By Jennifer Brister
As many small companies are finding out, commercial Web sites are useless without traffic. Your company Web site may be the shiniest on the block, but if no one can find it, it's not going to help create profit or publicity for your brand. If your competition is large, you may be wondering how to get targeted users to your Web site. There are several methods you can use, but one of the most effective is creating YouTube videos that are related to your niche.
Creating useful videos generates traffic by three important methods:
- YouTube ranks highly in search engines. If your video is about a topic that thousands of people are searching for, your video will be viewed by many targeted, Web-savvy users who are interested in your niche. When they view the videos you create, they may be noticing your brand for the first time. This gives the user a good first time experience with your company brand, since they are getting useful content for free.
- Publishing YouTube videos generate valuable backlinks for your Web site. One of the ways that Google and other search engines decide which sites will rank highly on searches is by looking at how many other sites on the Web are linking to a particular Web site. The more sites that link to yours, the higher your search engine rankings will be. If users are searching for "blue widgets" and several hundred different Web sites link to your site about "blue widgets" then your site will likely appear on the first page of search engine results.
By making your videos available for embedding on other sites, you will see your backlink numbers soar. Each and every time a user embeds one of your videos onto his or her site, your company will get publicity and better search engine rankings, causing higher traffic to your site. - Every video has the potential to go viral. If you can create videos that are useful, entertaining and memorable, they will be more likely to go viral, resulting in huge amounts of traffic back to your Web site. Viral videos are videos that users watch and like so much that they pass them on to their friends — who then pass them on again and again. Anytime a video goes viral, its views grow exponentially, giving your Web site and your company a much appreciated boost of traffic.
Even though more than 75,000 new videos are uploaded every day to YouTube, and competition to go viral may be fierce, remember that YouTube generates up to 200 million clicks per day. If you use highly searched terms in your videos and your tags, the possibilities for YouTube success are endless.
About the Author
Jen Brister has been a writer, researcher and Internet marketer for three years. She makes her living writing full time, publishing videos and creating Web sites.