We have all seen mentions about how video marketing could be useful in terms of making money online. But the issue with it is that few business owners use it, and many of them don’t really do it well. Can you use video sharing sites like YouTube and Daily Motion to attract some customers to your website? Definitely. Here are some tips that you will find helpful for this:

• Use public video sharing sites and not your own server

The obvious advantage of this is that you will be saving bandwidth, as the videos will be hosted on a site such as YouTube and not your own server. Another advantage of this is that more people will be able to see your videos if they search for their related keywords. If you host your videos on your own server, they can only be seen on the places where you put them, such as websites, blogs or social media pages.

• Put your website and business logo at the beginning and end of your video

Even though YouTube allows you to put links in the description (which you should do as well), you are better off putting your website in your video as well. This is because some people may see your video and choose to embed it on their own website or blog, or share it with social media. If your video goes viral and is seen by a lot of people, chances are it will be embedded on a lot of sites, so to get the most traffic from this effect, your website must be present in the video itself.

• Give useful content to your viewers

It is said time and time again, nobody comes online to watch commercials, there are enough of them on TV. The content of your videos therefore needs to be relevant to your products and niche, without looking like you are only promoting your website or goods. Instructional or informational videos are the best. For example, if your company sells replacement iPhone screens, then having a video which demonstrates how to open up the iPhone and change its screen without messing up the phone would be quite useful. It can also be used for intangible products such as guides and learning materials. So if you sell language courses, you can create a video which teaches some important phrases, pronunciation, words, in another language, then at the end refer the viewers to your website so they can check out the product and see if it is good for them.

• Don’t give up if you don’t get many views

It is a fact that most videos will not achieve millions of views, especially if your niche is very specific. The issue is quality and not quantity. You can make sales with just a handful of viewers that are truly interested in the content of your video and the product behind it, while uploading a video that gets thousands of views because it is “cute” or “funny” may not bring you any serious site visitors.

You aren’t required to be a SEO expert to understand the fact that in order for your website to go up in rankings on Google, you will need to have lots of quality backlinks. These are essential for anyone who is trying to get more traffic through organic search results. While building enough backlinks to have an effect on your traffic can take some work and requires patience on your part, the results will be well worth it. A question that is often asked in webmaster and internet marketing communities is how to get more backlinks for your site. There are many places that you can get backlinks to your site. Here are a few examples:

Article directories

These are sites where you submit an article that is related to your niche. Depending on the rules of the article directory, you can either include links inside the body of your article, or in a signature box at the end. This will help you get traffic in two ways. You will create backlinks to your site and will get some traffic from people who read the article and then click through to your site. Search engines hold article directories in high regard, so they are an essential tool for you to use in your search engine optimization efforts.

Blog comments

On many niche blogs, you can leave a comment after reading a post and include a link to your website. It is important, however that you do not simply spam comments and actually write something useful. Also, make sure that the blog you are commenting on is related to your niche to give you the maximum quality backlinks.

Classified ads sites

Here again, you can get traffic in two ways. Either from the increase in search engine ranking due to your backlinking efforts, or from the people who will see your ad and click on to your site. Not all classifieds sites allow you to insert links in your ads, so check beforehand. Some let you post a link if you pay a small fee.

Video sharing sites

These are places such as YouTube and Dailymotion, where you upload videos for other viewers to watch. Creating your own videos and uploading them is a great way to get traffic from video sharing sites. But a fact that a lot of people forget is that you can also make use of these sites in order to get backlinks as well. Many sites allow you to place a link back to your sites in various places, such as on your profile, in the description of videos that you upload, as well as in comments on other people’s videos.

Remember, backlink building is an activity that will boost your traffic, but it has to be done gradually to have the best results. If done correctly, you will soon notice that your site is increasing in position in search results for your desired keyword and that you are getting more visitors from search engines.

There are many ways to use a video sharing site such as YouTube in order to get traffic to your website. Since broadband internet access has made viewing and sharing online videos a lot more accessible, many online marketers have jumped on the occasion of using various video sharing sites to get traffic to their sites. Video sharing sites like YouTube are not just places where you can watch some funny video of a dog riding a skateboard or a kid falling off his bike. When used correctly, they can turn into a powerful marketing tool for you.

The first question that comes to mind is what kind of content you should create. Many people believe that creating videos is a time consuming task which will take hours to complete. While anything may seem difficult at first, it will actually become quite easy as you get more used to it.

As an online marketer, you probably already know the importance of creating unique articles to have some useful content on your site and to submit to various online directories in order to get traffic to your site. Well, it is possible to turn these articles into short videos.

All you need to do is to take the content of the articles and to change it into a “presentation” format, similar to PowerPoint slides. You would then do a voice over, explaining the various parts while the viewer follows on screen. This works very well, as some people don’t like reading long articles but instead pay more attention to what you have to say when you turn it into a video. At the end of the video, you would invite the viewer to visit your website to get more information.

