Video Marketing on YouTube is a must for small businesses and startups in 2012. YouTube videos are longtail pieces of marketing content that can drive organic traffic to your website for many years to come. Here are 15 tips to know about marketing on YouTube.

1. Anyone Can Do a Video

The best part of YouTube Marketing is you do not need to hire models, buy fancy equipment, or have a baller studio. Most of the “highest viewed” videos are shot by a simple cell phone or webcam. Another option for those who are camera shy is to use Powerpoint or a similar program to make the presentation. Use Camtasia to record your voice during the presentation.

2. Learn What Works on YouTube

Basically there are three main types of successful videos that can be found on YouTube: funny, weird, and useful. If you design your video to fit into one of these categories, you will have a better chance for success.

3. Customize Your Channel

Customizing your background, colors and fonts is a quick and easy way to make your video channel stand out from the rest. This can be quickly done with Photoshop. If you are not a graphic designer- you can find a bunch of freelancers on www.fiverr.com that can quickly produce a custom channel for the low price of $5.00.

4. Put the URL Into the Description

Putting your website address at the beginning of your channel description, helps market you and your website. Be sure to always include the http:// before the website address. This will form the clickable link automatically on YouTube.

5. Put Your Keywords Everywhere

There are couple ways for searching for content on YouTube. One is through the Categories and the other is through the Advance Search. It is important that you use any keywords that you can think of to make your video easier to find. Use these Keywords in the Title, Description and in the Tags. In the Description it is also a good idea to use a Question and Call to Action format that will entice the viewer into wanting to watch your video. Using the Google Keyword Tool to find these keywords!

6. “Steal” Keywords from Successful Videos

Still can’t think of some good keywords? Try looking at other successful videos in your niche. YouTube will show a list of related videos on the right-hand of the screen. These videos are sorted by YouTube based on the Tag Relevance. Using the same tags from other videos in your market improves your chances of getting found.

7. Choose the Best Thumbnail

As most people know- first impressions are everything. The same goes for your video. The thumbnail image that you chose is like the cover to a book. It is the first thing that will draw the viewer to your channel. Taking time out to make sure you have the right thumbnail will increase your viewing rates.

8. Use Video Responses

Under all videos in YouTube there is a place for viewers to leave their comments. There is also a little known and under utilized option that allows you to respond with a video response aka a video comment. This allows you to search out the most popular videos in your market and allows you to post your video as a response. This should be used sparingly so not to look like a spammer. Also make sure the video is a complement to the video that you are responding to.

PRO TIP: A video response also improves your own YouTube marketing ranking so use your personal account to create video responses for the videos on your channel.

9. Create a Playlist

Creating a new playlist for your video and other relevant videos is a great way to promote your YouTube Video. It is important, again to use a Keyword as the name of your playlist. Once the list is created, then search out other relevant videos that are highly viewed and add them to the playlist.

10. Offer Valuable Content, Not a Sales Pitch

YouTube is NOT the place to Hard Sell your product. The Video should always be about sharing valuable content with your viewers.

11. Use Calls-to-Action

When posting your video, there is a tab called Annotations. Use this for creating your Calls-to-Action. Here is where you can remind the viewer to subscribe, like your Fan Page or whatever other calls-to-action you would like. You can place these calls to action randomly throughout your video.

12. Organize Contests

This is a great way to draw new viewers to your channel and also gather new content from your audience. Be creative with your contest ideas. Think of something fun that your audience will WANT to do. Prizes can be simple and cheap. People just like winning.

13. Promote Your Videos Outside of YouTube

Be sure to take advantage of promoting your videos on your Twitter profile, Facebook pages, blog pages and everywhere you can. The more you promote your videos, the more they will be seen. Do not forget to ask people to SHARE your video- ask them to re-tweet and Like the video etc.

14. Keep it Short

Videos should be under 2 minutes if you can. This seems to be the ideal time to keep a viewer’s attention and get more views.

15. Create Content Regularly

Create content weekly. Try to develop 2 YouTube videos a week.

YouTube is an amazing channel to market to your customer. It is highly under utilized. Stand out and use YouTube to market to your customers.

Guest Author – Matt A. Smitty is the Co-Founder of BusinessPirate.com. Follow @BusinessPirate on Twitter to learn more about their video courses.

