How can YouTube help my website?
What is YouTube?
Currently (June, 2011) the world’s fourth most visited website, YouTube as you probably know is a free video sharing and viewing platform. Users can upload videos, watch videos and leave comments on videos, amongst other things.
YouTube was created in 2005 by three PayPal employees as an easy way to share videos. In October 2006 it was bought by Google for around 1.65 billion US dollars. Not a bad for a few year’s work.
How Popular is it? As of May, 2011, You Tube was the world’s fourth most visited site, with an astonishing 3 billion views per day. Apparently 48 hours of video are uploaded every minute.
How can I use it to help my website or business? There are at least three easy ways to use YouTube to help your website.
Firstly, you can upload videos about your business, products and services. These videos will draw traffic naturally when people search for your topics related to your business, whether they search in YouTube or even through a search engine like Google. The videos you upload about your business should be helpful, interesting and offer as much information or entertainment as possible. Include your logo and web address somewhere in the video so you can draw traffic to your website and build your brand awareness.
Secondly, you can embed YouTube videos onto your own website extremely easily. In fact almost any video that is on YouTube can be embedded into your site in a couple of minutes, and you don’t have to be a web designer to do it. A video on your site, which loads up nice and quick (because it’s from YouTube) can greatly enhance your user experience and give your website a visual boost. If the video is well made, it also presents a level of profressionalism about your business which will go some way to establishing trust with potential customers.
Thirdly, you can advertise on YouTube itself . Now that Google owns YouTube, it has been incorporated into the vast Google advertising network. This means you can place an advert into various places across YouTube, including directly onto the videos themselves. An advert can appear either as a small text advert or a video, like a normal TV ad, which plays before the users requested video has played, so that the user is forced to watch your advert.