Using You Tube to Drive Traffic: 500 Million People Can’t be Wrong!

500 million people can’t be wrong! That’s the number recently estimated that visit You Tube looking for videos on a given month! That means, if that many people are on You Tube, as a business owner, you need to be too! It’s very simple to join, create your own channel, and set up a constant flow of viewers to view your content and get your message across. So we’ve got you convinced that You Tube is one of the best new marketing tools around? How do you you use it to your advantage? Here’s how. 1) Make the content engaging. Just like with article-writing, blogging, or any other method you use to get your message across, you first need to start with good content. Create a video or hire a professional videographer to do it for you. Make it engaging, interesting, and introspective about your product or service. Remembering that most people stay on a video an average of 1-3 minutes, what do you want to say in that limited time to catch their attention enough to get them to keep watching? Focus on the positive, and think like a consumer. What need does your product or service fill? What would YOU want to see? 2) Make the title shot unique. You get a choice in You Tube of which screen shot will be seen first when people find your video. Choose wisely and choose something that will get their interest. Remember they will be searching for a particular thing, and yours need to stand out among the rest. 3) Use analytical tools. You Tube has many on board tools to see how your video is doing. Look into this by clicking on the tools option in your account under video manager. This shows you such important information such as how long they watched, where they came from, what device they were using at the time, and much more. This is valuable information to a business to monitor how to change or adjust your video to interest more viewers. 4) Use keywords. I cannot state this point enough. The use of keywords in the video description is of paramount importance. Why is this important? For one thing, Google OWNS You Tube and Google decides which sites are most relevant. So what better way to bring in viewers than to make your site relevant with keywords that will be indexed by Google. Then, when people search for content, it will find the closest match to the search. When entering keywords, think like the searcher, not a business owner. 5) Use meta tags. These  short descriptions also indexed and referred to by search engines, namely Google and Yahoo. So make sure to include a description that people using long-tailed search words might use, as well as serving as a longer title for what your product or service is about. If you don’t know how to effectively include meta tags, you will miss out on a big part of the traffic. So either learn it, or hire it out. It will likely be worth it in spades in the long run. If you apply these strategies, you will see that You Tube will start working for you. Then, be patient. Don’t expect results in one day. But do subscribe to some sort of stat counter service, so that you can view your results in real time. Use this, as well as You Tube’s stats to see how you’re doing. Remember, it’s all about keeping their attention. An extra tip: the  use of You Tube videos in conjunction with content (articles) has proven to increase traffic even more over time. One site I run has had an increase of about 50% in views once we added the You Tube account alone! So get to You Tube and start a channel. Even Ted Turner had to start somewhere!