YouTube made major headlines earlier this month when Google bought the video giant for $1.65 billion. A web site worth that much money must be something. Here we are going to talk about how you can use YouTube, and other popular video sharing web sites, to promote your web site and increase traffic. Videos on the Internet are becoming very popular these days, and the success of YouTube and other video web sites illustrates that people are indeed looking for web sites that have some video content. This in turn presents an inexpensive yet effective advertising opportunity to help you increase traffic to your web site.
The concept is quite simple. Create a video that is interesting and something that people would find entertaining enough to leave YouTube and visit your web site. This can be done by having some sort of cliffhanger at the end of the video, or cutting the video in the middle and displaying a message that reads: “For the rest of this video, visit MySite.com.” - Make sure that you remember to include a quick blurb about your web site in the video itself. Then upload the video to video sharing web sites. There are over 1 million videos uploaded to YouTube daily and only the select few that happen to get the most views, move up to the home page of the “Most Popular” list. You can get people to view your video by visiting popular forums where users are looking for videos, like the eBaum’s World forums, and post a link to your YouTube video. You can also submit your video to web sites such as Fark and Digg and hope for the best. If you get enough views, you will have millions of people watching your video, and with that many people viewing your video, you are bound to get at least a few thousand unique visitors.
