You don’t need to just stay on Youtube to drive traffic to your Youtube videos.

Here are some Web 2.0 tips to steer traffic to your Youtube videos:

On your blog or website, you should link to your Youtube videos or embed them on your site.

You can create a Squidoo lens, at www.Squidoo.com, that links to your Youtube videos. Then make sure that you go find other people on www.Squidoo.com who are in your market, and post comments on THEIR Squidoo lens.

This is how it works in any social networking community. When you interact and comment on people’s writing, or posts, or pictures, they will often visit you and go to check out your website. Read the rest of this entry »

So you’ve created an account, and made some excellent videos, and you have uploaded them.

You’ve written enough descriptive tags for your video that people who are searching for a video in your subject area should be able to find it fairly easily.

However, you don’t just want a little traffic from your videos, you want MASSIVE traffic. And you don’t want to wait for it. That means that you are going to have to put some effort into promoting your videos.

How do you find viewers?

Remember how in a previous post we talked about taking advantage of the fact that YouTube gets massive traffic? And the way you do that is by going to YouTube and presenting your videos in to all those viewers, which means you are standing in front of all that massive traffic, showing your wares.

Well, you’re going to continue employing that principle.

Don’t just go out and try to find little bits of traffic and drag it back to your site.

Go where the traffic is.

In this case, that means go find the most popular videos that are aimed at the same market that you are looking for.

In addition to studying and learning from those videos, and employing the same techniques as they do, as we had mentioned in the previous chapter, you will want to leave comments on the popular videos. These comments should be helpful and positive, and should make people want to click on your user name, which will lead them back to your YouTube home page.

Now, don’t be negative or competitive in any way, because the per-son whose video you are commenting on has the option to block your comment.

Say you are commenting on someone’s video about how to make a chocolate mousse.

You could say something like “I love that recipe! Here’s what I do to make sure that I can lift the mousse cleanly from the pan”, and then explain it in a sentence or two.

Always start out by saying something complimentary about the video you just saw, and then add a sentence or two that gives a different twist or offers some additional information.

Leaving comments on the most popular videos is a great way to get your name in front of a lot of people.
Of COURSE you would only do this on videos that appeal to the same market that you are in. There is no point in commenting on a hugely popular entertainment video if you are trying to get more cus-tomers to your cooking website.

YouTube knows how to find the videos that you are searching for be-cause when the videos were created, the person who uploaded them was allowed to add in

Tags, or keywords, which describe the con-tents of the video.

It is very important to include descriptive tags so that when people are searching for dog training lessons, or web design lessons, or por-trait painting lessons, or they want to know how to find a stud in a wall and put up a shelf…or whatever type of video you are putting up…they will be able to find you.

So make sure that you type in as many tags as possible.

Try to think how the people searching for videos in your subject area would think.
For instance if you have a cooking video showing how to grill a steak, imagine what you yourself would type in if you were looking for such a video.

You might type in something like: how to grill a steak, how to grill flank steak, grill flank steak, grill ribeye steak, grilled steak, grilling a steak…

If you were creating a video on pesticide free herb gardens, you might type in natural pesticides, pesticide free herb gardens, how to kill garden pests naturally, kill garden pests without insecticide, insecticide free gardening, green gardening, organic herb gardens…

The more descriptive tags that you put in, the easier it will be to find.

YouTube hosts millions of videos. If you are making videos about anything that people want to learn about, in any market where there is profit potential, it is guaranteed that other people have already created videos that cater to that market.

Don’t worry about it - it’s good news.

First of all, if there were absolutely no other videos at all about your subject area…it would mean that you were making videos that would not likely appeal to many people.

If there is an audience out there, someone has made videos that will appeal to that audience.

And it also means that you can learn from other people’s successes, and other people’s failures, on YouTube, and use that knowledge to make better videos of your own.

One of the best ways to learn how to shoot good YouTube videos is to spend some time on YouTube browsing through other videos that cover the same subject that your videos will. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, when people go to YouTube they are looking for one of two things: information or entertainment.

Making a genuinely entertaining video is a good way to get a lot of views and potentially even go viral, but it is also much, much harder to do, especially if you are also trying to sell something.

To make a video that is really entertaining you need to be able to throw in some humor and it doesn’t hurt to have fairly high quality video editing skills. Not Hollywood quality, but along the line of people like Frank Kern, who have other people - professionals - shoot and edit their videos for them.

It’s much easier to create a video whose primary purpose is to inform. There are countless “how to” videos on YouTube and a lot of people would rather get their information in video form than in written form.

You can make a how to video for just about any type of product or service. The key is to give away some good, helpful information to show peo-ple that you are knowledgeable in your field.

