Online video marketing has become a highly effective internet marketing strategy that is underused by many marketers, but very profitable for those that do it well. Many marketers don’t use video marketing simply because they don’t know how to get started on it. It isn’t actually that difficult and you will find it remarkably easy when you do use it.

Videos can very easily be shared online or “go viral” which can bring a lot of interested visitors your way. Plus, search engines love videos too which you’ll notice in your Google searches where YouTube videos often rank very highly. It doesn’t hurt that Google owns YouTube, of course…

Creating videos doesn’t have to be difficult. You can create a live action video using a smartphone or digital camera, or simple webcam on your computer.

Using a tool such as Camtastia can be used to capture video on your computer screen and demonstrate how to use different software or website applications online. These are often very popular videos because people are frequently trying to figure out how to do different things online, and if you create video tutorials for different online activities and upload them to YouTube, you’ll start getting a steady stream of viewers who search for and find your videos online.

Promotional videos can be created by Windows Movie Maker, which is installed on most Windows XP and above computers or you can use other third-party tools such as Jing or Animoto. These services make it easy to make professional videos quickly.

For best results, your video needs to be concise and entertaining. If your video isn’t interesting or useful, no amount of marketing will help. But a well-produced, informative or entertaining video can take on life of it’s own as people find it and start sharing it… ➡

When you create a video and upload it to YouTube, it’s useful to think about your keywords, title and description for the video as this will determine where your video ranks in the search engines and YouTube search results. It’s best to do some keyword research for this to determine popular searches so you can position your videos in front of an audience. Google’s keyword tool is a good place to start your research, or you can try alternative keyword apps such as KeywordTool.io.

Once you create a video, submitting it to different video directories can increase your views and traffic. You could manually submit your video to different online directories, but this does take a considerable amount of time. There are many tools online which you can use to distribute your videos which are only a Google search away. That said, for the sake of economy, simply submitting a well developed video to YouTube and having it properly optimized with title, description and keywords is your fastest and least expensive way to get your video in front of a potentially interested audience.

Best of all, videos that you upload today will likely still be available for internet users to find and watch years from now. Set up a Google Alert for your video name and you may be surprised to see how much attention your video gets over time.

Video marketing is a highly effective method of marketing and attracting interested visitors back to your website and online offers. That said, it is still a very underused media for many online marketers, and one that you can start to use immediately to boost brand awareness, online influence and website traffic.