective your efforts will be and using video sharing sites to gain more followers is definitely a great idea.

• Give something for free or another type of special offer

People always like to feel special and to have something given to them for free. The possibilities are endless with video marketing. For example, if you promote IM related products on your site, you could offer a free report on how to make money online and include a link to it in the video description.

If you don’t have anything to give away, why not instead give a special discount for viewers of your video who click on your link and proceed to your website? It is much more effective than simply linking to your site with no special offer for your viewers.

The biggest growing segment on the internet for traffic is mobile web browsers. Every smartphone (minus BlackBerry until BB 6.0, at least) has a very capable web browser able to display rich content just like you are used to on your computer.

The problem is, it isn’t always fluid. What does that mean? When you are viewing your website on the web browser, and you have an iPhone or Android phone (without Flash) your header image might not be there because it was Adobe Flash based instead of HTML. That ruins the experience for the viewer, and with more and more people that will be viewing your website on their phone you need to do something about it.

First thing first, no Flash. I don’t care if Android just announced they would be getting Flash today, you are still segmenting a huge piece of the market if you continue to use Flash on your website. It simply isn’t worth the hassle.

Another thing to be conscience of is your navigation. I have a Motorola Milestone and it doesn’t have the best touch screen (actually, it is horrendous). The inability to click on tiny links is very frustrating to me and ruins my experience (and wastes my time) on may of my favorite sites.

By making navigation bigger and easier to select (and not select the wrong one) you will improve your user experience both on computer and mobile browsers. Drop down menus are a great example, Android phones can click the first link fine, but any links in the drop down menu can be easily mis-clicked while on a mobile device, breaking the experience.

You can have a great website for a computer, but make sure you also consider the mobile device. Having your designer code for the mobile version as well is really important. Keep the mobile market in mind when doing anything, or have a complete mobile version. WordPress and many other platforms have great mobile plugins that allow you to easily transform your design into a mobile version, or create your own.