YouTube is a video sharing community website owned by Google that offers a unique (and free) avenue to promote your business on the web. Sure, you can put videos on your own website without using YouTube, but then you aren't tapping into the huge and ever-growing YouTube community, which can virally spread the word about your products and services, ultimately driving traffic back to your website–if you know how to put this powerful tool to work for you.

Your Account

Not surprisingly, the first step to using YouTube is getting yourself a YouTube account. Note that you can use your Google account as your login if you already have one. Once you have an account, click "Account" at the top of the page to see what kinds of preferences you can setup, and to explore the tools available to you.

Your Profile

On the account page, there is a link for Personal Profile. Be sure to add some profile information to this form so that your users can "get to know you". (Don't forget that updates to your profile and channel customization can take up to 6 hrs to show up.)

Your Videos

Uploading Videos

YouTube has a comprehensive help section on how to upload videos. If you are uploading videos that are 100M or larger, you will need to use the YouTube Uploader. This is software that is installed on your computer. For additional information, please see this help topic. Be patient while your video is uploading–it can take 20 minutes to upload a 100+MB video! Also, your video will not appear immediately in your account.

Tagging and Categorizing

Tagging and categorizing your videos is an important step that's often rushed, but if done right, will yield benefits you probably don't want to miss out on. For ideas, check out popular videos in your niche and see how they have been tagged and categorized. Don't overlook the fact that choosing less popular categories might reduce the competition your videos have, and may help launch your videos to the most popular or most viewed in your category. With tagging, add as many relevant keywords as you can, and again, see if you can match them to other existing video content. This will help gain additional exposure for your video content.

Your Playlists

See this documentation to learn about Playlists and how to create them. Playlists can contain your own videos and/or the videos of others. Either way, putting playlists together is easy: select clips from the My Videos section of your account and add them to a new playlist, or visit the video you are interested in and click "save to favorites".

The benefit of playlists lies in providing videos that are organized into a niche-targeted context enabling your users to find related content quickly, without having to resort to using YouTube search. In providing this service, you can boost your web traffic without ever even recording a single video of your own! Look for quality videos with a low view count, and you'll help users find content that hasn't already "done the rounds".

YouTube Email and Bulletins

It's not too common for YouTube users to simply stumble across your channel. To help get the word out, YouTube provides you with a number of self-promotion tools, including email and bulletins. With YouTube email, you can reach out to other users who share similar interests and let them know about your videos, or send them thoughts about theirs. Bulletins allow you to create short messages that appear on your channel page, or leave messages on other users' channel pages. Share information about your status, newest videos or anything else that you'd like to broadcast to the YouTube community.

Video Responses

Just like with blogs, you can leave comments on videos posted by others, but with YouTube you can also leave video responses. These can be chosen from your existing videos, or you can create new videos in response to another user's video. Just remember to keep your response relevant, choose your target video well (preferably a high traffic video related to your niche), and respond early to get your video response noticed by others.

YouTube Groups

YouTube groups provide a way for users to discuss and share videos. You can browse groups by category, or create your own group from the YouTube Groups page. Contributing to YouTube groups provides you with a targeted audience to promote your videos to, hopefully attracting users to visit and subscribe to your channel. Joining an existing group provides you with a base of users to interact with immediately, while creating your own group requires you to wait for users to join before you have an audience to promote your work to.

Active Sharing

With Active Sharing enabled, your username and a link to your channel will be displayed next to videos you are watching for 30 minutes, and all of the videos you watch will be added to a "Videos I'm Watching" section in your Profile. This allows others users to discover you and your videos (and perhaps also your website), based on the fact that you share interests and watch the same videos.

YouTube and the YouTube community offers an effective method of online promotion, either through your own video content or the videos of other YouTube users. By putting YouTube's community features to work for you and your business, you have the chance to develop a new and viable source of customer acquisition.