Can Youtube Be Used To Generate New Business Sales Leads?

The clear answer is yes. The question is why do most companies avoid using YouTube, or if they do start to use it, usually neglect to maintain and optimise their YouTube channel? Why do marketing managers not integrate the use of video as part of their social media strategy?

Maybe the reason is that a lot of businesses see YouTube purely as a place where individuals can gain traction, but companies but can't cut it. I want to dispel that myth in this post and explain what it takes for a business to do well on YouTube.

Remember when you're building a channel on YouTube you're not just planning to get people to find your business through YouTube. Since Google bought YouTube it's been including videos increasingly more in it's search engine results pages (SERP) and with the fragmentation of the SERP due to universal search, adding the use of video to your social media strategy is definitely a must!

Let's look at some case studies where companies have successfully used YouTube as part of their social media strategy.

(Note: I deliberately tried not to include big brands in these case studies – we haven't all got the budgets of Nike or Google!)

www.ehow.com 

This company produce 'How To' tips and advice on just about anything you'd care to mention.   They have successfully built you a strong fan base on YouTube. Their videos are well presented, but by no means has their been expensive production costs. The people in the videos come across as very knowledgeable about their particular field of expertise. Ok, so you might think this company is custom fit to produce videos  – no so. If you look at their website for an example, let's say How To Build a Light Meter this is all text, no video in sight.

YouTube Optimisation

Given that YouTube has over 90 million visits a day (in the US alone)  – why do most marketing managers ignore this valuable website as part of their social marketing campaigns?

What Exactly Is Youtube?

Seems an unnecessary question – surely it's a video sharing website and a repository of online videos?

Correct but it is also a search engine. In fact with 80 million visits a day it is the Number 2 search engine on the internet.

So, apart from music and comedy videos, people use YouTube to get more serious information and education. This means that by optimising their video content business marketers can make sure their product or service is easily found and gets lots of views and drives more website traffic.

The broad factors controlling the Youtube search engine rankings fall into three broad areas as follows:

1. 1. On-Page SEO Factors:

Videos need to be optimised in a similar way to website pages. However, instead of meta data and body copy, it is important to ensure that keywords appear in the title, description, and tags.

1. 2. Off-Page SEO Factors

Just as with a website there are many of these. A major one is inbound links. A YouTube videos should have external links with keyword-rich anchor text pointing to gain authority.

1. 3. Community Interaction Factors

In addition to links and the age of each video, YouTube also measures a video's authority based on the interaction that takes place in the interest community or the category in which it is indexed. This means the number of views, ratings, comments, and other interactions. So to have a chance at achieving SEO success in YouTube, the video content must be interesting, engaging, and compelling enough to make people watch it, rate it, and comment on it.

So does your SEO strategy include YouTube? If not it definitely should.

Adsense Revenue Sharing Sites

This is a list of sites where AdSense publisher can use their own AdSense IDs to earn money. 

Do go through them thoroughly and investigate the legitimacy of each site before handing over your AdSense ID to them. 

Forums/Community                                        
Digital Point Forums
KernalTrap.org
Work From Home Forums
IDN Forums
Domain Name Portal
NameSlot
NamePros
HostSeeker
HTTPPoint
Senserely
The Rant
SoundChilds.net
BlogUserHelp.com
TheOnlineDeveloper
Zizula Forums
ScreenDig
Webmasters.org
AuctionCUT

Blog Hosting
Cybersist
Blogger Party
My Life Of Travel
YouSayToo
HYIP Blog

Article Directories
Xpress Ideas
Article Codex
writingUp
ArticleTrader
ArticleWise
Hot Web Tools
TechnologyParent.com
Oocuz.com
Savvify
Xomba

Other
Simpy (bookmarking)
Joomlaya (Joomlah!/Mambo)
Downline Partners (online mktg)
Rummage4Money (search)
ScratchProjects (code)
RateItAll.com(opinions)
TagTooga.com(social tagging)
Flixya(video sharing)
Swicki(custom search)
FritterWare(games)
Freerange Stock(stock photos)
MediaFlix.net(video sharing)

News Communities
DotNetKicks
Kick.ie
ForuMatrix 

370 Passwords Shouldn't Use For Your Twitter Account

Twitter has hard-coded all banned passwords on the sign-up page. All you need to do to retrieve the full list of unwelcome passwords is take a look at the source code of that page.

Do a simple search for 'twttr.BANNED_PASSWORDS' and voilà, there they are, all 370 of them.

Along with, names of famous cars such as "porsche" and "ferrari", and football teams like "Chelsea" and "Arsenal" are also banned.

"THX1138" -- title of the first film by Star Wars fame director George Lucas, is banned. So is "NCC1701" -- the registry number of Star Trek's starship Enterprise -- and "trustno1", Fox Mulder's password in The X-Files, the report said.

This isn't a security issue, of course, and in fact it's helpful to distribute the list so you can check if your favorite password that you use for other services might not be as fail-proof as you'd like to think. For the full list, simply check this TXT file.

Google Search goes Real Time

The much awaited wait has at last come to an end. Google search has gone real time. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/relevance-meets-real-time-web.html

The real time search results consist of tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles and Web pages including the otherwise organic result for your query.

And that's not the end to it.There more in this package that Google is giving us.

Google deal with Facebook, Twitter & MySpace

Google have done a deal with Facebook and MySpace, i.e., all information from Facebook Page and Myspace will be public and appear in these live search results. And to top it was the deal with twitter which did take place a few months back in October. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/rt-google-tweets-and-updates-and-search.html

This feature is not available to all searched results and Google has assured that it will come up in a few day. It has started appearing for the 'Hot Topics' in Google Trends. Click on any of the 'Hot Topics' and you’ll see the 'Latest Results' area of Google search results.

Click on this to get the latest news and real time search results on Tiger Woods story.