Another possibility is creating instructional (how to) videos. These will give the viewer information on how to do something that is related to your website‘s niche. It takes a bit more effort to get done and will probably involve taking a video camera and actually filming things. But if you are in a niche where most of the things are done on the computer (such as website building, “make money online”, investing, etc) you can simply use a screen recording software and voice over to provide explanations to the viewer.

One thing not to do is to create videos that are simply a commercial for your site. Those who browse video sharing sites rarely do so to see advertising material. Provide something that will be interesting and captivating to the viewer and you will have a better chance of them visiting your site after looking at your video. If you create content that is useful and interesting, you will find that viewers will share it with other, either through social networking sites or by embedding your video on their own websites or blogs. All of this means more potential traffic and more potential customers for your business.

Everyone notices that the world around us is always changing at a fast pace. After all, we don’t live in the dark ages anymore, so technology, culture and society are always evolving. The same can be said for the internet and especially social media sites.

If your business is not on social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter, it is the time that you consider joining them and create a page for your business or website on these social networks. It doesn’t cost anything and it can be done in less than an hour if you are not the most computer savvy user, or a few minutes if you are an internet expert.

But how do you truly take advantage of all the social media sites? To do this, you need to be aware of one thing: the social media world is always evolving as well. Let’s take a look at Facebook. It currently has over 500 million active users around the world. But there is a fact about the site that very few people actually know. At first, Facebook was only designed for students who were currently enrolled in a college or university. The site then opened up so that anyone could sign up and also create fan pages for businesses. This created a wealth of opportunity for business owners to promote their offerings on the site.

Besides the most famous sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, there are plenty of smaller social networking, social bookmarking and video sharing sites that, while being used by thousands of people, are often ignored by marketers. Not expanding your reach to the smaller sites out there could be a big mistake. Here’s why:

1. The potential for growth

The internet world can be quite unpredictable at times. There is obviously no way to predict whether a certain site will one day detrone Facebook or YouTube in terms of popularity. But it could happen. By creating a profile and being active on various social media sites, you will be one of the first ones in should a site explode in popularity. And it doesn’t take much time: creating the pages and making regular posts only takes about an hour each day. You can outsource it if your schedule is really tight and you want to save time.

2. These sites still have traffic

Even if they aren’t as popular, smaller social sites still have people who visit them, otherwise their owners would simply close them down. Even though having a presence on a certain site may only bring you a few hits a day, this is still good traffic that is going to your site. With online traffic, you never know which visitor will be profitable for you. Out of these few visitors that you get from small social sites, one of them could become a great client who makes regular orders, or could turn out to be an excellent business partner who could help your company get even more online profits than it is doing now.

Video can be a great way to enhance your blog or product because it helps put a face or voice onto the voice that normally just shows through the text. Video can be a very engaging way to interact with your audience, and when done right, video can make or break a website.

Using effective and well designed video is extremely important. If you are going to be recording it via your webcam, make sure your background is uncluttered and that you proper lighting. I would suggest putting a table or desk lamp to the side of your monitor if that is the case, to make sure you are getting proper lighting on your face. It will make a world of difference.

Promote New Products
One use of video can be to promote new products you are launching. For example, you could create a video tour of a new product you are launching, you could show the user interface, some of the content, and give a brief overview of what the product does and how it will help people. This is an effective way to explain the goal of your product and to try and convert leery buyers who may be a bit skeptical at first.

Promote Your Website
Video can be used to promote your website as well. If you created a video every time you posted new content to your blog, you could include the video and the transcript of the video in one post. By posting it to YouTube, Vimeo, and other video sharing sites you can then try to capitalize on click throughs from the video to your blog or product page. It also creates a way for people who may not want to read the entire post to receive your content, for example while they are cleaning their apartment they could have your video on and still be benefiting from your expertise.

Teach Something
Using your videos to teach people sometime specific can be a great way to set yourself up as an expert on a certain subject. For example if you are a WordPress guru it might be beneficial for you to create 3-4 minute videos and post them to YouTube with a link back to your website where you do consulting. You can teach people very basic things such as installing WordPress, modifying themes, etc. You then upsell them when they want to find an expert on WordPress, they think of your videos and your offering. It is a great way to establish credibility with potential clients.

Youtube is now becoming a major tool for searching online for breaking news similar to how twitter is being used.  For example if there is a news story people will most likely go to youtube to search for a video relating to this news piece.  Some people will use Twitter to search for information regarding this news piece.

A great way to use youtube to drive traffic to your website is to be the first to upload any breaking news to your youtube account and you will see a massive increase in video views on this video.  You can download the news video from any major news site as long as you mention where you got the video from in the description.  To drive the traffic to your website you can simply place your website link in the description offering a free gift to intice your youtube viewers to click on your link and give them a free gift to download in exchange they give you their email to help build up your email subscribers for example.  Once that user is on your website then you have a better chance of getting a sale if you are selling something or a service on your website.

You can also use it to build up your twitter followers by placing your twitter account in the video description.

Also once you have reached over 150,000 views on your videos you can then apply for the youtube google adsense partner programme and make money from your videos aswell.  Joining their partnership programme means you will make money from any advertisement that is shown on that page from youtube.  You will earn commission if a viewer clicks on those adverts.