The Internet is the great equalizer, allowing a small business to effectively compete with the 800-pound gorilla in their space. But, there are some fundamental ways to go about setting yourself up for success. Here are five affordable tips to promoting your small business using digital marketing:

1. Build a Quality Website, Use WordPress

The best place to start is to launch a website for your business, but not just any website. Create one that is clean, easy to navigate, has good content, and is optimized for search engines to crawl and rank – WordPress is a great place to start. Use SEO best practices like continually writing fresh content that incorporates your most relevant keywords. Use the power of blogging to help in your SEO strategy. Google likes social media content.

2. Drive Unpaid Traffic to Your Website

Drive organic traffic to your website by blogging regularly about information related to your services, but that is helpful in nature from your audience’s perspective. Don’t use this medium to directly sell. If visitors to your site like what they are reading, they are very likely to share it with others through email, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. They may even re-blog your post with links back to your website. Another way to drive traffic is to write content for other websites as a guest or regular writer. These engagements typically allow for a link back to your website in your byline. Also, contribute to conversations within forums like Yahoo! Answer or LinkedIn Groups.

3. Get Social With Social Media

One of the best way to reach targeted audiences for your narrow range of services is through social media. Many people use the Internet to search for services, many long before they actually plan to render them. Social media can act as an influencer, used in the awareness and consideration stages of the typical decision making process.

Create a company page on Facebook and LinkedIn, and promote it to your customers and to any permission-based email lists you have in place. Regularly update the content on these pages and directly interact with your prospective customers. Listen to their queries and satisfy them with your expert answers.

4. Focus on High Impact Keywords

Use Google Insights for Search to identify high impact keywords related to your business, then develop content incorporating these words on your website and blog. Tweet information, trends and tips related to these keywords and also test Google Adwords to drive paid search traffic.

Google Insight for Search screenshot.

5. Become a Thought Leader

Operating a small business with a limited marketing budget means focusing more of your energy on developing your reputation as an industry expert and thought leader. Offer advise online through articles and webinars. Offer a feedback loop for website visitors to give you an opportunity to answer their questions. And consider sometimes getting out of the digital world and into the real one by speaking on expert panels.

Have you ever seen the Old Spice commercials? Chances are if you have, you’ve seen them on YouTube. The Old Spice commercials first premiered as a television campaign, quickly turning viral once they appeared on YouTube. Viewers sent the links to their friends, rapidly spreading them throughout the Internet. Eventually, the view count for Old Spice commercials reached over 110 million views.

Although most associate YouTube with homemade videos and music videos, many companies and businesses are turning to YouTube as an alternative means to social marketing, and it’s working. Because creating a channel and uploading a video is free, the costs of utilizing YouTube are obviously extremely low. Users simply need a camcorder to get started. For businesses looking for an effective, affordable means of marketing, YouTube is a popular platform that can result in high potential gains. Here are 5 tips on how to use YouTube as an effective marketing platform:

1. Interesting Content

The goal of creating an effective video is to produce interesting content that will compel the audience to do something specific. Unless you have a keyboard playing cat or a pair of otters holding hands, it may seem difficult to create a viral video. However, companies don’t need a cute animal to create a marketing video; there are some general guidelines that companies can follow.

When creating a YouTube video, companies can choose from a variety of video formats. One successful type of video is the informational video, in which users create a ‘how-to’ guide or a tutorial on their products.  An important factor to keep in mind is that many people visit YouTube for the purposes of quick entertainment. Therefore, another valuable technique is to create a short, comedic video that possesses replay value and compels users to share it with others. In short, content is the most important component in a video; if your video is boring, then it is likely to disappear into YouTube obscurity.

2. Customize your YouTube Channel

Your YouTube channel is the main portal through which visitors access your videos. Therefore, customizing your channel is a great way to market to viewers. The most popular form of customization is through creating playlists to organize content, showing visitors your related videos or popular content. There are also many ways in which to brand your YouTube channel such as placing a logo, a banner image, or links to your business website or other social media platforms.

3. Call-to-Actions

An effective way of marketing your company using YouTube is to place a call out at the beginning and end of your video. Some examples of call outs include contact information, the company’s brand, or links to a website. In addition, YouTube allows uploaders to place annotations throughout the video, permitting greater applications in marketing.

4. Search-friendly Videos

When choosing a title for your video, don’t use a generic title with few keywords. Instead, try to be descriptive and place the most relevant keywords at the beginning of the title. Another way to make your videos more accessible to users is to write a description with keywords and links to your website. Tags are an additional way to promote search-friendliness; use as many keywords as possible in the tags field.