For instance if you are promoting a cookbook, shoot a series of vid-eos showing how to prepare some favorite dishes.

If you are teaching golf, shoot some videos demonstrating some golf tips.

If you have a product about designing a website, you can create a slideshow with audio, showing some of the steps that you would take designing that website.

It’s a good idea to start your video with a very short jingle - no more than 5 seconds - and to use transition effects between shots, along with a few titles.

People have short attention spans these days, and showing them one long monotonous shot will bore them.

Some programs that allow you to create slideshows and capture screenshots are:
www.photozig.com
www.camtasia.com
www.keynote.com and www.imovie.com (for Macintosh computers)
www.camstudio.com (free)
www.hypercam.com for Windows - free trial
www.jingproject.com (free, for Mac and Windows!)

When you create a new website or try to promote a new website, you are joining a huge throng of hundreds of millions of other websites and blogs that are all competing for attention.

In short - they are all competing for possibly the most important thing on the net - traffic.

Going out and trying to convince people to come visit your website can seem tedious and discouraging.
Advertising your products and services via pay per click or banner advertising can get very expensive and often doesn’t yield high quality results, yet until recently this was probably the most popular way of trying to get visitors to your website.

But now with the huge popularity of social networking sites, things have changed a little.

There is a better way.

Going on to extremely popular, high traffic websites and posting there, with a link back to your site, gets you in front of a huge audi-ence and lets you borrow some of the traffic from that site.

One of the most popular, regularly visited sites today is YouTube.
According to Quantcast.com, they are now averaging 73.5 million visitors a month. That’s a lot of visitors, even by astronomical internet standards.

People who do business on the internet are increasingly adding You-Tube to their marketing strategy. It’s a medium that’s difficult to ig-nore.

However, there’s a right way and a wrong way to use YouTube, and we are going to tell you how to take advantage of YouTube’s massive traffic correctly, so you can steer some of it your way.

This is equally as important as creating your product. You can create the best, most useful product in the world but that doesn’t do you much good if you don’t know how to sell it, does it? Your product doesn’t make you any money sitting on your hard drive.

There are numerous ways to sell an information product online and you may end up choosing to use several of them.

One way to do it is using Google Adwords pay per click. This is being mentioned only briefly here because learning how to do well with Google Adwords would fill another ebook entirely.
Adwords are the advertising links that you see in blue on the right side of Google Search pages. MSN and Yahoo have their own ver-sions as well.

If you had a dog training ebook you would bid to have your adwords ad appear when people typed in relevant search phrases like “Dog Training” or “How To Teach My Dog To Sit”. Read the rest of this entry »

Pricing is always a delicate issue, because if you charge too much people won’t buy, but if you charge too little, people might perceive that what you are selling has no value.

You should start out by looking at other information products that are similar to yours and examine their sales pages thoroughly to get an idea of what they offer and how much they charge for their product.

You don’t want to charge too much more than the other people in your field.

However you want to see what they have to offer versus what you have to offer.

If they are just selling a 20 page ebook on puppy training and you are selling a 100 page ebook on dog training from puppyhood through adulthood, along with a set of step by step videos…then of course you should charge significantly more. Read the rest of this entry »

Now, we’re going to talk about what form your information product is going to take.

There is a lot of talk these days about how video information products are hot and everyone prefers video.

Don’t believe it.

Video is perfect for some types of information products and not so hot for others. And not everyone loves video.

There can be drawbacks to presenting information in video form. People have limited time and short attention spans these days, and it’s a lot easier to scan an ebook and get what information you need than it is to scan a video. Then again some people claim the exact opposite. Read the rest of this entry »

Once you have a general idea of what subject you want to write about in your information products, you should start thinking about branding yourself and your product line.

Creating a brand identity is a way to build customer loyalty and to ensure that when customers are looking for a solution, they think of you first.

Think of someone like Cesar Milano, and you automatically think “The Dog Whisperer”.

When you think of home decorating, what name pops into your head? Chances are pretty good that it’s Martha Stewart.

Think of cooking, and you’ve got a lot of different options…Emeril Lagasse…Rachael Ray…and yet even there, people have found ways to distinguish themselves. Extreme eating, adventures in dining - Anthony Bourdain! Southern cooking - Paula Deen!

If you’re from the UK you might think of Jamie Oliver when you think about School Dinners or Barbara Woodhouse when you think of dog

training. If you think about money saving in the UK you think about Martin Lewis. When you arrive at his website the first thing you see is a picture of him. That tells you immediately you’ve come to the right place. Branding! Read the rest of this entry »