Are Video Sites Becoming the Main Way to Advertise Online?

The Internet marketing arena is nothing if not fluid. There was a time when basic search engine optimization was perfectly adequate, but no more as a variety of new ways emerge to successfully market your business online.

Whilst social media integration is probably the hippest term du jour, and organizations seem to want to fall over themselves to establish their Twitter presence and their Facebook fan clubs, video marketing is probably the hottest form of Internet marketing today.

There were signs over the last few years that video marketing was establishing more and more credibility but in recent times its reach has become huge. The dominant online site YouTube now boasts an average of 100 million videos viewed per day. This astonishing figure is backed up by other gems – 91 million viewers were estimated to have watched more than 5 billion videos on YouTube during the month of July last year. A total of 75% of the total US Internet audience watches some video online and the average duration of each video was a tad under three minutes.

With these eye-opening figures little wonder that marketers are turning to video to get their message across. It is no secret that people prefer a more passive way of receiving their information and prefer to watch the moving image rather than scan through the written word. The video can excite the customer and is almost always more visually enticing.

Some online “gurus” maintain that a correctly composed and optimized video, giving valuable information about a relevant keyword but with subtle links back to your site, will be preferentially ranked by Google and the other engines. They say that the video will appear in a prominent position within search results in a very short period of time – days and sometimes even hours. Many Internet marketers are getting excited about this idea!

It does appear that, as a marketer, you need to be subtle yet persuasive in your approach. It is unlikely that an out and out commercial will help your video to go viral, but many are getting good results by once again providing valuable information, tips, advice, lessons or entertainment and adding a link for more details at the end.

Video seems to be a required marketing component for our new era. Do you agree?

Matthew Toren

Adam Toren

Adam Toren is a serial entrepreneur, mentor, investor and co-founder of YoungEntrepreneur.com. He is co-author, with his brother Matthew, of Kidpreneurs and Small Business, BIG Vision: Lessons on How to Dominate Your Market from Self-Made Entrepreneurs Who Did it Right (Wiley). He’s based in Phoenix, Ariz.