5. Social Networking

The marketing efforts should not stop after posting the video on YouTube. You’ll have to do a bit more legwork in order to extend the reach of your content. Twitter is a medium in which YouTube videos have the potential to quickly spread on the internet. As users “tweet” your videos, their followers spread it to others, creating a ripple-like effect with your content at the center. Posting your videos on blogs, Facebook, and other social media platforms are great ways to spread your content to potential customers. YouTube videos are generally more appealing to those on social networks, so your efforts have the potential to go much further than if you were to share an article.

More and more companies are turning to YouTube as a means of marketing their products and businesses online. With luck, your YouTube marketing campaign become the next viral sensation, and allow business awareness to spread rapidly to millions of viewers.

Guest Author – Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to factoring. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including business proposals to small businesses and entrepreneurs for the leading business B2B Directory, Business.com.

Is your email marketing program fizzling? Here are 10 ways to improve your email marketing strategy to drive higher response and engagement.

1. Deliverability, verifiability, and bounce reduction.

Permission-based lists and clean data have the best chance of getting response. Make sure your email solution has high deliverability rates and can track message activity (deliveries, bounces, clicks) or you’re just wasting marketing dollars.

2. Aim before you send.

Email marketing starts with targeted, clean and compliant lists. Build your email lists based on specific attributes and behaviors of your target audience to best capture attention and encourage response.

3. A marketing ecosystem that walks, talks and works together.

Your email campaigns, website, social media channels and sales team all need to have the same key messages and value propositions. Give your prospects an easy way to respond to your offer – wherever and however they find it.

4. Give your lists a fighting chance.

Build trust with prospects by providing them with opt-in opportunities, delivery preferences, and privacy settings. Follow up with valuable content with relevant subject lines and messages. Avoid spam-trigger words: “Free,” “Discount,” or “Click.” Test before launching.

5. Don’t ignore opportunities to improve conversions.

When analyzing the success of an email, determine what recipients clicked on versus what was ignored. Note where the majority of prospects navigated away from your content and adjust future email campaigns based on these results.

6. Email haiku – only 3 seconds to make an impression.

Can you answer these three questions: “What am I asking them to do?”, “Why should they care, or do it?”, and “Am I making it easy for them to act?” Have just one objective in an email, and make your call to action clear and easy to respond to.

7. Be human.

Write your email as if you are speaking to an audience of one. Ask the recipient’s opinion and present future content that addresses these conversations. And whenever possible, have the email come from a real person, such as the CEO, CP of Sales, CMO, or other appropriate contact.

8. How to beat the preview pane.

Don’t make prospects click “Download Image” to even understand what you’re offering. Focus attention on the message and call to action. Downsize your banner and make it clickable. Shorten horizontal graphics, move up a promotional message or add header box to increases response rates.

9. Track behaviors and metrics!

Demographics, psychographics, online and offline interactions, transactions, and responses deepen customer profiles. These should be used to drive personalized, relevant and timely communications, as well as sales engagement.

10. Drive conversions through social media.

Take conversations outside the inbox and integrate socially by creating a site with social media sharing capabilities. When a prospect shares your content, track the activity to gain knowledge for future campaigns. Social sharing is the new viral marketing.

Guest Author – Act-On Software is the maker of a cloud-based marketing automation platform.

According to Facebook‘s blog, there are over 800 million users on the site. According to Alexa’s rankings, Twitter is the third highest rated social media site, with Facebook being the first and YouTube being the second. Many online marketing experts agree that social media can play a major role in small business marketing. However, many (if not most) small businesses are using social media the wrong way for marketing. Here are three common mistakes being made that you can avoid:

1. Brand Confusion

When launching a new business, it is common (though not wise) not to have your brand identity fully baked. During this period, be judicial about how you message and how often to the market through social media. If you blast everyone with your messaging, and then soon after change your positioning or value proposition and continue with a new message, you can end up confusing the market. Confusion usually leads to indifference which makes it difficult to cultivate a community through social media. Use the beginning stages as a “test” period. Test your message amongst smaller controlled groups to see what resonates. For example, create separate circles in Google+ that receive a different test message. The data you obtain from your testing period can be used to refine your brand and message before you’re going full tilt.

2. Sending Out Sales Messages

Fight the urge–don’t try to sell through social media. It simply doesn’t work, and can end up doing far more harm than good. Tweeting out price promos or bragging how great your business is, or worse yet, putting down the competition makes you look cheap and unfit for social media. Use this channel to generate conversations around hot topics related to your field of expertise. Demonstrate your knowledge by sharing helpful articles and useful tips that reflect well on your brand. Staying true to this approach will help you stand out from the competition, position yourself as someone worth following, and ultimately contribute to sales.

