Networking Your Website Using YouTube

My 8 year old son Tommy, wanted me to help him start an online business.   I agreed to help him out.  Tommy loves Legos, so we decided to do a Lego show, where he does reviews of his different Lego sets.  We are using a Flip camera (which is a pocket size camcorder that you can buy for under $100), and we are hosting these amateur video shows on YouTube.  (And when I say ‘amateur video’… I’m saying that these are amateur videos in the extreme!)

Yet… in just 5 months, Tommy has had over 100,000 video views on YouTube, and is right now averaging about 1000 video views per day.   That’s big!    He is hoping that he will be discovered and get paid for doing these Lego shows.

Are you thinking about adding a video to your website?  Although there are some very good video applications and platforms out there, I usually recommend that my clients use YouTube, so that they can get more bang for their buck.  YouTube is free to use.

YouTube will host your video for you, so you don’t have the expense of video hosting. You can upload a video using different types of video formats, and YouTube will then convert your video to Flash.  (If your video file is too large for YouTube, you might consider using Google Video instead ).  The benefit of Flash is that most everyone can watch your video, without needing special software installed on their computer.  Adobe claims that 98 percent of US Web users and 99.3 percent of all Internet desktop users have the Flash Player installed.

But the opportunity to get your video to go viral is really why I like using YouTube. 

Here are some ways in which YouTube can help you get your video to go viral:

1)      Someone watching a video on your website ( or any website ), can easily share the video with another person.  YouTube makes it easy for them to refer your video to someone else.

2)      You have the option of allowing other people to embed your video onto their websites or blogs.  As long as your video is branded, you might as well benefit from the extra exposure.

3)      YouTube has some marketing features in the control panel, in which you can automatically post your video onto places such as Facebook or Digg.

4)      You can tag your videos to reach your target audience.  In Tommy’s video, I used all the main keywords that described what his video was about.  This was very impactful in driving people to Tommy’s Lego Show.

5)      There are social networking options that you can enable on YouTube, in which people can comment on your videos.  This can help build a community.

You might consider adding a how-to or an entertaining type of video to YouTube.    There should be something in your video that is interesting enough for people to want to watch it and then to refer it to someone else.

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