The truth is, until recently, the power of YouTube as a marketing tool was not completely exploited. It is hard to produce the kind of video that markets a product and yet captures the millions of views a good video should capture. The best example of use of video has to be the BlendTec video series “Will It Blend?”. If you haven’t seen that video, go to YouTube right now and put in Will it blend. You will have a selection of videos all answering the same question – Will it blend? BlendTec is a manufacturer of commercial blenders and every couple of weeks they film a new segment, blending wild things like tennis balls, iPods, iPhones, pens, rake handles, whatever they feel like blending. Some of them are funny, some of them are outrageous, and it is always a fun thing to watch. Because of the uniqueness of the product and the series, each of those videos has had well over millions of views. It’s the ideal in YouTube marketing…

…but, did you know that YouTube can be an ideal place to boost your long term SEO strategy? It’s true. In the description section of the upload area on YouTube, you can paste in the URL of your web site. That might not seem like a big deal, but I have had great experiences with this little feature. Google seems to like that YouTube links to your site. It doesn’t seem to matter whether people actually watch your video, but having a link to your site, along side relevant keywords and tags, makes a huge difference when talking SEO. I do a weekly video for a local chiropractor which we put on YouTube and on his website (http://www.familywellnesscenter.info). His pagerank went from one to three in a couple of weeks because of our YouTube strategy. He has had calls from all over the world about his services, but the great part is that they aren’t finding him first on YouTube, but through Google search, THEN YouTube.

Who cares where the business comes from as long as it comes, right?

I have a good friend that makes big money from AdSense, Google’s display ad service. He swears by the YouTube method. If his site comes off the first page, he puts up another video and back to the front page it goes. Obviously in high traffic and competition keywords this isn’t going to be that easy, but it can help. Next up: the iPhone