3. Sharing Frivolous Information

You may love watching the Jersey Shore, but tweeting about what Snookie did in last night’s episode through your company Twitter account is disastrous. And yet, surprisingly enough, it happens a lot. There is a fine balance between adding a personal touch and voice to your brand, and compromising its credibility entirely. Stick to talking about and sharing information related to your brand. Go ahead and insert your personality through style and tone of voice, but ensure the content is relevant and remains that way.

Guest Author – Kathleen Hubert is a blogger who writes on a variety of different sites. Check out more of her work at auto loans.

Starting a new business but not quite sure whether to incorporate, set up a limited partnership or simply have a sole proprietorship? The folks at Business.com have put together an infographic to help you choose the right business structure for you. Check it out.

Visit Business.com for more resources on How to Start a Business

According to MetricMail, half of the top one million Alexa-ranked websites use Google Analytics (GA). These include popular sites like Dailymotion, Twitter, Answers.com and Myspace. Google Analytics allows a webmaster to measure site visitors, time spent on pages, bounce rates, and much more. But how exactly do the top websites in the world interpret this data? Let’s start by looking at a typical GA dashboard:

Notice that GA shows you lots of data but it does not tell you what to do with this information or how to use it. It’s just stats. What you do with this data is up to you. Here are some ways to use your Google Analytics data to help you increase website traffic and conversions.

1. Adjust and Test Your Site Structure

As the famous quote goes, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” So, if something about your website isn’t really working for you, use your Google Analytics data to make a positive change. For example, let’s say you have a website that sells seasonal items like Halloween costumes. Your Google Analytics data shows a very short Average Time on Site stat for your Group Halloween Costumes landing page, but a longer average time being spent on your regular Halloween Costumes landing page. You may conclude your site visitors are not interested in group Halloween costumes. Or, it could be the landing page itself isn’t optimized for higher engagement. With this in my mind, you can begin testing elements of your page to see if it can drive more visitor time spent on the page:

Layout – Compare the two landing pages. Does your Group Halloween Costumes page organize the graphic elements and content differently? How about the colours used? Use Google Website Optimizer to run A/B tests of your landing page to see which combination of elements drives the desired outcome.

Add a Prominent Feedback Vehicle – Is the quantitative data still not giving you enough to work with? Add a Comments field to collect qualitative insight from your visitors about what they like or don’t like about your website and/or offerings.

Improve Navigation and Linking – Use the data to identify the most popular pages on your site, then ensure your main navigation, home page and inside pages link visitors quickly to those pages. Map the customer journey through your website and identify holes where visitors can fall out of the journey without buying or giving your their contact information.

2. Adjust and Test Your Content

In the Visitors section on the left side of the dashboard, you can review Visits, Pageviews and Average Pageviews. If there is one page that has far more visits than any other page on your website, try these tactics:

Expand the Page – Turn your most popular page into a larger section of your website. The content of that page can be used to leverage more pageviews throughout the site by adding more related but deeper seeded pages, and links to other parts of the website.

Improve Poorly Performing Pages – From your GA data, you may determine that some pages should just be killed, while others you believe should perform much better than they are. This is a great opportunity to review the content of your page to ensure it is using SEO best practices. Are you incorporating the right keywords that will help online users to find you? Are you using the data from your Adwords PPC campaign to guide you on what phrases are converting well to use in your SEO? Improving your on-page SEO can have a dramatic impact on performance.

Consider Multimedia – Pages with multimedia content like videos, infographics or interactive content can drive higher visitor engagement. They can also be used as assets to obtain customer contact information you can use for lead nurturing. For example, site vistors to your Halloween Costumes landing page are greeted with a teaser video that shows them how to make a Superman costume with household materials. From there, you offer site visitors the opportunity to sign up and receive instructional videos on how to make ten other superhero costumes.

3. Track Conversion Through Goals

To increase your site conversions, use Google Analytics’ Goals feature. A Goal is basically a very important Pageview you wish to measure that marks the end of a conversion. For example, a “Thank You” page visitors see after making an online purchase. Or, the “Confirmation” page they see after submitting their contact information through your online form. To create a Goal is simple. Under the Goals section, click Add Goal. Then, simply paste the goal URL (pageview to measure) into the field – i.e. myholidaywebsite.com/thankyou.html. Once completed, GA will then start tracking the number of site visitors that reach that page or complete a Goal. You can also track the steps (or path) that the visitor took to get to the Goal. This can help you identify a successful customer journey to replicate for other Goals you add.

