Dominate Your Local Market!

Videos are proving to be the premier traffic generating media for the websites wise enough to use them. They can also help hold visitors on your web pages once they get there.

Search engines recognize the importance and user draw of videos and crawl the major video sites on a regular basis. You can literally grab a high ranking in just a few minutes of hours by submitting a video to YouTube.

I’ve been using videos placed on numerous video sites for the purpose of generating qualified traffic and I thought it would be interesting to see which ones draw the most views.

Here are some recent stats on views for the videos that appear on the HowDoIDoThatVideos YouTube channel:

These videos are all in the “Instructional/How To” category and used the same text in the info box on each of the services making the comparison a valid one.

The stats don’t include Google video which I also regularly upload to because I am using my TubeMogul stats to ensure that all services are reporting for the same videos for the same time period and Google stats are not available.

As you can see, YouTube is still far and way the venue where most of my video views take place. Metacafe is second and Revver is a distant third. From individual stats, I can interpolate that Google Video falls somewhere in between YouTube and Metacafe.

If you are producing videos to place on video sites to generate traffic ( and traffic means business), be sure that your videos appear on the top sites. For my uses, that means YouTube, Google Videos, Metacafe and Revver. I also upload to Howcast, as it is a site that specializes in “how to” videos.

When planning your videos, be sure to observe file size and video length restrictions. For instance, YouTube requires that videos be a maximum of 10 minutes in length. My upload service of choice, TubeMogul, limits file size to 100mb for it’s quick upload service and a 500mb file size limit for it’s resumable “big file” uploader.

On YouTube, you can upload up to 10 videos at a time. They can be a maximum file size of 1gb and a maximum length or 10 minutes.

If you want to use TubeMogul to upload your videos, it offer several advantages:

You can upload you video once and have TubeMogul distribute the video, along with description and tags to many online video services, such as YouTube, Google, Metacafe, Yahoo, Revver, MySpace, Daily Motion, Howcast, 5 Minute Videos, Blip, Veoh and more. It’s a real time saver.

Placing videos on YouTube et al offers so much opportunity for exposure to potential traffic for your website that you really need to include this strategy as part of your overall online marketing plan no matter what your business.

For national or international businesses, it is essential – for local businesses uploading videos is one part of your strategy to “Dominate Your Local Market.”

HubPages is a social media type of website. On HubPages, you can submit content in article, web page or sales letter format with links to your web pages, online listings, catalogs, affiliate programs, etc. And those pages, or “hubs,” can drive lots of highly qualified traffic your way.

HubPages has proven to be very effective at driving targeted traffic to websites of all categories. And it’s the “targeted” traffic that is the key. It’s not hard to drive non-targeted traffic – just expensive and frustrating.

On this blog, we’ve discussed ways of finding and attracting traffic of a more targeted nature before. Targeted traffic converts at a much higher rate, but where do you find it?

The web surfers who visit HubPages tend to be looking for something specific. It’s something like using long-tailed keywords in Google AdWords, but a whole lot less costly.

OrangeCat.com and HowDoIDoThatVideos.com today released the HubPages Traffic Video Tutorial – 11 videos that show you exactly how to take advantage of the HubPages site to drive qualified traffic to YOUR web pages.

Need more traffic? Don’t want to pay through the nose to get it? This video series will show you how HubPages can make an enormous difference in your website traffic.

For more information on what using HubPages can do for you, visit the HubPages Traffic Video Tutorial Series website.

Now we’re talking …or texting …or emailing.

Read Matt Mullenweg’s short post about his wi-fi experience aboard a Virgin America flight.

For those of you who travel on business, this could be the beginning of beautifyl friendship.