Joe Whyte created a Guide to Video Marketing on Youtube a couple of months ago and has some very good information. One of the things he focuses on is the importance of building your Youtube profile. As with all social sites, the more “friends” and followers you have, the more exposure your posts and comments are going to get – since there are ways of spreading the word to your little community (”sharing”) every time you add something to your profile.

He also suggest you use your friend and contact lists on other sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Twitter to notify them when you’ve posted a new video.

Joe has done at least two more posts on video marketing on Youtube…

Video Marketing on YouTube.com, and

How to Boost Your YouTube Subscribers : Power of Video Marketing

And this article by Grant Crowell,

Video SEO Expert Interview – Performics Jeremy Clem

The author puts particular emphasis on the importance of tags for optimization within specific sites – to take advantage of the natural traffic within the site. All sites categorize videos in a variety of ways, and you want to make sure your videos come up in the right lists. Videos also get grouped when they are viewed with others sharing similar subject matter. So there is a visual impetus to click on videos with similar content.

For instance, the author suggests using “category descriptor tags” such as “comedy”, “mystery”, “finance”, “health”, “business” so they come up in internal searches for videos in these areas.

Video: Dancing Monkeys and Video SEO

It is hard to know what to say about optimizing videos to get search engine exposure and traffic until you’ve actually posted a few videos and seen the result. Your first few video posts may be disappointing because they will probably not get much traffic. You may get lucky and hit on a topic and a presentation that gets some buzz, but for most marketing applications that seems unlikely.

That is why video marketing enthusiasts focus on trying to come up with “viral” videos. But the problem with most “viral” videos is that they get a lot of “junk” views. Sure it’s impressive when a million people look at a video of a dancing monkey or some guy playing a guitar with his toes, but what does that have to do with marketing. If you cannot leverage those views to get exposure for your product or brand, from the marketing point of view those views are simply wasted.

This leads us to ask “What is my objective in putting up these videos?” From the marketing point of view there are several reasonable and obtainable objectives and you’re best to get these straight before beginning your “campaign”. Recognizing these objectives and setting things up to achieve them is what I mean by “optimizing” your videos.

Let me throw out a few objectives for consideration:

Objective 1 – To get people to view your video.

Objective 2 – To expose people to your product or brand.

Objective 3 – To create a positive and attractive impression of your product or brand.

Objective 4 – To encourage viewers to click thru to your website and actually get some traffic.

As I said above, setting your videos up to achieve these objectives is what I mean by “optimizing” them. This is more than SEO – search engine optimization – although it includes that. Because they are relatively video-unfriendly, the search engines only play a relatively small part in using videos to drive traffic. From the marketing point of view, optimizing your videos is about getting people to see and act on them.

In my next post I’ll look at the first two objectives – getting people to look at your videos, and exposing them to your product or brand.

Check out Linknet Video to see how we create an optimized video campaign.