Guest Author – Mitch O’Conner is an online marketer who specializes in site planning and content creation. When he’s not busy building new websites, he enjoys spending time with his family, working out and watching movies.

When it comes to the word branding, many small businesses mistakenly think that it is only important for larger companies. Branding is the true essence of marketing for all businesses. Until and unless you brand your company and product properly, you cannot expect to attract the right audience or differentiate yourself from the competition. And you also don’t need a big budget to start creating your brand strategy. Here are some tips to help you get started today:

1. Define Your Value Proposition

Give people a reason to buy your product. Highlight the unique selling points (USPs) of your business that makes it stand out from the crowd. It may be easier for businesses with bigger marketing budgets to develop a well-defined  value proposition based on primary research and focus groups, but that shouldn’t stop you. You likely have a good sense of who your customer and the competition is, and how you can position your business so that it is both different and compelling. Once you’ve defined your value proposition, use it generously throughout your marketing messages and materials. Reflect it in your tagline, elevator pitch, boilerplate, and the intro paragraph of your company description. This let’s people know right away why they should consider doing business with you. The value proposition also serves as a guage to measure your products and services against, so that if you are considering to add more offerings, you want to ensure it aligns with it.

2. Package Your Brand

From logo to website, to point-of-purchase materials, ensure your brand is visually clean and consistent across all your touch points. Adhering to this simple discipline will go a long ways to generating a positive and professional brand perception in the marketplace. You don’t need a big budget to do this, just a conscious effort. Create (or get outside help) a company brand book that outlines your value proposition, USPs, company description, key messages, correct logo usage, brand colours, and font set. Then, use it to guide anything and everything you message out to the market – this isn’t the time to get lazy with your marketing.

3. Use Multiple Marketing Channels

Public relations, social media, search advertising (PPC), SEO, event marketing/sponsorships, and  traditional advertising are all marketing channels available to you. Your annual marketing budget will determine which channels you can engage effectively. For most small businesses, traditional advertising like radio and print ads are expensive and hard to measure. My suggestion is to focus  your budget and efforts on these three channels before engaging the others:

Social Media (Twitter, blogging, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook) – blog often, with information that your audience would find useful in the form of tips, how-tos, trends, and product updates. DO NOT use your blog for sales messages, or any social media outlet for that matter. Social media is a dialogue and when used correctly, can engage you with a growing audience potentially interested in your product. It can also help you be seen as an expert in your field. Use Twitter to share your blog posts, as well as any other helpful information consistent with your brand. Similarly, creates videos with helpful content and post it to YouTube where it can be found by others.  A study by Zoomerang suggests that out of 751 small companies surveyed, almost 89 percent are interested in investing their marketing budget in social media; while a quarter of them are planning to increase this budget up to 30 percent in 2011.

Public Relations – PR is often overlooked by small businesses, and yet, it is one of the most powerful brand building channels out there. Nothing holds more credibility in the business world than third-party credibility in the form of positive press coverage and word-of-mouth. Today, the average person is exposed to 5,000 advertising messages a day as compared to 500 messages in the 1970s. PR can help your rise above the clutter and help you be seen and heard.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Along the same lines of third-party credibility, having your company website appear in the top 5 position of page 1 on Google from an organic search, tells people that you are important, relevant and worth checking out. It also drives a lot of qualified traffic to your website at no cost. Implementing good SEO practices doesn’t have to cost you a lot of money. In fact, you can achieve some excellent SEO success with no budget at all. There are three key tactics to helping search engines find you – a clean website that Google can crawl, continually adding fresh content that includes your most important search keywords, and in-bound links to your site. The first two you have control over, while the last will come as a result of how well you do the previous ones. I recommend WordPress as your website platform. Out of the box it’s incredibly SEO-friendly, it’s easy to use, and it’s free!  For fresh content, blog regularly. The content you generate here can have a dramatic impact on your overall SEO.

4. Hire Service Obsessed People

Most people hire for skill, I hire for attitude. Skill-set is important, don’t get me wrong but it alone is not what makes for a great employee. Service and expertise are currency in business today. Sharing expert knowledge freely (through your website, events and social media channels) and delivering exceptional service at every interaction will get you a lot of new and repeat business. Having the right people to deliver that service is critical – getting customer service isn’t good enough, it needs to be a personal passion that drives the right behavior. This means don’t just consider the IQ of candidates, but also the EQ (emotional quotient). you can teach skill, you can’t teach attitude.