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Many Internet marketers are just discovering that marketing with YouTube can bring lots of traffic and lots of sales. YouTube is by far the most popular of all the video sharing sites and was purchased by Google back in October of 2006 for a whopping $1.65 billion.

And although marketing with YouTube as a means of promoting business and capturing more sales is a great idea, what many Internet marketers don’t know is that video sharing sites like YouTube are a very good way to perform market research.

It’s an idea whose time has come – marketing with YouTube.

The search function on YouTube is very similar to the search function contained within a normal search engine. However, the search feature used by YouTube is much less sophisticated than the complex algorithms used by the search engines. This is really great news for video marketers because it means you can easily dominate the YouTube search results.

Before you submit your video you’ll need to do a little keyword research like you would if you were optimizing a page for the search engines. Once you have selected some keywords that you would like to target add some of the keywords to your video’s tags and title.

If you have done everything right, your video should be able to pull in some really nice traffic to you website. But the feedback you get from channel viewers can actually be just as important as getting traffic. Market feedback is a classic direct marketing technique that is achieved in real life by using costly things like polls and surveys.

Your videos actually give you the chance to pull in tons of market feedback without spending a dime on polls or surveys. Market feedback allows to get a more precise glimpse of exactly what is that your target market wants and how much they are willing to pay for it. This information is priceless.

You will frequently receive video comments that tell you whether or not your video was interesting or helpful. Many times you will receive negative comments that will tell what you did wrong. Except for the comment spam that you will inevitable receive, almost all of the comments you receive will be useful to you.

The most ideal comments are those that request additional videos. These comments are your target market telling you exactly what they want! Offline businesses pay a small fortune for this kind of information. YouTube users readily offer up this kind of information to Internet marketers at no charge.

Online videos are a truly fantastic way to promote your business and get more traffic without spending a great deal of money. But remember that your video submissions can actually help you improve your existing marketing strategy and develop new product ideas.

It’s an idea whose time has come – marketing with YouTube.

Video ranking

The key to making good use of YouTube’s SEO and marketing potential is to aim to improve your video ranking. Here are some tips for improving your video ranking:

• Include an accurate and descriptive title
• Make sure your description is, well, descriptive. It should be accurate and unique, and written with complete sentences.
• Descriptive keyword tags but avoid “keyword stuffing”.

Social networking

But YouTube is much more than just a video search engine. It’s also considered to be a powerful social networking community site. Which means that community opinion counts. As with any other community on the web, your best results will come if you actively participate. So, ideally, you should be aiming to share videos with other members.

Try experimenting with:

• Annotations
• Video responses
• Thumbnails

Embedding

What’s more, YouTubers should also ensure their videos are embedded to make them more “discoverable”.

Analytics tool

Find out more about videos on YouTube by using the analytics tool to:

• Check demographics
• Find where video are posted
• Discover who posted videos
• Check Hot Spots, that is you can pinpoint the specific parts of the video that get viewed the most.

There’s a whole world of YouTube marketing out there that many people haven’t even considered. Now start filming!