Video directories such as Youtube provide an excellent opportunity to promote your brand online and marketing your products and services. It provides one of the best, fastest and cheapest ways to drive targeted traffic to your website and generate leads. What you MUST know is the fact that there is a right way and a wrong way to use video marketing. This document shares tips that will help you effectively leverage the power of video to promote your business.

Here are 4 tips for your success:

1) Be relevant and provide valuable content – While some of the videos you post should be a commercial for your products and services, it is important to understand that you will need to also post videos that provide solutions, answers and help for the issues your patients and clients are experiencing. Videos that are humorous, edgy, share a testimonial, inform and educate often get better responses than videos that simply push a product or sell a service.

2) Get Endorsed by Viewers – When shooting your video, don’t forget to ask the viewer to rate your video or leave a comment. The more comments and ratings your video accumulates, the higher it will be ranked by YouTube for the purpose of their search results.

3) Optimize Your Video Description. – Before posting your videos online it is essential that you first plan your strategy for using them to get additional exposure. There are four key areas you need to pay attention to in order to make the most of your video marketing efforts.

• The Name of Your Video File. Be sure to include your keywords in the name of your video file. For example if you are a Dentist and have a testimony of a patient you helped with dental implants, you would want to name the video something like “Melissa_Jones_Dental_Implant_Patient_Testimonial_03_22_2010.mp4″.
• The Title of Your Video. When deciding on a title for your video, be sure to also include your keywords to help with search engine optimization (SEO). You can use the same title as the name of the file but this time you can include spaces. So for our example we are using, the title of the video might be “Melissa Jones Dental Implant Patient Testimonial 03-22-2010″.
• The Description of Your Video. Your primary keyword should appear near the beginning of the first sentence in your description. It is wise to also try to include the primary keyword a couple of times in your description if it is possible.
• The Tags for Your Video. Using your keywords in the tags for your video will also boost your chances of ranking well in search results.

4) Promote your video on Social Bookmarking sites – Another way to gain additional visibility is by submitting your videos to social bookmarking sites. Sites like Digg, Propeller and StumbleUpon will help you gain additional visibility and exposure for your work. Users see your content on these sites and if they like it they can vote it up the charts which bring you even greater visibility and traffic to your sites.

It costs almost nothing to use video marketing to promote your brand and If you apply these simple strategies and consistently upload a few videos per week you’ll quickly begin to generate new leads around the clock, even when you are sleeping.