It’s no big secret that video promotion is huge these days. Some videos on YouTube have been viewed millions of times by people around the globe.  Some videos are purely personal and aren’t part of an online video strategy, while others are part of a company’s online video marketing agenda – as can be the case with video such as Superbowl commercials.

The bottom line is that online video advertising works. And it works very well when you’re video is compelling and engaging.

So how can video promotion benefit you or your business? Easy. Get video in front of your prospects! Here’s a brief overview of the strategy and process:

Online Video Strategy Step 1 – Decide where you’ll host your video
The first thing you need to do before you even point your camera is decide where your videos will be hosted.

Now, unless you have some technical know-how when it comes to hosting and serving video, 3rd party video hosting (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) is likely your best option. For the sake of this post, I’m going to assume this is the way you’ll go.

Online Video Strategy Step 2 – Create your presence
One step many marketers miss is completing their entire YouTube profile. This means branding your channel as much as you can to match your brand. You want as much congruency as possible for people who may see your videos on the 3rd party’s site. YouTube makes it easy to change color scheme of your channel to match your online presence.

Also, when you create your account and begin uploading videos, complete all the information fields so search engines and visitors have as much information about your videos as possible. Ideally your videos will come up as search results in Google (for YouTube videos, at least).

Online Video Strategy Step 3 – Upload your videos

Video hosting sites like YouTube make it easy to upload video, but they also make it easy to control how and where that video content is delivered. For example, you might want to restrict people from viewing a particular video on YouTube.com, but allow them to view an embedded version on your site. You can make a video private, but still embed it in your website, making your site the only place that video can be seen. This is important for tracking and conversion purposes.

Follow-up video promotion tip:

Surround your video with meaningful content.
This means writing complete descriptions for the video so that search engines have something to ‘see’ when they index your videos when they’re on YouTube. The same goes for embedding video on your site – be sure the page with the embedded video has a descriptive title and enough copy for search engines to figure out what the page is about – and index it accordingly.

With the right strategy and the right video, you can create a content-rich experience for visitors that engages them and guides them toward buying your products or services.

As always, I’m here to help with any online video marketing advice you need.  If you liked this post please ReTweet it up above!