Sure, much of these 2 Billion views are “viral” dancing cats and such things, but increasingly, small businesses of all kinds are using YouTube in their marketing to directly increase sales. A fun example is the now semi-famous Will It Blend campaign from Blendtec, which increased product sales 700%, 5 X the companies old record.

The campaign educates while entertaining, using clever lab coat humor to ask a funny question: what can’t you put in this powerful blender? The Blendtec YouTube channel now boasts 170M video views and 40K channel subscribers. If you have not seen one of these, here is the Will It Blend iphone video. Note: do not try this at home (the black smoke from a pulverized iphone is most certainly toxic.)

Introducing vSEO – Video Search Engine Optimization

One of my online marketing mentors is YouTube “Queen” Julie Perry, who introduced me recently to a whole new subset of SEO, called vSEO, a study of what it takes to get your video to the top of the search engines. See Julie Perrys recent article at Fastcompany.com blog site: How to Make YouTube Part of Your Social Media Marketing.

YouTube Video Optimization = Content + SEO + Community

Julie also introduced me to a great vSEO resource: reelseo.com (clever name eh?) According to ReelSEO founder Mark Robertson, it’s not just about tags and text anymore. The basic methods may still work for very long-tail keyword queries, but for more competitive keyword phrases, you now need to:

1) create quality, compelling video content

2) publish using SEO best practices, and

3) engage with the community, both within as well as outside of YouTube.

How to Optimize and Market YouTube Videos – Presentation

In Mark’s presentation slides below, you will see in detail:

• Making the case for online video and for YouTube in particular
• How to publish and optimize YouTube videos (the gist of which starts on slide 8. )
• YouTube ranking factors and things to consider
• Promoting and marketing YouTube videos
• Driving conversions with YouTube videos
• Customizing YouTube embed

18 to 34 age group spend 4.3 x time on Social media as TV, newspapers and other media combined!

Facebook adds 240K users per Day! PER DAY!

FB has 140 M active users
almost doubled in last 12 months – grew much faster than Google in adding users.

out of $50B TV ads – 8% now moved to Youtube and internet video  – soon it will be much higher

folks are still reading but they are reading blogs – 13 Million active blogs and more than 5B readers

Dont try to be “professional” – not company to person but person to person

spend 30 minutes a day – have fun
Social Media like party be cool – make friends
blog like house and should be 80% about you and 20% about what you do – get to the back porch – this is where you sell stuff – folks will  come to you.

follow every follower that are following folks you like
many will follow you back

find your twitter style
tweet at your leisure – should be fun.

compliment them
confirm their suspicions – news
support their dreams
ally their fears – tell them its ok
throw stones at enemies – (Delta Airlines)
give resources
be funny or borrow funny – youtube video
ask questions – even when you answer
answer your @’s dont be a twitter snob

Follow @perrybelcher for more of this great stuff and check his followers – 59,000! Not sure how he can possibly keep up with 59k folks to follow but there you go. I know he made a bundle recently with just one little twitter post about a certain big product launch. And if you have 1000′s of folks listening to what you have to say, that is powerful.

I am certainly encouraged by this to keep working social media in the right way – not being one of the too quick to sell jerks he talks about – but someone who  gives real value in my work and folks will listen and eventually, buy my stuff, as Frank Kern  likes to say.

Here are some guidelines:

1. Resolution: Use 640×480 source as that gives youtube more resolution to work with when they re-encode down to 320×240. (or do the resize yourself if you think you have better software to do it, but they’ll just re-encode your 320×240 source back to 320×240 again, so why not give them more to work with?). In any case, keep an aspect ratio of 4:3, which is what Youtube uses. Also, the higher res will allow the new high res versions which Youtube will offer if your uploaded video is higher res.

2. Bit Rate: Use the HIGHEST bit rate combination for audio and video that you can and still stay under the 1GB upload per video limit. Again, this allows you to give YouTube the best possible source quality that they will accept, so when they run it through their transcoder, they’re starting with a nice clean source. Some say to aim for 1500kbps and this should be fine. Some encoders will let you set a target file size, so if yours does so, shoot for 100 MB, and you’re golden.

3. Format: MPEG4 (DivX, Xvid) is recommended. You can output from most encoders to mpeg4 and I’ve also had good results using Quicktime Pro saving to .mov format.

4. Audio: 64k Mono or 128k Stereo MP3 audio. Again, youtube will downsize your audio so start with at least this level of quality.

5. Frame rate. No matter what you upload, YouTube is going to encode it down to 15 fps, so you might be better off getting the cleanest 15 fps source you can in a good editor/encoder before uploading. On the other hand, if their encoder is good, you might want to feed it 30 fps so it can interpolate between frames itself with that higher bit rate source and 640×480 resolution. I recommend 30fps at 640 x 480 resolution at high bit rate.

Anyway, you should simply give Youtube the highest bit rate source to start with that still meets their requirements. This one thing alone will do more for end-result quality than the complicated technical tips offered on most how to optimize for Youtube video pages.

These recommended compression options are from Premier using Quicktime but are similar to other encoders as well:

1. Click on File / Export / Adobe Media Encoder. 
2. In the “Format” dropdown menu, select “QuickTime.”
3. In the “Preset” dropdown menu, select “QT 256 streaming NTSC.”
4. Click on “Video.”
5. In the “Codec” dropdown menu, select “H.264 Encoder.”
6. Set the “Pixel Aspect Ratio” to “Square Pixels (1.0).”
7. Set the resolution to 640×480.
8. Click the “Set Bitrate” option and set the bitrate to “1500″ kbps.
9. Click “OK.”
10. Click on “Audio.” 
11. In the “Codec” dropdown menu, select “32-bit integer.”
12. In the “Frequency” dropdown menu, select “44 KHz.”
13. Click “OK.”
14. Type in a file name and click “Save.”

For more details, see:
http://www.squidoo.com/youtuberight