Small Business Online Marketing Strategy – Part 3: YouTube Traffic

YouTube is owned by Google, and it's the second-biggest search engine on the Internet, after Google itself. Some of the statistics quoted by YouTube are staggering:

• More than 13 million hours of video were uploaded during 2010 and 35 hours of video are uploaded every minute.
• More video is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years
• 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
• YouTube reached over 700 billion playbacks in 2010

The reasons for the growth of online video are easy to understand:

• It's easier than ever for ordinary people to create videos – most cell phones can record acceptable quality videos.
• Internet bandwidth is dramatically cheaper than it was, say, five years ago – although South Africa has a long way to go in this department.
• Social media sites like Facebook make it easy and quick to share videos with your friends. YouTube is itself a social media site, where you can subscribe to other people's channels, comment on their videos and connect with friends.

How do you use YouTube to market your business?

You create short, informative videos about your business, products and services, and upload them to your YouTube Channel.

You encourage your friends, employees, customers and Facebook fans to watch them – the more views a video gets, the better it ranks in YouTube's search results.

For some keywords, Google displays YouTube video links in the search results, which increases your views and ultimately increases the traffic to your website.

Here's a great example from Naked Pizza:

Your videos don't have to have Hollywood production values to be successful. This short video has over 47,000 views on YouTube:

In case you think it's just about restaurants, here's a customer testimonial:

What can you do with the videos you create?

You can publish them on your website or blog; you can share them on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and other social networks.

There are other video sharing networks besides YouTube, some of which also get a lot of traffic. You can submit your video to all of these sites, which can help drive traffic to your website.