On using youtube, there are too many reasons not to use it for business videos. These, in no particular order, include; distribution rights (you give up yours when you upload), quality (it’s compressed to a lowest common denominator), stickiness (they will always draw eyeballs to their site from yours), distribution (it’s out of your control).

Right now we have several disparate systems that need to be tied together in order to streamline the traffic generation, video presentation, content and sales process.

For example, we need a search engine for people to find our video presentation and website. We need to host the video at a site like Google or You Tube – intermingled with all kinds of non business related videos that discourage shoppers from searching for product related videos. We need a website to display the video and promote the product. Then we need a shopping cart system to take orders and an affiliate program to encourage people to send visitors.

The You Tube phenomenon was started, it seems, by just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what would stick, without much thought about the idea of business marketing, advertising and sales. And now everyone is trying to make You Tube work for their own purposes.

Now take Google, You Tube, My Space and put them together with checkout and multi-tier affiliate tracking and assemble them into one site, just for people or businesses who have something to offer and people looking for a product, service or solution.

Here is what is coming down the road for the benefit of businesses and consumers:

A site where advertisers can set up their own pages, host their videos and audio presentations, manage their text content – all for free, and use the built in checkout process and setup an affiliate advertising program.

Visitors use a search engine on the home page to search by keyword terms. The search results bring up pages within the site that are relevant to the search terms – and perhaps some sponsored ads. The visitors find the pages they are interested in, watch the associated videos, review the content and make their purchases.

If the visitor is interested they can register as an affiliate for the page they viewed, tell others about the video, page content or products, and share in any revenue generated.

For businesses it is easy and free to promote and sell to people who are looking for their products, services, and materials – using video, audio and text. Plus have traffic sent to their pages by other motivated consumers and businesses.

Consumers search, find and learn about their interests and make purchases – all in a consistent format, using various media formats including video and audio. Consumers can rate the content found on pages.

Affiliates sign up for the pages they want to promote and send visitors to that page. If the visitors buy within a year, they share in the revenue.

It’s a winning scenario that brings together in one place the pieces of the most popular web services available.

To learn about the kind of system I am talking about go to this page on the beta site by using this link:

http://www.freeiq.com/websource

- Bob Speroni

It is being used quite effectively for campaigns, mailing out the links to the videos, etc. This might be the most effective way to use the tool.

Another similar method might be to choose videos made by others which support your message and send your readers these links in your mailouts and blog.

My space has a fairly large video ad market, but it seems the marketing opportunities available there are under constant scrutiny in order to protect the members from spam and the like. Yet it is still possible to produce an imbedded video and give it away free for now.

Another effective tactic I’m seeing much more of these days is instructional or “proof of earnings” videoa made with your audio and screen captures from your home computer. Camtasia seems to be the vendor of choice most of the time for these productions. This is an easy product to produce and since it is a “how-to” product, is very popular.